There is a perception that internet marketers who defraud people succeed because they are good marketers. They don’t. They persuade people to buy, by lying. Anyone can sell something if they only tell people what they want to hear. That doesn’t make them a good marketer, it only makes them a good liar.

A truly good marketer is one who does not compromise honesty or integrity, and who delivers value that lives up to their promises. They understand people, well enough to help them understand what is good in what they are selling. They do not manipulate. There is a difference.

If we are going to be able to distribute accurate marketing information, that myth that marketing requires dishonesty, must be done away with.

Good marketing centers on truth. If you want to market well, start with the truth, and end with it, and do not depart from it in the middle. Learn to understand people – there is truth there too. But do not focus on manipulating – rather, on communicating in a language they understand.

If this were the standard, marketers would not have the negative reputation that they do.

There are any number of places that you can network online. New “social networking” sites are springing up each day, and they all have a little different focus.

Networking can benefit you in two ways:

1. By bringing you into contact with your prospective customers. This is the benefit most people want, and which they go after aggressively – often burning out in a fit of spamming.
2. By bringing you into association with your competitors and collaborators. This helps you develop greater expertise, gives you people to draw knowledge from, and helps you find people to work alongside. It is valuable, but only if you understand how to use it.

Most of the time, those two different groups of people do NOT hang out in the same places! So you have to choose a group or venue for the right reasons, and make sure it can deliver what you are looking for.

In order to network effectively, you have to consider two basic factors:

1. Where is your target market hanging out?
2. What kinds of networking are you comfortable with, and which ones allow you to market through your strengths?

You CAN learn to be comfortable with new types of marketing. But you’ll do best, especially to start with, if you build on your strengths first.

For example, if you write well, you have a lot of options. If you like to write on a schedule, a blog may work for you. If you don’t, it might not. If you want the freedom to write when you feel like it, article marketing (a cousin to online networking), or forum participation might work best.

If you like to feel plugged in, then networking communities with a lot of minute to minute action might be good – Twitter, blogging communities, etc.

If you want to build a network of friends, and if your target market haunts MySpace or FaceBook, they might work for you – but remember, these are primarily social, secondarily business, so they absolutely do not work for some kinds of businesses.

Ryze, Merchant Circle, or FastPitch might work for you if you like how they work, and if you can regularly check in and participate in forums or browse profiles for connections. They have a distinctly business focus, which works very well for B2B businesses.

One of the keys to choosing networking venues, is to choose things you enjoy doing. If you like it, you’ll do it more regularly. At the same time though, you MUST balance your day! You have to know when to read the posts, and when to skip them, and how to put business first when necessary.

Many venues offer chances for event participation. Choose the events by the same criteria – by whether your target market is likely to be there, and whether you can communicate effectively with them there.

Look for Trade Associations also – many have networking options available. Some of them do a better job of reaching CUSTOMERS, others do a better job of reaching associates. Each has its value, just make sure you are choosing it for the value that you want!

Don’t just join a bunch of groups – each takes time to set up a profile and make it work for you. You need to look them over and make sure they have a good chance of benefiting you, and chose those that will help you do so effectively. If they have a lot of fluff, and take a lot of your time, you’ll burn out. They need to be fairly efficient to use, and allow you good tools for doing what you need to do in a successful manner.

If you join a group, and it does not give you what you need, OR, you end up not using it, drop it. Otherwise it is dead weight. In order to make them work, you have to WORK them. Select carefully, between 2 and 10 venues, and then get to work.

In an effort to simplify the networking process and help it be more easily understood, this article will cover the basic steps in online networking success. The steps are each fairly simple, but they do take some time. This list does not need to be completed all at once, in fact, some tasks are periodic. If your time is lmited, then work through the list a little at a time.

1. Choose a venue. A future article will go into this in more detail.
2. Register for an account. If the venue offers more than one membership level, start with the free one, and see whether it gets any results. In a good venue, a free one will benefit you some, a paid account will benefit you more.
3. Go through the “getting started” steps. Most have some kind of benefits that require some effort on your part – setting up a profile, linking your website or blog, uploading a photo, etc.
4. As you do each step, think about which items you are doing might be repeatable. If you need a photo, get one. You’ll use it over and over. If you need a business description, save a copy, because you will need that again. I suggest you get a copy of Notesbrowser and keep a copy of each thing you create to fill your profile. This will make it faster to network in a new venue.
5. Browse through the profiles of other people. Do this as regularly as you feel like, just enough to see if there are other people you want to connect with. Do NOT spam them!
6. If the venue offers a way to submit articles, then set a schedule to do that on – once a month is good if your time is limited, once a week is more powerful.
7. If the venue offers forums (most do), then locate those that have topics of interest to you, and join in.
8. Write a good signature line that includes your URL, and a statement about what you offer.
9. Lurk in forums if you wish, but you won’t get far if you just lurk. Eventually, you need to introduce your self (not with an ad!), and engage in friendly conversation. Drop a sig line on each post.
10. Find ways to help people. Helpful people get more business.
11. Remember, your goal is to build personal relationships that can help you succeed. Relationships come first, both for customers, and associates.

If you get some good elements assembled, networking online becomes much more efficient. Then go through the steps, over and over. Give yourself some time each day for networking, but don’t let it consume your life and interfere with successful business progress.

You hear the same things over and over in internet marketing. You hear them so many times that you figure there MUST be some truth in it, or so many people would not be saying it! It never occurs to you that so many people would be either dishonest, or deceived. Yet they are!

The vast majority of internet marketing books are filled with half-truths, and outright misinformation. They are perpetuated by greed, and inexperience. Greed on the part of the people who knowingly promote them, inexperience on the part of people who want to be honest, but do not yet realize that what they are promoting isn’t going to work unless they are dishonest.

I’d like to see more truth in the online marketing arena. Less repeated rhetoric that people recite by rote, with no real understanding of what they are saying. We see this in the distributorship arena also, where upline repeats what their upline said, because they really haven’t the experience to know what does and does not work yet.

This kind of scam has always been around, but at no other time in history has it been so powerful. The internet is FULL of information. If you do a net search for the term “internet marketing”, the top positions are held almost 100% by people repeating the same old stuff that does not work. You can go 10, 20, 30 pages deep, and never see anything different. So while there is plenty of information, there is almost no GOOD information.

Every person that puts out false or misleading information does so with a motive. That motive is not to help you, it is to profit from you. They all say pretty much the same thing – that they failed and failed and finally succeeded by the methods they are recommending, that they just want to help people so they are letting it go for the amazingly low price of whatever. But they really don’t want to help you. They want your money.

The internet marketing arena needs more reality. More voices of experience with integrity, who are out there to help people succeed, not out there for what they can get.  It needs more thinking people, and fewer drones who repeat the same lines without thinking about what they mean.

For those who are teaching something different, the challenge is huge. It is almost impossible to get into the visible listings, and it is very hard to succeed by telling the truth, when the lie sounds so much easier, and when so many people are repeating the lie. To make a go of that, you need to find others who are on the same quest (there are not many), and you need to persevere with dogged determination.

If you are looking for good marketing information, do a net search on the terms “bad marketing”. You’ll get more truth than you will from searching for internet marketing directly.

I’ve heard from people that they do not have time to wait on network marketing. They complain that they were on some forums or that they attended some networking meetings, but never got anything out of it. Generally, there were a few key reasons why it did not work, but the two principal ones are:

1. They expected to be able to go in, advertise their business, get a flood of response, and walk out.
2. They left and stopped going when their expectations were not realized.

Under those circumstances, it never will work. You’ve got to pay your dues – you’ve got to be patient, and kind. You have to be interested in other people, develop relationships, and find ways to be helpful (even if it is just offering a little advice on something you know about).

If you don’t do that, and if you don’t KEEP going, you are wasting your time.

Networking is HUGELY powerful! We are talking BEYOND virtually any other form of marketing! And it is generally highly cost effective. But it takes time to get started. It is only after you’ve paid your dues in TIME that it starts to pay off. And then it starts slow, and, like a snowball rolling downhill, gains an awesome force and momentum!

You see, when you go and introduce yourself, everybody is nice, welcomes you, and asks you what you do. You tell them, they tell you what they do, you exchange business cards, and both of you go home and either file the card and forget it, or throw it away and forget the person who gave it to you. You did that, didn’t you? Everybody else is just like you!

Go back again! Do it all over again! Only this time the people will greet you like they know you, even if they forgot your name. You’ll notice that the next time only SOME of the people you met the first time are there. The ones who are there are watching you, counting the fact that you are there again, weighing it in the balance. This time they’ll still forget you, and forget what you do.

Keep going. They are still watching you. But after you’ve been there 6-8 times, after you’ve been there more than you’ve NOT been there, after you’ve kept on introducing yourself, kept on stating your business name and what you do, something starts to happen. It is slow at first, but they begin treating you not like someone new, or a piece of furniture, or even someone nice to chat with, but like a BUSINESS PERSON! And there is a difference!

See, in networking groups, there are the “wannabes”, and the “real” business people. Wannabes come and go. They hit and run. They are inconsistent. Real business people are stickers. They are dedicated. They last. Their business hangs in there.

So many people come in and introduce a new business, and then disappear. So when someone new comes in, everyone waits, and watches. They are going to let you prove yourself before they consider you to really be one of them.

Once you cross that bridge though, you’ll get a call from someone who says they were referred by someone in the group. Someone in the group will finally talk to you about their needs in a way that gives you the opportunity to do business. Once that happens, word gets around. It happens again. Little by little, it grows.

You may think you do not have time for networking, but I’m telling you that you don’t have time NOT to do it! With it, your business will show significant growth within a year, and you’ll be able to see that the momentum really WILL be there. Without it, in a year, you’ll still be working hard for every single customer or client. Me, I’d rather have them come to me, pre-sold. Saves me tons of time and marketing expense!

So if you are on a shoestring budget, find ways to effectively network. We’ll be giving a step-by-step breakdown for online and offline networking in a few days. It’s worth the effort.

One of the biggest mistakes that new marketers make, is in thinking that the marketing process is about their desires, and feeling that they must tell everyone what they want to get what they want.

This leads to overeager actions which are interpreted as rudeness, inconsiderateness, and inexperience. You can always recognize the new marketer on the forums when they post their ad as an introduction – they are not the same thing! You can recognize them when they blast an ad every time they are allowed, or worse, in spite of forum rules prohibiting ads.

They create a newsletter and get signups and blast ads to them. They greet people and try to tell them what a great thing they have in the first sentence. They beat the streets leaving brochures behind with only a “hi, I’m so and so, I do such and such, call me if you need it.” They appear at trade shows, and feel that if nobody buys anything, that everybody hates them.

The fact is, it isn’t about you. It isn’t about what you want at all. It is about what your customers want. And until you help them know that what THEY want is more important than what YOU want, for YOU as well as for THEM, you can forget developing a loyal client or customer base!

When you only want to talk to someone if they are interested in your product, you are missing a great opportunity. If, on the other hand, you show some interest in the PERSON, as an individual, and come to know them, all kinds of unexpected benefits come, and many of them are financial. In fact, many of them come at you out of the blue, and you wonder how it has happened that fortune has smiled so upon you – when in fact, it was because you were nice to that person, who remembered you, and recommended you to someone else, who came to you presold!

We offer a free service, which serves as an introduction to our skills, and allows us to demonstrate first hand how we look out for our clients’ interests. Not all businesses can do that, but for those who can, this is the ideal way to “give first”.

For product sales, if you discuss a person’s needs, and put aside your desire for the commission long enough to consider their point of view, you are more likely to make a sale in the long term than if your eyes glaze over and you lose interest the minute they say THEY are not interested.

Once you gain their interest, it is STILL about their needs more than yours. Have you ever recommended a LESS expensive option? Have you helped a client analyze their needs, and helped them figure out the cost/benefit on the options they are considering? You may miss making a bigger sale in the short term, but you’ll profit more in the long term as they come back again, and refer their friends, because they knew you really did put their needs first.

Get into the mind of the customer – not to manipulate them, but to help them in the best way. Do that, and marketing goals become very clear, and efforts become very effective. There are those who will tell you they do not have time for that, while they feel they do have time to blast useless ads and try to bully people into buying what they want them to buy. In fact, doing it right takes less time than doing it wrong, and when you do it right, it builds momentum – it grows upon itself until the efforts of marketing are minimal compared to the results it returns.

Give it a try at the next trade show – hold up a mirror so they can try on jewelry, sympathize with their budget woes, give them something to giggle about, help them know when your product is NOT right for them, talk about their problems in relation to your expertise in a conversational way,  and let them know you care about them as a human being. Then see what happens – both how your customers respond, and how you feel.

Betcha something good happens!