I was recently asked by someone new to online network marketing how long it would take them to learn all the techniques of online marketing. 20, 40 or 60 hours? How long? For those that have been doing this for a while you will probably be taken back like I was when I first heard this question. The answer is you never learn all the techniques. First, there are so many different ways to market online it will take a long time just to understand each method. Second and more important is however you do it today most likely is not the same way you will do it six months from now.
This question led me to want to write this article. Let me list some of the most popular ways to market online and then I will pick one and review some techniques of how to use that method. Some of the most popular ways to market online is to use the social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, BetterNetworker, MySpace or YouTube. Other ways to market are Pay Per Click (PPC), writing articles, Banner Ads, solo ads, email marketing and many many more. Each one of these has very specific techniques that you should follow in order to market that are unique to the web site or applications being used.
Just to understand how much detail there is to learn one technique I will pick one of the most popular ways to market which is Facebook and explain one way it can be used. Facebook is the 2nd most visited website in the world right after Google. There are hundreds of millions of people on Facebook and it is growing every day. With Facebook, after you have created your account, you want to begin to invite people to be friends that are in your target market. A good place to start is to search for groups of companies that are competitors to the one you are affiliated. Join those groups and start to invite friends. Now if you invite too many friends at one time Facebook will see you as a threat and may disable your account. A good rule of thumb is to invite 50 people at a time. More than that can get you in trouble. Continue this process every day to grow your list of friends. In a few weeks you can have almost 1000 friends as long as you are consistent and do it every day.
The next step is to get those friends to optin to your list web page so you can get them into your sales funnel. To do this you need to give your friend or prospect some value so that they want to do this. One way is to invite them to a free webinar where a subject is being taught that the prospect has an interest. For example, how to get your web site on the 1st page of Google for free. Do you think people would want to register for that? Of course they would. In no time you will have friends opting in to your web site to attend the free webinar.
The next step is to contact the new prospect and asked them how they enjoyed with free webinar that you gave them. At this point you are building a relationship with the prospect and in time some number of them will purchase something from you or join you in your primary business. This is not something that will happen over night but certainly you can see how this technique will lead to sales over time. This can be enhanced by you making comments on their status updates or on their pictures over a period of time. People like to do business with people that they like and this is when you build that relationship. In time some will attend your webinars and in time some will purchase your products or join your business. How fast it happens depends how how well you build your relationship with that prospect.
I realize that this is a high level look at this technique but I have given enough details that you can see how this can work for you. It will not happen over night but it will happen over time as you build relationships with your Facebook friends. You also should realize that I have only gone over one way to use Facebook where there are over twenty different ways to market on Facebook.
As you can see from this one example, there is so much to learn about marketing online you can appreciate that this is a very large endeavor and one that will take a long time to master. I realize that new network marketer that asked me how long it would take did not know what he was asking but when I had some time to think about his question, I realized that I have learned so much I take a lot of what I know for granted. Some questions such as this one make you look back and realize how much there is to know about this field of online network marketing.
