Put Your Recruiting on Auto Pilot
by Chris Ellington
Published on this site: July 6th, 2005 - See
more articles from this month...
Getting people to join your company can be hard work. Whether
you are looking to hire staff or to build a downline for your
network marketing business, attracting the right people is
key to your success.
Obviously you want productive go-getters who are going to
make a contribution to the bottom line, not just warm bodies
to clog your cycles and waste your time. But how do you find
the right people?
Take a cue from the marketing folks. Become a magnet for
interested, qualified "prospects" who eagerly want
to become a part of your team. Use an established technique
that draws new customers as a model for attracting downline
participants and employees to your company.
What is this technique? It’s called “article marketing”
and it is one of the most effective methods of catching the
attention of large groups of people. It works like this: You
write a simple article that is interesting to the kind of
people you want to attract. They could be salespeople, independent
business owners, MLM participants – whoever you think
would make the perfect addition to your team.
You don’t have to write "The Great American Novel".
All you need is about 500 words on the topic of your choice.
Then submit that article all over the web to ezine publishers,
newsletter editors and content laden websites. When they publish
your article (and they almost always do) your perfect candidates
read your words, and see you as an expert in the subject (after
all, you’re a published author!) and they click on a
link to your website that you conveniently provided at the
end of the article. Viola! You have tons of interested, qualified
people you can add to your downline.
Keep in mind, that your article remains out there for people
to find for weeks, months, even years. As new people happen
across your article, they click the link and visit your site.
You have a perpetual recruiting machine, drawing tons of pre-qualified,
interested potential recruits to your site. This is better
than advertising, and far less expensive.
The process works. The problem is that you have to go through
the effort of submitting your articles to enough sites that
you really make a splash. Most business owners submit their
articles to 9 or 10 places before getting burned out on the
tedious submission process. I can’t think of anything
more dull than the sheer drudgery of article submission.
Fortunately, you can avoid that drudgery, get your articles
to more editors, get them there faster - which gets you recruits
sooner - by taking advantage of one of the following three
methods:
- Hire a Virtual Assistant to do the work for you. Cost
$400.00
- Buy and install article submission software. Cost: $69.00
- Use a free web service. Cost: $0
Here are the good and bad points of each one.
Hire a Virtual Assistant to do the work for you: Cost
$400.00
(http://www.articlesthatsell.com/ArticleSubmissionFAQ.pdf)
I think Virtual Assistants are terrific. Typing, proofreading,
sending invoices - they do clerical work for an hourly fee.
This particular Virtual Assistant specializes in being your
"publication coordinator". She does everything by
hand, submitting your articles one by one to various places
around the net. She’ll also do light proofreading of
your article.
The downside: While I think $400.00 is a fair price
for the amount of time she is going to invest, I fear that
the price is a bit steep for most small business owners trying
to build a downline.
Ezine Announcer Software: Cost $69.00
(www.f1000.com/ezineannouncer)
This is a pretty cool program. It automates many of the tasks
that are time consuming and boring. It comes with a long list
of 1700 publishers who want your articles. You enter your
article and then run through the sites you want to contact.
Yes, you still have to do the work, but it takes away some
of the pain. You buy it, install it, and then you can run
it whenever you have an article to publish. The software solution
is great if you’re technically proficient.
The downside: Once you install the program, the list
of submission sites has already begun going out of date. New
sites spring up all the time and existing sites become defunct.
While many of the submission tasks are automated, you are
still tied to your desk working through the submission process.
I like the software solution, I just wish there were a few
more features.
Article Marketer: Cost - Free (www.articlemarketer.com)
ArticleMarketer.com is a free web service. You enter your
article and press the button - then the system goes to work.
Your articles are submitted to 2,351 people, as well as content
web sites and popular article directories. Articles are distributed
according to publisher guidelines and based on the categories
you choose. The list of sites is always up to date, with new
publishers being added all the time and the defunct ones deleted.
The downside: The free service is only sent to a fraction
of their list. They have a paid program ($8.95) that distributes
your articles to the complete list of over 50,000 people.
With a subscription ($39.95), you can send an unlimited number
of articles to the full list.
To summarize: If you want to really build your downline
quickly, submitting royalty free articles to ezines and newsletter
editors is the way to go. If you don’t want to spend
the hours and hours of drudge work doing article submission,
you should give one of these solutions a try.
Of the three, ArticleMarketer.com is my favorite (for obvious
reasons). It allows me to maximize my budget and get my articles
to the greatest number of people with the least amount of
effort. I put this article in (it took literally 45 seconds)
and here you are reading it. Now that’s what I call effective
marketing!
Chris Ellington gives effective and easy to implement
marketing strategies to small business owners and home business
entrepreneurs. His Simplified Selling System has been a favorite
of salespeople around the world. Get your free marketing strategies
at www.simplifiedselling.com
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