What’s going on everyone? Last Christmas I went to a Phoenix Suns game down in Arizona. That’s where my parents live, and I went with my brothers, and it was awesome. In the stands, we were there in the stands, and the game was cool. It was awesome. We’re in this big arena downtown. There’s lots of life, it was at night obviously, and the city’s alive. It was super fun, right? Very vibrant. A lot of life. That’s what it felt like, and you walked in and it was an indoor arena, a basketball court in the center obviously, and it was a lot fun, but I remember sitting down, and I was looking at all the different logos of all the businesses, all the people who had paid to put their name and their logo inside the stadium, right? Lots of money inside of it. Lots of money on those ads. Lots of money, and there are two kinds of these ads though. I remember sitting down and I was looking, and was noticing that there was a difference. There was really two kinds. There was one kind, and this difference is one of the major reasons why I know my upline didn’t know how to teach me to be successful when I was doing MLM for the first time, this one difference. I was looking around, and I was reading all the signs. I’m really fascinated with ads. I’m the kind of guy who would watch an infomercial for fun. I get it. I obsess over it, and I know it’s one of the reasons why I’ve been able to be good at it. I encourage you to obsess over your craft also. But anyway, so I was sitting down and we were in the basketball game, and it was a lot of fun. Very close as I remember it. It was a great game, and like I said, there’s two different kinds of businesses that had bought ad space. The first kind was they just had literally their logo and their name, and that was it. That was it. The second kind had a logo, a name, and a call to action. There was an offer on there, meaning it would be like, “Until Tuesday, get two extra tacos for just a dollar each,” or something like that. I was like, “Huh, that’s interesting.” One kind of business type in this arena just wants their name out there, and they’re literally throwing money away in my mind. The second part though, they had an actual offer on the ad with a call to action. They were trying to recoup money from the ad space they had purchased. Interesting. Hmm. Let’s think about the difference between those two real quick, because the difference between those two is why I can do paid prospecting, meaning I get paid even when someone doesn’t join my downline. Last year I made about fifty grand that let us go, we went on a cruise, my wife and I, we went for our anniversary, I set up a bunch of cool stuff in my home office, we got a gym, lots of stuff that it did regardless of somebody joining the downline or buying a product or whatever it was. Those are the kinds of systems that I give my downline, these paid prospecting systems, and because of this one principle, I’m allowed to do that. Any time you place an ad, any time you go and you put your name out there, this is the reason why I don’t have a business card. Any time I go put my business card out there and I say, “Hey, here’s my business card,” it’s nothing. There’s no call to action, there’s no offer. There’s literally no reason. I literally just gave it to them so they could put it in the trash for me. That’s it. I know I did that episode a little while ago about business cards, but this one principle, you’ve got to understand that there’s a huge difference between promoting and advertising. An ad versus a promotion, and most people in MLM, like 99% of them are stuck promoting their MLM. One will get you a lot of money. One will get you almost no money, but you’ll spend a lot. Does that make sense? If I am just running promotions, if I’m just promoting my MLM, it means I don’t care who I’m targeting, I don’t care who sees my ad, I don’t care that I had to spend money to get it up there, I don’t care to make back the money I spent to put the promotion up there. Does that make sense? When you’re promoting, in my mind, it is the absolute least effective kind of marketing that’s out there. Big corporations are known for this, right? Massive, massive with huge, deep, unlimited pockets, and they’ll go buy an ad on the Super Bowl and spend millions and millions of dollars just to get their name to flash on the screen a single 15 second spot, right? Or even they’ll just put their name inside the actual arena itself. That’s it. Coca-Cola and their name’s spinning around the inside of the stadium. That’s it. They can afford to do that. They’ve got a massive, massive, massive bottomless pit of cash they can just toss at stuff, right? They’re in an awareness branding stage where they don’t care about anything else except sustainability, people seeing the name over and over, that’s it. They don’t care about recouping the ad cost. I care about that. My ability to go and create some piece of marketing where I can recoup ad costs, now we’re…
3 Steps of MLM Marketing
What’s going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and you’re listening to Secret MLM Hacks Radio.
Here’s the real mystery. How do real MLMers like us, who didn’t cheat and only bugged family members and friends, who want to grow a profitable home business. How do we recruit A players into our downline’s, and create extra incomes, but still have plenty of time for the rest our lives? That’s the blaring question, an this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Secret MLM Hacks Radio.
All right, all right. Hey, hope things are going well for you in your life, and MLM life, and everything. A cool thing going on right now is we are about to turn ads on for the show. Got an amazing ads person. I’m definitely going to get to interview her sometime for you guys in the future, so you guys can see how she’s running ads on Facebook for MLM topic things. Anyway, she’s about the start running ads to the show. That’s kind of cool, so if you guys see it just be aware that’s what’s going on. We’re trying to widen the group.
What’s really fun is the thousands of downloads that are already happening for this show. I think we’ve definitely struck a cord. Anyway, it’s excited. Really, really pumped to have all of you guys be here as listeners. One of the cool things I like to do is obviously engage with you guys. If you go to SecretMLMHacksRadio.com and you opt-in, on the bottom right there’s a green button, and if you click the green button you can record a question straight from your browser right to me. Which is awesome. Now one thing that I like to do is grab those, I put them straight inside the episodes like I did a few episodes ago, and answer them live. That’s what the plan is.
This question comes from Eli Fuentes.
Hey Steve, what are the top three most important things we need to know about marketing our MLM?
Hey, what’s going on Eli? Great question. What are the top three things needed in order to actually market an MLM appropriately?
I don’t know what it was. It was probably six months ago now, I was speaking at an event in Vegas, and I was all prepared, I was really stoked. It wasn’t that big of an event, but it was a good size though. Definitely a big room. I sat down, and I was thinking I was all prepared. It was funny, I sat down in the back just to kind of listen, see what the other speakers are talking about, and it became apparent very quickly that I had prepared the wrong speech. That the actual questions, and the actual things that I could give in order to actually be powerful for these people while I was on stage, I had prepared the wrong thing. It was extremely nerveracking, because I was on very shortly.
I pulled my computer up in the back, and what I did is I started writing like crazy. I wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and I was redoing my slides, and I was like oh my gosh I have literally created … I created this speech as if these people are doing X, Y, and Z, but they’re not. They’re actually in this whole separate industry. I was like, oh man. I mean, I changed my title slide, the name of the thing, the main points I was going to make, all the stories. I changed almost the entire thing, and it was nerveracking.
What I had realized, like I said, it’s not just that I had created the wrong speech, but I understood the false beliefs that these people had about what I was going to talk about. I had falsely understood those things. Meaning, I thought that these people had all believed that … I can’t even remember right now what it is. Anyway, the whole point is that I was not being accurate in what these people believed and didn’t believe. Does that make sense?
It’s really, really easy for a golfer to believe that there’s a few ways to improve the swing. You know what I mean? People are inclined to several beliefs related to what they do every single day. Just like for an MLM. If someones going to go … It’s very, very hard to recruit somebody who did not already have a preexisting disposition towards MLM, or entrepreneurship. Right? It’s very hard to do that.
My whole system, everything that I do is all about finding people who have preexisting dispositions towards MLM, and then helping them get closed into MLM by various things. Does that make sense? I realized that I had understood the beliefs incorrectly. The reason why it’s such a big deal with marketing is because, all marketing is is education. Marketing is merely just educating people on a new way of thinking. They’ve got to take on some new beliefs.
If you’re going to go market an MLM, meaning you’re basically saying what education are you giving. Now education can come in the form of stories. It’s not like it’s a classroom, but it can come in the form of stories, it can come in the form of facts, it can come in the form of a lot..
MLMs Revenue Activities
Hey, what’s going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen and you’re listening Secret MLM Hacks Radio. Oh yeah. Here’s the real mystery, how do real MLMers like us read and cheat and only bug family and friends want to grow a profitable home business? How do we recruit A players into our down lines and create extra incomes, yet still have plenty of time for the rest of our lives? That’s the blaring question and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Steven Larsen and welcome to Secret MLM Hacks Radio. Hey, what’s going on everyone? Hey, I’m super excited for today. My dad was really into teaching me how to work. I grew up in Middleton, Colorado. I was the oldest, still am, oldest of six kids. Had a great childhood. We played hard.
We worked hard. It was really important for my dad for us to know how to work and I’m really grateful that he taught us that. We would be out in the yard weeding on Saturdays for like six hours. No joke. Whenever there’s a big problem to solve, instead of giving us the answer, he’d be like, “What do you think? What do you think?” I really appreciated that he did that with us because when it comes down to it, the person who’s willing to work, I mean you’re just going to go so much further. There was one day though he took me to the side and I was getting ready to go to college, I think so, I think that was about that time or I was in it or something like that. Regardless, it was a long time ago. He said to me, “You know one of the reasons why …”
We weren’t like wealthy, wealthy or anything like that, but were certainly not struggling. My dad definitely knew how to provide. He was awesome. We had a lot of awesome fun family trips and memories and all those things. It was really great. I promise this ties right into network marketing. He taught me this lesson that has stuck with me for years and still to this day. I believe it’s one of the major reasons why I really believe that it is one of the major reasons why I have been successful with the things that I do. It all comes down to this concept that he told me. I was the age where I understood, “Oh my gosh. Dad makes money. Oh my gosh. He probably makes around this much in order for us to have this life.” You know what I mean?
I was around the age when I start putting all those things together and I was like, “Oh wow.” I can’t remember how really or when or where. Just around that time in my life the whole conversation came up of what your role in a company is. He said to me, “Steven.” He said, “Steven, there are two kinds of businesses. Sorry. There’s two kinds of employees in a company.” He said, “The first kind of employee resides on the cost side of the business.” Now there’s more security there, right? Meaning your job does not provide revenue for the company. There’s more security, meaning your part of the normal job functions. Let’s say you’re part of HR or you’re part of billing, right? You’re part of some kind of management role.
Meaning there’s a lot of security in it, but you’re not really directly responsible for any revenue into the bottom line of the company. I was like, “Okay. Sounds good. This was the first kind.” He’s like, “First kind, no revenue to the bottom line. You live on the cost side of the business.” He said, “The second kind of person though is on the revenue side of the business and the revenue side of the business is slightly more risk, however, vastly more income is available there. Salesmen.” There’s a reason salesmen get paid so much money because it’s not easy job, number one. Number two, not many people want to do it. I mean there’s more risk. If they don’t sale, they don’t make their commission, they don’t eat.
If you get someone whose good, you get someone whose actually awesome at it, they get paid a lot more money. Typically, salesmen, if they know how to make it rain, holy crap, they’ll get paid a lot than the people whose jobs and their positions ride on the cost side of the business. I was like, “Okay, dad. Yeah, that’s cool. That’s interesting and everything.” I didn’t realize how much that would affect me both in my own MLM and my own business, in my day job, and all the things that I’ve been doing. You know what I mean? I had no idea how much that would affect me. He’s right though. I mean every single job that I’ve ever had where I’ve been sitting on the cost side of the business, I mean growing up that’s mostly where your teenage jobs are.
You know what I mean? Those are like the nine to five or even later and earlier. Construction style jobs that I had, the labor jobs. I’m so grateful I had those. They were hard, but they were good, right? I was on the cost side of the business. I was not adding to the bottom line. If I was a door-to-door salesman like I was for a while or I did telemarketing, one sale would result far more money than I’d make doing those other kind of jobs.
Selling MLM Online
Hey. How you doing guys? This is Steve Larsen and you’re listening to Secret MLM Hacks radio. So, here’s the real mystery. Are there real MLM er’s like us? Who didn’t cheat and only bug family members and friends, who want to grow a profitable home business. How do we recruit A players into our down lines and create extra incomes? Yet, still have plenty of time for the rest of our lives. That’s the blaring question and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Steve Larsen and welcome to Secret MLM Hacks radio.
All right guys. We got a really fun episode today here. As some of you may know, actually, some of you guys probably don’t know, if you go to secretmlmhacksradio.com and you opt in there, what it does is it allows you to ask any question you want that comes up on this actual podcast. And what I do is I go through, and I do vet them, and I just kind of, as far as questions that apply to everybody so we can all learn together. Then what I do is I go through and I listen to them and I actually go toss in the actual question from you guys inside the episode.
So, here is a question. We’re going to start with this first question, here right now. First one of this podcast. I do this on my other podcast show and it’s been awesome so I thought I’d do it here too. So, great question here from Bernadette here.
Hey Steve. My name’s Bernadette. So, I have a question. I know your philosophy is that MLM is more about the opportunity and the products are kind of like an after thought. I’ve got the opposite philosophy and I’m wanting to build my business around that. I’m wanting to help people through my products. I don’t give a, not swearing, about the opportunity. So, can you help me with that and how do I use online funnels to do that? Cheers.
That is a fantastic question. I thought that was really funny, actually. Hey, yeah, absolutely. So, your question is more about, obviously I call it the MLM down line recruiting funnel. Obviously that means it’s focusing more so on the opportunity of MLM rather than the actual product itself. And I totally understand. Actually, that’s one of the bigger questions that I’ve had over and over again. Fantastic question on how do I actually sell the product using funnels?
What’s interesting is that most of my background is more on how to actually sell products, as far as in my other life I should say. How I got started, my own career, actually. So, you can use sales funnels to sell anything. Anytime you sell anything, whether or not you meant to, you created a funnel. If I go, I’ve used the example of McDonald’s before, if you go into the drive through at McDonald’s, and you’re in their sales funnel, right, they might get you with some coupon to get in there as their free thing. They might get you with some little ticket thing. They might get you just because you’re hungry. But they’re almost always trying to upsell you something. Hey, can I offer you this? Hey, you want to biggie size that? Hey, you want fries and a drink? Hey, you want this, this? Hey, you want this? Those are the different up sales that you can give along the way.
Now, it depends on your MLM’s compliance. But, one of the ways that I’ve been working on right now … I’m working on the launch of this actual product right now. One of the things I’m working on right now is, there are several e-commerce sales funnels that I’ve built that have gone and two and three x’d companies sales revenues, right. There’s a really good model that sells physical products online. And I know that it works very, very well. It’s not Shopify. It’s not like Amazon. It is the act of taking just a single product and selling that one product, asking if they want more of the same thing and then upselling them on a few other things as well. And it’s really, really cool. It works very fantastic. Of the four or five times that I’ve put that one together for other companies, I almost always three days later, get a frantic phone call, begging me to turn it off, because it works so well. I know it works really, really well.
So, anyways. You could build that kind of funnel for your MLM. And depending on your MLM’s compliance, use that to sell physical products online. Now, that product, that funnel, is included in the Secret MLM Hacks product that’s coming out soon. I’ve built that, I’ve put it all together so that you can plug and play. You can put, again, it depends on the compliance of the actual MLM you’re in. I’m only saying that over and over again so that you guys don’t get in trouble or obviously so that I don’t have liability also, because some MLM’s are fine with it and some are not.
So, regardless though, it’s going to be part of that product. But it is a funnel that has made, not just like a couple million, we’re talking tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars. So, what I did
3 MLM Ampliphiers
Ho, ho, what’s going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, and you are listening to Secret MLM Hacks Radio.
Here’s the real mystery. How do real MLMers like us, [inaudible 00:00:10] even cheat and only bug family members and friends, who want to grow a profitable home business, how do we recruit A players into our downlines and create extra incomes, yet still have plenty of time for the rest of our lives? That’s the blaring question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Secret MLM Hacks Radio.
All right, all right. Guys, I’m so excited to do this. It’s one a.m. in the morning right now, and I’ve just had this on my mind, and so I decided that I would just record it anyway, even though I have got to get up soon. I just really like what I do, so I just decided to stay up and get it done.
Anyways, hey guys, today I wanted to talk real quick about the three things that changed my MLM business forever. You know what’s funny is, I once sat down and I wrote all of the business that I had done and tried and tried to make money in, and I sat down, I wrote them all out, and it was, just off the cuff, it was probably 14, 15 businesses. It was a lot. This wasn’t small, little endeavors, like I tried that for a day or two, this was four, five, six months per thing.
I’ve been selling stuff in the business world for a long time now, especially comparative to most people, far longer than most people do it, or make it I should say. You know what’s funny is, on every single one of them, if I had the three things that I’m about to tell you right now, I know I may not be talking to you right now. Number one, I’m like, I wish I knew these three things. Stuff would have been so different, but at the same time, I wouldn’t be here talking to you right now, in your ears, and that makes me sad.
All right, heres the three things okay? I remember, one of the very first businesses that I created, that was on a subscription model, was a smartphone insurance company. It was a company called Fixed Insurance. What we did was, we went and we were looking at all the different insurance models for smartphones, and they’re ridiculous. Some of them, they’re just straight-up ripping people off, and we’re like, “Oh, we could totally sell that better.”
One of my buddies had a smartphone repair shop. He owned it for a long time. He did great things with it, and then he flipped it around and he sold it, and made profit and it was great. He’s like, “Dude, Steven, let’s go make this smartphone insurance company, um, and er, you handle like the onboarding of customers, and er, and I’ll go handle like the back and management part of it,” and I was like, “Sweet. Hey, this is cool right.” I was in the middle of college, we were both excited, we were ready to rock and roll on it, and it was going to be really cool.
Well, we got to work, and we wrote out exactly what it is that we were selling. We figured out what the different things were we could offer with it. We went and actually started looking at what all of the people who were also selling smartphone insurance already were already doing. Same thing that I tell you guys to do. Same thing that I did. I went out to the top MLM people, and I was like, what do these people do? What are they actually doing? Oh my gosh, it’s totally different things than the upline’s telling me to do. I’m going to stop doing the things the upline’s telling me to do, and start doing what the top MLM guys are doing. You know what I mean? That’s basically how it happened. That’s one of the turning things.
But for the smartphone insurance thing, we did the exact same thing. We were looking at all the other top people, all the other top companies. How are they selling, how are they selling, or what are they selling? It’s funny because we went and we planned this thing out. I handled the technology side of it, I built what we call sales funnels, and I put together a sales funnel online, it was all automated, so that someone could buy and there was automation. They could handle their policies, all this stuff. I went and I put it all together, and it was really cool. It was cool, and we built it, we put it all together, we hit the go button, and we had a few customers buy. Not many, but enough to be breaking even. We’re like, you know, really wish there was more people, but that’s not bad. All right, cool.
What’s funny is, it just floundered. It just stayed there for a little while. At first, its was just like, well this is just the period where they’re just talking to the people that they know, and customers will be coming soon. They never did though. I looked back on that and I was like what happened? This is so weird. How come these people aren’t joining? What the big problem with this? What I realized is that, I got this from Russel Brunson,