Dale Reynolds Blog

I have a pet peeve on Facebook. I do NOT want game requests, neighbor requests, causes requests, gifts, etc. sent to me!

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I know everyone wants entertainment, and if you want to play Facebook games with your personal friends and family, enjoy. Send them hugs and kisses, candy, cookies, cafe neighbor requests or whatever.

But, when you connect with other network marketers on Facebook:

• Look at their profile to see if you have common interests
• Look at their recent wall posts, and the groups and fan pages they belong to

Then pay attention to what their profile tells you!
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This all comes back to how you should approach relationship building. You should be looking for ways to add value to the other person’s business or life. Are you really adding value by sending this stuff? You may be wasting their time and annoying them! If they don’t play games, they will not respect you as a serious business person if you attempt to engage them in games.

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An extra clue would be if they are a fan of “I dont care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia!!!”  There are over 5 million fans of this page!

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In a traditional job environment, you work during working hours. You play games and chit chat on breaks. I know, MLM is not a traditional job. We are in this business largely because we dislike traditional jobs. We don’t want someone telling us what to do or when to do it. But we do want to make money, right?

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The only way playing games could possibly be part of an income-producing activity is if it builds more know, like, and trust into the relationship. And it will only do that if the person actually likes playing these games. If you see that they play games, after you have built a relationship, ask if they want to play. But do NOT send these invitations to people unless you KNOW they are interested!

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If you spend quite a bit of time playing games, and if your business is not as successful as you would like, ask yourself if these things are connected. To me, it is the same as counting your paper clips, sorting your papers, and running errands that could wait. You are getting ready to get ready to work. You are avoiding the real tasks that could build your business. Think about it!

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This is probably related to your personality type.  Learning about the personality colors, and getting personal development training, could get you into action.  You can get started today by downloading the free Success In 10 Steps ebook from the button on the left.

Most experts on personal branding suggest that your blog website be the “hub” of your branding.

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I picked WordPress for my blog platform on the advice of some local experts, and have also seen this mentioned by many online experts as the platform of choice. Of course you can always consider others.

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There are two ways to create a WordPress blog: on their site, or your own site. I suggest having your own site because if you host on their site, you are restricted as to the look of your blog and I don’t think you can have widgets at all.

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What steps do you follow for creating your blog on your own website?

1. Reserve your url
2. Decide where to host the website
3. Pick a theme
4. Pick and customize your widgets
5. Advertise the heck out of your new website

The first step is to decide what your website name will be. Your name should be in the url. Reserve your url after finding one that works. I chose to insert a hyphen between my first and last names. I could have also tried.biz or some other extension but I wanted.com since it is the most popular. One of my friends put “goto” in front of her name. Get as creative as necessary, but get your name in there!

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I can’t give much advice on where to host your site, since I am spoiled rotten in this area. My husband has the equipment and the knowledge to host mine for me (no, he won’t do anyone else’s.) You can go with a big company or look for a smaller local company if you want to actually know the people you are buying from. The Chamber of Commerce is a good place to look for local companies. My only caution here is to be sure they really have their act together as far as backups and security. In fact no matter who hosts your blog, I’ve been told you should have your own backup just in case! A good question to ask is how many outages they have had in the last year, what caused them,and what was the duration of the longest one.

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Other factors to consider are cost (of course) and ease of making changes. Ideally you want to have access to make changes yourself, and not pay for them. You will want to keep your photo updated over time, you might join more social networking sites or other groups and want to mention that, or you might need to remove something or change your contact information. You don’t want high costs or long delays to get changes made.

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One assumption I am making is that you already know what you will be writing about. You want your blog entries to be related, in an area of expertise for you. If you are all over the map, like writing about piano playing one day and bird watching the next day and foreign travel after that, your readers will not know what to expect and you will not get people to bookmark or subscribe. You want to create a “following”, that is what personal branding is all about! So stick with a central topic theme.

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The layout and graphics of a WordPress blog come from the “theme.” There are many themes available on the web for WordPress. Some are free, and I chose a free one to save money. The only caveat with a free theme is that there will probably be an imbedded link at the bottom of the page to someone else’s website (the person who wrote the code wants something for their work!) If you know someone who has programming knowledge on personal computers they can get rid of that for you if you like. Pick a theme that relates somehow to the subject matter of your blog. I will warn you, you can spend DAYS hunting down the one you want! Just remember that you’re planning to keep it a long time (this is your personal brand after all!) so take the time upfront to get the one you really want.

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One thing you will see right away is that some themes have space for advertisements. Some people sell ad space on their blogs to help offset the cost of running it. If you are involved with a company that provides banner ads for you, or you find something on the web that you like and it fits, you could plug those in also although you wouldn’t make any money on that. I chose to find one without ad space.

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Widgets are endless! You can have a widget created for pretty much any social media site or information sharing site. One thing you will find is that widgets which show your latest posts on that site may slow down the loading of your page. Some widgets also might not fit well into your theme. You just need to play around with them. It normally is good to have some sort of widget that links to each of your social media sites. You will also want a bookmark and share widget to allow people to easily find their way back, and share your posts with others.

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My favorite widget is a simple text widget. This allows you to connect any graphic image with any web url.

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Once you have the site customized, the final step is to advertise it. My blog is the website I list in my profile on all social media sites. I advertise other links in individual posts, but my blog is my central identity. Remember that you want your blog to be your hub because, as long as you have your own site, it is the one site YOU control the content of! Other sites might contain advertising, recommend “related” posts that you do not approve, or have links taking people to other places. They can also close your account, or get hung up with too many users online, or change the site so things don’t work the same. Your own site is the only one you control.

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I hope you find this helpful. If you have questions, feel free to ask!

I’ve written before about the importance of reading your MLM “contract” which is your policies and procedures.  This week I learned about two more “gotcha” clauses I hadn’t seen before and also a new thought about your need to keep checking things over time.
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The first clause I learned about was a clause that says if you leave this MLM company, you cannot join another one for 12 full months.  Isn’t that outrageous?
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The second one I heard about is more confusing.  It is stated in a bunch of “legalize” but what it boils down to is this: you agree that if you leave this company, they are immediately and irreparably harmed to the extent that no remedy of law can make them whole.  What this means legally is, they can come after anything and everything you own, including your house and your cars, in an effort to repair the “damage”.  Outrageous!
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You might be thinking as I was at first, that this must be illegal.  But it isn’t!  Contract law is outside of the constitution.  When you click the button that says you agree to the policies during your sign-up process, you are effectively signing a contract and a court of law will bind both parties to those terms.
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The real kicker is, companies can add to or change their policies at any time without notifying you (that is stated in the policies you agreed to.)  I believe that the first case I mentioned here was actually done as a later add-on.  While some states have laws which protect distributors, other states have laws which protect the companies far more.  So it is critical that you read you policies again from time to time to protect yourself.
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Here are two more clauses contained in most MLM policies that many distributors are not aware of.  The first relates to your relationship with the company.  You are always an independent contractor, NEVER an employee, in MLM.  And yet I see in Facebook profiles every day where people have listed their MLM company as their employer.  In most cases, this is a direct violation of the policies and procedures and could result in immediate termination.  The second common clause prohibits you from using the company logo, yet people frequently use the logos on Facebook as well as their personal (not replicated) websites.  This could also get you terminated.
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What most people think is that if they are making money for the company, they would never be terminated.  But what if the company runs into financial trouble?  Is it easier to go bankrupt, or to find an excuse to terminate a few people and keep their commissions?  Of course, to avoid embarrassment, they aren’t likely to kick out the people who star in their promotional videos and present on stage at every conference.  But the “renegades” who are making money without being involved in the company training, and are staying out of the spotlight, are certainly fair game!
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If you would like to get plugged in to the training system where I learn all of this great information, please start by downloading the free ebook “Success In 10 Steps” on the left.  It could save you years of failure and frustration!

In the course of my self development I find myself asking, “What makes a great leader in MLM?“  I believe a leader does the following:
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• * Teaches people where to find answers instead of always being the expert
• * Helps people succeed without fear they will do better than him/her
• * Builds relationships so they understand each person and can help them grow
• * Sets a good example by practicing what they preach

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1.  Some people feel the need to appear very smart (EGO) so they answer every question themselves.  After a corporate life where I was always trying to prove myself to get raises and bonuses, I must confess I was doing this at first in MLM too.  Now I understand that as a leader in MLM you need to develop your people so they can become self-sufficient.  That means you become a professional “pointer” and show them where to find the answers.  They will in turn teach this to the people they sponsor (duplication.)  Teach people to fish, rather than handing them the fish!
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2.  I was thinking (after the olympics) about athletes wanting to set new records.  They want to be the best, to prove to themselves and the world what can be done.  That is fine in sports.  If you are trying to be an MLM leader though, it’s not such a great idea.  If you are a heavy  hitter or sponsor monster you simply set the bar too high for 90% of your downline to duplicate.  They will get frustrated and quit.  You need to develop your people, and if you are working with more than 10 at a time you are probably spread too thin.  So if you directly sponsor people very fast I hope you are placing some of them under someone else with leadership potential and asking them to work with those people.  Michael Dlouhy, author of “Success In 10 Steps” currently has a goal to help 10 people in his downline to exceed his income (which will be incredible!)  Now THAT is leadership!  No EGO!
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3.  When you sponsor and move on without building relationships, two things happen.  First, your people are not loyal to you and will jump ship at the next “great” opportunity.  Second, you can’t really help them magnify their strengths and minimize or improve their weaknesses.  This takes work, which is why I suggested above you not work with too many people at once.  I was recently “advised” by someoone that I should never target people already in MLM because they will just quit eventually and take everyone with them.  Well, I am not targeting heavy hitters, I am targeting the people who believe in MLM but have been abandoned by those heavy hitters!  If this guy has people jumping ship, it is because he is sponsoring the wrong people, and/or too fast, in order to make a quick buck.  He is not bothering to build relationships and help his people, which builds trust and loyalty.  He may make more money than me in the short run, but how could you ever retire with confidence that you have real residual income when you are constantly afraid your people will leave?  In his scenario, even if he brings in people with no experience don’t they eventually get experience and become those people who readily jump ship?  Actually, no, because he never develops them!  So he has to keep sponsoring more to make money.  Either way he never retires with residual income, right?
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4.  This point may be obvious, but you cannot expect people to do what you are not willing to do yourself.  If you want them to be on calls, you need to be on them too or at least listen to the replays.  If you want them to go to the convention, you need to go too.  If you want them to become leaders and develop their people, you must have set that example with them first.  I had an upline forget about a 3-way call we had scheduled once.  What example did he set?
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I hope this gives you some ideas to work with.  The Mentoring For Free system definitely develops leaders!  If you would like to learn more, please click to the left to download “Success In 10 Steps” and I will be honored to work with you and serve you!  That’s what true leaders do, you know, they serve others without an EGO in the way!