When you take time to recruit a potential applicant for your team, be genuinely concerned with whom they are and what makes them special. Treat them as respectfully as you would a new friend.

Because your applicant wants to join your team, it is natural for them to try to come up with the “right answer” or posture with an intelligent response to what they perceive to be possibly a trick question as to why they want to join your team or begin internet marketing online.

A powerful way to gain relevant insight quickly into what might matter most to your applicant is to ask, “If money were no object, how would your life be different today?  Would you still continue to work where you are now?  Would you retire early or pursue a hobby or special interest?  Would you buy a new car or house?  Would you pay off any debt or buy any toys?  Would you live where you currently do or move somewhere else? How would you be able to impact your family’s lives differently?  Would you travel or play more than you presently do?  What would change as a result of the financial freedom and time freedom you had created?”

By getting to know your applicant’s dreams you will gain insight into the areas that would make a home business internet marketing online a game totally worth playing for them. People like to work and associate with others who share things in common with them. The more areas of interest your applicant shares with you, the more likely she is going to listen to you.  Your applicant will trust you as a leader, share your values, and be interested in becoming a business partner with you.

What Are YOUR Critical Success Factors?

What are Crictical Success Factors and why are they important? Critical success factors indicate and measure the overall vitality of the business enterprise and the performance of everyone in it. Positive critical factor activity is required for ensuring the success of any business, and the absence of any one of them, even for a brief period of time can lead to business failure and loss. 

Each home based internet marketer has personal critical success factors, the performance of which determines his or her internet marketing success. As an entrepreneur, you’re no longer subject to annual job evaluations that point out your critical success factors and core competencies. That’s why it’s good to use a check list to evaluate your own performance from time to time.  A weakness or failure in any one of your key skills can undermine your overall effectiveness and weaken your ability to do your job effectively and turn a profit.  Look at your marketing campaign and your own core competencies as a marketer and business owner.  Then, measure your strengths and weaknesses in each one, and develop a plan to become excellent in the areas that can help you the most. 

Surprisingly, most new online marketers do not have a strong understanding of their company compensation plan, or the ability to formulate a sound business plan for their downline.  If you don’t understand your product line, chances are your only selling part of what your capable of selling. Your weakness could be a lack of training in countering objections effectively resulting in an inability to close the sale.  By improving your critical success factors as a sales person and marketer you could easily double or even triple your sales. 

Move Forward 

Your personal strengths and core competencies are what you have brought to where you are today.  They are the foundation of your current position and the determinants of your income.  Your weaknesses are more powerful than your strengths because they form a glass ceiling on your ability to achieve your goals. Your weakest critical success factors set limits on how far you can reach and how fast you can go.  They act like an invisible holding pattern which in turn prevents you from actualizing your full potential. 

To move ahead, you must be brutally honest with yourself in seeking out and facing your areas of weakness.  What are they? What one skill, if you developed and mastered it, would have the greatest positive impact on your career or your business success? Whatever the answer to this question, this is where you should begin to work on yourself.  This is where you can get the biggest payoff in terms of increased competence. What are the critical success factors of your business? The areas of activity where you absolutely, positively have be excellent at in order to be the best. 

What is your plan to become absolutely excellent in one area that can help you most of the time? Whatever it is, begin immediately to work on yourself in that area, and don’t stop until you have mastered this key skill. Begin today.

Instinctually, we all base our perceptions of others by what we first see.  But that isn’t where the real attraction lay.  Sure, you can live in the trendiest neighborhood, have multiple homes around the world, have the ultimate job, the sexiest life, make millions of dollars, go on exotic vacations, and dud yourself out with eclectic style.  But if you haven’t developed a strong magnetic mindset you probably have a zero personality and even fewer friends.

Here are some simple ways to amp your attraction meter ratings to something a little better:

1. Lead a flourishing life. This is the most powerful attraction factor by far: create more, be more, do more, grow more, have more, give more freely in every area of your life rather than struggle and react like a victim of circumstance. It’s that simple.
2. Be real, but then keep growing. Stop social modeling by imitating images you see in the media. Oscar Wilde puts it succinctly, ‘Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.’ Forgive and accept your past, your shortcomings and where you have failed with others.  Fix those areas one by one. See your own goodness and beauty. Build it out. Take a piece of paper and write down all of your characteristics you can think of, both good and bad.  Be brutally honest.  Then take another piece of paper and write down all of the characteristics you want to have—in other words, draw the picture of who you want be.  Let go of the things on the first list, and start taking actions to become the person you want to be.
3. Show genuine interest in others by listening. Two ears, but only one mouth. The other person is trying to convey a message to you.  Stop waiting for a pause in the conversation to inject your personal opinion.  Listen to understand, not to respond.  It’s okay to check in to keep the flow of the conversation going, or to repeat a thought back.  It demonstrates that you are paying attention.  Every counselor knows that one of the basic needs of a person is to be heard. Be that person. Really listen so the other person will eventually get his/her thoughts across to you.
4. Stop complaining. No one wants to be around a human complaint department.  Confide in the person that can actually help you solve your problem.  Broadcasting your ills to the world will kill your personal Nielson ratings, cancel your show—and your sales.  Work on being positive.  Positivity can calm negativity like a reset button.  Keep transforming the negative into a blessing or opportunity as the challenges arise daily. Strive to see the light and buoyant positivity in the situation at hand. Positivity sparkles with good feelings drawing others toward you.
5. Believe in yourself and gain confidence. Confidence is the secret sauce to success and the can-do attitude.  Being confident makes you more likely to find other confident and successful people. This will not only open up new opportunities, but you will also find that your own goals and plans will start to become bigger and you’ll be capable of pushing relentlessly working to achieve more. In time you will gradually exude more self-assurance and a stronger belief in yourself. Keep it all in check so you don’t morph into an arrogant Superman complex.
6. Make long-term friendships. A long-term relationship is based on love, intimacy, passion and commitment. The intimacy portion of love is that of friends; you enjoy spending time together, and have grown rather close strictly within the realms of “personality attraction.” Although physical attraction is necessary in any relationship, this feeling does not need to be acted upon right away without full fulfillment of the intimacy aspect. The passion and fire aspect of attraction can attribute to many distortions and relationship losses. For example, if you rush head-first into passion without considering the needs of a new friend, somebody is going to end up hurt. Rushing screams neediness and an attitude that “it’s all about me”, not the long-term friendship. The final, and equally important aspect of making long-term friendships work is that of commitment. (ew!) That means making a conscious choice to remain with this person for an extended period of time.
7. Be a nicer person and become a little Mensch-kin. Mensch is a Yiddish word that connotes a person who is admired, respected, and trusted because of a sense of ethics, fairness, and nobility.  Do something really nice for someone you know, but altruistically, with no intention of ever having the favor returned.  Be sure you do it to sincerely help them and not just to position yourself in their good graces.

Too much to do? Then here is a very simple way to get it right. Smile. Be kind and gracious as often as possible, and do it in a way so moving that it inspires other people to want to do it for another person. That’s really what being a powerful people magnet is all about.

Another work day goes by. You’re thinking about how disconnected your boss is from the operations of the business. Through casual and business conversations you begin to realize he really knows very little about what is actually going on. It’s embarrassing and irritating to have to constantly fill the blanks to keep him informed, and suddenly your respect for him diminishes.

Everyone has someone within the chain of command who knows less than we do about the business or work that we do every day. The signs of this lack of knowledge seep out gradually. Sometimes it’s blatant, like the proposals he makes when leading a meeting. The same proposals that came and went when they were tested out over a year ago. Maybe you and the entire department pick up a trail of clueless conversations from her that let on he has been far removed from the reality of the work place for a long, long time.

What should you do if you believe your boss is unqualified to manage or lead? How do you prepare your own mindset to cope with this, and continue to improve your own work performance?

The work place has a constant energy of give and take, for both the boss and the subordinate. Maybe this is temporary and he could benefit from classes or a little extra support to bring him up to speed. Because your career development is important, do your best to grow and learn from those around you, even if the boss cannot keep pace in his own arena. By producing excellent work and occasionally asking your boss for advice, it will appear you respect and seek her knowledge. By staying humble, you will stay out of trouble.

If you’re wide awake, take this as an exit sign to grow. Your boss is not leading you towards greatness and the deeper truth inside you knows it. Move along and find a new leadership position with a boss that will challenge you to be your best.  Maybe you have reached your potential with this employer and realize you are working in a very limited learning environment, and now is the prime time to strike out on your own.  Becoming your own boss is one of the most rewarding leaps you may ever make.  Get started today.

Working from home is 90% mental work. That’s why as a new marketing professional you constantly hear everyone beating the drum about mindset, mindset, mindset.  The psychological transition from employee into becoming a self-directed boss is HUGE and just one of many quantum leaps you’ll make.  While mindset is fundamental, marketing online is a real business that requires working smarter, not harder in order to maintain balance and generate profits. One of the first things you want to do is begin practicing effective work habits.  By doing so, you’ll side step confusion, distractions, and  death by failure that the majority of  new business owners fall victim to.

BECOME A MASTER MARKETER

1. Spend the majority of your time becoming a Master Marketer, but be sure you integrate your goals with your marketing campaign. Why both? Because goals are about making big things happen, not just worrying about getting the list done. In the first few months you’re going to be busy building  momentum and online presence. To do that you’ll focus almost exclusively on marketing to drive floods of traffic to your site.  So how do you tie in goals to your becoming a Master Marketer? A good way of gaining expertise and working on your goals would be to use one or two marketing strategies to generate 2000 leads to your sales funnel. Becoming good at one or two marketing strategies is the best way to gain effective skills that will give you the serious results you want.  New marketers are easily lured into thinking that more is better and end up trying too hard. Juggling multiple strategies at once like Twitter, Facebook, video marketing, article marketing, and blogging will give you mediocre traffic and leave you feeling  scattered.

FOCUS ON INCOME-PRODUCING ACTIVITIES

2. Commit yourself to an ambitious daily productivity schedule. Your marketing goals may be to produce, edit and distribute one video, then publish and bookmark one article and one press release every day. At first, this is going to take an entire day, but after a while you’ll begin to systemize your marketing, and get it all done within just a few hours. Being productive includes taking short 10 minute breaks but staying focused and not allowing yourself to get lost in non-income producing activities like surfing the internet for an hour or checking your e-mail 8 times a day. It sounds simple enough, but for most new entrepreneurs, it takes time and discipline to achieve this.

TEN HOURS A WEEK ON SELF-EDUCATION

3. Jim Rohn said it best when asked about learning, “A formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.”Spend at least 10 hours per week training. By leveraging the internet your training can be an interesting mix of online webinars, conference calls, podcasts, books, and watching instructional videos. The first few years of earning and learning are no different from freshman and sophomore academics at the university. An encylopedic-volume of information is coming at you at the speed of light. The only way to practically gain control is to “eat the elephant” one bite at a time. That means setting aside regular study time to self-educate and grow to prevent the feeling of overwhelm.

MEET AND LEARN FROM TOP EARNERS EVERY CHANCE YOU GET

4. Attend every conference and event you can where you can meet top earners who will freely share with you their pwn path to wealth and success. You”ll appreciate the wisdom gleaned from those conversations again and again after you return to your home office. That one-on-one experience alone is worth thousands of dollars to your career and business.

DAILY MOTIVATION IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SKILL YOU WILL LEARN

5. Cheerleading yourself through the day will be one of the most important skills you’ll ever learn. Staying the course, keeping yourself inspired and motivated takes effort at first. Some days inspiraton will magically turn into flow and passion. Getting motivated is also about your ability as a leader and entreprenuer to control your mindset so you can save yourself on rocky, tough days.  Facebook is a wonderful resource for inspiration. Every day tens of thousands of online marketers inspire their teams and others using Facebook. Nourish your mind and soul by reading personal development books or becoming inspired for one hour each day until the knowledge and lessons become “the new you”. Reading entrepreneur success stories will also keep you very motivated and protect you from the dreaded complacency even top earners have to constantly avoid.

CONNECT WITH OTHERS AND CREATE YOUR OWN MASTERMIND GROUP

6. You’ll face many uncomfortable hours of isolation also known as ’cabin fever’ that can be strange. But the good news is, the former water cooler crowd can be replaced with a positive, like-minded accountability friend or two you check in with by e-mail or phone a few times a week. You’ll be surprised how fantastic this kind of partnership can really be IF you’re on the same page with schedules, flexibility, values and a sincere commitment to making it work. A second way to socially adjust to your home office setting is to surround yourself with other marketers that will keep you connected and inspired.   Warrior Forum is a great place to learn and connect with other online entrepreneurs often dealing with the same  challenges as you.

BECOME A BIG THINKER AND SET UNREALISTIC GOALS

7. Become a big thinker if you aren’t already. Big thinkers are constantly setting ‘unrealistic’ goals that keep them driving fast. Keep one foot inside your business and one foot outside. Ask yourself, what is on my calendar in the next 90 days to increase lead generation and profits, and position myself within my company as a leader? Where am I beyond my home office: where am I relative to the economy and financial market, and where do I want to be?

I covered just a inside practices of top earners that will help you jet start your home marketing business. I know this seems like to think about, but if you sit down for a few hours and begin implementing a few of  them gradually, the return of your time investment will be worth it. Take a few minutes out of every day and try to do them one at a time. By the end of the month, you will begin to see you’re more efficient and organized the way you leverage your time and efforts.  More efficiency means more free time to enjoy life.  And, isn’t that one of the reasons why we chose business ownership in the first place?

Unlike your website, your blog will get discovered immediately by people subscribed to relevant key words and key phrases from Ezine, Technorati, WordPress, Stumbleupon, and Digg. Your online reputation is important.  Everything anyone reads that you have written online will either help or hurt your reputation. The best way to manage your online reputation as you blog is to pay attention to these points:

1. Dress your blog to impress. That free theme you’re using on your blog might be enough to impress a few readers, but if it’s the same theme used by dozens of other blogs, you’ll blend into the crowd. Just as you’d consider a new suit a great investment for a big event or conference, you should consider a custom design a great investment for your blog.
2. Mind your language in the blogsphere. Blogging lends itself well to a casual attitude. What does it matter if you don’t spell check your post? Why worry if you happen to insert profanity here or there? Well, if you were to swear throughout your first meeting with a prospect, or utter sentences such as ‘I is very experienced,’ what do you think you chances would be of converting the prospect to a rep? You WILL be judged by what your language in your blog posts.
3. If you want to make a great first impression, bring an unexpected surprise!  Always aim to blog a unique subject and then infuse it with insight, facts and fascination they’re unlikely to observe on their own. That is the core creative challenge to blogging.
4. Listen as much as you talk. Sure, your readers want to hear your advice, thoughts, and opinions, but you’ll build your reputation as a super blogger by learning to listen to them and engaging in conversations with them. Not necessarily in comments, but by subscribing to their world and their blogs, and by referencing their posts in your blog.
5. Don’t let the fire burn out too early. Your readers will become comfortable with the frequency of your posting. If you post twice a week or twice a month they’ll get used to that schedule. Stick with it, it’ll pay off in an enhanced reputation and more leads.

Bloggers may be the most important visitors your blog will ever receive. In the world of SEO networking, bloggers are the social marketing evangelists of your message, or potential prospects and reps, or maybe all three. If they like what they see, they’ll naturally want to subscribe to your blog, share your posts and follow your links.