Mark Ewell

Your “Million Dollar Story” is one of the main reasons people will want to talk to you about joining your business. It is through this story that people will see that you may be able to help them get what they want.

Why? Because they will see that you have gone before them. They will see that you have solved the problems that they are currently facing. They will be able to identify with you. And, once they meet you, they will want to work with you as long as you become expert in identifying and bridging the gap between where they are and where they want to be [more on this in another post].

Before you create your “Million Dollar Story”. You may ask, “What is it?”

Good question. To answer it, let’s back up a bit . . .

In 1949, Joseph Campbell wrote a book entitled “Hero with a Thousand Faces”. In it he talks about his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero found in the world of mythology. I am sure you are all familiar with those heroes’ journeys. They have been with us throughout time.

According to Campbell, the “Hero’s Journey” occurs when:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons (blessings or benefits) on his fellow man.”

In fact, since Campbell’s book came out, his theory has been applied by many including George Lucas, who has articulated a debt to Campbell for the stories of the Star Wars films.

Your “Million Dollar Story” is akin to Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey”. It is your version of it.

So, how do you write it? There is a process:

1. Start off high (describe how life is now – pick something positive or in an upward trend)
2. Tell them about your LOW POINT (“my life was not always this way”)
3. Tell them about your turning point (“then I had a breakthrough and I learned…”)
4. Tell them how things are now going well – give them some inspiration so that they can see that they have a way out by following you! (“I’m going to show you how this is possible for you too.”)

Think of the Hero’s Journey as a lot like an emotional rollercoaster where you take your potential business partners from high to low and back to high again.

Make sure that in creating your story you:

• show some humility,
• show them you care, and
• are being your authentic self.

Your “Million Dollar Story” is NOT:

• your bio,
• about YOU, or
• FOR you.

Your “Hero’s Journey” IS:

• a means to support other people, and
• a story that shows your clients that YOU ARE THE BRIDGE to get them from where they are now to where they want to be.

Note: Whatever you have gone through, it is so you can help your people get through it too! If your people can relate to your low point, you can inspire them! You can attract them to you. You have gone before and you can show them the way.

So, take some time and write a compelling “Million Dollar Story” and then get on the phone and talk to your prospective business partners.

This is some food for thought in setting up your web site and selecting what to write about. Keep this in the context of your archetypes, values, loves and talents, your ideal prospect, and your overall strategy.

There are 3 Major Reasons People Come to the Internet
● To make money or save money
● To find solutions to problems
● To find happiness or fulfillment

The Top 10 Niche Markets Are
● Make Money or Save Money
● Self Help/Personal Development
● Supernatural/Spiritual
● Technology/Information Technology
● Shopping
● Fitness/Diet
● Relationships
● Everyday Problems
● Food/Recipes
● Hobbies/Crafts

Note that the controlling forces driving human behavior are:
● Pain
● Pleasure
and, that people will do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure.

Also, there are 6 main motives for human action:
● Love
● Gain or Greed
● Duty
● Pride
● Self-Indulgence
● Self-Preservation

And 4 major motivators:
● Immortality
● Recognition
● Romance
● Reward

So, keep these in mind and you will never have a shortage of new, compelling content for your followers!

If you know somebody’s needs, then you know how to help them get to where they want to be. This is the key.

Needs fall into 9 basic categories. If you know what they are, you know what to look for. If you know what to look for, you can find them. If you can find them, [and you can articulate how you and your opportunity can fill them] you will be able to relate to people better. If you can relate to people better, you will increase your recruiting rate. If you deliver on the promise to fulfill the person’s need, you will increase your retention rate. If you know how to do this, you can duplicate it through your organization.

Is this important for your business? Yes!

So, these needs can be put into 9 categories:

• Security
• Acceptance
• Community
• Exchange
• Expression
• Expansion
• Power
• Adventure
• Freedom

Generally, people have three primary needs and the others are secondary. Your job is to identify the three primary needs for each person with whom you are dealing. This will tell you what you have to know to optimize your dealings with them. You will be able to communicate with them more effectively.

You will also find that you will have more natural rapport with people that share your needs. If you do not share needs, you will have to create the rapport. More on this in a separate post.

Let’s have a brief look at how these 9 needs show up in people.

1. Security.
They need to feel safe, feel protected. They need predictability. Security can mean many things:

• Having a “good job”
• Owning a house “free and clear”
• Having a “big bank account”
• Being debt-free
• Living in a “secure” community
• Having a car on which they can depend
• Carrying sufficient health, life, liability insurance

2. Acceptance.
This is the need to be accepted by others – belonging. These are people that like:

• Joining clubs
• Doing things to make others feel good
• Building relationships with the neighbors, other kids’ parents, etc.
• They are always “nice”
• They are very tolerant
• They are always “helping”
• They work towards the inclusion of “others”

3. Community.
These are people that like to be around other people. They love get togethers. Here is what you might see:

• Somebody who hosts lots of parties
• Someone at the center of the office activity
• A peron who belongs to many clubs
• Someone who coordinates some kind of campaign
• Someone who hosts groups at their home [family, social or business]
• Someone who will run for office

4. Exchange.
These people need to trade information and knowledge with others. For instance:

• They love to debate
• They love to stay in touch with everyone
• They love to work with people towards a common goal
• They want to make sure people are treated “fairly”
• Working on commitees is good
• The build and maintain an active network of contacts
• They love networking
• They can share deep relationships with people with whom they perceive they can communicate

5. Expression.
Expressives need to be seen, heard, felt. They are often artistic. They have the need to express themselves through words, actions, dress, art and self-creations of all types:

• Writing
• Creating art
• Dance
• Design
• Teaching arts to children
• Speaking on the arts
• Writing about the arts

6. Expansion.
This is the need to create. Somebody with the need for expansion might:

• Build a business
• Expand a business
• Expand an important collection
• Protect the environment
• Create new knowledge
• Be a visionary
• Create something nobody else has ever thought of

7. Power.
This is all about authority and responsibility. These people may be:

• The Boss
• The political leader
• A speaker
• Responsible for people, projects, events, situatuations, projects
• Authorities on something
• Somebody people look upon as somebody to follow

8. Adventure.
These people love to have new experiences, travel, have drama in their life, have a sense of anticipation about upcoming events. People who need adventure can be found:

• Starting a new company
• Being an entrepreneur
• Having a job that moves them around
• Being early adopters
• Setting some record
• Planning a new trip

9. Freedom.
These people love independence and spontaneity. They need to have choices and to feel in control of making those choices. They need to be able to:

• Make their own choices
• Select the business they want
• Select the lifestyle they want
• Move around when they want
• Make their own decisions
• Be self-sufficient
• Look how they want
• Follow the rules that they want
• Be with whomever they want

So how do you find these needs? Well, after building rapport with the person, use questioning. I don’t mean interrogation. I mean relationship building questioning to see what is important to them. You can formulate your questions if you know how these needs can manifest themselves. You can formulate them based on the characteristics of each need. Start with the general and then get more specific. And listen carefully.

Note that people often only question others in a way that reflects their own needs. This will keep you from connecting with some two thirds of the population! Surely you don’t want that! Go through and identify your own needs but then set them aside. Find the needs of your people and communicate to them under those terms.

Once you are able to get at what people’s real needs are, you will be able to connect with them more easily. You will be able to communicate with them in a way they can internalize. Once they see that their basic needs can be met through what you are offering them you will begin to talk to them about their dreams and what they really want to accomplish. When you get to that point you will have a business partner for life.

I don’t know about you but when I am evaluating a business I want to make sure that I can turn it into a cash cow. How do I do this? Well, a business must have a number of key traits to make it “interesting” – to me anyway. And – guess what – being in on the ground floor is not one of them.

What I like to follow is Warren Buffett’s model.

There are four questions that Buffett considers when he is evaluating a business. If the answers are acceptable to him, he will invest. If not, he will pass. Might I suggest that you do no less of an analysis in evaluating a business you are considering.

1. Do you understand the business?

• Do you understand how money is made?
• Do you like the business?
• Can you reasonably predict future earnings?
• Does the business have excellent business economics and pay plan [cash cow candidate]?
• Does the company have a franchise/consumer monopoly [good] or is it a commodity business [bad]?
• Does the business have favorable long-term prospects?

2. Does the business have a durable competitive advantage? [economic moat] What is it?

• Product leadership
• Brand name
• Superior product
• Intellectual property
• High switching costs
• Economies of scale
• Human capital
• High fixed costs

3. Is the management up to the task?

• Are they hard working?
• Are they intelligent?
• Are they honest?
• Do they do ordinary things exceptionally well?
• Do they profitably deploy earnings?

Honesty is critical – if they are dishonest yet hard working and intelligent they will rob you blind.

4. Is the price of building the business in line with the initial cost and the desired return?

• Are the returns sufficiently high?
• Can you leverage it?

It’s far better to get into a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.

I was reading an interesting blog post the other day. It gives some useful metrics on why people in the US leave brands they were following on Facebook, Twitter, and email. We can all learn something from these statistics – even those of us in network marketing. So, pay attention and avoid the pitfalls.

Over 80% of consumers say they have “broken up” with at least one brand on Facebook, Twitter, or email. The main reasons are that they find the messages that they are getting are irrelevant, boring, or there are too many of them.

As far as Facebook goes, 63% of fans there have “unliked” a company because of too many posts while 38% of have “unliked” a brand because posts were boring or repetitive.

On Twitter, 41% of users say they’ve stopped following a brand. Boring content is the main culprit (52%). Frequency is less of a concern (39%) for these users but clutter is more of a concern (41%).

Over 90% of email users say they have unsubscribed to a brand’s list. The main reasons are too many emails (54%), repetitive or boring content (49%), and cutting back on email subscriptions (47%) in general. In addition, 17% delete these emails as soon as they arrive, and 8% hit the spam button.

What can we conclude from this? Well, my conclusion is that people do pay attention to what you send out. So, respect your followers. Keep your content quality high and your message frequency reasonable. Only speak when you have something useful to say. Otherwise, you will become one of these statistics!

Here is the link to the full article.

Note: The study was conducted by ExactTarget and CoTweet. The findings are based on a survey, conducted from Dec. 2010 to Jan. 2011, of 1,506 online adults in the US.

MLM Success can be a reality. It is no secret that in recent years the world’s financial landscape has changed. The property market has collapsed, share prices have faced steep drops, and more people than ever are losing their job.

These aren’t people that have only just started working within their positions either. These are people who have worked with commitment and loyalty for years on end. The sad fact is that small to medium sized local companies can no longer afford to sustain their current business models.

With fewer and fewer jobs on the street many are looking for other ways to earn money, including the possibility of working for themselves. What are you supposed to do however if you don’t have a product to sell? Maybe you don’t feel you have a particular trade that could be marketed, or perhaps you just don’t know where to start when it comes to starting your own business.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a way you could work for yourself, selling a range of products which have proven to sell over the period of many years? Wouldn’t it be even better if you had full training and support in the daily running of your business from people who are already successful in their own businesses? How about if you could eventually improve the lives of other people by helping them to create and run businesses of their own?

Well, that is what people who are enjoying MLM success are already doing! Now before you spit out your coffee or pull the curtains in your living room in case anyone outside spotted you reading the words “MLM Success”, relax. As as someone who is already running a very successful MLM venture of my own, I am here to dispel some of the myths for you. I will also help those who want to be free of the rat race some with some useful tips about how to avoid the scams.

How Does MLM Work?

MLM stands for multi-level marketing and is one method that companies use to market their products and services. This is how it works. The company brings in Master Distributors who build a sales team to sell the company’s products for them. The people on the team receive a commission for everything they sell. Let’s call this group of sales people “Team 1″.

What this team of sales professionals can then do is recruit other people to join the sales team, so that they can also begin selling the company’s goods. Now you have the original sales team (“Team 1″) selling the products, as well as the newly recruited sales professionals also winning new business. Let’s call this new group of sales people “Team 2″. Now as well as earning money for the sales that they make themselves, the “Team 1″ now also earns a small commission for sales made by people they recruited into “Team 2″. They have two separate streams of income, direct and indirect.

Now “Team 2″ can make money selling products alone, or they can also recruit new people into the business and receiving commission on their recruit’s sales. What this is doing is creating the same two income streams for the sales staff, as well as getting more and more people out there selling the company’s products. You can think of it as mini-franchising. This increases profits for the people on the team, the company, as well as increasing brand awareness.

Some claim MLM companies are simply pyramid schemes. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Pyramid schemes are illegal. The companies involved never have an actual product to sell. Money to pay the existing people is taken from the new people paying their way in. Think Bernie Madoff . . .

A professional MLM business, on the other hand, will have a fantastic range of products, that are proven sellers, and that actually add value to people’s lives. MLM is simply the vehicle they choose to market and promote those products. They could spend millions of dollars on advertising, they could promote themselves on radio, or they could deliver flyers to people’s houses, and so on. Instead they chose MLM.

Businesses who use MLM to sell their products are simply using a different method of promotion. They are also giving
ordinary, everyday people the chance to earn money from home, as we as the chance for those who are driven enough to begin their very own successful home business. That, my friends, is what MLM success is all about.

In an economy that is seeing millions lose their jobs and their homes, ask yourself is that a good thing or a bad thing?