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When the Renegade Professional launched for the first time there was always going to be a mad rush to get in but no one expected a melt down…
Many people tried for hours to get in but couldn’t.
Although the Renegade Professional team had prepared by getting 2 new servers for the job, it still wasn’t enough. The huge number of people all rushing to get a spot at once caused everything to freeze up and many missed out.
Obviously many people persevered because the doors to the Renegade Professional closed within 8 hours of the launch. The Renegade Pro membership site was bursting at the seems with new subscribers.
For many the pre-launch excitement of the Renegade Professional ended in disappointment…they were unable to access the order page and then had the doors closed in their face.
Some people got up at all hours of the morning to be at the sign up page, while others took the day off work or arranged babysitters…you can imagine how these people felt.
Ann Sieg and Mike Klingler understood this and so beefed up their support staff so that they could take on more subscribers and decided to re-open the Renegade Professional. They re-opened for 2 days to allow those that missed the first time a second chance.
The Doors Are Shut Again So Now What?
The reason that the numbers were limited was so subscribers would get the support they needed. After everything settles down and Renegade Professional team can assess what they need in terms of support the doors will re-open once again.
If you are wondering what you should do in the meantime…don’t worry, there’s plenty.
During the launch of the Renegade Professional there was a lot of excellent free content released and that is still available. You can access the free Renegade Professional training here, this will also allow you to access the free membership area where you will have access to other excellent free resources that will get you started with attraction marketing.
When you join the notification list through the link above you will also get to attend webinars that I will hold to expand on the marketing concepts taught in the free videos. This alone will be enough to help you get started with generating your own leads online.
The million dollar question on everyone’s lips at the moment is — can social media really be used in business?
Unless Gary Vaynerchuck, head of a New Jersey Liquor company with over 100 employees and a turnover of more than 50 million dollars is nuts, the answer is most certainly yes.
Gary V noticed a shift towards social media a few years ago and so he decided that he would give up his role of leading the company he built up with his father to focus on creating a wine TV show that is now the phenomenally popular Wine Library TV blog.
Most people actually thought he was nuts for doing that and some people just think he is nuts anyway but one thing is for sure, he knows a heck of a lot about social media and it’s worked like a charm in his business.
Here is a 4:25 minute snippet from an interview he did with Rich Schefren a while back:
As you may have gathered, Gary Vaynerchuck is huge on becoming part of the community. He apparently gets over 500 emails per day and he takes the time to answer every one of them personally. Since his increased popularity as a result of his Wine Library TV blog, he has also started a blog where he just talks about business, which is also a passion of his. If you really want to understand social media, watch Gary Vay.Ner.Chuck as he probably gets it better than anyone else on the ‘net.
The Renegade Professional has been open for nearly one month and already some great stories of success are starting to come in.
The training in the Renegade Professional is the most comprehensive training on setting up a internet/network marketing system I’ve seen (and I’ve been around a few membership sites over the past few years).
Although this training is really aimed at network marketers who are wanting to take their business online, there seems to be quite a number of people who are not in network marketing but are still finding the training very useful.
Every move you make, every click you take, I’ll be watchin’ you…
It’s kind of creepy but if you are on my website, I’m going to know what word you typed in to get here.
If you didn’t find this site through a search, I’ll know if you came from twitter, facebook or any other webpage on the net.
If you typed my domain in because you already new about this site, I’ll know that too.
I’ll also know exactly how long you stay here, whether it’s 1 minute or 10.
In fact, I’ll know exactly how you leave, whether you hit the back button or click on a link or banner (of course I’ll also know which link or banner you clicked on).
If you stick around and read a few different pages I’ll know that too, and I’ll also know which pages you went to and in what order.
You are probably starting to think this guy is bloody weird, what’s his problem…
I can’t tell you how thrilled I am about the free content that has been made available since the Renegade Professional launched.
As an affiliate promoting the Renegade system products in order to generate leads for an MLM business and also create a steady stream of income, this is really great news.
Having a good contact management system is an important factor in building any business, especially a home based network marketing business.
I’ve had people decide to join my network marketing business 1 and 2 years after our initial contact. Staying in constant touch with these people over a long period of time allowed us to develop a relationship that was built on consistency and trust.
In all cases these people joined me in business at a time that was just right for them. Everyone has their own time line when it comes to getting involved in a business and it has little to do with what YOU would like to see happen. If you are not in constant touch with your prospective business partners, you probably will not be top of mind when they are ready to get started with a new business venture.
With hundreds of people on my contact list, keeping in touch regularly with people would be hard without an excellent contact management system.
Are You a Hunter or a Farmer?
In Joe Nunziata’s book, Spiritual Selling he divides sales people into two groups;
Farmers – those who cultivate relationships over a long period of time
Hunters - those who go for the quick sale and then move on to the next target
Farmers are the people that build huge lists of contacts and continue to nurture those relationships over a long period of time. If this way of working appeals to you, then having a very good contact management system will be crucial for your success.
I personally prefer to build relationships over time and so have tried a number of different contact management systems.
The first one that I used was Microsoft’s Outlook and I must say that I was very happy with it. I did find that it was a little hard to integrate all of the tasks, notes, appointments and emails with contact information but for a long time I made do with it and was happy.
On a few occasions I lost all my data due to computer malfunction (as well as me not backing up properly) and that was an absolute nightmare. This is not something that can be blamed on Outlook but I must say using a web-based contact management system gives me a lot of peace of mind on that front.
The next contact management system that I used was ACT by Sage. I switched to this because it was recommended by a few of my mentors and most of my team was using it. There is no doubt that ACT has some powerful features that Outlook doesn’t but I never totally got used to using it. I found it a little too complicated and never got past using the simple features.
One drawback with ACT and Outlook
I use a desktop computer for all of my work and both ACT and Outlook were PC based systems. This meant that if I was anywhere other than my office I couldn’t access my contacts, appointments and scheduled tasks. I know that ACT has a palm device that can by synced with a PC but I just never felt inspired to go there.
Then came Oprius…
I wasn’t really looking for a new contact management system but was asked to trial the Oprius Sales and Contact Management system to see if it would be a good affiliate program for the Renegade Marketer System. There was a 30 day free trial with Oprius which required no payment details. I tried it for the 30 days and have been using it ever since.
I used to love playing with new software and tools. I’d happily spend hours fiddling with them until I was comfortable with all of their quirks…not these days. Because I have better things to do with my time than fiddle with software, I want things to be obvious and intuitive. If I try a new piece of software and it’s not fairly obvious how to use it, I move on very quickly.
That was one of the things I liked about the Oprius Sales and Contact management system, everything about it was obvious. Within minutes I could find my way around the basic features and the slightly more complicated features could quickly be grasped by watching their short and simple tutorial videos.
One of the other things I loved about Oprius was the fact that it was web-based. After losing my data more than once this was very appealing to me.
After about 1 week into trialling Oprius I was converted and over the following couple of months I started to really see how useful it was in building relationships for my business.
I was chatting with the CEO of Oprius a while ago and he mentioned the conversion rates for Oprius, I was amazed but not surprised — web traffic to free trial converted at 7%, free trial to paying customers converted at 48% and the retention rate was 98% !!
These are quite an incredible statistics and give you an idea of the level of satisfaction that people have with the Oprius Contact Management system.
Over the coming months I’ll be doing a series where I break down all the features of Oprius and how I use them in my business.
You can take a 30 day trial of Oprius and see what you think. I’d love to hear your comments…
By the way, what contact management system are you currently using if any?
I’d like to share a little rant about pitchers in social media (and I’m not talking about baseball).
I had a friend request on my facebook account recently. The person found me through a marketing colleague so I figured that this guy would be fine to add as a friend…
NOT!
Soon after clicking the accept button I noticed Renegade Network Marketer and all sorts of other promotional stuff plastered through my facebook account.
This is the first time I have ever ‘un-friended’ a person on facebook so I was scrambling to find the button for that as fast as I could.
Luckily within about a minute I found it and he was gone…sheesh!
You see, the thing is, my facebook account is a social place. I have friends in there that I went to school with, friends from my wife’s church, family friends, family members and also marketing colleagues. This is not a place for advertising affiliate products or business opportunities, no way!!
A quick look through and you’ll find all my friends are talking about social things mostly; uploading pictures of family, talking about their weekend, a trip they were on, everything except business.
So why was I ticked off?
Think of it like this…
Mr so and so comes over to my party and says,
hey can I come in, your friends such and such said it would be cool if I did.
My response is oh yeah, she’s cool, sure come on in and join the party. Next thing before he has even introduced himself to anyone, he whips out the megaphone and shouts,
“I’m a marketer, a network marketer, come over here and let me sell you stuff!!”
I’m like, who the heck is this guy coming into my party and pitching crap to all my life long friends (well it’s not crap, Ann’s stuff is great).
They didn’t ask for it and most likely are not interested in it. You see next, these intruders say to your friends, hey I’m a buddy of Steve’s can I join your party too? Then they go in there and trash your friends house with their sales pitches.
Then my friends are like, dude, what sort of people are you hangin’ with? That guy you introduced me to was a jerk, just tried to sell me stuff!!
I’m sorry buddy, this is a party not a sales convention, you’re out!
Why am I telling you this?
Because social media is getting extremely popular and many people are catching on to the fact that it’s a powerful business tool.
In my opinion there is a right way and a wrong way to use social media in business – the above example is definitely the wrong way in my opinion.
If this guy wants to join any of my other social networks do you think I will accept him…no way!
Social media is like a party and at parties you get to know people. If over time a relationship develops were business becomes part of the natural conversation then that’s great, but there’s no need to force it.
Twitter is the same, some people go on there and just pitch stuff all day long, the community hates that. People on these networks are looking to interact with people that bring value not sales pitches. Networks marketers that bring the old 3 foot rule to social media will be avoided like the plague.
I recently made a welcome page for my Twitter profile so that when people clicked on my Bio link they would get taken to a video message from me introducing myself.
When people click on your profile link they want to know a little bit about who your are, they don’t want a landing page or a sales page, that’s not why they click. Why not give them what they want?
(My rant and an explanation of a better way to do things. Length 8:53)
What you’ll notice on my twitter welcome page is that I do talk about business and I also add links to my websites BUT when a visitor clicks on one of those links they know exactly where they are going, it’s not a tricky link that is misleading at all.
Think of it like this, I interact with people on Twitter which is like socializing at a party. If people are interested enough in what I’m saying then they are going to want to know more about me and more about what it is that I do.
In a real life setting they would come up ask me but on a social media site they will go to my profile page and click my bio link, it’s like the person saying tell me more about yourself Steve…
At that point in the conversation I don’t just shove a business card in their face and say, here’s where you can buy my stuff…no I talk a little about myself and mention work as well.
If the person shows interest than I may hand them a business card and say call me some time if you’d like to know more.
This “tell me more expression of interest” on social media is when they click my website links on the welcome page.
Do you see how it’s more natural?
I’m not presuming that they are interested in what I do and just send them there, I’m giving them that choice and that’s just the way people like it.
I know it sounds like pure commonsense but seriously, there are so many people out there getting it so wrong in my opinion.
They are totally alienating themselves from the community and giving the mlm industry a bad name while they are at it, it’s basically spam.
Bloody viruses, worms, trojan horses, who sits around thinking these things up?
The past couple of days I noticed that AVG was crashing each time after a scan. I ignored it for a while but today curiosity got the better of me and so I decided to check out the scan logs and see what was going on in there.
To my horror I found that there were some warnings about trojan horses in the system! They were;
trojanhorsedownloader.bandoadAHZS and trojanhourse.generic12.BGE1
Just typing it makes me nervous….
Naturally the first thing I did was Google it to see just how bad it was (anything with a name like that couldn’t be good right?).
After a few quick searches I decided that these little trojan horses had to go and sooner rather than later.
I found a link to the MajorGeeks Forum and they had some solutions for getting rid of malware but it seemed like a ‘major’ pain in the neck to me (and hip pocket as some of the solutions where paid software).
I decided to do a little more hunting around to see what I could find. I came across a thread in the AVG forum which seemed like it might work.
Some how this breed of trojan horse attached itself to the restore files in the system. Now I’m not a major geek but I know that your computer remembers dates so that you can restore your PC if something goes wrong (which obviously won’t work when you’ve got little horses in there running wild).
The fix was too simple to be true really, just get rid of all the restore points on your PC and trojan horse be gone!
I decided to make a quick video of the process just in case any one else using AVG comes up against this little devil.
And if any of you trojan horse breeders out there happen to read this, leave me alone ya buggers. I’m just a simple little Internet marketer goin’ about my business, haven’t you got better things to do with your time?
Hey did you ever wonder if the spyware and malware software producers create these viruses so they can sell there stuff?
Recently I had a question about how to add a webcam video to a screencast. Lately I have been doing a lot of screencasts but I also like to add a personal introduction before I actually get into the topic for the video. I feel this just adds a personal touch.
Also I’ve been adding my webcam videos in the lower corner of my screencasts to give them a little more of a personal feel as well.
In order to do this you will need to be using the Tech Smith software, Camtasia (I wish it was an affiliate product because it’s an awesome tool). At $299 USD I feel it’s reasonably priced but if it’s outside of your budget then I would just use the 30 day trial and make videos like a madman (and hopefully make that in affiliate commissions).
The other option is to use the free software Camstudio (I’m not sure if you can have screencasts and webcam videos together though).
I decided to make a video of exactly how I create my Camtasia videos with my webcam video included. It’s about 16 minutes long, so I hope you’ve got a cuppa ready for this one!
If anything is unclear, feel free to ask a question in the comments section, I’m more than happy to make another video.
There is no doubt that using video is a powerful way to connect with people. More than any other medium, video allows people to get a sense of who you are. The only way that is more powerful is to meet people face-to-face.
The only problem with this is that you can only meet so many people in any given day and so there is not much leverage there. This leads us back to the next best thing which is video.
Different ways to use video
Basically you can do videos of yourself speaking or screencasts.
Screencasts
A screencast is where you use a recording software to capture your computer screen so you can demonstrate how something is done. This is really good for a how-to videos and this kind of information is highly sought after on the Internet.
You can also record a Power Point presentation using screencasting software which is more like a presentation rather than a how-to type video. These also can be very useful as long as they are not too long or boring.
There is a free screencasting software called Camstudio. I’ve never used it so I don’t know much about it but I’ve heard that it’s adequate for doing this kind of work. If you are on a tight budget then that would be a good choice.
If you have $299 to spend then I would highly recommend Camtasia. I’ve been using it for a few years now and am very happy with it. In fact, I don’t know what I’d do without it now.
Webcam Recordings
This is basically where you use a webcam to record yourself speaking about a particular topic. It’s very easy to do but if you don’t get the settings and light right, your videos can make you look and sound pretty bad. It is possible to get reasonable quality videos out of a webcam though and until you decide to get a more expensive camera it will be fine (it’s all I use at the moment).
What’s The Best Online Video Hosting?
There is a huge number of choices for hosting videos, some paid and many free. I’m not going to talk about paid services today because I’m not actually using any of them at the moment (although I have tried many).
Youtube is perhaps the best known free video platform but it’s not my preference for embedding videos onto my websites.
You can upload your videos to any free video platform and then take a simple piece of code and paste it into the appropriate place on your website and like magic your video appears. The term for this is embedding videos.
Basically the information is being transferred from the video service you choose and is just getting played on your website. One of the traps with many video sharing services is that they will play other peoples related videos once yours has finished.
If the viewer clicks on the actual player they will end up on that persons video channel. This is not so good for marketers wanting to keep visitors on their web sites.
Things to consider when choosing a free online video service;
- Do they have advertisements and is there an option to turn them off?Some services run ads on your videos and you’ll get a commission on the click. It may be a few cents per click but to me, it’s far more valuable to have people stay and watch your video.
- What happens at the end of the video? When someone is watching your video and they get to the end of it, you want to have some control over what they see next. If it’s just ads or someone else’s related videos that’s not ideal in a marketing situation.
- How is the quality of the video and what are the download speeds like? Not all video services are created equal and believe it or not, Youtube is not the best quality service out there. I’ve looked at many different services and the two that I’ve settled on for now are Viddler and blip.tv.
- How much choice do you have with the video players? When you are embedding videos onto your website you may want to change the color and size of the video player. In some cases you may want to adjust the sharing options as well. Of all the players again Viddler and blip.tv seem to offer most customization.
Here’s a video where I talk about why I feel Blip.tv is a very good online video hosting service:
Although I now use blip.tv for embedding my videos, I still upload my videos to all the major video services. You may wonder why I would bother doing that? It’s mostly a traffic and exposure strategy really; I use blip.tv for embedding my videos onto my website and all the other services to get traffic and exposure.
It’s a pain uploading videos to all these different video services so I automate the process using various tools. In another post I will talk about these services and so you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss those posts as they come out (you see at the bottom of this post a box to do that, I prefer to subscribe via email as I don’t use RSS readers at this stage).
I will actually do a blip.tv tips series so you can take advantages of all cool features that they offer…that will be coming soon. For now you may want to duck over and get yourself a free blip.tv account, it’s a piece of cake.
I’d love to hear what you think is the best online video hosting service…
Recently I have been getting lots of questions about the Renegade Professional sign up day. The word is that only a certain number of people can be let in on the first go around.
It seems people are desperate to get going with attraction marketing and they are very worried about missing out…fair enough.
Ann Sieg announced that the Renegade Professional will be going live on the 2nd of April and it seems like the doors won’t be open too long.
Some people feel this is just a marketing ploy to instill ‘fear of loss’ (which seems to be working judging the amount of emails I’ve been getting). I feel that this isn’t the case and I explain this in the short video below.
What I also explain is a surefire way to be amongst those that do get a spot in the Renegade Professional on open day. This has never let me down yet, but you have to be there on time.
How To Be Sure To Get Into The Renegade Professional
If you don’t already have Roboform, you can get a 30 Day Free trial. After the trial I believe you still have limited access which is still quite good. I have found it to be my favorite piece of software of all time.
To go on the priority mailing for the Renegade Professional all you need to do is optin for Ann Sieg’s Attraction Marketer’s Manifesto, if you’ve done that then you’ll get the info you need.
I hope you find your way into the training on the day.
Stephen Anderson demonstrates a true entrepreneurial mindset as well as one who knows how to get into action quickly.
He realized in short order that if he was to succeed he would have to take ownership of his own business and not rely on others to do it for him.
Within days of reading The Renegade Network Marketer, Stephen has learned how to create his own websites and has developed a mini-system within The Renegade System.
Stephen's creativity and resourcefulness is a demonstration of his rising status as a leader in the network marketing industry.
When the Renegade Professional launched for the first time there was always going to be a mad rush to get in but no one expected a melt down…
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Stephen Anderson demonstrates a true entrepreneurial mindset as well as one who knows how to get into action quickly.
My name is Steve Anderson. I'm a 36 year old guy from Australia. I'm an Acupuncturist by profession but through chance became involved in Network Marketing. It wasn't long before I realized that there must be a better...