Tweamster's Blog

Focus On This

What Is Focus?

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, focus means “to direct toward a particular point or purpose.”

Now, in order to direct something, in this case, your network marketing business, toward a particular point or purpose, do you think it might be a good idea to know what that point or purpose is?

I thought you might. So, what is the point or purpose you’re shooting for?

What’s The Point?

The point, or purpose, in the beginning is to achieve some initial success, if you don’t have that, you probably won’t stick around long enough for anything else to matter.

After that, your purpose becomes learning the business of network marketing so that you can build towards your goals and help others build towards their goals.

In their book, Your First Year In Network Marketing, Mark Yarnell & Rene Reid Yarnell say “The key to building a successful business is to stick with one system long enough to allow it to work.”

So Why Is Focus So Important?

Without focus, anything can knock you off the path. Another company, another recruiting system, another leader that you think has a better idea, or even the latest email you got saying that with the XYZ method, John Q. Public made $42,000 in the last 15 minutes. The possibilities are so huge in network marketing you might be tempted to swallow this and go off on a tangent only to discover a month later that you’ve wasted the last month.

You want to stay on a consistent path, otherwise those people you sponsor to work with you get confused and lose their focus (why, because you’re their leader and you lost your focus). Stick with one plan, follow it religiously and others will follow it too.

Put Your Blinders On

Mark & Rene call all the possible distractions and divergences that you might possibly encounter in your first year “the scatter bomb.” They warn you to put your blinders on so that you can stay focused and not get distracted. When you’re working in a traditional business, your boss ensures that you don’t get distracted or he fires you.

In a network marketing business, you are your own boss, so learn a system, put your blinders on and do that system consistently.

Otherwise, you’re going to get distracted, lose your focus and give up on your dreams; and I want you to have your dreams come true.

Consistency

Once you’ve got a system that is working for you, you have to follow that system. Whether you have 3 hours per week to devote to your new business, or 30 hours per week, when that time slot that you’ve allotted for working your business arrives, you had better be out there doing whatever your system requires.

Busy-work

Network marketing requires a flow of people to talk to or promote to in order to find people who want your product or your business opportunity. That means that when your “business” time arrives, you should be doing what you do that gets you that flow of people.

Reorganizing your email address book doesn’t do that. Reading a book on leadership skills doesn’t do that. Putting together and printing a full color one page flyer to hand out doesn’t do that. (Handing that flyer out to 40 or 50 or 100 people does.)

In other words, whatever time you have allotted for your business, make sure to keep the main thing the main thing, whatever you’re doing to attract people to your business or your product; that’s what you should be doing. Whether it’s handing out flyers, or handing out business cards, talking to people one on one, blogging, doing surveys, whatever you do to approach people, make sure you actually do that and not the easier to confront things that don’t put you in front of people.

Fit the other things in wherever you can.

The Slight Edge

I would be remiss not to mention at this point one of the key success strategies. Jeff Olson devoted a whole book to this called “The Slight Edge – Secret to a Successful Life.”

In his book, he outlines his philosophy as the difference between simple disciplines done every day vs. simple errors in judgment. The simple disciplines are easy to do and easy not to do. But done consistently over time, the simple disciplines add up exponentially just like compound interest.

A couple of examples, let’s say you decide to go on a diet, you’re going to cut out snacks and junk food and eat only three nutritious meals per day.  Are you going to notice any difference the first week? Not likely, but I promise you if you do that every day for a year you will notice a difference. If you get inconsistent on doing this, will you notice that you’re getting worse right away? No, but keep it up for a year and see where you’re at.

Let’s say you decide to talk to one person every day about your business. Are you going to sponsor anyone the first week? Probably not. But I guarantee you if you keep doing that every day without fail, you will start succeeding. What’s going to happen if you skip a few days or a week, are you going to notice any huge change in your sponsoring? No, but over time are you going to have less happening in your group? Absolutely.

I encourage you to read this book to understand the importance of simple disciplines done consistently.

How Do I Find A Company To Work With?

One of my purposes in starting this blog was to give my readers information on what to look for and why.

For more information, go to www.AlansMLMTips.com and sign up for the “7 Days, 7 Insider Secrets” email newsletter. It’s a free newsletter that will give you more ideas on what to look for in a network marketing company.

Quote

Every day do something that will inch you closer to a better tomorrow.  – Doug Firebaugh

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