Tips for the frustrated Coastal Reps

Fellow Coastal Reps,
Let's use this thread to help eachother out and give some encouragement to the new members of Coastal who have yet to see the success they want to have in Coastal Vacations.

It took me 2 months to make my first sale in Coastal. I was excited and scared when I started much like most of you guys on this forum. I thouht I knew how to use payperclick advertising but, after going 2 months without a sale, I finally decided to actually LISTEN to the wonderful training available in our back office at the WeCloseYourSales.com call center. I learned tons of stuff I didn't know and when I applied what I learned I generated $4,000 in 3 days! I just had to except the fact that I didn't know what I thought I did. I had never been successful in any other home business but now, with the training the Coastal Vacations Call Center has in their back office and the coaching from my director I am successful in Coastal Vacations.

The most important thing to remember is DON'T GIVE UP!!!! The one thing that all people who don't succeed in Coastal have in common is that they eventually give up. If you aren't making sales then change your strategy. Don't keep throwing money away on leads if they aren't working for you. Move over and do internet advertising or newspaper classifieds. Our call center says that most of the calls that come in to the center are from classified ads in papers. Now, personally, I haven't had success with classifieds but many people have. You need to find out the best method of advertising for your personality. Ok, end of tip number one. Who else can offer our new members some advice?

 

Hey Harold, great tip.

Classifieds haven't worked for me either.

Pay per click worked better in getting more opt-ins and calling the Call Center. But the problem was that most of them were just tire kickers who did nothing but waste my time and my money.

But the worst had to be the leads. At first, it seemed great. Real live leads coming in and I was just sitting by my computer waiting for the numbers so that I could call them.

Problem 1: I was glued to my computer. Not exactly the business life that I was looking for when I joined Coastal.

Problem 2: Most of the leads didn't know Coastal and I had to explain to them. This defeated my advantage of having a Call Center.

Problem 3: I had to get them to opt in to my marketing website, the process in which I lost a lot of of my leads.

Problems 4: I was constantly on the phone. Waste of my time and again defeating the purpose of my advantage with the Call Center.

There are others, but these are the big issues with me.

So I'm currently looking into finding better ways to get leads and get them to call me or the Call Center. To automate it as much as possible.

Since I have the Call Center, it makes sense to figure out a way to utilize that tool as much as possible, leaving me more free time.

I have 3 to 4 methods right now that I'm trying to iron out. If they turn out to work well, I will post on this forum again and let everyone know.

Keep your fingers crossed.

In the mean time, unless the leads are working amazingly for you (meaning you're amazing on the phone, which I'm not), stop wasting your money on the leads.

You know who the lead programs make rich? The lead program companies. That's all and that's the truth. Save your money and figure out a better way with me.

 

Here's a little tip for those with their own websites and are concerned with SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

There are two main categories of criteria a SE (search engine) will look at when ranking your site for organic results.

Before going further, organic results are the results you get, usually on the left side, in the case of yahoo, live (MSN), google, etc... The small ads you get on the opposite side are what's called PPC (Pay Per Click). These are paid ads.

If Google is a good indication of where all SEs will go, and there is no evidence to doubt this as of yet, then relevancy is a huge issue. In other words, your content should be relevant to the search term entered by the surfer.

SEs will look at both on-page and off-page criteria to determine who gets what ranking.

ON-PAGE:
-The number of times a chosen keyword appears in a particular page. This is what's commonly called keyword density. Remember that you can have more than one keyword designated for a page, but generally they seem to lose their effect if you have more than 5 keywords or so assigned to a page.

-Having the main keyword appear in the URL, page title, description, and heading. It also helps to have the main keyword appear in the first 500 or so characters in the body of the content.

-This one isn't known too well compared to the other elements. It's helpful to have a text link from your non-hompage pages to the homepage. In the link, make sure to put in the main keyword of that particular page. This should be easy if you've included the main keyword into the page title.

OFF-PAGE:
-The time spent on your page by a visitor before exiting the site. This criterion is pretty much obsolete as it's not a great indicator of the relevancy of your site's content. People do forget to turn off the computer or browser. This was one of the first criterion used by SEs in the early days.

-There are few other ones, but as far as I know, they are becoming more and more obsolete as well.

-The one that continues to be important, as far as we can tell, is the inbound link. Inbound link means the links coming into your site from other sites. Links from within your site pointing to another page in your site don't count as these.

These are still considered important by many because it is believed that SEs like Google will put high value on these based on this logic.

If your content is valuable and relevant, then people will link to your site. That's basically it. So the more inbound links you have, the higher your chances of ranking higher and higher.

It should be noted that SEs are getting wise to non-value based links such as link farms or paid links. When they detect links coming in from sites that have nothing to do with topics covered on your site, the effects are minimized at best or both sites are penalized.

But don't worry if someone links to your site without you linking to them, it doesn't hurt you. It only hurts you when you link to sites that have no value to your visitors, as a general rule. And SEs are developing list of link farm sites, so don't ever be tempted to get links from such source under any circumstances.

Basically, keep it clean and give the SEs what they want. Valuable content.

Thomas

 

GREAT INFORMATION, Thomas! I'm glad you are on our team!

 

Good insight Thomas, thanks.



Roger

 

While on the topic of SEO, I should mention this as well. For those of us with a cookie cutter sites or duplicated sites like those of WCYS or CSG, the chances of our sites ranking high is virtually nil.

Two reasons for this.

1. We do not have [full] control of the keywords, page title, etc... Basically, the main site operator submits everything to the SEs if at all.

In case they are not, we must submit them on our own, but as you'll see, it doesn't much improve our chances.

2. From the SEs' point of view, all the duplicate sites are 'spamming' their index database. As such, they will tend to ignore most of these sites or even drop them from the index.

If you were to type in a search word that matched my site, then it means it also matches everyone else's site as well.

As you can guess, trying to get our duplicate sites are not the best use of our time and energy. I think most people have caught onto this very early on or knew it and never tried. Perhaps I'm stating the obvious.

What's better is to submit articles and such to a variety of sources with links to your site. It's not as effective or grand as ranking on the coveted first page of Google, but it works and can bring good results if done well.

Thomas

 

I posted some tips on the topic of email here.
http://www.work-at-home-forum.com/22_3149_0.html

I thought I'd expand a bit more on it since email marketing is such an important part of our business.

Did you know that less than 1% of the visitors on your site will make a purchase decision to buy on the spot? That's why follow up email is so important.

Here are some things to keep in mind. Print this off and make notes!

-Always put your URL and contact info in your signature file. This is the equivalent of your business card.

-An average person received over 60 commercial and/or spam emails a week. For this reason, you need to stand out from the crowd.

-Make your subject line and body text personal. This doesn't mean personalized, "Dear Thomas, ..." This worked well when it was first conceived, but spammers are now doing it, so you need to differentiate yourself from them. Always watch what they are doing and do what they're not doing.

-Respect your prospects' time and keep to the point.

-Write the email as if you are writing to that one person, not a list of 100 or 1000. Sounds easy, but it's not.

-The most part of the email is getting it delivered. All rests on this. For this reason, see the above thread and eliminate the use of spam-like words from subject line and body.

-Make sure to use the free online tool to get your email tested for spam at http://www.lyris.com/resources/contentchecker/

-Write an attention grabbing subject line. Many techniques are available, but generally, make it personal, cliffhanger (using ... at the end), etc...

-When they open your email, the first few lines are critical to hold their attention. If it's not interesting, their curiosity will have been satisfied and the chances of deleting or closing the email is higher.

-Stay with just one message per email.

-Provide some kind of value for them for reading the email. It can be monetary reward (discount, bonuses, download link for voucher, etc...), but not always. The value can be informational as well.

-Tell them of the benefit for what you want them to do. Benefit for them, that is.

-Finally, don't drop the ball at the end by not giving a call to action. Make it crystal clear, without sounding bossy, what it is that you want them to do next. Here, don't give more than 2 or 3 steps. They won't remember.

I hope you see the value in this posting and implement some of the suggestions to your email campaign.

Best of luck.

Thomas

 

I am a member of CSG and all of my business comes from purchasing leads. This works out okay but I would like to try a call center. Would this be possible even though I'm in another group? Thx! -- Wendy

 

Hi Wendy,
Like you, I also started Coastal with a group outside the Call Center but joined the C.C later on so, yes, regardless of what group you are a part of you can utilize the Call Center and I can tell you it works!

If you have any questions feel free to contact me and you can test the system out yourself by opting in the link below.



Roger

 

Hi Wendy,

Yes, doesn't matter what group you are with, you can try the Call Center. You can call them directly and get your answers straight from the horse's mouth.

1-800-378-1169
ID 5264TC

Thomas

 

Have any of you ever tried Veretekk? You use it to produce your own leads... it sure works for me...

 

One thing I have noticed from listening to recorded trainings and reading forum threads about Coastal it seems that the ones that are saying that they sold several hundred thousand packages have been with coastal for 5 plus years.

I have heard some Directors say they sold over 100,000 packages, than you hear people say that they sold over 20 plus packages within their first 3 months.

This all makes new people apprehensive if we aren't selling and recruiting at least 10 people consistently in our first 2 months. Especially with a good system to follow.

Is 10 plus recruits first 2 months the norm?
Are over 100,000 the norm for the first few years?
If you don't get hold of people on the phone and leave messages and dont get to talk with them does that mean you will never sell them??

Thanks
Terri

 

Terri,
I would say that many people that make 10 sales in their first month are people that can actually do Coastal fulltime right when they start. They probably work fulltime hours either calling leads or placing and tracking ads as hard as they can go to generate a quick start. Most of us don't have that luxury so it takes a little while longer to get going and find that marketing method that seems to work for us. I know you want very specific answers with specific numbers but there really is no definate way to pin that down. I usually tell people that you can expect to make $3,000 to $9,000 in 30 to 90 days if you do what is recommended in our back office. That is no gurantee, by any means, but I know I did generate that much money within those time limits.

 

Hi Terri,

Just wanted to add to Harold's response. Keep in mind that these "Superstars" might have had a lot of experience in other network marketing, mlm marketing or direct marketing field. And with that, they might have the advantage of coming recruiting over their previous downline to their new business: Coastal Vacations.

This is sort of a circular argument I guess in a sense because this would only happen (them having a downline and them following this person to the new business) if they were a good leader with solid performance history.

So you could say that they would have done well in Coastal anyways, but obviously not to such a rocketing start.

In any case, I don't think most people would generate sales in the range that you wrote about. Everyone has different learning styles and learning curve. Some take to the real world faster and learn by advice or trial and error. Others take much longer to get to the real world by trying to understand the business more (marketing, products, sales process, etc....)

Thomas

 

From all the reading I have done in this forum and from all the calls that I have listened in on. I have to say that YOU are the only one that can decide how much money you will make.

From my research I have found that every group has support systems in place. Every group has people that you can go to for help. Every group has their own training. The only difference is what YOU do with all that information/support. If you work the system and don't give up, then you will reap the benefits. But if you do nothing, well then you get nothing.

Man I really need to take my own advice and get started.

 

Thanks everyone, you all gave more realistic expectations for someone working part time.

Terri

 

Quoting: OnlineMoney24 7Man I really need to take my own advice and get started.
You and me both....

 

Harold,

I dont think I could have put it any better. People who quite are the only ones who fail in this business. I stress that to my team everyday. When you enter a business like this you very quickly realize that if you dont work on yourself and learn from the experts that preceeded you , you will make things hard on yourself. The training that's there in our back office is no there because someone else fells they can do a better job than you . It's there because it will help you get get better results personally.
When it comes to the types of leads out there. I have tried them all. There is none that I think that works better than the other. Being consistent and persistent is what helps me along with working on myself to get better every day.
I work with an objective and that is to get results. I dont just do for the sake of doing. So if something doesn't work, reevaluate and try again. I teach that to my team everyday.

 

Quoting: OnlineMoney24 7Man I really need to take my own advice and get started.


Hey Jat,
I am sure you will do well with Coastal. It seems you have been doing the research and have good knowledge on what Coastal is all about.

Hope you do take your own and advice and get started! Love to have you on the Coastal team.

Best of success to you,
Susan

 

hi everyone,in regards to blogging. i am new to coastal(wcys). i have a blog site. is there anything anyone can suggest on how to get my blog noticed? i have heard blogging is a great way to advertise. all i have done so far is to register my blog on socialbook mark,feedburner,blog submissions.etc,etc.i must be doing something wrong.or is it because my blog is free?anyone who can help here will be great.this forum has been a godsend for me.the support is unbelievable.on another note.i had listened to someones advice to me on one of my posts about ad words and all i did was change 1-2 words and my opts ins more than tripled, but still no sales. how can i get these opt ins to move further along and find out if they are tire kickers or not. i have called these people 3-5 times in the day and evenings. most as we all know are never there or never call back or have no clue who i am,even though they opted in and or spoke to someone about a home biz op.i feel i am doing my time in regards to calls,ads, ppc, voice shots etc,etc,but i cant get a sale. i will never stop trying. i planned on doing this full time, but i am now forced to take a sales job i was offered untill this takes off(which i know it will).as my director said to me once i am unemployable,because i used to own my own franchise for 22 years and it was GREAT, but i sold it becuase i had no life, no family time, but i had the $. what good was ot with no time to enjoy it. i know i am all over the place with this post,but i have so much to say.thanks again to this forum, it keeps me motivated
thanks garyd