What I Have Learned from Donald Trump

This blog is about network marketing and internet marketing. What does Donald Trump have to do with this, other than the failed Trump Network? I’m going to share with you what I have learned from Donald Trump this year.
If you’ve been following the US Presidential election process so far this year then, love him or hate him, you’ve definitely noticed Donald Trump. You will agree that he’s been absolutely brilliant throughout the process if you understand what he’s doing.

Some people think that the elections are about the best candidate. Not really, there isn’t a best candidate if you ask me. Others think it is a popularity contest. With most of the press you hear it doesn’t sound like Trump would be winning a popularity contest.
It’s all about exposure and name recognition. Donald Trump has done better than any of the other Republican candidates in making sure that he gets that exposure and recognition. His speeches are designed to get him press coverage. Every time that he offends some group of people in a speech he gets more news coverage. If there hasn’t been any news about him for a few days he’ll pick a new fight with Fox’s Megyn Kelly and get back in the headlines.
The months leading up to the election in November will be interesting because Hillary Clinton also knows how to stay in the headlines. They can always dig up something new about email servers or something.

What Does This Have to Do with Network Marketing?

In network marketing, as with any business, we need to gain exposure and name recognition to sell our products and find people who want to join our teams as new distributors. In our line of work we generally want more favorable press than what a national-level politician can get away with. At our level there are more choices and an option to not take part at all.
Still, like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, we want to get in front of as many people as possible as often as possible. Some network marketers do that the “old fashioned” way. They go out to coffee shops and meet with people. They have meetings at hotels and try to get a lot of people there. The presidential candidates do the same thing. They usually command a larger audience, but they are doing essentially the same thing.
Live events are great for stirring up energy and emotion. They are a great way to get people actively participating in whatever you’re doing. At political rallies you see everyone holding up their signs and cheering. A good old-school network marketer can get people engaged like that too, though probably on a smaller scale.

Online Marketing

Other network marketers go online to get exposure. I guess you could call us the “new-school” network marketers. We have our blogs and we use all of the social media sites – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others – to get our message out and stir up interest.
You can sort of compare our blogs with the news websites, again on a much smaller scale. We share our articles about our products and/or our business on a regular basis so that our followers know what we are doing.
Many of the big name politicians use social media now. I read after President Obama was elected that he had used Twitter very effectively to improve his standing with his followers. He is also the first President to have an official Twitter account at the White House. It will be interesting to see how that is handled when he steps down next year.
I know that Donald Trump uses Twitter because most of the news stories I have read about his relationship with Megyn Kelly say that his attacks take place on Twitter. It looks like Hillary Clinton is very active on Twitter too.
You can't succeed in business if you're not getting noticed. Click To Tweet

How to Get Noticed Online

I prefer to go the online marketing route for my network marketing business. I find it a lot less expensive and, more importantly for me, it allows me to be home with my family. The offline methods work but you have to rent space, or at least buy someone a cup of coffee, and they mean that you aren’t at home. Being with my family is why I got into network marketing in the first place.
Other than paying for my hosting account and my website domain names every year, and a small monthly fee for an email autoresponder, my online marketing is free.
The hardest part is getting your website and blog setup, but it isn’t too hard. I believe anybody can do it with a little guidance. Once that is in place then it is just a matter of setting some productive habits.
You can find advice from successful bloggers that will tell you that you should blog anywhere from several times a day to once every few months. My suggestion is to blog two or three times a week if you can when you are starting out so that you can get some content on your website quickly. Once you have that then you can back off to once a week.
You also want to visit other people’s blogs, read what they have to say, and leave a good comment. I have learned most of what I know about online marketing from reading blogs and interacting with the authors.
I get on Facebook once a day for 20 minutes or so. You will find plenty of people who will tell you that you need to be on more often, but it seems to work for me. I look for posts that I can comment on and start to form relationships with other people. I also share posts from several others to help them promote whatever they are doing.
I do pretty much the same thing on Twitter, retweet content from other people and find some good ones to reply to and start a conversation. Because Twitter works differently than Facebook, I do use some automation to spread my content throughout the day to maximize its reach.
Whether you use any automation or not, it is still important to actually get on the social media sites every day to engage with people. One, you don’t want to appear to be a robot. Not many people want to do business with a robot. Two, there are a lot of very interesting people out there to connect with and learn from.

Conclusion

Watching the presidential candidates over the next few months will be very interesting. Watch what they do, both online and offline, and see what you can learn from them that you can apply to your marketing.
If you would like me to walk you through getting started with your own online marketing, check out my free Online Marketing e-book. The page describes my approach to online marketing and the ebook is at the bottom of the page.
What have you learned from watching how others market themselves? Share your thoughts in a comment below and please share this post with your followers on Facebook and Twitter.