My Tanya Aliza’s Ultimate Branding Blueprint Review is one of my most popular posts. It’s understandable since most network marketers want to promote their products and opportunity without chasing leads. Tanya’s Ultimate Branding Blueprint promises to help you to enroll 2-3 business builders a week, so that’s pretty enticing! Ever since I started my network marketing business, I was intrigued by the prospect of building my business online using a blog. That’s why I joined Elite Marketing Pro and Wealthy Affiliate. Then, I bought the Ultimate Branding Blueprint and many other blogging courses. This post is an overview of what I have learned over the last 3 years. It’s a step-by-step alternative that will help you get started with making sales online using your blog.
Step One: Creating Your Website
This one is kind of obvious: If you want to build your MLM business online, you need a Website. There are some things you should take into consideration when you are setting up your Website and I will guide you through that.
Self-Hosted or on a Platform?
One thing I appreciate about Tanya’s Aliza’s Ultimate Branding Blueprint is that, as far as I know, it’s the only attraction marketing course designed for network marketers that don’t try to sell you a hosting platform. Tanya is pretty adamant that you need to self-host your Website. Why? Because this way, it truly belongs to you and you are in control. It’s a lot more affordable too! I understand the convenience of using a platform; the learning process is much easier and many network marketers do not want the hassle of trying to figure out how to set up a Website. However, I concur with Tanya Aliza: set up your website on WordPress.org, not on a platform. I created a 30-minute workshop to help you do just that:
It’s all About Your Niche
Most network marketers create a Website to brand themselves. For this reason, they use their name as the URL and the name of the site. That’s what Tanya Aliza does and that’s most likely what you are thinking about doing. I guess it’s possible to succeed that way, but I don’t know. I told you that I would share a step-by-step alternative to Tanya Aliza’s Ultimate Branding Blueprint from experience. My experience is that you need to pick a niche to attract your ideal customer and build your MLM online. Picking a niche is more than just branding yourself. A Website intended to brand yourself is not the most effective route for beginners.
Should You Focus on the Business or on the Products?
When you pick a niche, you need to ask yourself who you want to attract. I would imagine most network marketers would prefer attracting teammates and business builders rather than just customers. That’s what you will see most network marketing gurus do by giving network marketers advice on building their network marketing business. However, if you look closely, you will notice that all of them are teaching network marketers to build their businesses using traditional prospecting. I find that pretty ironic. They attract network marketers who want to build online, yet, they teach the traditional approaches. Because what else would you talk about if you want to attract network marketers?
2-3 Teammates a Week?
I am not going to discourage you from using your Website to brand yourself while hoping to attract 2-3 teammates a week as seen on Tanya Aliza’s Ultimate Branding Blueprint sales page. All I am going to say is that my experience has been about selling my MLM products on autopilot, not finding teammates. I may eventually find teammates through this Website, but I think it is much more effective to find customers online rather than teammates. Selling your MLM products is much like selling affiliate products online. That’s why choosing the right niche matters so much.
Niche Ideas
Now, if you are convinced that you want to create a self-hosted Website to sell your MLM products rather than to brand yourself as a network marketer, I am going to give you some niche ideas:
- Health and beauty for women over 40
- Special diets
- Weight loss after baby
- Hair styles
- Makeup Tutorials
It’s crucial that you pick a niche that is congruent with your products and that is narrow enough to get the traffic you need to make sales. Read my post How to Pick Your Niche Blog Topic for more tips and advice.
Step Two: Writing Consistent Blog Posts
The next step after setting up your Website is to start writing consistently. Decide how frequently you want to write and stick to it. You need to write AT LEAST once a week. In fact, that’s what I do on this blog and my other product-oriented blog. However, be aware that blogging only once a week is not likely to make you a six-figure earner within 2 years. Network marketers who already have a decent influence can build a sizeable business fast using the traditional prospecting approaches. Growing your MLM business online is a much slower process, but the results are more lasting because once you produce content, it’s there to stay. It will bring in new customers for years to come.
Step Three: Grow Your Traffic
To make sales online, you need traffic. It’s pretty obvious! What may not be as obvious is how to grow your blog traffic. You may get tired and frustrated because you are not seeing the results that you were hoping to achieve. The first thing I want to do is to put your expectations in check. Most blogging courses will tell you that it takes about 3 months to start getting decent traffic. Make that a year or two if you are writing only once a week, OK? You need to be diligent and consistent even when you don’t make the sales you were hoping to make. Sure, finding the right niche and understanding how to drive more traffic to your blog effectively will help, but in the end, it’s all about doing the werk. Your best traffic sources will be Pinterest and Google.
I am quite surprised that Pinterest is still such a great source of traffic! Most platforms lose much of their effectiveness after a few years. However, Pinterest is still a definite winner. Listen, for a long time, all I did was pin my blog posts every week and still got enough traffic from Pinterest to make sales and see growth. My blog traffic did seem to reach a plateau after a while, so I decided to up my Pinterest game. I took multiple Pinterest courses early on in my blogging career. I didn’t think they were extremely useful until I came upon Pinteresting Strategies, the cheapest and best course about Pinterest ever! If you are not ready for a Pinterest course yet, check out the Pin Template Starter Kit. Having beautiful pin templates makes your life so much easier when it comes to getting Pinterest traffic. In fact, for about a year, I just used by pin template subscription to make my pins. It was totally worth the money and allowed me to get enough traffic to make sales on autopilot for my MLM each and every single month.
If you know what you are doing, Google is your best source of traffic long term. Pinterest traffic tends to decline if you don’t pin regularly. Google traffic increases no matter what when you do proper keyword research and SEO optimization. One of the main reasons I decided to up my Pinterest game is that I have been seeing a decline in Pinterest traffic on both my Websites. It looks like pinning only once a week may work for a time, but it’s not a sustainable long term strategy. My Google traffic, however, has been steadily increasing (albeit slowly – I did say if you blog only once a week, it takes time, right?). Just a quick overview:
- Use Ubersuggest for your keyword research. Make sure to pick the low hanging fruit (keywords with less than 1,000 queries a month).
- Use the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize your blog posts.
That’s all I have been doing and it seems to be working. For more tips on improving your blog traffic, read my post Top 7 Most Effective Tips to Get More Blog Traffic While Working Less.
Step Four: Brand Yourself
That’s what Tanya Aliza’s Ultimate Branding Blueprint is about, right? Branding yourself. Let me start by saying that just having a blog in your niche is an effective way to brand yourself as a expert. You can also do a few more things that may help down the road if you decide to do some more traditional prospecting.
Social Media Branding
I typically don’t recommend bloggers spend a whole lot of time branding themselves on social media. I used to be a fan of Instagram and found it to be an excellent platform for network marketers for a year at least. Now, social media is something you can do if you enjoy doing it. On top of getting some highly engaged traffic to your blog, it’s a good way to practice getting out of your comfort zone. However, it’s not worth spending hours agonizing over what to post. I enjoy posting on social media because I have been able to make some interesting online friends but it’s just not how I make sales for my MLM business. To brand yourself on social media, all you need to do is post a bit about your daily life (which will make you more relatable) and post similar info to what people will find on your blog.
YouTube or Podcast Branding
For me, the most effective branding method has been YouTube. I think you will find that a lot of network marketers are having success on YouTube, but podcasts are also growing in popularity. Even Tanya Aliza has a strong YouTube presence, although she doesn’t tell you about how to create an effective YouTube channel on her Ultimate Branding Blueprint. I like to create one YouTube video on week. It usually just relates to my blog post and I embed it on my Website YouTube has been an excellent tool to make sales because it creates an instant connection with my audience.
Step Five: Invest as You Grow Your Business
You have heard me say this before: Blogs don’t make money, businesses do. If you want your blog to bring in an income, you have to treat it like a business. And what to business owners do? They invest in their businesses. Any time you find that your traffic or your income reaches a plateau, it may be time to think about what else you could learn to grow. Successful bloggers are always taking courses, investing in coaching, and experimenting. Taking courses is essential from the beginning as you learn to create a blog and drive more traffic to it, but it remains important as you grow your business. It will help you avoid becoming stagnant.
In Summary
Even though I love Tanya Aliza’s teaching style and her Ultimate Branding Blueprint is the only course that I know that’s specifically designed with network marketers in mind, I would not recommend it. Instead, my alternative is that you follow the step-by-step guide that I have outlined in this post. Focus on selling your network marketing products in the same way an affiliate would sell affiliate products. You will still benefit from the higher commission that network marketing gives you and you will have the ability to promote a one-stop shop rather than a bunch of affiliates. Of course, promoting your network marketing products doesn’t exclude the ability to promote affiliates, but your focus will be your MLM. It will make your blogging business so much simpler!
