Put Your Recruiting on Auto Pilot

Getting people to join your company can be hard work. Whether you are looking to hire staff or to build a downline for your network marketing business, attracting the right people is key to your success.

Obviously you want productive go-getters who are going to make a contribution to the bottom line, not just warm bodies to clog your cycles and waste your time. But how do you find the right people?

Take a cue from the marketing folks. Become a magnet for interested, qualified "prospects" who eagerly want to become a part of your team. Use an established technique that draws new customers as a model for attracting downline participants and employees to your company.

What is this technique? It's called "article marketing" and it is one of the most effective methods of catching the attention of large groups of people. It works like this: You write a simple article that is interesting to the kind of people you want to attract. They could be salespeople, independent business owners, MLM participants ? whoever you think would make the perfect addition to your team.

You don't have to write "The Great American Novel". All you need is about 500 words on the topic of your choice. Then submit that article all over the web to ezine publishers, newsletter editors and content laden websites. When they publish your article (and they almost always do) your perfect candidates read your words, and see you as an expert in the subject (after all, you're a published author!) and they click on a link to your website that you conveniently provided at the end of the article. Viola! You have tons of interested, qualified people you can add to your downline.

Keep in mind, that your article remains out there for people to find for weeks, months, even years. As new people happen across your article, they click the link and visit your site. You have a perpetual recruiting machine, drawing tons of pre-qualified, interested potential recruits to your site. This is better than advertising, and far less expensive.

The process works. The problem is that you have to go through the effort of submitting your articles to enough sites that you really make a splash. Most business owners submit their articles to 9 or 10 places before getting burned out on the tedious submission process. I can't think of anything more dull than the sheer drudgery of article submission.

Fortunately, you can avoid that drudgery, get your articles to more editors, get them there faster - which gets you recruits sooner - by taking advantage of one of the following three methods:

1) Hire a Virtual Assistant to do the work for you. Cost $400.00

2) Buy and install article submission software. Cost: $69.00

3) Use a free web service. Cost: $0

Here are the good and bad points of each one.

Hire a Virtual Assistant to do the work for you: Cost $400.00 (http://www.articlesthatsell.com/ArticleSubmissionFAQ.pdf) I think Virtual Assistants are terrific. Typing, proofreading, sending invoices - they do clerical work for an hourly fee. This particular Virtual Assistant specializes in being your "publication coordinator". She does everything by hand, submitting your articles one by one to various places around the net. She'll also do light proofreading of your article.

The downside: While I think $400.00 is a fair price for the amount of time she is going to invest, I fear that the price is a bit steep for most small business owners trying to build a downline.

Ezine Announcer Software: Cost $69.00 This is a pretty cool program. It automates many of the tasks that are time consuming and boring. It comes with a long list of 1700 publishers who want your articles. You enter your article and then run through the sites you want to contact. Yes, you still have to do the work, but it takes away some of the pain. You buy it, install it, and then you can run it whenever you have an article to publish. The software solution is great if you're technically proficient.

The downside: Once you install the program, the list of submission sites has already begun going out of date. New sites spring up all the time and existing sites become defunct. While many of the submission tasks are automated, you are still tied to your desk working through the submission process. I like the software solution, I just wish there were a few more features.

Article Marketer: Cost - Free (www.articlemarketer.com) I started ArticleMarketer.com as a free web service. You enter your article and press the button - then the system goes to work. Your articles are submitted to 2,351 people, as well as content web sites and popular article directories. Articles are distributed according to publisher guidelines and based on the categories you choose. The list of sites is always up to date, with new publishers being added all the time and the defunct ones deleted.

The downside: The free service is only sent to a fraction of their list. They have a paid program ($8.95) that distributes your articles to the complete list of over 50,000 people. With a subscription ($39.95), you can send an unlimited number of articles to the full list.

To summarize: If you want to really build your downline quickly, submitting royalty free articles to ezines and newsletter editors is the way to go. If you don't want to spend the hours and hours of drudge work doing article submission, you should give one of these solutions a try.

Of the three, ArticleMarketer.com is my favorite (for obvious reasons). It allows me to maximize my budget and get my articles to the greatest number of people with the least amount of effort. I put this article in (it took literally 45 seconds) and here you are reading it. Now that's what I call effective marketing!

Chris Ellington gives effective and easy to implement marketing strategies to small business owners and home business entrepreneurs. His Simplified Selling System has been a favorite of salespeople around the world. Get your free marketing strategies at http://www.simplifiedselling.com