As you start reading the beginning of this post, you find yourself wondering… “What on earth is a Central Hub and Why should I care?”

If you are a professional Network Marketer, and are using the internet to promote your business, you need to know what a Central Hub is and how it can benefit your business.

Allow yourself to imagine the bustling scene of your family kitchen.  Most women would agree that their kitchen is the central hub of their homes.

This is where the family meals are prepared, children may be doing their homework at the table, you may be working on your home business there.  The kitchen is where all of the activities of your household and family’s lives come together to find cohesion and harmony.

In Network Marketing, we often start several marketing strategies with the goal in mind to attract potential prospects into our businesses.  But if we do not have a central hub, our marketing energies are not focused.

Secret # 1 

A Central Hub serves as the focal point of your marketing strategies.  It’s a home base so to speak.

All of your marketing strategies should point to your Central Hub.  If your other marketing strategies are ways to become introduced to people, then your Central Hub is a way to invite them in to get to know you better.

Secret # 2

If the term Central Hub sounds intimidating, don’t let it. 

Your Central Hub is generally a website, quite often a blog.  That’s easy enough isn’t it?

It’s important to remember that you should never use your company’s website or splash pages as your Central Hub.

Remember you’re inviting your new friends over to get to know YOU better, not throw your company or products at them.

Secret # 3

In using a blog, you will want to focus on content that adds value to your audience, or new friends.

Charles Heflin teaches that your content should entertain, educate and/or enlighten.

We should always be adding value to the network marketing community, especially to your niche.  This value needs to be interesting to your audience…so interesting that they will want to share your content with other people.

Secret # 4

Your Central Hub, or your blog, like in my case, needs a clean, crisp appearance. 

Avoid cluttering your sidebar with a lot of advertising.  The small amount of income you may make won’t compensate for detracting your visitor’s attention away from your content. 

It also makes it appear that you are desperate to make money.  So perhaps your primary business is not all that lucrative after all.  (Not a good impression.)

Your sidebar IS the place to offer a free ebook, newsletter, or other training information.  Do not be tempted to spam your audience with your opportunity.  You are still in the process of building your relationships.

Secret # 5

Once you have written your blog post, you will want to submit it to some social news websites like,

1. StumbleUpon
2. LinkInn
3. Digg
4. Reddit
5. HubSpot

Make sure you are visiting other’s sites and commenting and voting on their posts as well.

This gets you backlinks to your site and shows the news websites that you are not just submitting your own work. 

Get your wheels turning and generate your energies on making your central hub the focal point of your online marketing strategies. 

Wishing You the success of a Lifetime!
Karen Miller
k.j.miller.777@gmail.com

The time has come to blog with the Big Dogs!

We are now officially hosted through HostGator and are living under a real domain name, www.mlmnetworkingwomen.com!

We have a new look with a new theme, color scheme, and WordPress software.  This is going to be exciting learning a new format and playing with the plugins and widgets…as soon as I learn what those are for…haha! 

This is a new phase of my blogging journey and I am excited to share it with you.  Blogging is an important facet of your online marketing campaign.

The first step was signing up with HostGator.  They have a lot of tutorial videos and live chat support.  The technicians don’t mind if you ask what you might think are “stupid questions”.  If you’re like me, this is unchartered territory and there is NOTHING obvious about this process.  Some days I just sat and stared at the computer screen waiting for the heavens to open up and enlighten me. 

You want to talk about alphabet soup?!?  cPanels, FTP, IP, SSL, SSH, MySQL, php, MIME, and what the heck is a GnuPG key????  I am a Green personality type and I like to research and understand everything I do before jumping in.  But this was getting ridiculous!  I may not understand all of this stuff until my kindergartener graduates high school!  Besides, being techie is not my passion or talent…I had to accept the fact that I couldn’t afford the luxury of being an expert in this case and just get off the bean and DO IT. 

I got through the process though, and so will you.  I watched the videos and learned how to set up my cPanel (by the way that is your Control Panel).  I even learned how to upload a new theme and “unpack” it…process also known as “unzipping”…something you do to a bunch of related files that get packed (like in a box) or zipped (like in overstuffing and zipping a suitcase for your vacation) so they are smaller in size for sending through the internet.

Why host your own blog?, you may ask.  Because it is going to be the center of your internet business efforts.

If you are building your business and use your blog as your central hub, it would be catastrophic if you logged in one day to your blogging account and found that your blog was blocked.  Why would they do this?   Perhaps the blogging service you’re using found your content in violation of their terms of service.  Yikes!  There goes your connection with your clients and target market!

Hosting your own blog, like with HostGator, allows you to own your blog.  The content is stored on your host’s servers.  You pay a monthly subscription fee for the service.  HostGator still has their terms of service you have to abide by which are generally no illegal activity, no spam, etc.

Also with hosting, your blog has a more professional presence…you have a clean and accurate domain name that remains consistent with every page of your blogging site.  This is different than buying a domain name and having it redirect to your free blogging service blog (like Blogger).

I was happy with the service at Blogger and have no complaints.  Like I said, it came time to start blogging with the Big Dogs.

Wishing You the Success of a Lifetime!
Karen
karen@mlmnetworkingwoman.com
skype ID karen.j.miller