Lately I’ve seen a lot of replicated websites popping up all over the place especially for Global Resorts Network, but not only that for every home-based business opportunity that’s out there. If you’re not familiar with what a replicated website is basically it’s a website that was developed by somebody else that you have access to and you can use to market as your own website but it’s just a copy of another website. So it’s basically a carbon copy of an exact other website. These can be good and bad for several reasons. I want to talk about why they’re good and why they’re bad and why there’s a time and place for both of them.

At first when you are first getting started I think that replicated websites can be good. They’re like training wheels on a bike; I think that’s the best way to describe them. You know when you first start learning how to ride a bike you don’t just want to hop right on because it’s really difficult and you’re going to get really frustrated really fast and you can ultimately hurt yourself if you don’t learn the basics first. I think the same thing applies with replicated websites. So there is a time and a place, when you’re first getting started if you don’t know anything about marketing, if you don’t know anything about creating websites, trying to learn all of that at first can be extremely overwhelming. So with a replicated website you can learn the basics of marketing and lead generation without having to learn all the other stuff like tracking your progress and split testing, and I’m not even going to through all of that out there but there’s a lot to learn with marketing as any new subject; anything that you take on completely new there’s a lot to learn and you don’t want to try and throw all that information at once and learn it all at the same time, you want to slowly learn it.

The first thing to do, obviously, is to start calling leads. Start getting comfortable on the phone, learning what to say and learning the sales process. And as you start to get comfortable with the sales process you start to get good at turning your leads into sales. Then you want to start generating more leads and you want to start learning how to generate your own leads so that you can generate more leads for less. And when you start making that transition it’s good to use replicated websites so you’re not learning too much at once. So you want to break everything down. You want to learn the sales process, then you want to learn the marketing process, then you want to learn how to improve and really strengthen the marketing process, and that’s when you start to create your own websites.

The other great things about replicated websites is that you can get really good results really fast, because they’re turnkey. Like I said before you don’t need any website design knowledge. You don’t need to know how to put together a site and it’s quick, easy, simple. You see the site that you like, you get an exact copy of it, you pay a monthly fee, and you can run that website just like it was your own website.

The problem with this mentally is it’s the give a man a fish mentality. Okay, so you’ve heard the old adage I’m sure before, I’m going to go ahead and repeat it anyways. Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a life. Replicated websites are literally giving you the fish. They’re feeding you now, they’re feeding you today however there’s only so long that we can give you the fish. There’s only so long that you can just have the fish handed to you on a silver platter before you need to step up. It’s the difference of only having one fish a day, one meal a day to having five, six, seven bigger more extravagant meals a day and that’s not the best analogy but I think that you get the point of what I’m trying to say here.

The other problem with the give a man a fish mentality is that you have no control over your marketing. For instance if your pages only converting at six percent, the replicated websites only converting at six percent for you, there’s no way for you to improve that website for you to get better results. Some other down sides of replicated websites are there’s lots of people using the same exact site so the whole website gets saturated and it starts to lose its appeal because you do a search and you see the same website five times, the search will lose its credibility a little bit because it’s not original; it’s not different. You’re not separating yourself from everyone else. A lot of times with these websites you’ve got to pay really high monthly fees to continue to use the site and it can add up. It can get expense with all the other fees that are involved with running a business. And the biggest problem is that you’re not branding you. One of the biggest things that you need to be doing in this industry, in the home-based business industry if you really want to be successful, is separate yourself and brand yourself as a leader. If you’re using these replicated websites you’re branding somebody else or you’re branding something else and you’re not really truly branding yourself. And that’s really honesty what it boils down to is people are buying somebody that they like, they’re buying a leader. So it’s very important for you to learn how to brand yourself. We can talk about that a little bit later.

As with any marketing this is going to be a really huge key point. This is a turning point, this was a paradigm shift for me when I started to realize this with my marketing, is that it’s extremely important to go against a grain. If everyone is doing one thing, try doing the exact opposite thing and seeing what kind of results you get. For example, if everyone’s saying that the reverse funnel system is a great system and they talk about why it’s so wonderful and why you need to be getting in and there’s all this hype about it, then why not take the reverse approach and talk about why the reverse funnel isn’t so great; some of the pitfalls of it and some of the reasons that you should look elsewhere. Only do that if it’s true and you really feel strongly about that and that’s not the best example but again I think you get the idea of where I’m trying to go with this. You know find something there’s a lot of hype about that’s not maybe as great as the hype and expose some of the weaknesses in it or whatever but just go against. If everybody’s going one way, try to go the other way and test that and see what kind of results you get. In that example that I just used there you might benefit from all they hype. There’s a lot of attention geared towards, or there was at one point, towards reverse funnel system. So a lot of people are talking about it. A lot of people were searching for it. So you’d still benefit from that traffic except while everyone’s seeing everyone’s replicated reverse funnel sites, all of a sudden they see yours and it’s completely different. You’re probably going to get better results. You’re probably going to get better opt-ins because it’s a breath of fresh air. It’s something completely different than everybody else is talking about and it kind of provides some honest insight.

So at some point you need to take off the training wheels. There comes a time and a point where you need to progress in your marketing and you need to take things to another level where the one, two or three sales a month just aren’t’ cutting it anymore and you realize that by making a few changes and tweaks, you can reach a whole another level in your marketing. So you need to start learning to do things for yourself. Stop calling leads and start generating them. Stop using replicated websites and start creating your own and even more importantly everyday strive to make your website just a little bit better. If you start doing this, this is the foundation of good marketing; you’re gong to start to see good results. You’re going to start to see great results in your marketing and your results are going to start to improve daily and consistently and at that point you will start to build a sustainable successful business.

For more information on global resorts network or working directly with Ryan to learn how to create financial freedom from the comfort of your home, visit http://www.ryandunn.biz.