Dave Gilbert   Web Entreprenuer
We Have all heard that teamwork is the way to achieve success but for some reason teams usually fail to deliver the goods, and there is generally a good reason for this failure.. the team itself.

We all see these so called Gurus achieving phenomenal income with seemingly little effort, their ads are always spot on and make you want to purchase as are their websites and sales copy, but they don't achieve all this on their own even though theirs is the only name you ever hear of or see for that matter.

Yes Gurus use teams to obtain their success but it is the structure of those teams that are the real reason Gurus succeed where the average marketer fails.

Most marketers form their teams from people they meet on the internet and while this practice is acceptable it is also the reason most marketing teams fail, if you pick 10 people at random from your lists of connections the chances are that 8 of those 10 will have exactly the same marketing skills as your self and as you will read shortly this is where teamwork starts to breakdown.

My first team was exactly like this made up of people skilled in article writing and forum posting but with few skills elsewhere so while our articles and forum posts were the best our graphics and sales pages were horrendous resulting in very low conversions, our team campaigns were flawed and before long team members started to drift away to join other marketing teams or to pursue their own interests.

If this is or has been the case with your forays into team marketing then you should really look into your team structure and how you put your team together.

The key to successful teams can be found in how the team was built and the way it is structured, to explore this we'll look at a basic team suitable for today's web market.

To start with you are going to need people with some skills in the following areas:

CopyWriting
Graphics
Video Production
Traffic Generation
PHP/HtML
Keyword Research
SEO/SEM/SMO
Social Bookmarking/ Forums posting
Accounting
Marketing
Management
Advertising

This is only a short list of the number of skills required to run a campaign successfully like the Gurus see they have massive teams of people mostly with accredited skills in each of those areas and mostly recruited through agencies and intense interview processes.

While you may not be able to afford a paid staff of professional people to create and run your marketing campaigns you should be a little choosy when putting a team together, you need to ascertain who has what skills and exactly where they will fit into your team, they need to be capable of performing more than one function in most cases ie Graphics and Video Generation or Graphics and Marketing.

Now most of us are really good at one thing and can manage adequately in a couple of others so it's important that you assess team members and assign tasks that fit their abilities best in order to obtain quality results when performing tasks.

Every team needs to be balanced so that all the tasks are performed within proper time constraints and the team leader needs to be able to control the team while working as a team member and front man, Most of the most noted Guru's are simply front men they have little say in how the team works or what tasks are performed by individuals, they are simply the face of the product someone that through good fortune has amassed a large following on a social network or obtained a large list of contacts through emails and instant messaging, don't get me wrong they know their products it's their job to know them and know them well but the people you speak with in support areas are normally the true power behind the product they are the creators of the product and can offer even more in depth answers to those awkward questions.

Of course your team is likely to be structured very differently to a Gurus team, apart from probably being much smaller it is also going to lack the funding and expertise, it is therefore important that each team member fully understands not only their role in the team but also has a sound knowledge of the product the team is to promote as they will most likely have to fill in as support staff too.

Selecting your team should be done by first conducting some research on those in your contact list and then having discovered who knows what you can then invite individuals to participate, you may have to send out several invitations for each team position before your team fills up and once you have enough people accepting your offer you will need to hold a group meeting to further explain what it is you hope to achieve, this may see some of those who accepted opt out of the team and you may have to find other people to fill their slots.

Your first team meeting is probably the most important meeting you will hold with the new team as it will stamp your authority on the team while showing team members what sort of leader you are, you need to be confident at this meeting and convey a sense of authority while restraining enthusiasm to a reasonable level, you need to instill the spirit of the team at this first meeting giving them the confidence in both the product and yourself to see a successful outcome to the team campaigns, How you speak to them will determine how much the team will absorb speak to fast and they will lose or miss information, too slow and they will become bored and dis-interested you will need to blend the right amount of hype with a solid base of facts meanwhile playing to each team members personality (Tip: write down each team members name and have it at hand during this first meeting it will help you address each member properly especially in large teams).

A few days after your first team meeting follow up on each team member individually, go over the major points covered at the first team meeting and arrange a time for a second team meeting, it's normally a good idea to have some form of agenda for the second team meeting and to convey this agenda to each team member during the follow up call.

If you put your marketing team together properly instead of just accepting all and sundry and you lead them properly you will find that suddenly sales start to rise and marketing new products become much easier, once your team tastes success you will see their efforts increase and introducing new products will be a breeze.
Nov 24th 2010 06:12