Network marketing online is a mystery to most folks, even though the Internet has been with the general populace for over a decade now. Additionally, even those who would love to begin marketing on the Net are often discouraged from doing so by their upline leadership.
This is unfortunate because these upline leaders simply don’t understand the harm they’re doing. I understand why this happens, though.
Some upline leaders believe going online to market means their downlines will become “distracted” with building sites.
Rather than recruiting and building, the thinking is that people will spend all their time tweaking out their sites. There also exists the belief (an incorrect belief), that network marketing online means “hiding” behind the computer and never creating any real relationships with possible team members.
Allow me to handle that myth right now. Although gaining an online presence for your MLM business requires time spent in front of the computer, there’s absolutely no way you can build your business entirely on “auto-pilot”.
When people talk about building a business online and how it can be done on auto-pilot, what they’re talking about is the MLM Lead Generation aspect of building your network marketing business. As with all things in life, when you only get half the story, confusion reigns supreme.
Network marketing online means you’re using the power of the Internet to build traffic to your website. Your website educates the visitor about you, you opportunity, and how you can help them build their own business under your leadership and training.
However, that’s all your website does…it educates. If you’re going to actually recruit some of those website visitors, you’re going to have to pick up the phone (oh, the HORROR!) and begin building a REAL relationship with them.
The Network Marketing Online Reality
Are you starting to see why some people say the Internet can’t be used to build a network marketing business? The misconception is they think proponents of the Internet are saying, “Put up a site and watch the recruits flood in.”
In reality, what people like me are doing on the Internet through network marketing online can be summed up as, “Put up a site, invest the time to drive traffic to that site, watch the LEADS flood in, and then build a relationship with those people.”
See the difference? Network marketing online is about leveraging the power of numbers. Don’t all those Internet naysayers tell you that MLM is a numbers game…that you must talk to a certain number of prospects in order to find one recruit?
Then, why would anyone in their right mind ignore the power of the Internet when it comes to generating huge amounts of “numbers” on auto-pilot so that we can invest our time talking to INTERESTED prospects, rather than tire-kickers or the “is this a pyramid scheme” crowd?
Classic Internet marketers have been harnessing the “numbers” aspect of the Internet for years. Some network marketers have caught on to this idea. But, it’s not about learning network marketing online, throwing your site visitors “up against the wall” and hoping a few will join by accident.
So, I Can Get To The Point Where Interested People CALL ME?
All you’re doing through network marketing online is allowing your educational website to sift through the numbers in order to identify the people who become interested in you and your opportunity and then actually contact you and ask for more information.
Did you grasp that? Every network marketer is struggling each day with the fact that they don’t have enough real, qualified prospects to talk to. So, they run around “hitting up” their Uncle Bob, the guy at McDonald’s, the clerk in the mall, or that person in line at the grocery market.
And, their upline actually encourages this as if it’s some type of scientific and effective form of “marketing”. Is it any wonder so many folks get disillusioned with MLM and why our entire industry has a bad name in the minds of many people?
On the other hand, if you take the time to learn some online marketing basics, you’re now tapping into a marketing medium that is definitely scientific and effective when it comes to attracting targeted leads…interested in what you have to offer.
Attract enough targeted prospects each day, and a certain amount of them will contact you and ask to talk with you. A certain percentage of those people will join you. It’s that simple.
How differently would your network marketing business look if you were only talking to people who asked to talk with you? How would you feel if you never heard, “Is this a pyramid scam” again?
I know you would feel wonderful because I never hear that anymore and it feels great to spend my prospecting calls with folks who WANT to be in network marketing and are just looking for the best person to join.
So, If Network Marketing Online Sounds Good, Listen Up…
OK, you’re convinced that online marketing can help your MLM business. How do you get started? Let’s go over some basics to how to properly use the Internet for network marketing online…
First of all, you need an online “presence”, otherwise known as a website. There are a couple of ways you could go here. One, you could buy a domain name that is simply “yourname.com” so that you begin building a presence about who you are, what you have to offer, and why folks would want to join you.
Two, you could get a domain name that has something to do with your business specifically. For example, if you’re in MonaVie, maybe you could get the domain name, superspectacularyummyjuice.com. If you’re a Pre-Paid Legal rep, you might grab legalissuessolvedhere.com. Get the idea?
Personally, I use both methods. I have a blog with my name in the domain name and I have domains that relate to the specific businesses that I promote. From my blog, where I’m helping people understand who I am, providing various tips, revealing how I can teach others how to succeed, I then link them over to my business domains where they can join me in business.
Got Your Domain? Great, Now You Must “Host” It & Build It
Once you decide on your domain name, you need to buy hosting services through places such as GoDaddy.com or HostGator. This allows your website to be seen “live” online. By the way, there is minimal cost here. You can pick up a year of hosting (along with your domain name) for less than $60-$70 or so.
Next, you need to start building your site. You can hire someone to design it all or you can use a site builder that brings it all “alive” for you.
In order to be successful with network marketing online, you’ll want to build a website that focuses on educating your visitors about you, your company, and, most importantly, why they should join you.
At first, this is where most people get stuck. They develop the belief that because they are new to all this, they don’t have anything to offer on their site in the form of training or info that “positions” them as a leader worth joining.
This is easily handled if you simply become a student of your network marketing online craft. Did you know that if you summarized the info I’m sharing in this article on your site that you would educate the 99% of all network marketers who don’t understand the concept of network marketing online?
If each day, you watched an education video or read a quality article about how to market online and then simply paraphrased that training in your own words on your website, your readers would come to recognize you as someone they want to join. Why? Because you’re already teaching them in advance! They want to join you because you’re already providing them valuable education and help.
Drive Traffic To Your Network Marketing Website
Online, the only way to get any results is to invest time and energy in driving traffic to your website. This is the area where many misconceptions come in to play because people think that after your website is built, it will automatically attract visitors.
This isn’t how it works. You must tend to your business and success by marketing it. Doesn’t any business in the world have to market and advertise? Of course, and it’s the same online.
Here are some ways you can market your website:
- Article marketing
- Video marketing
- Social media (posting on Facebook, Twitter, etc)
- Pay-per-click advertising (such as Google’s Adwords pgm or Facebook’s PPC pgm)
- Free classifieds
- Paid banner advertising
- Forum marketing
- Ezine ads
- Press releases
- Safe Lists
All of these methods can be quite effective in raising awareness about you and your website and bring visitors to you. If these are all new to you, you need to pick just one or two and begin investigating what they are all about.
Get good at just one or two traffic generating methods. Invest time in them for a few months. It takes time to build a nice, steady flow of traffic to your website. This is another reason why some upline leaders discourage their downlines from going online. Again, they believe (mistakenly) that their downlines will stop prospecting as they work on this.
The funny thing is that you can begin working on this process an hour or two each day and still have time to call some of your warm market contacts. Do both of these for the first few months. In the end, you’ll build a huge traffic flow to your site and then your network marketing leads will begin coming in. Do it right and your upline won’t believe the upswing in your results.
You should realize that an MLM business is a long term project, whether you’re building online or offline. Therefore, give your networking marketing online efforts time to build. The great thing is that as you post articles or videos, this content will keep bringing you leads months and even years from now.
We all join network marketing because of the residual income possibilities. The Internet provides you the same principle of a passive lead generation flow that keeps coming in long after you’ve done the upfront work in these first few months.
The entire idea is to build a traffic flow to your website(s) that provides you those qualified, interested leads month after month.
What Do I Put In My Articles or Videos?
This is a great question and this idea of online marketing may seem intimidating at first.
Remember, though, that anything new creates anxiety at first. Didn’t you feel anxiety on your first day of school, your first date, your first day at your job, etc? What happened the more you learned about those things? It became easier and you wondered why you ever felt that anxiety to begin with, right?
It’s the same with network marketing online. You simply need to invest a little time learning some new concepts and skills. Once you do, you’ll wonder why you ever worried about all this.
After you’ve spent a week or two investigating article and video marketing, you’re going to have a lot of notes on the ins and outs of both. Your first article or video can simply be about some of these new concepts and skills you’ve found out about.
Write about one of these in the form of an article. Then, create a quick video going over the major points.
By simply re-publishing what you learned in your own words, you now have two pieces of content you can distribute on an article marketing directory or on YouTube with links pointing back to your own website. You’ve just started gaining traffic to your site!
How Does All This Turn Into Attracting Qualified Leads?
The final piece to the puzzle when it comes to network marketing online is to set up what is called an auto-responder follow-up system. There are various companies, such as Aweber or Get Response that offer these services to us.
You simply create a web form that asks visitors on your site to submit their name and email in exchange for more information about you and/or your network marketing opportunity. Your auto-responder service will provide you with a snippet of “code” that you place on your site and this web form simply appears and begins collecting your leads.
Inside your auto-responder service software, you can set up follow-up emails in advance that go out to each prospect who requests your information. You do this work once and then every lead is being followed up with for months and years to come.
Your follow-up should include more information on you and your network marketing business. It should include useful info that “brands” you as a person who cares and someone your prospects will want to join. Do this follow-up correctly and some of your prospects will actually begin calling you and asking for more info or how to join you.
Then, you simply answer your phone or call them back and have a human-to-human conversation with a real, qualified prospect. Do you see how this is different and more sensible than talking to the guy at the supermarket? You’ve now generated a daily flow of prospects educated on what you are about and you can stop bugging people at the movie theater.
Network Marketing Online Requires Time, Work & Dedication
At this point, you may be saying, “This network marketing online sounds like a lot of work”. Yes, you’re building a real business here. I don’t know of any business in the entire world that just “happened”. Yet, I see this prevailing thought in the network marketing world that it will all just happen by itself.
The choice is yours. You can work hard at chasing down unqualified prospects all day long. Or, you can build an online sales funnel MLM system that will have qualified leads calling you.
Yes, it takes some time and effort to set up. Once you set it up, though, it begins prospecting 24 hours per day, 7 days per week for you.
From that moment on, your valuable personal phone time is invested with people who are 90% ready to join. If you answer their questions and help them see you really will be there to guide and train them, how likely is it that many of them will decide to join your business?
Are you going to earn millions of dollars overnight by starting your network marketing online efforts? Of course not. But if you invest the time to get it all set up (and it does take time), then you’ve set yourself up for real success on a long-term basis.
The great thing, too, is if you join a network marketing opportunity on a team that is already using the Internet properly, you have upline mentorship that “gets it” and that is set up to properly guide you along. If your current upline isn’t using the Internet, you may want to re-think who it is that you’ve aligned yourself and your family’s hopes and dreams with.
Give it some thought. If you’ve always wanted to make serious money from home, network marketing online may be something to think seriously about. Together with an upline who already knows what to do online, the Internet and network marketing may be your ticket to finally achieving the success you want.
Just be sure to know that this doesn’t happen overnight. You’re building a real business and will have to work hard at it, just like any successful business owner, offline or online, has had to do. If you’re ready to work at it, then I encourage you to get started toward your goals.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Matt,
That was a great post. You packed a ton
of information in there. You could turn
that post into a decent product!
I liked how you explained that the internet
part of it is for generating leads, leads for you
to call and develop a relationship with, just
like old school mlm.
Thanks.
Jonathan
Thanks Jonathan…Yeah, that’s the thing I see many online marketing “naysayers” missing. You’re just exposing yourself to more people but you still MUST develop that relationship.