Success in Network Marketing

Photo by Chris Potter via Flickr

Network marketing; you may not understand it completely but you know the basic concept. It has been around for many years now, with another name, multi-level marketing, or MLM.  When people hear the phrase, “MLM”, they may think of Amway, or rounding up friends and family to put them through an uncomfortable sales pitch. These pitches can lead to stress in both parties, which is often detrimental to the long term success of both your relationships and the business you are trying to build. This article isn’t about helping you sell to your friends and family. In this article, you learn how to succeed in the Network Marketing world, without involving your family or friends.

This article was written by guest writer Don Teague.

What you should know about Network Marketing?

Before you can succeed at network marketing, there are several things you should know.

• It’s a business opportunity, not a get rich quick scheme.
• Find a product you believe in.
• The difference between network marketing and a Pyramid Scheme.

Any network marketing opportunity should be considered a business opportunity and not a get rich quick scheme. Any reputable opportunity is going to take hard work.  If it were a ‘simple’ way to get rich quick, would anyone really tell you about it? You should also treat anyone whom you may do business with as a potential business partner. The only way to be successful in network marketing , is to have a network of trusted alliances, who can help build your business foundation.

You need to have a product you believe in. For example, if you are selling weight loss shakes, muscle building supplements or other nutritional remedies, you are going to have a hard time selling them, if you haven’t taken them yourself and achieved great results. Imagine you are selling a weight loss product, but you don’t take the product. When someone asks you, “Hey Don, how is that product working for you?”, you won’t have an answer. Your potential customers and business partners won’t think too highly of your product, if you have not even tried it. If you are selling a technology product, but you’ve never used it, you have a hard sale ahead of you.

There is a very clear distinction between Network Marketing and a Pyramid Scheme. The following is an excerpt from a statement made by the Federal Trade Commission.

“Multilevel marketing programs are known as MLM’s, and unlike pyramid or Ponzi schemes, MLM’s have a real product to sell. More importantly, MLM’s actually sell their product to members of the general public, without requiring these consumers to pay anything extra or to join the MLM system.

There are two tell-tale signs that a product is simply being used to disguise a pyramid scheme: inventory loading and a lack of retail sales.”

Any Network Marketing opportunity that you decided to engage in, should be carefully investigated to make sure it’s not a pyramid scheme.

How to succeed in network marketing

Now that you know what network marketing is and what it isn’t, let’s talk about how to be successful in your business. Every year in late January or early February, there is a really big football game that a lot of people watch. During this game advertisers spend millions of dollars, for a 30-second slice of air time. I don’t know about you but I don’t have millions lying around to advertise my own network marketing opportunity. However, there are many ways to advertise your network marketing opportunity that doesn’t cost millions of dollars.

Let’s look at some of the ways you could advertise your opportunity.

• Social Media and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Blogs
• Webinars

Social Media may seem like an obvious choice for marketing your opportunity. Sure, you know about Twitter and Facebook. However, did you know there are over 50 different websites that could be considered a social network site? What if there was a way to post content to 10, 20 or even 50 social networks at once? There is. OnlyWire.com will allow you to post your content to 50 social networks through one easy platform. That’s huge! Why? Three words: Search Engine Optimization.

Photo by Cookbookman17 via Flickr

For those who don’t know what that is, and how it may affect you, let me explain. When you post something on a social media site, many search engines will rank that post  higher than other content on the same subject, (Note: This is a very simplified version of a very long discussion).  Also, consider this: freshness counts. Would you go out and buy fruit that had been sitting on the shelf for two months? Probably not. Search engines can be the same way. They see content that is 2 days old and other content that is 2 months old, guess which gets the higher ranking? (See number 58) Keep in mind, most of the time, SEO is not an exact science.

Blogs are another great tool to build your network marketing opportunity. However, it takes work to build a blog, with one of the most important factors being regularly updated quality content. We can take the same analogy from the social media section of this post and apply it here. Content that is old might not rank very well in the search engines, unless it has a ton of backlinks. There are ways around this though. For one, consider automating your posts. Many software packages have the ability to schedule posts, and have them go ‘live’ on your site at the date and time of your choosing. One other option might be to purchase content to go on your site.

Another tip for building your network marketing business is webinars. A webinar is a great way to share your message with a large group of people at one time. You could hold a webinar each week with continually updated content, which would keep people coming back for more if your content is valuable. How then might you capitalize on these webinars? By holding webinars, people know that you are serious about your business. Your audience will know they can come to you when they have questions, which will build trust and may give them a higher comfort level when deciding to join you in your venture.

How does this help? If you offer great content, your will invite others, bringing more potential business partners to your opportunity, hence the name network marketing.

These are just some of the ways you can promote and grow your network marketing start up. If you have more questions please contact me:

Don Teague
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Twitter: Training4Wealth