In order to generate more qualified leads for your network marketing business you need to put yourself into the shoes of your prospects. Identify their needs and market your product or service accordingly – at the early stage your prospect is much more concerned what the benefits for him or her are rather than in how great your product is.

Below are the most common questions, needs, and concerns that your prospects might have and the way you should address them:

Who is the person that is trying to sell me his product?
Make sure that you introduce yourself to your prospects, they should get to know you, trust you, and see you as a leader and an authority figure that can help them solve THEIR problems. You must identify your prospect’s needs and address them – they want to earn more money and it is your task to show them how they can do this promoting your product or service. They must feel like they know you well and can trust you – once you establish a great relationship, you will get people calling you months after you have met with them.

Is this a legit business?
The line between a solid MLM business and a pyramid scheme can be a very thin line and you must convince your prospect that you are running 100% legitimate business and your offers are rock solid. If they have even the slightest doubt, you will not recruit them no matter how hard you try.

If I get involved in this business can I really succeed and earn good money?
You must explain and convince the people that they can achieve the financial freedom that they are after if they follow your network marketing plan. What makes an individual choose one multi level marketing business over another is nothing, but their beliefs that they would earn more money. The product or the service that you offer are only coming second – if you can convince a prospect that he will earn much more with your marketing system than with another MLM, then you have won the battle.

Can I really do this?
Remember that people resist change – the idea of starting a new venture can be quite scary for many people and is taking them out of their comfort zone, you must address their fears and show them just how easily they can learn your business product or service and become great marketers themselves.

Do I really want to do this?
Again, it is your job to talk to your prospects and convince then that this is not only something that they CAN do, but something that they WANT to do – this is crucial if you want to close the deal.

Remember that generating good MLM leads has nothing to with your product or your service, of course you must be confident that what you are selling is of great quality, but rather how good you are at drawing people. You must assert yourself as an expert, friend, and you must inspire your prospects. Most of the network marketers are failing not because they are selling poor products, but rather because they have no idea how to market these products. You must put the people that you talk to at ease, you must learn how to attract people that are looking for a home made business opportunities, and even after you have sealed the deal you must be always available for some advice, coaching, and recommendations.

In order to succeed in your MLM business venture you need to recruit a lot of qualified leads and one of the best ways to do exactly that and gain great exposure is to establish an online presence. This is way easier than most people think – you don’t have to pay thousands of dollars in order to have your own network marketing website, all you have to do is follow these nine easy steps:

The Internet is growing at an amazing rate and millions of new users get online every single month – learn how to use that to your advantage, building your own site is not enough: nurture it, make it grow, maintain it, and it should help you grow a massive business. If you keep adding fresh articles and text to your website it will attract a lot of visitor, get a lot of search engine love, and ultimately bring you a lot of qualified leads.

If you want to boost your MLM business into success, try to build one of its platforms on social media. As commonly recognized, social media refers to video, audio and blogging. Having so little boundaries and reaching millions of people throughout the globe, social media can be an excellent marketing tool for your MLM business.

Here are some simple tips on how to do it:

Blog It
Own a WordPress blog. There are plenty of free beautiful WordPress templates you can choose. Host the blog on your own hosting account so that you can have greater accessibility and control over it.
Post to the blog some articles you’ve written on your own. Write about something you’ve been passionate about MLM business. Try to keep each article short, for four or five paragraphs (around 200 – 300 words) long. Short articles keep your blog attractive, while too long ones will make it simply boring.

Podcast Your Business
Create short interesting podcasts about your MLM business, and then upload them on your blog. Choose the most interesting topics and, as usual, keep them short. This way your visitors can browse the whole blog while listening to your voice. This is a good way to give your blog a personal touch.

Add YouTube
Pick any video related to MLM business; there are plenty of them on YouTube. Copy those videos’ embed code and upload them on the blog. Google loves YouTube videos and will adding these videos to your blog will also help your blog to rank higher in Google’s search engines.

YouTube Yourself
Create your own video. This is very easy to learn, anyone can do it, and so can you. After all, all you need is an affordable camera. Or, you can always use webcam (web camera); the latest PCs and notebooks often have built-in web cameras.

Spread the Word
Let everyone know about your videos. Upload them on YouTube and other video sharing sites. To do this you need to keep your recording session short, about 10 minutes or less.

Send Out a Freebie
Write a useful report on how to build an MLM business, send it to all contacts in your e-mail. Post it on your blog as well as on other people’s blogs. It will give you extra credit: personal branding as an expert on MLM. Even better, it is an excellent way to let the world know about your MLM business.
These six tips are simple, easy to do marketing strategy. These are some things social media can do to boost your MLM business into success. Try them, and you’ll be amazed of how it turns to be.

In any MLM or network marketing businesses, distributors would have their own strategies at earning maximum income as soon as they understand the marketing plans. Ambitious distributors would go all out to make personal sales and sponsor as many new downlines as fast as possible.

One of the ways distributors go about their MLM business is accumulation of rewards that allows him to save up purchase products and accumulate point value in order to reach the next rank as easily as possible. So a distributor can purchase products with the point value that he needs to push his ranking up. Should he need 10,000 points to go from 5% to 10%, he can purchase products of 3,000 points in the first month, 2,000 points in the second and 3,000 points in the third month. Let’s see the pros and cons of   this sales strategy by some distributors.

Advantages of Front Loading

• It gives the distributor their own time frame  to move from one rank to another giving them less pressure and less stress
• Volume gained from sales in previous months doesn’t get flushed away. This means you can gather the volume, go away on a 3 month holiday, and you can start immediately again as though you haven’t left.
• Protected against the effects of demotion in ranking.

Disadvantages of Front Loading

• With Accumulation, the distributor is encouraged into what is called Front Loading – which means he decides to buy tons of products to meet his target faster. Indirectly, he is buying his position up the rank faster instead of really going out to promote or sell the products or recruit downlines who in turn do the same in order to earn his commission. The danger in doing this is that the products would just sit in his house and not move on to customers. He does not then earn on retailing them. He does not promote them to people who might even like them and buy them repeatedly. He would definitely be in no position to use or consume all the products himself.
• When there is no time frame, the distributor is not pressured to deliver. But given such an easy- going method of earning the income, the distributor will not have the incentive to go out to look for sales or recruit downlines.
• If there are no repeat sales in the business, the business organization is hollow. Most people stop buying or recruiting once they hit a new level in an accumulation system. This becomes unhealthy and products are not moving out to downlines or customers. In other words, since there are no quotas, you can have 10 Super Diamond Ambassadors in your organization who don’t buy anything.

Normally a person is a user or consumer of the product of the network marketing business. He may want to join as a distributor because he is a regular user or consumer and believes in the product. Then he might decide to join the business and introduce the products or business to other people too and earn some money.

It is advisable to educate your downlines on the correct approach in developing the MLM business with the right strategies. Short cuts like accumulation or front loading and buying position should be discouraged. As a leader, you should encourage your downline to be regular users or consumers of the products in order to be convinced of the quality of the product. Then only can you or the downlines be able to convince customers to buy your products.

Products that have a high consumption rate or repeated sales like health products or skin care products are usually targeted. It is common knowledge that repeated users or consumers would like to join in the company to enjoy distributor or cost prices of products.

Believe that repeat sales are what keep a business running long term.

In addition to having good repeat sales, you must also focus on enforcing an 80/20 or 70/30 rule where 70-80 percent of the products purchased by a distributor should be sold to customers and the remainder 20-30 percent is used for personal consumption. By doing so, accumulation would not happen, front loading strategies would not work for distributors who are only interested in short-cuts to reach higher rankings in the compensation plan. Also he would only be able to earn fast bucks on a short term basis only.  A network marketer should be trained right from the beginning when he signs in that he should look at the long term benefits of the business.

There are some common misconceptions regarding compensation plans both for the distributor and the company that need to be explained further.

I will only be a serious builder once I find the best company plan .
There are people who do not work hard enough in their business, that they blame the plan for their failure. They blame the plan, the management, or even call them a scam. If you decide to leave a company for a better plan, make sure you leave strictly based on business reasons and not to justify your failure!

The compensation plan is not important; all I need to do is recruit people.
A good plan will make or break a company. When network marketers understand the company’s plan clearly and find that it works fairly for every distributor who works hard and income is generated accordingly, the down lines would not fall out and leave easily. In fact, when a leader of a whole group of down lines works, trains and motivates well, he would sustain the distributors’ enthusiasm right from the start till he achieves success too. As a rule, the team survives only if the down line builder has exemplary qualities for them to emulate and together they would all be able to make money.

Other considerations like payout, maintenance and even the joining fee play a part in the company’s survival. If a company has quite a high maintenance and their distributors are not making money, they will drop out even faster.

I must explain the entire plan to the prospect so that he understands.
A new person would probably understand only half of your plan initially. He would get very confused, so it is up to you not to try to make him understand everything about the business immediately .When he feels pushed ,he might not sign up even.
Keep the plan simple and explain in terms of benefits instead of features.
If you are starting your own network marketing company, outlining the benefits and writing in terms of potential earnings is more advisable because most people want don’t want to think too much.

If I want to start my own network marketing company, all I need is a good plan only.
Ultimately, the success of a network marketing company depends on many factors. The most important factor is who is managing the company. Even a company that is making the most money will still fall apart if it is not backed by a solid management team. Yes, a good leader and a few more persevering down line leaders who can help support newbies and train, support and motivate them too.

Other factors also include having a viable product. A good product ensures repeat sales and cash flow for both the company and the distributors. The plan should be designed to complement and synergize with all the other elements. At any time, each element should not be designed at the expense of the other.

If the company has a high payout to the multi level marketers, everyone will join the company.
If everyone in the company is enjoying extremely high commissions, you must observe the product more carefully. An expensive product does not necessarily mean that it is a product of quality or reliability If a product’s mark-up is too high, it may be good for the distributors in the short term and distributors sometimes find the products too unreasonably expensive even for own consumption or use. Then when they themselves are not consumers or users, how can they convince their customers to do so? Customers can sense the sincerity of network marketers in their sales promotion and this does not auger well for the sales in the long term. In this way high retail mark-up will hurt the consumers and devalue the product.

A product must rely on good repeat sales and reasonable mark-up at the retail level or else the company will not survive long. In their eagerness to make money fast, most companies simply grab any product and give it an exorbitant mark-up so that many builders would grab the opportunity to make fast bucks without any thought of its long term survivability.

As in any other kinds of businesses, the MLM marketing business has its own string of terminologies and jargons which a newbie has to be familiar with. Here are some of the common ones:

Upline
Your immediate upline is the one who recruits you into the business organisation. Then you in turn  begin to recruit people as your downline . An upline earns commission from your group volume of sales. Usually your upline is responsible in training and motivating you so that you would be able to succeed in the business. However if your upline is also new like you, then the upline leader or mentor would help in the guidance and training.

Upline Leader/Mentor
An upline leader actively trains and guides his group of dowlines. He needs to train  his downlines in many areas of the business such as the marketing plan, product knowledge or sponsoring techniques. Of course, when a newbie joins an organisation, it is his responsibility to attend meetings to learn from his upline mentor. An upline mentor is there to actively counsel his down lines especially new ones..

Builder
A builder begins his business by recruiting people to form his down lines. He is a distributor of the products or services he intends to deal with. Normally a builder is first convinced of the quality and  viability of the product or service he has confidence in and wants to recommend them to other people. At the same time he builds his   network marketing business with the products or service and recruits other people to join him too.

Depth
Depth refers to the level of your downline’s downline. A person who has built  depth usually would have sponsored many downlines who are actively getting their downlines to join him. Usually he would have reached a certain level where he has a secure organization.

Leg
A leg is a downline group in your network starting from the person you personally sponsored. He and all the downlines under him are considered one of your legs. Depending on the marketing plan of the MLM business,  a  distributor usually trains, motivates and develops many legs simultaneously.

Sponsor
When you join an MLM business, your sponsor is the one who directly introduces you into the business and you are placed  under  him or her.

Downline
The people who join you in your business under you or your downlines   in the organisation are your down lines. They may be many, many levels down your hierarchy and at times you may not even know them personally.

Sideline/Crossline
The people in the sidelines or cross lines are not considered in your organisation and you do not gain financially from their sales.
However, depending on the culture promoted in the company, they are either perceived as the worst competitors, or valuable allies. You have to know that  somewhere along the line, they are also in your upline’s group, so helping your sideline means helping your upline and his group.

Front Line
These are downlines that are personally sponsored by you or are directly under you. You must be directly responsible for their success because you are the one who introduced them to this business. The people in the front lines are very important in your organisation as they would eventually be your downline group leaders as they expand in the number of their own down lines . When they achieve successful levels of performance in the sales plan they would determine the status of  your achievement in the business too. Normally a builder tries his best to push the success of a few front lines and even strategise putting his new downlines in their groups to strength the teams and  increase their total sales volumes. The development of your frontline will determine the success or  failure of an entire downline group.

Width
The number of people you can personally sponsor. Matrixes and Binaries usually limit the maximum width. Normally a strong downline is one that builds and develops a very large width.

Override
An override means you are paid a certain percentage of sales volume over your downline’s  group. Normally an override is calculated on the performance sales volume of  your frontline only.

Profit Sharing Pool
Profit sharing is a bonus that is paid out to high  achievers who have reached certain conditions in the marketing plan. A pool is a collection of sales volume from distributors all over the company regardless of whether the sales volume comes from your sideline.

Maintenance
A mandatory (sometimes optional depending on certain criteria) sales volume a distributor must achieve. This is only fair in the sales plan otherwise it will look as if your down lines work so hard to make money for you. At the same time you are not showing a good example to your downlines  if you do not generate sales volume too. Often maintenance is done to override your downline, become eligible for profit sharing, or maintain a certain rank or even the distributorship.  This is enforced because the company needs to make money as well.

Total Payout
A  percentage of a product sold by the company  is set aside for distributors and retail sales only. The company only keeps the remainder.

In MLM or network marketing businesses, compensation plans are what distributors really want to look into as that is how he is going to earn his income from commissions from his and his downlines’ volume of sales. Compensation plans differ in every organization. It is indeed very overwhelming or even confusing for a newbie to comprehend the big circles and small circles at the first sponsoring or introduction into the business.

Therefore it would be an advantage to sponsor someone who is familiar with network marketing in the first place. However if a newbie is introduced then the distributor has to be patient and slowly familiarize him or educate him with the compensation plan and help him along the way in his new found business. The distributor has to find the right compensation plan that works for him and that can help him earn money. Therefore what’s most important is that he understands the plans well especially on how he can earn his commissions based on his downlines’ volumes and his own volume of sales.

Distributors will always be looking for new downlines to join him in his organisation. But before he goes a step further in roping in his downlines, it is almost imperative of him to master the knowledge of his company’s compensation plans. One will never know when one would meet someone who might have just left another company and is well versed with compensation plans already. How can the distributor be a good leader, exude the type of confidence so needed to influence others into the business if he himself is not well trained in the business yet?

It is not true that people join an MLM business because of a superior compensation plan. More often than not distributors might already know his new downlines as he would like to share his money- making venture with them too. Or they could be his customers who have confidence in his products or services and give him repeat sales. It can be said that it is actually the leadership, influence and confidence that attract new downlines to a good distributor. There could also be that chance opportunity that a company collapses, distributors have a fallout with his upline and there you are, some well trained people waiting to join you in your company. You will never know!

Now that we have set the record straight, knowing your plan and their plan well will bring you one step to closing a new sale or sponsoring a new distributor from another company.

It sounds unethical to pinch downlines from other companies. There is actually no rules that say you can’t really. However be careful not to do this within your company as you might be disqualified or terminated in your distributorship. Some form of competition is healthy but it would be better for the distributor to sponsor new people out of the company. Remember, your downlines might also want to leave you to join other companies too! Then it is time to realize and look into the reasons and improve in areas like leadership qualities, support and motivation that you might have failed to provide them with.

Having said so much about compensation plans of MLM companies , it is then advisable that a distributor invests a lot of time and effort at learning the details of his own company plans as well as other companies’ plans too. It would benefit him a lot to attend as many opportunity meetings as possible to gain more knowledge about compensation plans and other aspects of the business in order to succeed in his network marketing business.

Saving Money In Network Marketing

Retailing of a product is very important to an MLM business. Lack of (or even non-existing) retailing could be harmful to the distributor or the company as certain states have outlawed ‘headhunting’ and have their own policies.

Nevertheless, saving money on an MLM product is one of the most wonderful key features of joining an MLM company if recruiting is not your forte.

In certain compensation plans, repeat purchase of the products you buy from the company gives you more rebates or bonuses. In essence, the more you buy, the cheaper it becomes. This becomes an even greater pleasure if you are totally in love with the products or you have already set aside a budget for those products (which means you are now buying from the MLM company or your upline instead of buying from the supermarket, pharmacy, grocery store, etc)

There are some important aspects to take note however, if the company requires you to purchase the products in bulk (hence the term – frontloading), is there a DEMOTION in your achieved position in the company, is there MAINTAINANCE required, or how much are the renewal fees for membership. All these will be further discussed in the later chapters.

Meeting New People In Network Marketing

This is one of the many reasons why people join MLM companies (even if the first two reasons discussed above don’t even concern them). There are all types of people in the world. Some like the positive environment. Others like the social events the company or team organizes. Some look for a potential life partner there!

Lots of people even go all out to join these kind of businesses to get more contacts for their OWN BUSINESSES (maybe even THEIR OWN MLM BUSINESS). Bear in mind one thing. There is this old saying that goes, you scratch my back, I scratch yours. If you participate in their activities but don’t go full force in their company/team vision, don’t expect them to join you or buy from you. There may even be negative repercussions (such as being banned from coming back to the company).

Personal Growth And Self-Improvement

One of the biggest reasons why I would recommend joining an MLM company and doing the business is opening your mind to positive thinking and achieving your full potential. There are many companies out there who have the best training courses, motivational rallies, sharing sessions and whopping transformation camps that will not only fire you up but take your business building to the next level.

I will not touch much on this subject extensively here. There are so many companies out there that will do a fantastic job in terms of training.

Remember that growth is a journey and not a destination.

People who join the network marketing business have different thoughts and aspirations when it comes to how to make money from their business. Let us take a look at the different ideas and determine which of them suits you best….

(a) Looking for fast money
(b) Building a long term business with money coming in long after you have ‘retired’
(c) Investing in the product itself

For people looking for fast money, there are pros and cons to this kind of thinking.

Some people are WELL TRAINED salesmen. They have built the relationship with their clients, customers and all sorts of people. People trust what they say and will trust whatever they are selling. They may sell the product itself (sometimes, in large quantities), or they may sell the opportunity (the money making part of it) or both. Are YOU this kind of person?

Fast money is not impossible, but it COULD be for the short term only. Consider the facts that 80-90% of people in the world are NOT built for sales. If a salesman sponsors a non-salesman, would the non-salesman be able to do the same thing as his upline? Does that mean that I would spend most of my time looking for the 10-20% of sales types?

The next type of money is the long term type.

When I define long term, it does not have to mean that you might not see money right away. It differs from company to company. But as a general rule of thumb, it involves BUILDING A NETWORK OR AN ORGANISATION.

The key to building a large organization as quoted by Zig Ziglar, “You will get whatever you want in life if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” In other words, if you will help enough downlines get enough downlines, you are on the road to network marketing financial freedom. The key is to help others.

There is one more category of people who ‘invests’ in network marketing companies, not to make money through retaining or networking, but rather investing in the product, position, or depending on the company, appreciation of their ‘assets’. A few examples would be investing in a product, so that in the future, its value will appreciate, so you can sell it to other people at a very high margin (sort of like old comic books.) Others might purchase the account or distributorship from you (depending on the compensation plan of the company) while some Internet companies actually pay you to ‘invest’ in their company, sort of like buying a share of the company.

A new kid on the block in the Multi-Level Marketing affiliate program often makes some mistakes at the beginning. Many of them are too naive, enthusiastic and ill-prepared that they fail to make an in-depth survey of the background of the company leadership. They do not check out whether the company has enough experience in this field too. The newbie also lacks the knowledge of basic marketing principles too. As such he would meet a lot of problems or failures in the beginning of his venture into the MLM business.

A newbie has to be very careful to make the right choice of a dependable and trustworthy company that can show proof of success in such affiliate marketing. He could be misled into believing in the fantastic offers which more often than not are actually of short term high rewards by some fly by night companies that do not consider the long term benefits for the companies. Often a newbie realizes too late that he had been misled and finds that he has lost lot of money and time in the company.

Before venturing into such a business, he should gather information about the rules and principles of MLM marketing strategies.. He should get in touch with experienced people who are skilled in MLM marketing and join hands with them in the affiliate programs. Simply recruiting anyone interested in your program won’t do as he needs recruits of caliber, skilled and experienced who would be able to help generate sales volume. A newbie should refrain from being desperate in his recruiting efforts. He should carefully pick and choose ones who have enough experience to help him succeed in the MLM marketing program together.

Strategy plays an important role in recruiting down lines. He should target those who are able to help him generate links and sales. Understanding the marketing plan is of utmost importance as he would be able to build his down line strategically in order to maximize income and sales. He should make calculative moves in placing his recruits under his down lines in order to generate revenue from the groups. Thus he should actually know the number of down lines and recruits and build the hierarchy under leaders so that he can earn the ideal income from them.

Probably another mistake a newbie makes is signing up his own family members and friends in his MLM program. He should venture out of family and kin and look for new faces and people who possess some entrepreneurial aptitudes to join him in his MLM business .Of course people who are experienced and possess skills and knowledge of the MLM programs.

When a person is new in the MLM business, he may be overly enthusiastic and try to push or force sell products that he hardly know anything about. Thus it is always advisable to invest some money in some products, use them to be convinced about their worth. In this way the customers can see through your sincerity and belief in the benefits of the goods. Most of the time, customers buy out of obligation and the next time they will try to avoid seeing his face again. Once the customers are convinced of the quality of the products or services, they would naturally follow-up and the newbie does not need to try selling to them at all cost.

Perseverance and motivation are key factors in making a success out of an MLM business. A person has to be patient in building the down lines who believe in him and the products or services. A newbie cannot afford to be idle and expect to generate income from down lines who work hard. He has to work together with the new down lines giving them motivation and transferring skills and knowledge about the strategies of the business to them. He has to give customers confidence in his services or products as they would also recommend new customers to him. And of course once a customer has confidence in a product or service from his company, he would like to expand his usage of other products too. In this way then only can he generate more revenue in his business. Leadership by example is the way in MLM programs- a successful leader or up line in the business works and trains his down lines hard in order to build his team successfully.