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.

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.