Why do people cringe at the mention of the idea of MLM or Network Marketing? Well, for the same reason that you stink at MLM (Provided you fall into the bottom 97%–at best. Maybe it’s 99%.
See, “everyone knows” that “MLM sucks” because “everyone knows” that they themselves stink at it. Therefore, “everyone” stinks at it. And so “MLM sucks.”, because “everyone” is just like them and they are just like “everyone”. And “no one” ever makes any money in MLM, because “they” can’t make money in MLM and “they” is “everyone” and “everyone” is “me” and… this all gets very confusing because we all then become the same person– I am you, you are me, we are everyone and everyone is us. We’re all just one, big, negative mind that can’t accomplish anything because, well, it all just stinks! Oh God, we should all just find a big hole somewhere that we can lay down in and just wait passively for the end of days.
How’s that for a motivational speech?
Well, alright, how about a more middle-of-the-road example?: Guy wants to make some extra dough. A friend of his invites him to a meeting. Guy gets very excited at the meeting and hears stories about how Big Joe Soandso make a zillion dollars in 3 years with this amazing MLM Company. Guy hocks his wedding ring and buys into the opportunity. Guy makes his warm list of 50 people, only about 25 of them does he actually know very well, and the rest are, like, his 3rd grade teacher who hasn’t seen in 30 years, and the guy who changed the oil in his car last month, etc. Then Guy spends more money on promotional flyers, business cards, etc. and calls the entire list and busts his hump and feels like he is bothering every single one of them and 30% of them never return his call at all and after a couple weeks Guy is out of people to call and has already called all 50 on his list at least twice and some 6 or 7 times and he has made a total profit of -$400.00 (or whatever his cost were).
Sound familiar? That is what MLM is about right? Boy, those of you reading this who don’t know me personally may be beginning to get the idea that I am a “glass if half-empty” type of guy. Not exactly. I am a proponent of network marketing. But I am trying to drive home a point.
I began in direct marketing with a MLM company back in the days before the internet was really a viable means for marketing for most MLMers. Funny thing is that it was not all that long ago. I’m talking back in 1998. Yes, there were big internet companies then. Amazon hadn’t quite turned a profit yet and Microsoft had come out with their WebTV so that people could access the internet on their TV. Most people did not have computers and get online at that time. Many did, but not most. I didn’t know anyone who actually knew how to build a web-page. That was reserved for a few “nerdy” types. So when I began in networking I had to do it the old-fashioned way and I must admit that it began not too much differently from the example above. I began with 25 family members (which my overly-helpful Grandmother) helped me book appointments with, and did my damnedest to create referrals from those 25 (not very effectively I might add) and yes, I ran out of people to contact. So, I went door-to-door, and I went business-to-business, and I put flyers on cars in movie theater parking lots, and I ran ads, etc., etc. This was NOT easy!, certainly not anywhere near as easy as it seemed during the initial meeting I attended which started the whole process for me. What the hell was wrong with everyone?!
Well, it was just that they were all stupid. That was all. Just didn’t have the ability to recognize an opportunity when they saw one. Yeah, it was just that I was the only person on planet earth who had the ability to recognize an opportunity, well, me and the guys who recruited me. Yes, that was the problem– you see? “Not my fault. Not my responsibility, not my issues, not my lack of ability, etc.”.
OK. Now that we have gotten the insanity out of the way… I actually did experience success in the industry. I began to sell product and I began to feel like I knew what I was talking about and I actually began to make some commissions and pay my bills–most of them anyway. But I certainly wasn’t wealthy and certainly didn’t see any hope of being wealthy with what I was doing. Eventually I worked at it until I to got where I was simply recruiting full-time and I did develop a six-figure income. Over the course of about two-and-a-half years with that first opportunity I recruited approximately 4500 people into the business. I was doing it in groups and things were going well. Then one day the company that we bought our product from just stopped making it. !!! What the ___?!
Well, that was a very hard lesson and there is a solution to that problem too, a solution which I didn’t have at the time, and which maybe I’ll share in a later article. But out of those approximately 4500 people that I recruited do you know how many of them actually were able to get themselves to a point where they were making a decent living working with that opportunity alone?
Seven.
That’s right. Seven.
And these seven people were also people who eventually all opened their own offices and began recruiting in bulk, under me, just as I was doing.
Do you know how many of the 4500 actually made a decent full-time income doing nothing but selling product and recruiting people individually, the way they were were taught to do by our immediate upline when we first signed up?
Zero.
Well, the point of all this is not to steer you away from network marketing. In fact it is just the opposite. I am today a network marketer and I love it. I think MLM is the cream of the crop as far as work goes. It is the only thing I know of that allows one to create truly MASSIVE amounts of cash without having to be a slave to boss and without have to go to school for “ump-teen” years, and without having to invest a huge amount of money. And short of being a hugely successful artist or copyrighter of some sort, I am not aware of a better way to create large residual income for oneself. Someone with very little start-up capital can make it go right to buy in to a decent networking company if they really want to, so the opportunity is available to just about everyone who wishes to reach for it. And I believe it is also the best way to make friends with some of the most wonderful, positive, exciting, ambitious people in the world. What else can one do where they can generate a massive stream of residual income and not have to go to work unless they choose to? What industry has created more millionaires? I am not aware of any.
I believe 100% that there needs to be a paradigm shift so that the “average Joe” on the street think of MLM as THE thing to do, and envies those that do it. MLM is the table where the cool kids sit. It is the deep end of the pool. It is the best club in town, for those with the right tools. And if you are the guy thinks that people can’t make money in MLM, try telling it to Mike Dillard, or Jonathan Budd, or Raven Starr, or any other f the host of MLM millionaires. Probably none of these folks would laugh directly in your face simply due to a sense of manners but I can guaranty that they would find you horribly misguided and uninformed, much like a silly child.
So, let’s get to the answer to the initial questions about why people cringe when you bring up the idea of MLM. The answer is: BECAUSE THEY DON’T KNOW HOW TO MARKET. And that’s it. And isn’t that interesting because the field is “Network Marketing“, or “Multi-Level Marketing“. Somehow that seemed to escape all of us in the early days.
The folks who actually did know how to market were way, way up the line from us and they were making tons of cash and they WERE NOT DOING WHAT THE REST OF US WERE DOING. The rest of us were busy harassing our friends and family, most of who had absolute zero interest in running their own business.
So, the guy who says, “Ugh. MLM? Bleck! No way!”, before he has even bothered to look at the opportunity– this guy does not know how to market. If this guy (or girl) were absolutely guaranteed to have 150 people every single day calling him up to ask him how they could sign up for his opportunity and all he had to do was answer the phone and tell them where to send the check, I’d bet that he would not be so against the concept of MLM. Any disagreements? OK, good. You see, this guy does not know how to market. You can have the greatest product in the world and you can have a whole garage full of it but if you do not know how to market, it is just going to sit there forever. Well, there has been a paradigm shift my friends.
The 1972 techniques that you were taught, as I explained above, are no longer viable. Yes, there are still companies doing it this way. “Why?”, you ask? Well, there are various theories circulating around. My personal opinion is that there are two main reasons. One, the company knows that most new distributors will move at least some of the company’s products this way, so the company will make money and each distributor is going have product auto-shipped to themselves every month and the company profits form this as well. And two, they have to be able to teach the new guy something that he can actually do. Just try to bring in a brand new distributor who knows nothing of currently effective marketing techniques and tell him, “OK, well once you have built your website and created all your capture pages, and set up your auto-responder system, and once you have all your pay-per-click ads going and your Twitter and Facebook pages are both up to 10,000 members, and you have all your articles and email follow-ups and newsletters written, etc., etc.,well then you are really going to begin to make a living with this.”. Huh?! Oh, did no one tell you that you have to be a web master and marketing genius to be able to make this go right these days?
Well, actually, you don’t… anymore. But there are some things you do need, and in today’s society if you are not using the internet to grow your business you are practically living and marketing in the Stone Age.
Customers and prospects are far busier these days and far more stingy with where they give their attention. The fact is that it is easy to get someone to read a page on the internet for a minute and it is HARD to get most people to venture out of their home and their busy lives and away from their kids to attend an opportunity meeting. And you can get your single message out to millions of people in one fell swoop rather than spending countless hours trying just trying to get fact time to get that message to one person. But you don’t need to be a web master or internet marketing genius. You need to know what works. What marketing actions will actually provide the right type of qualified leads, those people who are eager to join? And what techniques will drive them to you? What works? What doesn’t? Forget about all the “how to”s of what it takes, technology-wise, to create the pages and other tools to make this happen. Just focus on “what works?” and “what doesn’t?”. If you are starting from absolute zero as far as your knowledge of internet marketing and you don’t really know where to begin, this is going to take you a tremendous amount of time, maybe 50 hours. It could take you 100 hours. How about if you are not a fast reader? Maybe it takes you 200 or 500 hours to really and truly grasp exactly what it is that you need to create and put in place to actually be effective as an internet marketer.
That is just to figure out the “what”. Not to mention the “how”. I can promise you whole-heartedly that if you are not a person who already knows how to build websites and effectively drive large amounts of traffic to those sites, and you are going to embark on trying to figure out how to make that happen all on your own, you are going to waste an incredible amount of time and you are are going to pull out and incredible amount of your hair trying to get to where you need to be. Why do I say this? Because I’ve done it. Yes, countless hours, missing sleep, trying to learn how to code HTML, trying to find pre-written templates that I could customize to my opportunity or product, trying to learn to use the web-hosting service to create what I wanted rather than just plugging some text into an easy-peasy novice site builder. Countless headaches and frustration and hours wasted just trying to figure out how to get the scripts that I did manage to create uploaded to the server for the host that I hired. Seems like this would be fairly simple, the way the hosts advertise. By the way, most hosting companies, if any, do not have support staff to help you build your pages. They are there to host your site, not build it. So if you are having trouble with the creation process you are pretty much on your own or you have to hire a web master and pay him to help you. If you’ve never even see a control panel– the one you would use to manage your site on your host’s server– this can be overwhelming. I didn’t know what 80% of the icons in the control panel were, or what they controlled, etc. You get the idea.
OK, so let’s just throw in the towel because we don’t know how to do all that and well, it sure must be nice to know how because then you could really learn to market, etc. Listen friends, this has all been done for you already. You don’t need to know how to do all that technical stuff. As I said, the paradigm has shifted. Yes, you too can use the power of the internet to get your message seen by millions of people. And while you do need to provide the product or opportunity, all the “what” and “how” has now been taken care of for you.
Some brilliant people, who do know what works and how to make it work, and who have made it work and have generated millions in such a fashion, have put together some very simple “plug-in-and-go” programs that you can use to market yourself. Yes, you do need to provide your personality and your product info and maybe your own YouTube video, etc, but even the step-by-step instructions on how to do that have been integrated into these systems. So you can plug yourself into a program where not only will you learn step-by-step what works, but your will be taught in baby-step fashion how to plug in your specific opportunity so that you can effectively use those techniques which have been proven to work– proven to drive in traffic, and lots of it!
No building web pages. No fighting with your hosting company. No wondering what to do and how to do it. These things have been totally resolved. Now for most of these systems you are going to have to invest a bit to get access to all this knowledge and you are probably going to pay a bit every month to be a member and have access to the ongoing training and tools. This is an extremely small price to pay for the value of what you get with these programs. Utilizing only one technique which one of these systems will provide could result in literally hundreds of thousands of dollars for you.
One thing I was amazed by when first discovering these systems, after actually getting into the training library, was the sheer volume of knowledge that there is to be had about internet marketing. It is a BIG field. I sort of feel like I have gotten Bachelor’s in internet marketing, or some such thing. (Not sure if they have those or not) But one thing you will realize is that if you had to actually find all this knowledge on your own, aside from actually learning how to use it, it could take you a lifetime. So, some folks have done all work for you so that you can focus on what is really important to you— building your business and feeding your family! A small monthly payment is nothing in return for the value that you can have access to. And, “No”, I don’t own one of these companies and I’m not just making a shameful promotion. I just happened to be a guy who has saved many countless hours worth of wasted time, headaches and stress because I discovered that there are some people out there that have the answers, and they were willing to share those answers. So now I can focus on my business and feeding my family rather than getting further bogged down in all the “how-to”s.
–Alan
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Kiley, that is so funny. I get so many people commenting on that article. And that one gets about 20X the response of any other article I have written. Guess I found a good button with that one. Thank you for your comments on the way it is written. Seems that the ones I put the least effort into and just sort of hack out quickly get the best responses. Heck, I don’t even recall what it says! :oP
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