MLM lead generation is a highly misinterpreted idea in the MLM business arena. The cause for this misunderstanding is the ‘old school’ yet, widely popular method of lead generation taught by MLM sponsors: “The first thing you should do is make a list of everyone you have ever known including all relatives, acquaintances, and people that work with you.” After you’re finished making your ‘warm list’ of so-called ‘leads,’ you are told to call everyone up and drag them to a home gathering or local hotel meeting where the business opportunity is to be ‘hard sold’ to them. While this tactic works for about 0.001%, the rest of the newbie network marketers either try this and fail, or are afraid to ever try at all, for fear of being added to the NFL club (the ‘no friends left club’). In my opinion, it is this twisted, faulty method of recruiting new reps that accounts for the 97% failure rate, and average life span of 93 days for network marketers.
The number one thing you’ve got to be aware of is that MLM is a real business, and has to be conducted like a business in order for you to reach any level of success, or even sponsor your first few distributors. Would you open a boutique on a side street that nobody can see, only tell your two sisters, and expect to actually grow a business and get into profit? I think not! Network marketing is not at all different. To be successful, you’ve got to employ the most essential, but most ignored word in multi-level marketing – marketing.
So what is the proper way of marketing your business? There are lots of ways both online and offline. Offline MLM lead generation tactics include but are not limited to flyers, drop cards, the ‘three foot rule,’ mail outs and cold callling via the telephone. There are a lot of people out there that will tell you that these methods are out-dated and no longer work. And while, I believe that they DO work, they don’t work as well, as fast or as cost-effectively as online methods. Actually, the internet allows you to contact a large group of people from all over the world, much speedier than you ever could being pigeon-holed in your own town trying to talk to each and every person individually. The truly amazing part in reference to online lead generation is the fact that people online are searching for work from home opportunities. The only thing you’ve got to do is become skilled at positioning your business opportunity in front of those who are seeking it out and people will call you up and join, without you having to beg or convince anyone of anything.
There are lots of online marketing techniques that are very efficient in getting you from a part-time home business owner to replacing your income from your full-time J-O-B in less than a year. As a side note, before we start – you should realize I’m saying a ‘year or less.’ That is because I want to make clear, whether you are online or offline, that it doesn’t happen overnight. Any time you’ve heard someone say they had success overnight, consider the fact that you only actually heard part of their story. When people say they were able to sponsor 186 people in less than a week, they aren’t exactly telling it how it is. It may be the truth, however, it’s more like a like by omission. People claiming these things are leaving out the reason why so many people joined them in such a short time. And the reason, is because a large group of people followed them from a previous network marketing company, to a new one. That’s the bottom line.
The following is a list of my personal recommendations generating leads. I’m recommending these marketing techniques based upon what I’ve found to work the best, starting with my favorite.
Content Marketing – Content marketing is basically creating videos and articles and broadcasting them all over the internet. This MLM advertising technique is pretty cool because it is totally free, and will bring residual traffic to your website. What I mean by that, is that you create it once, and people will see it when they’re searching for your keyword phrases for years to come. The only down side is that it’s not fast. In fact, it will likely take more than a month or two to even see any type of results from this method, which will leave some people frustrated and likely to quit before they see results. So if you know you are the type that needs to see leads in your inbox today, paid advertising will be the way you’ll want to go.
PPC – Pay per Click marketing is by far the most effective paid MLM advertising technique, hands down. Pay per click advertising is effective because it is just directed towards people typing in the EXACT thing you are offering. For PPC, you select a keyword phrase, such as ‘network marketing company’ and place a bid that you will pay, each time your ad is clicked on. Then, when people type that particular keyword phrase in Google, your ad will show up on on the right as a sponsored ad. The only time you are charged is when somebody clicks on your particular ad. Having said that, you can lose a lot of money with PPC if you’re not careful and don’t know how to use it properly. I suggest you NOT try any pay per click until you are properly trained. Perry Marshal wrote a good book on PPC, and there’s also some other good training out there on the Internet.
Social Networking – This is quickly becoming one of the leading MLM advertising techniques and the reason for that is because the way that humans interact with one another is changing. More and more people are making use of socal networks such as Facebook to meet new friends and network online. If you take a social approach to marketing and make friends while you’re at it, you could dominate this method and easily generate 20-50 leads per day. Social networking may soon become the most widely used form of online MLM lead generation.