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Network marketing is not a conventional business by most definitions. It doesn’t require much startup capital and it doesn’t require the usual difficulties of a business. By that I’m talking about things like administration, brand building, generating buzz, stocking product, shipping the product and so on. In most network marketing companies, such activities are taken on by the company itself.
Contrast that to starting say, a pet grooming business in your area. You would have to get the funding (large capital investment), find a location, get a land use permit, rent the space, get the space suitable for your canine guests and many more tasks just to get ready to open your business. Then you would have undertake some kind of marketing campaign to get people to come to your business. And since you’re just starting out, you probably won’t have the budget to hire help, so you’ll have to do all the work yourself. Yikes! Well a business like that could do well – over time. But it might be several years before it makes any money and word of mouth starts to help you out.
That’s just one example of a ‘traditional business’ but most of them share the same issues. The only thing network marketing businesses have in common is that, yes, you still need to market them. In all other respects, network marketing is very unlike other types of businesses, and that makes people forget it’s a business. Yes, it is still a business and should be treated as such.
Download your free copy of How to Select the Perfect Network Marketing Company – and enjoy!
What’s the Most Important Part of a Headline?
I used it in the headline of this blog post. It’s the first 5 words (‘the’ and ‘a’ don’t count)! Did you know that the first 5 words are the most important part of a headline? It’s their job to grab the reader’s attention and make them want to read more. Those 5 words should generate some sort of curiosity or interest and compel the reader to go on.
Why are the first 5 words so important? In many cases, the headline may appear in a list among other headlines. This would be the case with a blog post in an RSS reader or a classified ad on sites like CraigsList or BackPage. In those cases, the reader will be scanning the page quickly and doing sort of a ’speed reading’ exercise. Assuming the language is a western culture language, they’re be scanning from left to right. So you can see where you need to make those first 5 words count!
No waste! Here is a CraigsList tip. UPPERCASE the first 5 words (CraigsList allows this – BackPage does not). That will give the headline more visual oomph that sentence case and only make it stronger.
Hope you can enjoy and make use of this Friday tip. Have a great weekend everyone!
Years ago my doctor told me I should take supplemental B12. But oral B12 supplements don’t work, he said, unless they are sublingual. Sublingual B-12 supplements are not pills you swallow – you stick them under your tongue and let them dissolve. The idea is that vitamin B12 cannot be absorbed well in the digestive system so it’s best absorbed by the glands under your tongue.
So over the years I have been continually in search of a good source of Sublingual Vitamin B12. I have grown discontented over the vitamin stores which seem to carry a hodge-podge of different brands – some of which look like they’ve been sitting around for a while. I got tired of getting them home to find them stale (even though they were within their stamped freshness date).
So that eventually brought me around to TriVita. If you Google “Sublingual B-12″ you will find them listed so I thought : Ok let me give them a try. I knew they are a network marketing company and decided to put their product to the test. So I scoured the forums for a rep and clicked on her link, then bought a one month supply of their Super Sublingual B-12.
One of the things you look for in a network marketing company to determine if it’s legitimate is how the product is purchased. If you can purchase the product without a lot of hoop-la about the opportunity and the product stands on its own merit, then it’s probably a legit network marketing company. This was the case with TriVita.
I was pleasantly surprised by TriVita. Not only was the delivery fast with plenty of communication about tracking information, but the product was fresh. And there was plenty of literature that came with the product – a ‘welcome kit’.
I fully expected to see a bunch of blather about the opportunity in the welcome kit. But much to my surprise, there was not a peep about the income opportunity – rather the literature focused on the product and its benefits. It was a refreshing change to be sure.
If anything, there is too much separation of product and opportunity here. I don’t even remember the rep who I bought it from and her name was nowhere to be found among the literature. It would seem they would help her out by posting her contact information in the event that I was interested in the opportunity (which I am not at this time) and wanted to get in touch with her.
But all in all, my experience with TriVita was a good one and I will be putting myself on their autoship to save a few bucks on the product.
Network marketing is often compared to the franchise model of doing business. In a franchise, you pay a fee to join a company. For this fee, you to get to use their name and branding efforts. You also get some training provided by them. Franchises also grow their business (in part) by adding new franchisees. These are similarities to the network marketing model.
But the differences in fees between the two models are huge. Start up costs for even the most expensive network marketing company are dwarfed by the start up costs for the cheapest franchise!
Yet with those similarities, I never hear anyone saying a franchise company is a scam. I never hear anyone say that about McDonalds or Subway (they might say other things but they don’t call them scams). Yet you have a lot of people who claim that all network marketing companies are scams and no one but a few make any money from them.
People who are anti network marketing often cite the so-called high rate of failure in network marketing as a reason to question the business model. Yet there are failures in franchise businesses too. What’s the difference? The start up investment!
It’s much easier to walk away from a network marketing company if you’ve only plunked down $100. It just isn’t that much of an investment for most people. On the other hand, it’s not that easy to walk away from a franchise business. If you’ve plunked down 1.5 million dollars on a franchise business, you’re not likely to just turn your back on it. You will try very hard to make it work. You will be very certain before you even spend that kind of money.
So the very thing that makes network marketing so attractive (its low cost of entry) also contributes to its reputation as a high failure business model. Failure really isn’t the right word; quitters is a better words. People just quit network marketing because they claim they can’t make any money. But there is usually an underlying reason why they “can not” make any money. That reason is usually they are not taking their business seriously.
So even though you may only pay $100 to get into a network marketing business, treat it like a million! Take it seriously and you will earn serious income from it.
I was speaking with someone the other and she was talking about her job. A job which apparently she doesn’t like very much and refers to it as “prison”. She works at a low paying retail job and each shift feels like a “prison sentence”. I have to say, I understand where she is coming from. When work is a “have to” and there is no joy in it, it seldom is very fun and certainly rarely ever rewarding.
I can only recall my last “J O B” which I left in 2007. Towards the end, it did feel very much like ‘prison’. My time was dictated by someone else and that was the biggest problem for me. In fact a big chunk of my time was dictated by someone else. When you consider the typical 40 hour week in a job, that is a large portion of your time! There are 168 hours in a week, but assuming we spend 8 hours per night sleeping, that accounts for 56 hours. So you take the 40 hours per week and 56 hours per week from the 168, you are left 72 hours of free time per week. Actually depending on your commute to and from work, you have less than 72 hours.
I figured this out with my friend from ‘prison’ above because she is considering a home based business. She wanted to know if she is going to have enough time to devote to the business. This forced her to look at her time and make some decisions. She is swearing off American Idol and many other TV distractions to free up time. I give her a good chance of success only if she is remains aware of the time and manages it each week to give her business building some time.
There is a fine line to walk between spending too much time on your downline and giving them enough information to get started on their own. On one hand, if you spend too little time, your downline might feel abandoned or confused about what to do next or how to proceed in the business. That can lead to a non productive team member. Those team members don’t make you any money and only make dead weight in your team.
On the other side of that coin is spending too much time with a downline. If you spend too much “hands on” time with them, then you run the risk of spending all your time training people. This can impact your ability to grow your business. So you need to find that “fine line” between the 2 extremes.
It helps to define you role as upline. Most successful network marketers define that role as having one main responsibility; to get the downline started. This can be done with a series of a steps such as getting them to review company resources, getting them on training calls (if your company offers them), or giving them a script and getting on the phone with them to practice it. But it should include a point at which you move on or otherwise you get too bogged down in their business building.
I try to keep that fine line in mind when I sign someone up. The question I ask is: will this person work the business and/or buy the product? If I can’t visualize them going anywhere, then I say: NEXT.
Well I finally finished my eBook. I never knew a 30 page free report could take so long but I just had to work on it as I had time. A little at a time. That goes to show you that even if you just work on something a little at a time, it will eventually get finished!
It’s titled: “How to Select the Perfect Network Marketing Company (and Avoid the Stinkers)“. If you are lost in the sea of network marketing companies and wish to get a formula to size them up, then please feel free to download my report. Free of course, of I already said that. Here are some things inside:
- Case studies of 4 Failed Network Marketing Companies
- What is the most important thing to look for
- How to draw the line between legit and pyramid scheme
- How to avoid the bad apples
- How to “due diligence” a network marketing opportunity
.. and more! Now that I have finished that project I can move on to other things. How great it is to finish something that has been on my list for longer than I care to admit! This is a company independent report (it does not try to sell you on anything although it does have business links on my bio page in the back). You can download it at the link below:
Network marketing is well known for its high rate of failure. And there are almost as many opinions on the subject of ‘failure rate’ as there are network marketing companies. One of the reasons I want to address in this post is failure to take action.
One thing I have noticed in my own team is that about a third of the people I bring in never do anything. And it’s not because they don’t have a marketing plan. As I stated in an earlier post, I provide everyone who joins my team with a detailed, step by step marketing plan after they join. I designed my own marketing plan to be duplicatable so that I can pass it on to my downline.
This plan includes details on how to work the various marketing channels (such as classified advertising, social networking and so on), scripts to use, and even free leads for their first 90 days. I know that most of my team will not have a lot of experience with marketing when they join and it’s up to me to provide them with that guidance.
But yet many of them never do anything with that information. I try to screen people when recruiting. I would rather say NO to someone if I don’t think they have the desire to run a business. Perhaps my screening process will get better over time, but in the meantime I am left with about a third of my team not doing anything.
Every once in awhile I think about that non productive third. What causes these people to lose interest? They seemed so interested and eager when I interviewed them. And I provided them with a plan to follow. What went wrong? Did they not expect they would have to do some work? Did they not like my plan? Should I call each one and pester them every day?
I was told by a far more successful network marketer than me, that this is fairly normal. She said that 33% is actually pretty good; that most network marketers have a larger portion of their team sitting on their hands. Her advice to me was to focus on the other two thirds that are producing and just continue to hone my screening methods in recruiting. And that’s the advice I follow.
But I would be willing to bet that those non productive people in network marketing are a major contributor to the high network marketing failure rate.
