MLM and Network Marketing, Internet Style

One of the biggest barriers to success in MLM is the fact that sooner or later, you run out of new prospects. Maybe you live in a small town, and everyone there has heard about your opportunity, because the town is full of people promoting it. Or maybe your lifestyle is such that you don't encounter that many new people on a regular basis. Whatever the reason, sooner or later, you run out of new prospects.

An additional barrier to MLM success offline is the expense involved in writing to or calling your new prospects, and your downline, especially if some of them are at some distance from you. Those contacts cost you money, and take up a lot of time. Isn't there a better way?

Enter the Internet. Could there be a more perfect medium for MLM?

All of a sudden, instead of having at most a few hundred people to market to, your potential audience has expanded to thousands, even millions of people. You can have a web site doing the recruiting for you 24 hours per day. You can buy leads, and do email advertising. You can run ads on the pay-per-click search engines.

In addition to the wider audience, your communications can become much more efficient. You can have autoresponders working tirelessly for you, sending out information at whatever pace you choose. Inquiries and followups with your downline can be done by email, and you can save the most common emails so that you don't have to re-type them again and again. You can buy software that will send out an email of your choosing at the push of a button. Replies to your most commonly asked questions can be prepared and saved, and you then reply to email inquiries with what appears to be a personalized response, but is, in fact, fully automated.

You can put voice chat on your website, or just buy the software and use it to hold voice chat meetings with members of your downline. Or you can communicate with all of them with a text chat room on your website, or with one of the several free text chat clients available today.

Your downline can realistically include people from around the world, because the internet provides you the medium of communication to support them. You can open up whole new territories that way, by supporting and nurturing a member of your downline who lives in an area where your product and your opportunity are unknown. Your horizons become truly unlimited

I was introduced to Network Marketing in the offline world a few years ago, and really didn't like it. I didn't want to bug my friends, or resort to direct mail or cold-calling on the telephone. I didn't want to have to walk up to strangers on the street and try to sell them something. I liked the idea in principle, but I didn't like the implementation. I remember thinking at the time that it would be perfect if one could do it on the internet, but it was at least a year before I got around to checking it out. Having discovered how easily it is done online, I now love MLM!