This article is going to focus on some basic elements to your network marketing business model. Although these are key elements to both quicker success and long-term success, not many networkers employ everything here. If YOU don’t, please take my advice and consider expanding your business. Otherwise, you are stacking the odds against yourself needlessly.
First, of course, is the actual network marketing (or MLM) business that you are involved with. Since the goal here is to create a long-term, residual income, there are a few key points that your business MUST have. First, the company and management need to be strong fundamentally. The company should be debt free, have proven itself in the marketplace, and the management team should have the highest ethical standards. The company should have a long term focus on quality, and always keep at the forefront of their thoughts of all activities the impact to distributors. The product or product line should be consumable, unique in some way, and be of the highest quality. It does NOT have to be cheap or inexpensive, so long as there is a clear way to communicate its value.
Your absolute belief in the product, company, and opportunity is what is going to attract people to join you, so you better be sure you have that. In fact, an important exercise to do before you even begin is to work out your life vision, goals, and your important values. You need to make sure that your network marketing business is in alignment. Otherwise, you are almost certainly doomed to fail because you will never be 100% into your own business.
Secondly, the internet has really changed network marketing for the better. No longer are the 3% or so who can build a large network marketing business through their warm market the only ones who can succeed. Now, with appropriate marketing skills, we can reach more people more quickly and cheaply than ever before. Most importantly, our ability to specifically target prospects has never been more refined. However, 95% of the prospects you pay to advertise to will never join your primary opportunity. That is just a fact of life. This can make advertising expensive, in many cases too expensive for the every day part-time person to afford.
The trick is to make retail sales of appropriate training material or other tools to those people. This is known as a funded proposal, and allows you to reduce, offset, or even make a profit on your advertising efforts. Again, you want to refer only the highest quality products and training. My favorite resource for this are the training products that Mike Dillard has put out. His training is top-notch (I personally own it all and have benefited greatly) and he has a full suit of training that covers many topics important to network marketers.
The third element is known as a Top Tier program, or a high end direct sales business. It is also being called the G.P.T. Model, or Get Paid Today. The concept is that you refer customers to high end, high commission products that have great value. This allows you to pocket very large commissions up front (typically, this will start at $1,000), so that you are earning significant money now while your network marketing business grows. Astoundingly, the $1,000 commission is usually only for the first level of product. Typically, there will be a second and third level multi-day conference package that will have commissions payable to you as high as $5,000 and then $8 or $9,000. Even one or two sales here will make a big difference to your bottom line.
Especially here, you want to make absolute certain that you believe in the products and their value completely. As with all of your business dealings, your name is on the line.
Since these companies are direct sales and not network marketing, you will usually only be paid for a couple sales made further in your downline, if at all. (For example, in the “Aussie 2 Up” model, the first 2 sales made by anyone you refer will be passed up to you, and after that your referrals’ businesses are disconnected.)
There is one Top Tier company I’ve found that incorporates downline sales activity into a substantial residual income for you, but the details of that are more complicated than I can go into here.
If you look at each element individually, you’ll see that each has a weakness. Affiliate sales are typically only one-time sales for fairly small amounts; network marketing commission checks generally take several years to grow to substantial amounts; and high end direct sales commissions, though large, are generally one-time sales, and you do not benefit greatly from downline activity.
However, when combining these three seamlessly together, their strengths add up to be quite an impressive business model in total. Affiliate sales can completely offset advertising expenses; high end direct sales commissions allow you to make substantial money quickly; and your network marketing business builds a substantial residual income over a relatively short period of a couple years time.