Thursday, February 12, 2009

How to Generate Network Marketing or MLM Leads

If there’s one thing you need in order to succeed with MLM/Network Marketing its leads. Without leads, you’ll never make much money regardless of your company, the pay plan, your upline or anything else. You’re also going to need a lot of leads since there’s no way you’ll sign every one to be an agent. How many you’ll need depends on several factors such as your skill and your business. Not to mention; if you have a lot of leads, you won’t have to feel like you have to sign every one. It’s a lot easier to say No to having someone that doesn’t match what you’re looking for if you have 20-30 people waiting on your call. There are other factors involved in succeeding, but if you have leads and use them, that’s a large hurdle passed.

This article aims to give you a few ideas on how to generate those leads and make it as simple as possible. I don’t really like the term “Lead” since they’re really just people like you and me who are looking for a better life; but we’ll use the term for this article since that’s a commonly excepted term and to prevent confusion.

Let’s go over a few ways you can generate MLM leads.

Call everyone you know and ask for referrals.
Tell them about the great business you have and how they can benefit from either being a customer or agent. If you’ve chosen wisely and believe in your company, you won’t see a problem with this. If you aren’t sure you have a great business, maybe you should keep looking. A great way to decide if you have a good company is to ask yourself if you’d sign up your best friend or valued member of your family. Or ask yourself if you’d use the product if there was no pay plan involved. If the answer is No, maybe you should keep looking.

Build lead capture pages and get them listed high on search engines.
This will generate leads that are interested in your company. However, anyone who has worked at getting a site listed high will tell you this is time consuming and far from easy and it’s not an overnight job either. You could spend months working on your site and never break the top 100.

You can advertise your lead capture page on Pay Per Click (PPC) search engines.
The largest sites are Google and Yahoo. These are the ads that show up at the top or on the right when you search. This is the fastest way and depending on the key words you’re bidding on could be cheap or very expensive (some keywords cost over 100 bucks) and there’s no guarantee you’ll get a single lead. It only guarantees that someone will see your page. If you’re going to go this route, do yourself a favor and either get trained on how to do it or start slow or both. You can easily blow hundreds or thousands of dollars before you know it.

You can print flyers and post them on bulletin boards around town and put them on doors and cars.If you figure a 1-2% success rate, you’ll get 1-2 leads per hundred flyers and then depending on your closing rate, you can figure out how many flyers you’ll need to hand out consistently to reach your goals. Also figure in printing costs. Even if you’re printing these at home, you’ll have to pay for ink/toner and the wear and tear on your printer, not to mention the time and gas it takes to drive around and post the flyers. You should also get permission from property owners/managers if you’re going to put them on doors or cars since some people will throw them on the ground. One other thing to be wary about is car alarms.

You can spam the world with one of those e-mail 16 million people for 29.95 spam messages you get every week.Do us both a favor and don’t. The best you can hope for is to not get blacklisted or in trouble with the feds. The odds are that you’ll be visited by the feds and/or have your ISP shut you down. The way these are collected is by sending a little robot spider to crawl the web and collect e-mail addresses from forums, news groups, blogs, web sites and anywhere else they can find them. These are just bad news and may get you kicked out of your company since they could be black listed because you didn’t follow this advice. An easy way to tell if they are real leads or harvested is the price. If they’re unbelievably cheap or don’t include i.p. address, they are probably harvested.

Cold Calling
This is just as it sounds. You pick up the phone book and start calling. This is the cheapest way to generate leads and if you have a thick skin may work for you. The thing to remember is that those people may be on the Do Not Call List and it may get you in trouble. The best thing to do is research the legal requirements before attempting this. The direct link is https://telemarketing.donotcall.gov I’ve never done cold calling so I’m not sure if they charge you to be a member or not.

You can buy leads from a company that generates leads for you.
But even these aren’t created equal. Some companies sell the same lead to 5, 10 or more people; even people in the same company as you and sell them for weeks, months or longer. You could end up with a lead that is 5 months old and been called by 10 or more people and is just plain tired of talking to people or has already joined a company and is quite happy with it. Some are also overpriced and use shady tactics to get people to sign up such as contest sites.

Or you could join a lead Co-Op that only sells the lead to you and generates it after you order meaning they are about 1-3 days old and only sold once. You want to make sure the company is reputable, been around for awhile and truly cares about their customers/members. They should offer multiple lead packages, training on how to effectively contact those leads, multiple autoresponders to make contacting them for follow-up (the fortune is in the follow-up) and training them easier and a presentation to explain what network marketing/MLM actually is in case the person has never heard of the concept or your company doesn’t offer a recruiting site. It would also help if the company has a pay plan so that as you refer your new downline to the great leads you use, you can create an extra income stream (or at least get them for free) and so can your downline. One such Lead Co-Op is http://www.bestmlmleads.biz

The thing to remember is that regardless of how the lead was generated these people asked for information on starting a home based business and you should make it your responsibility to get them the information as soon as possible. Unless you didn’t take my advice and used a spam CD; then you’re on your own.

Another thing to think about when choosing a method is will it be duplicatable to your downline and get consistent results? But that’s a subject covered in a previous article.

Making Good Use Of An MLM Phone Lead

The MLM phone lead may just be the most avoided lead. Many people are nervous about making contacts via the phone. It is not surprising with all the rules and laws regulating soliciting phone calls. However, the MLM phone lead can be a great tool to get a MLM business turning a profit.

There is a reason why so many companies use telemarketing as part of its marketing efforts. That is because it works. If you know what you are doing, telemarketing can be a great way to secure new recruits.

One of the biggest obstacles in using a MLM phone lead is the National Do Not Call list. There is, however, an easy way to avoid being caught up in this legislation. You simply have to make sure your MLM phone lead comes from a good source - preferably the lead themselves.

If you get your phone leads from the lead themselves then you are bypassing the regulations of the Do Not Call list. The person requested for you to call them and gave you permission to call them and so the Do Not Call regulations do not apply to your call.

To get a MLM phone lead directly form the lead you will need to gather the information through your website where the lead can fill out a request form for more information. This is the easiest way to do this.

Once you have a MLM phone lead list you need to develop a script - what you will say during the call, your pitch. You will also need to consider how to rebuttal any objections they may have.

You can then begin calling and pitching to your leads. You should see some nice results because you are using a good method of marketing, as well as contacting quality leads.

Making A Home Based MLM Business Opportunity Successful

Making a home based MLM business opportunity successful does not have to be tedious labor, but it is nonetheless labor intensive. While the temptation with home based businesses is the ease with which the commitment to the work can slip if nobody is there to supervise and spur on, the fact that MLM business opportunities provide unprecedented money making capabilities have more than offset the risk of a truly dedicated entrepreneur losing out on profits.

To make your home based MLM business opportunity truly successful, there are some tips you will not want to be without.

* Break out of your box and think global. While in essence the nature of multi level marketing is the personal one on one sales contact, the fact that the Internet is now in play has permitted you to transcend your circle of friends and family and instead market your good or service nationwide. Yet why should you stop there? Think global! Why not take your business to the other side of the world? Find out what will appeal to consumers in other parts of the world and tailor your promotions to their tastes and needs accordingly.

* Make the most of social sites, such as You Tube and My Space. Similarly, become active in the bloggosphere. These are the current trends on the ‘Net and the movers and shakers are operating within these circles. Whenever you work in MLM it is vital that you remain on the cutting edge of the Internet and therefore always a step ahead of the competition.

* If you are currently involved in a home based MLM business opportunity that utilizes an actual good, try to shift over to a service that is sellable via the ‘Net. This way your global appeal with triple while a physical good may be rather limiting to a certain geographical area.

* Of course, the real key to making it in the competitive world of MLM is the ability to remain focused, manage contacts and inquiries, and never tire of exploring new avenues to make others aware of your business. This will most likely require long hours of research, networking, and trolling through forums and other areas where fellow MLM participants will discuss their exploits. Learning from others what works and what does not is a great way to avoid costly mistakes and numerous hours spent chasing customers where they are not to be found.

In addition to these tips, please remember that home based MLM business opportunity success will not come overnight. In spite of the attractive television infomercials, Internet ads, and webinars that all claim to have made millionaires out of ordinary folks just like you, the notion that such a step could be taken in a short period of time is unrealistic. The odds are good that you will spend the better part of a month getting to know the program and its limitations and then the remainder of the next six months growing your business and at the same time working on recruiting. Within a year, if you have been diligent, you will most likely see a good pay off, but the idea of a six figure income within 12 short months is usually more than just optimistic.