Most network marketers get little or nothing in the way of marketing tools from their upline.
Most people are utterly clueless about joining an opportunity and sign up under people they don’t know who cannot or will not do anything to help them build their business. I personally think that this is the single biggest reason for the high failure rate among MLMers. Smart MLMers shop for a strong sponsor who can give them tools and training.
BUT THAT IS NOT WHAT THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT! (I just wanted to get that point out of the way first.)
I want to address the situation of the small minority of marketers who ARE getting marketing tools from their upline…
The fundamental principle that all of network marketing is built upon is that every person benefits from the work done by their downline. If you are in a healthy company, most of your downline growth occurs when the people that you brought in go out and bring in more people and so on. That’s how it can be that everyone only needs to bring in 2 or 3 people and can still end up with a huge profitable organisation.
This should be obvious. But if it is obvious, why do people have such difficulty understanding the next point? The best way to grow your business is to help your downline.
As noted above, most uplines neglect their downline. But the other really puzzling thing that I see uplines doing is under the guise of helping, they are exploiting their downlines… Most marketers are very smart people. Why do uplines think they can get away with this behavior?
The two ways I see uplines exploiting their downlines are: 1) Charging them for marketing tools, and 2) Using them to promote themselves.
1) You should NOT have to pay your upline for your online marketing tools.
You have to expect to pay for offline tools like fliers and postcards. And you have to pay an outside vendor for a custom website with autoresponder, back office, etc… That makes sense, it’s how these vendors make their money. They’re not in your business so they don’t make money from the growth of your business, just from your purchase of their tools.
However your upline DOES make money from the growth of your business. That’s exactly where he makes almost all of his money. The growth of your business is the primary source of the growth of HIS business. Why should you pay your upline to build his business for him?
If your upline tells you that he needs $20+ per month to “cover his costs” he is probably jerking you around. First of all, if he is a leader he has probably done this before and already owns most of the tools. Hosting is cheap. Graphics are cheap. Even multimedia is pretty cheap nowadays. If you are paying your upline for spash pages, lead capture pages or simple websites, you are getting soaked. Your upline isn’t helping you, he is exploiting you.
2) Your marketing material should not have your upline’s name or face anywhere on it.
Your upline should not be using you as a billboard to promote himself. None of your marketing material should mention your upline’s name in any way. Your audio should not include your upline introducing himself by name. The videos should not show your upline’s face or name. Your team name should not include your upline’s name.
Think about it: If your prospect can see your upline’s name he is very likely to skip over you and join under your upline. If your prospect sees that “John Smith” is the leader of a strong team of “WizzyBizzy” distributors, he will probably just Google “John Smith WizzyBizzy” and find your upline’s site and join directly under him. (Now it’s true that some people will want to do this anyway and figure it all out no matter what is on your site, but most people won’t unless you shove it in their face on every page of your website.)
Your upline KNOWS this. That is exactly why he goes to the trouble of putting his name and face all over the material he provides for you. An upline who promotes himself on your tools is deliberately trying to take prospects from you.
The other reason that uplines do this has to do with “Branding.” Every strong marketer has visions of them self as the next MLM guru. And no matter how great the current opportunity is, we all know that there will be more great opportunities coming in the future. Strong marketers want to position themselves as heavy hitters in preparation for next year’s opportunity. They use marketing material to brand themselves and get name recognition. That’s just part of business and it’s one of the primary reasons that I have this blog. But in my opinion, if a network marketer wants to promote his name it should be on his own website or blog. NOT all over his downline’s marketing material. In my opinion, it is better to pay for your own marketing material than to use tools branded with someone else’s name and face.
Look at your marketing material. Does it have somebody else’s name and face all over it? Even if it is free, you are paying dearly for it!
In conclusion, you are one of the lucky few if you are getting any kind of help from your upline. But you may want to take a second look at what you are getting and how you are paying for it. There are plenty of good sponsors out there who will not take advantage of you. Spend a little extra time searching for them the next time you are looking to join an opportunity.
I recently put up a free membership site offering free tools and training for network marketers. Sign up here http://www.beginnerstowinners.com
This really is completely free. There is no upsell, no one-time-offer. No MLM is promoted so this site can be used to train any downline in any opportunity.
Squidoo has a new tool that makes it super easy to set up a very distinctive looking web page in a hurry…
Look at what I just created in about 5 minutes: http://best.bookwise-team.ever.com
I got that new web address courtesy of a new service at www.ever.com. Now it may seem the same as the sort of service that’s been around for ages - you know, where you get a web address like “http://flyto/yournamehere”.
But it’s not. It’s a very neat marketing ploy by Squidoo, the website where anyone can rapidly build a web page (which Squidoo calls a “lens”). One great advantage of having lenses at Squidoo is the high ranking that you can rapidly get in Google.
OK, back to ever.com. On the home page, you select the first term from a dropdown list (”best”, “smartest”, “biggest” etc) and you select a keyword. If no one else has this combination, then you can have it!
Then the fun starts. Fill in a few boxes, and ever.com builds a web page for you. But actually, it’s a Squidoo lens! To actually use this lens and then edit it (which you really have to), you need to open a free account at Squidoo.
I set up my first lens in this way in 5 minutes, and then spent another couple of minutes editing it. It’s not very polished yet but I just wanted to put it up real quick and then tell everybody about it!
Not a bad use of time to get a high ranking in Google. OK, it might take you a little time to find your way around the Squidoo editing system, but once you’ve learned it, you’ll find lens building very easy - especially starting off with the “ever” system.
You can get your free Ever websites here: http://www.ever.com
If you are serious about making a career online, then you will need to look at a number of Internet marketing tools that can help enhance your business. Here are a few examples of tools that may be just what you need.
Just as with a brick and mortar business, it is important to communicate effectively with your clients and potential customers. One tool that will help with this process is an autoresponder. This device will allow your email server to send out acknowledgement emails whenever anyone replies to an ad, asks a question about your product line, or wants to check on the status of an order. Using a device of this type will let all your contacts know the email was received and allow you a pocket of time to respond with something more personal.
Tracking software is another example of essential Internet marketing tools. The software allows you to keep tabs on the number of hits you have on your web site and out to your affiliate partners is also important. By having some idea of the number of hits you receive daily versus the number of completed sales, you can get some idea of how well your marketing efforts are going. Tracking software is built into the platforms for some web hosts, but that is not always the case. If it is not offered, then look into software that will allow you to manage the process.
Last, look into using a blog as part of your business promotion. Internet marketing tools such as web logs are great ways to showcase your products by providing content that has to do with the features, applications, and availability of the goods and services you offer. Blogs can also be configured to allow people to leave comments, which always encourages participation. Make sure to have links to the products and also to your main web site.
There are many different methods to putting together a viral marketing campaign. These methods include those that will have a small cost for the advertisers while others will cost nothing more than some time to make the promotion work. One of the more simple viral marketing tools is using a signature line on your emails. Almost all email sources will allow the addition of a signature line to an outgoing email. It can be part of every email that is sent even replies. It becomes a tool when instead of simply signing your name you use it with a tagline to interest the person who receives the email in a product or service you are offering. Therefore the way to make it work best is to write a catchy line and then underneath that put a link to your website.
Other viral marketing tools that are used a lot is the submission of articles. What you do is send an article you have written to a website that accepts them, being certain that you write on the topics they are looking for content about. Do this on sites that allow a space for the author, you, to put something in about yourself. In this area you can do a short bio on yourself and put in a link to your own website. This will bring traffic to your site simply by being on someone else’s. Again, it promotes what you are doing without you have to do much work except to keep your website interesting to others.
Probably the most common method of viral marketing is the one where the campaign uses word of mouth to spread their advertising message. This is done by promoting to a number of people, often beginning with people you know, and getting them to then forward the message along to others. To compensate them for their efforts discounts or some free items are promised if their contacts sign up at the website being promoted. This is one of the viral marketing tools used most often and can be incorporated into the advertising campaign of both big and small companies. It is notable for the large number of people that opt into the program.
What exactly is meant by viral internet marketing? The definition of this latest type of promotional campaign is simple; it is the use of an approach to advertising that allows for the message to be sent out by persons who are doing no more than passing it along and by this method increasing the potential exposure of that message. One message passed along form one person quickly multiplies until it is soon being sent by hundreds and then thousands. This is the best kind of campaign since it costs virtually nothing to get out the promotional message of a company about its products or services.
Other phrases for this kind of campaign include social networking, word of mouth, network marketing, or leveraging the media. These phrases are more commonly used when the promotion is being used offline. But when we are talking about internet promotions the phrase used is viral internet marketing. The best example of one of these campaigns is the subtle one used by Hotmail. They do nothing more than put an advertisement at the bottom of each email that is sent. This allows for those who receive the email to sign up for a free account. There is no pressure, no encouragement needed. The offer is there if the person in receipt of the email wants to use it. Yet, it brings in new subscribers daily.
The best thing about viral internet marketing is what it offers to those using this tool. It gives them a quick way to get their message out to potentially thousands of people at a low or no cost option. It can be used by large or small companies looking for large or small advertising campaigns. This method uses the internet, and sometimes the greed, of the average person to do the work for them. No new expenses are incurred since the internet is already in place and being used by the company wanting to promote their service or product. Lastly, the people doing the promoting for them are not asked to make a big time commitment. This also encourages them to get involved. Due to the ease in which one of these programs can be begun this type of marketing tool is steadily growing in popularity.
