For the past year I have dabbled in online network marketing with mixed results. I’ve found a few great team members through working on the internet but for the most part I have spent countless hours reading ‘guru’s reports and have come to several conclusions that I would like to share with you as follows:
There are many talented people teaching Network Marketing on the internet but for the most part they are teaching instead of doing. As a good friend of mine says, ‘those who cannot do, teach.’ After reading some of these reports which have been launched with such marketing hype I have found myself sucked into the world of the marketer, totally buying everything they say as I go along with them. At the end of the report there is usually a call to action of some type, as with any effective marketing. It often takes the form of a study course of some description which will ‘transform your business’ and you will never be the same again. Some of these courses may cost as much as $2,000, $5,000 or even $10,000. Usually you will receive many compelling emails over the next few weeks explaining exactly why you need to invest in them. Of course these marketers know that most people prefer to learn than to take action so it is a perfect recipe for the guru to profit and the desperate network marketer to go broke.
The ironic thing about this is that many of these gurus talk disparagingly about the heavy hitters’ in your upline who ruthlessly sell you DVDs and business tools to make money from you the poor innocent victim team member. Almost in the same breath they then very artfully move in for the kill with their own products, which incidentally have very little to do with your opportunity. The frustrating thing about this is that people are then distracted away from their job at hand and totally lose focus on their goal which should of course be building their own residual income cheque, not someone else’s database!
This leads us into the new report by Rich Schefren about the Attention Age doctrine. He quite correctly points out that people are so distracted on the internet by an overload of information that the online world today is so competitive that one needs to work much harder to grab a prospect’s attention. I don’t disagree with much of the information in his report but as a sponsor who is committed to helping my group develop their skills which are relevant to the business they were introduced to I find it irritating that so many of these gurus are offering solutions that quite frankly involve spending a lot of money and offer a way to create a business model or system which most team members have neither the time nor the financial resources to be getting involved with and is completely unrelated to the business they have signed up for.
I have been a follower of Mike Dillard’s Magnetic sponsoring ethos and find his information newsletters useful and of interest. The fact that Mike is such a compelling marketer has of course led to a complete saturation of his materials on the internet so that he has now changed his approach which is interesting. His new Online Community is a way to connect up with lots of other like minded people in our industry. The catch 22 is that there are now thousands of network marketers all trying to sponsor each other and claiming to have a winning system for success. The reality is that many of them wouldn’t have the first clue how to create a system that others can duplicate. It’s all very well being an ‘expert’ and being ‘unique’ and learning how to create websites to attract people to you but what happens when you bring someone into your business who has just 10 hours a week to build it and they are not very techno savvy, nor do they have $1000 to spend on their education? They have after all just paid to join your business with the belief that you will be able to give them access to a winning system. Unless you are a hi-tech whiz, at the most you will have created a blog or your own website. What system will you be passing on to your new recruit?
You may come full circle and discover ‘The Death of Network Marketing,’ by Mike Filsaime and Ellie Drake. You may think as I did, ‘well it’s alive and kicking where I am!’ Of course we are now recommended to spend hours in darkened rooms with glazed eyes as we learn and apply the strategies of Web 2.0. No sooner will we have mastered those techniques and actually started exposing our business opportunity than we will be told that Web 2:0 is dead and we’ll need to sign up for another report, order yet more courses and e-books only to discover that we are going back to basics and are now allowed to actually go out into the real world and sponsor people over a cup of coffee! Well I don’t know about you but that sounds really attractive to me and I shall be spending some time in starbucks being sociable and doing some real life networking.
Randy Gage has mastered the industry and is one of the most successful leaders in the field. Interestingly enough he actually is out in the field, not just reporting from the sidelines. He did spend many years as a consultant where he helped real people develop systems that could be duplicated to create passive income for huge teams of people. Now he is actively working as a distributor and teaching us the secrets of duplication, he says that to create true residual and then passive income, the kind which will keep hitting your bank account when you are retired and sitting on the beach in Fiji, we need to have a large group of people taking a few simple actions over a consistent period of time. So why do we complicate it so?
In all of the reports and online ‘manifestos’ that I have read I have not yet once come across something that is actually simple for a team member to implement and be up and running and earning income the same day. There are good strategies… that is for sure, but an actual system? No. I for one am going to stop complicating my business and am going back to basics. I am a great admirer of internet communication systems and I certainly will continue to leverage the tools that I have access to but next time you decide to ‘go off on one’ I urge you to take a little inventory. Ask yourself some questions such as ‘How duplicatable is this for my new team members?’ ‘Is this something that a large group of people can do over a consistent period of time?’ If not then leave the latest hot report where it is and give your upline leader a call and ask them to bring you back to the centre line! If your opportunity is not one that you can be proud of in the real world then hiding behind a computer screen is not the answer. Maybe you should be partnering with a group that have a proven and attractive system for you to follow immediately, that is after all why we join Network Marketing in the first place!
Remove the distractions! Find out more about working with a proven step by step system used by the top field leadership in the Randy Gage Group to generate millions of dollars in residual income in under 2 years:
http://www.MLMRockstarorgrinder.com
