A blogger asked me: “Should I be blogging about my network marketing company?”
Here are my thoughts about the pros and cons.
- In favour is the fact that a blog is a great place to record information instead of having to repeat it over and over again to prospects with the risk of forgetting something important. Using a blog post can save a lot of repeat typing when sending information to a prospect by email – or if you’re on a phone call, you can have the post open in front of you as an aide memoire.
- The biggest advantage of a blog is that once you’ve made your blog posts, they stay ‘out there’ and can be found years later. But be careful to keep your blog up to date if you change your company. There’s nothing more disappointing than someone wanting to join your MLM and then you discover it’s one you left two years ago.
Reasons to Quit an MLM
Having been so excited, just months before, why would you be combing your old blog posts to get rid of them?
Sadly the brutal truth – and I know from experience – is that, for the average distributor, the traditional method of building a network marketing team isn’t the simple process we’re led to believe it is.
If it was even half as easy you wouldn’t find so many paid adverts for expensive courses on ‘How to Recruit MLM Distributors’.
Even when I have built a team of three, it’s been disheartening to see those in my team nowhere close to finding their three, which is supposed to start the cascade to wealth. What happened to me, more than once, is that when people saw no results after a couple of months they left, and then I was back to starting from scratch again.
How to Build a Big MLM Team?
We’ve all seen the tables – two gets two gets two gets two etc and you’re rich. The maths is sound, but the actual ‘doing’ of MLM is hard.
I once built a team of thousands and was earning four-figures a month, I was even invited to speak on the ‘Achievers platform’ at a conference. (Although it was a proud moment, that was a bit too scary for me, once was enough. I’m a blogger, not a talker.)
Anyway, here’s how I did it.
If I’m honest the term ‘I built’ should be translated into ‘I got lucky and recruited ONE person who knew exactly what he was doing and built a massive team in my downline’. From this I got a reputation as a big earner and other people joined with me. (I was very inexperienced online back then and it took me a long time to figure out what how he built his team. It’s relevant, so I’ll write about it soon.)
Nice while it lasted. Then the company lost a lot of money over-reaching itself with a project that completely flopped, and closed down. Had they stuck to their successful core business, they would probably still have been trading now.
The other way that big teams are built fast is by the so-called ‘heavy-hitters’ with thousands of followers who decide that the XYZ company is amazing. They’ll fire off an email to their ‘list of contacts’ and everyone will scrabble to get the best position, probably earning the ‘heavy hitter’ fast-start bonuses and leaving the average networker wondering what just happened.
So for the average networker …
How to Recruit an MLM Team
Here are some of the methods I have tried after ‘my’ first big success. Sadly none of these worked for me.
- Long ago my family and friends made it perfectly clear they never wanted to hear about another ‘scheme’, and I really shouldn’t be pursuing this nonsense any more. I’d do better getting my excitement and interest in life from the TV.
- Random strangers in the supermarket and on social media didn’t prove a fruitful recruiting ground.
- Buying lists of networkers got a dismal return considering the cost involved.
- I have used marketing funnels to build a small email list of Business Opportunity Seekers, but only a tiny percentage of them have the slightest interest in Network Marketing. Some of them still seem to imagine that you can ‘Make Money Online Free’ – so emailing them about an MLM where work is involved isn’t going to be what they’re looking for.
- Paid ads are open to abuse (by opposition distributors clicking your ads and running up your costs)
- As an enthusiastic blogger, the obvious answer seemed to be blogging about my progress in my new Network Marketing company.
Blogging About My Network Marketing Company – Results
When you’re excited about your Network Marketing Company – the products, the compensation plan, everything – you want to shout about it on your blog, and share it with everyone you know.
Yes, more than once, I thought I had found the most wonderful company in the world and filled my personal blog with posts about it.
At first, my regular readers made enthusiastic comments and I really thought they were going to join. But as the weeks went by no-one joined and I finally realised that they were just being polite and had no interest in the MLM.
Eventually they drifted off, because I was no longer giving them the content they had come to expect from me.
So before too long the lack of progress turned my excitement into “Blogging about my network marketing company isn’t working”.
So blogging about my MLM on my OWN blog was a total failure.
A Better Way of Blogging about My Network Marketing Company
After all my recruiting failures I had vowed “Never Again” would I promote an MLM company.
But purely on the way it’s marketed I have joined and am promoting a health and wellness business. (Yes, the products are excellent, but I’ve bought excellent products from other MLM companies before and never once been tempted to promote them, because they all rely on traditional methods which I know from bitter experience are just a hard slog.)
What we are doing is using a team blog, devoted to the business and products, targeting long-tailed-keywords so that instead of me trying to pitch people on the products or business, people search for products or a business and – with luck – find us.
In short there will always be:
- Enthusiastic Network Marketers using Google (etc) to search for a new or better company to improve their wealth.
- People with problems, asking questions about improving their health and well-being. We describe our products to see if they solve these problems.
So instead of going out and searching for customers and distributors, we let ‘Search engines bring those people to our TEAM blog, that’s an ever-growing source of highly targeted articles. Attraction marketing, Content marketing – call it what you will, it made sense to me.
Experienced bloggers ‘got it’ immediately.
For those new to blogging, there is free Search Engine Optimisation and blogging training.
Everyone is expected to contribute to the team effort – although making videos is an option if you prefer that.
For those who ‘prove themselves’ there’s also a team rotator to help get sign ups, but you have to work your way through (simple) tasks to earn your place on that.
It’a a bonus for me that the costs and technical aspects of blogging are someone else’s problem.
Being part of a hard working team of bloggers is great; and we welcome any other bloggers who are up for the challenge. The more experienced the better. You’re welcome to open a free account and join our Facebook support group to have a look round, get your questions answered, and if it’s not for you, we will part as friends.
Click here to learn more about a better way to blog about your Network Marketing Company.
