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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.
About the Author
Brian Baldwin is a Professional Networker with www.agentswanted.net specializing in Telecommunications, Travel, Internet Services, and more. He currently lives in Reno/Sparks Nevada.
To find out what he's up to now, go to http://www.BrianBaldwin.com and read his blog.
For a Complete List of Articles, visit the Library at http://www.BrianBaldwin.com