The business skill network marketing companies don't teach

If a business cannot survive without good cash flow management, then a business will not thrive without good communications.

There are two parts to network marketing...

1. NETWORK and
2. MARKETING

Both parts are of equal importance in building a highly profitable network marketing business.

Your network is your relationship with the people in your business: your downline, your customers and clients and your prospects. Building a strong relationship with these people is critical to your business success. Maintaining these relationships ensures continued profitability because people only buy from those they know and trust.

Most network marketers have problems in developing these relationships to begin with, let alone maintaining them.

Developing relationships has all to do with the second part: marketing.

Most network marketers have never had prior business experience, and therefore have no idea how to market or promote their business opportunity or products.

Ironically, distributors who have no idea on how to promote, tell their downline members to go out and build themselves a business.

"Just write a list of 100 warm market contacts, hold a house party and show them the plan, tell them why you have such a great opportunity, sign them up and tell your new recruits to duplicate your efforts..."

That quoted passage is an overly simplified version of the methods most networkers use to build their downlines.

Does it work? Yeah sure, for a small number of people, but it doesn't work for everybody. And it's getting harder to build a business this way today, as there are so many competing business opportunities around trying to grab the attention of your prospects.

To me, marketing is very much like fishing. There are basically two ways you can catch fish...1) go for a swim in the ocean and try to catch as many fish as you can with your bare hands or 2) get out in a boat to where there are plenty of fish, cast the bait that'll attract the fish you want to catch and wait for them to take the bait.

I don't know about you, but method number 1 sounds like a lot of hard work and the probabilities of success are not very high. This was done in pre-historic days when people didn't have the tools they do now. You'd probably have to be a pretty good swimmer, with lightning reflexes. Method number 2 makes a lot more sense today doesn't it?

Put it this way: People have a natural tendency to run away from others that chase after them. Isn't it a lot easier to sell someone on something they already wanted in the first place?

The vast majority of network marketers do not achieve financial independence. Of those who really try, but do not succeed, their primary challenge is they don't communicate their network marketing business opportunity to enough of the right prospects. That's not an easy thing to do when you don't know how...

So what do you do when you've burned through your warm market and achieved little success through that avenue? It's time to learn marketing.

Do not be intimated by marketing - it is not a hard skill to learn, but if you master it, can provide you with incredible leverage. Leverage comes from the fact that marketing is done through a system. You write your message once, but it can be published over and over again to hundreds of thousands of people in your target market.

A common myth is that marketing is risky and expensive. Yes, it is possible to spend a lot money and not get any results with marketing if you don't know what you're doing. But thanks to the internet, it is possible to build an effective marketing system for very little cost - even no cost at all.

I learned from Eben Pagan that there are basically 3 streams of marketing...

1. Branding. This is the realm of big business and it works best for long established businesses. It's mainly used to protect a brand identity, so it hardly works for new businesses for whom the general public has never heard of. Brand advertising is what big companies such as Red Bull and Coca Cola spend hundreds of millions of dollars doing each year. It is the least measurable form of marketing - it's very hard to tell if some one buys a Coke as a direct result of him or her seeing a Coca Cola ad.

2. Retail. This is where manufacturers of consumer products partner up with major chain stores. The manufacturer can get its products across millions of people that way, some of whom will buy the product. This can be done online as well, through major websites like Amazon.

3. Direct Response. This is the most targeted marketing strategy and also the most technical and cost effective form of marketing. This is where a business generates its own leads using direct mail or the internet and converts those leads into paying customers.

Direct response marketing is the most effective marketing strategy for small-time network marketers like you and I. Top internet marketers such as Eben Pagan, Alex Mandossian and Mike Filsaime have used direct response marketing to build themselves multi-million dollar online businesses in less than 3 years.

Mike Dillard and Ann Sieg are two of the most prominent network marketers who have used internet direct response marketing strategies to build their multi-million dollar MLM businesses in recent times.

Direct response marketing is an art and science that will take some time to learn, but one that's well worth learning. Once you learn enough of this skill to get going, you can forget about prospecting your friends and family because you'll be able to attract an abundance genuine business builders who are already looking for your business opportunity.