MLM Lead Generation

I’m focusing here on MLM Lead Generation methods.  Once you generate a lead, of course, you need to communicate with them effectively. That is discussed in the MLM Prospecting section.

The way I always break this up in my mind is that there are basically 8 methods. I’m sure this list could be expanded or modified in a few different ways, but this is how I think of it. E-mail me or comment on the site if you think of additional mlm lead generation methods that I am not mentioning here.

1. Warm Market - Ah, the good old fashioned "warm" market! Relax, I’m NOT going to tell you to make a list of every person you’ve ever met and try to "pitch" them on your opportunity. This violates at least 4 principles of good business and good network marketing practices:

1. First off, as network marketers, we should never be "pitching" anyone anyway. We are in the business of educating and coaching, NOT selling. If you talk someone in, you’ll just have to talk them into staying in, and eventually it is just a waste of time on everyone’s part.
2. Secondly, talking to EVERYONE you know about your product/opportunity is 100% UNtargeted. Think spam, but in person. Fun.
3. Third, most people simply don’t have warm markets composed of entrepreneurs and business-minded people in the quantity necessary to be successful this way. It is a path to failure for 9 out of 10 people.  As networkers, we need to teach methods that anyone can legitimately learn, apply, and achieve success with.
4. Failure is all but guaranteed if that person doesn’t have a high level of confidence, communication skills, and rock solid belief in the industry, company, and product.

After all that, you’d think I was down completely on the warm market approach, but that is absolutely not the case. I’m just against promoting untargeted list-building and in-your-face spamming as a viable way to build a business, and the only way to build a business. I do know people who have successfully built their businesses 100% through their warm market, but they had one or more of these characteristics:

• Already had a large circle of influence, or high level of respect in their community
• Generally owned a business, or respected professionally in some way already
• Already had strong personalities, leadership abilities, and high-level of self-confidence

If the above discribes you, GO FOR IT! Leverage the credibility you’ve established and your past contacts to the hilt, once you have a company and product that you can stand behind 110%, YOU’VE EARNED IT! (And if you don’t have one yet and are looking, e-mail me. I can help you find an opportunity that meets your understandbly strict criteria.)

If the above DOESN’T describe you yet, that is ok. Most people are not in this category. Just keep the people in mind that you know that DO fit in that category. If you have the knowledge of how powerful this industry is, and have an exceptional company and product that you represent (there are many, I can help you find one if you don’t have one yet), you should have no problem bringing this to THE RIGHT PEOPLE. You are truly doing THEM a favor by bringing this to them to take a look at, and you can feel confident in that fact. Your sponsor will assist you in doing that as well.

Keep in mind, many people automatically want to discount the "successful" people they know, because they already have money and some level of prestige, so "why would they need this?" That is common, but TOTALLY misses the point of the PURPOSE of this business: to build up a residual income, that you can walk away from, but which continues to bring in money, month after month and year after year. This results in a LIFESTYLE that:

• NO DOCTOR
• NO LAWYER
• NO INVESTMENT BANKER

will ever know!! They need to work 60 to 80 hours a week to get their money. Not so with a networker who has laid the groundwork and built up an expansive and self-sustaining business: he doesn’t really HAVE to work anymore! Always remember, it is NOT about what you have in the bank, it is about what you make automatically and residually every month that matters.

If you want to learn more about approaching people about your opportunity, see the MLM Prospecting section of this site.

2. Local Market - This is almost as big a turn-off to some potential networkers as the warm market, perhaps even more so in some cases. (Think: walk around handing out flyers at the mall or putting them on cars.) Again, this is just about as untargeted and inefficient as you can possibly get. And yes, I’ve been there and done that! But, there are several ways that this can be done in a targeted and efficient way.

One of these involves using the internet and social networks, which I thought deserved a separate section (see section 7 below.) One other way is to join or start local groups strategically thorough places like www.meetup.com. With this method you find groups of people locally that either are interested in networking, entrepreneurship, or your products or services. If they are interested directly, let them know about what you have. If they are looking for networking or business-building, recipricate and be a doorway to other people for them, just as they will be for you. Don’t just join into a "pitch fest" where everyone is telling everyone else why their business is the best.  That’s just dumb and counterproductive. Rather, TRULY network with them.

The last method here is to practice "alert" living. By this I mean paying attention to those around you, and only approaching people in a targeted way for a specific reason. Mark Wieser covers this method excellently in his Surefire Sponsoring. If you don’t have that yet, go grab it now. WELL worth the $27.

3. Buying Leads - As with every method I discuss here, there are pitfalls to watch for. This is a GREAT way to blow a bunch of money fast, and end up with nothing but wasted time and frustration to show for it. Here is what to watch for:

-If you don’t have phone skills, this is a flat WASTE of time. You absolutely can build your business this way (that is how Mark Wieser did it) but you need to know what you are doing. Other than Surefire Sponsoring, in my opinion the best teaching tool for this is Mike Dillard and Mark Wieser’s Black Belt Recruiting.

-Lead sources can be expensive, low quality, or have inconsistent quality. Good sources can and do turn bad. Experiment with a small batch first to check quality initially though. Usually a range of "freshness", and quality (ie, phone verified or not) will be available, as well as local vs national. Especially in the beginning, start with cheaper leads as you build up your skills

-Make sure that you move quickly and DO NOT waste your time with people that don’t seem serious or have low energy or a negative attitude. Maybe those people can be successful, but you don’t have time to waste if you build this way. Don’t be shy to say "sorry" and move on to the next call.

-Have a quality, specific presentation or website to point them to. Don’t just point them to the company website. Wherever you point them, give them exact instructions on what they should read, listen to, or watch. If you can point to an online movie, that is best.

-Having something else to offer them, other than your primary opportunity, is a significant advantage to you that you should not over-look. See the Funded Proposal section below (section 5) for more details on that.

In general, I recommend generating your own leads as opposed to buying them. That way, they are exclusive to you, you know they are fresh, and if you don’t like the quality you can change your ad copy to attract more highly qualified prospects.

4. Free Internet Advertising - This method includes the old (and now ineffective) free classified ads, but also utilizing sites like Craigslist.org. I’m more or less including this here for completeness, as I don’t use these methods myself. However, there are other ways to effectively "advertise" on the internet for free, or at a very low cost. These methods include setting up a blog and getting natural search engine traffic; creating videos, articles, podcasts, or reports and directing traffic that way; and using social media sites to drive traffic. Each of those is covered in separate sections below.

5. Paid Internet Advertising - Here I’m really referring to using pay per click search engines, and specifically Google Adwords. Yes, there are other ways to pay for internet advertising, but those are more advanced and would be used much later on to scale up efforts AFTER resources like adwords had been fully exhausted. I’m not going to go into a full discussion on how to use google’s adwords here, but do want to point a few things out. One is that I do offer a basic tutorial on this for free in my Beginner’s Guide to Online Marketing, which you can get by subscribing to my newsletter in the upper right of this page. Second is the current best resource on the subject, Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide to Adwords, which you can get for just $30.

And the last thing to mention here is the critical concept of utilizing a "funded proposal". The concept here is that your advertising is focused precisely on solving a specific problem of a potential prospect. This allows you to position yourself as a problem-solver, earn money selling a low-priced retail product that meets their needs, offsetting some or all of your advertising (or even make a profit), while you generate leads for yourself. The key after that is to build a genuine relationship, keep in touch in an automated yet personal way periodically, and offer your opportunity when and if the time is right.

Using that method is much easier to do than promoting your opportunity right off, and allows you to earn money from the many people who will never end up joining your primary opportunity. Essentially, if done correctedly, this can generate an endless supply of free leads.

Both Mike Dillard and Mark Wieser are separately coming out with training specifically geared toward teaching network marketers how to use google adwords. Mike Dillard’s class is closed and I am one of the "beta testers" on that one. I will give a detailed review of that and a summary of my results in a blog post soon, that I will link to from here. I’m sure that Mark’s program will be excellent too, I will review that one as well.

6. Article & Video Marketing - This is a method that has been around for at least 6 to 7 years now, but the format is evolving. It used to be that you’d write articles and submit those to places like www.ezinearticles.com, but that is changing now. Now, you can also write up short reports, convert them into pdf files, and upload them to places like www.docstoc.com or www.scribd.com. And of course, you can make short videos and upload those to places like www.youtube.com, www.revver.com, or www.viddler.com. The advantage here is not only that it is free to do, but also that it positions YOU as a problem-solver or an expert. In that way, the people that find you from these places are pre-sold on you.

There is an art and a science to this. I discuss videos in the free report I mentioned before, and I do have some suggestions on utilizing ezinearticles here. I will be writing in much more detail about this in my blog on this site, so search for that if you are looking for more how-to type details, and when I have a signficant blog post I will post a link to that from here.

As a final note, you’ll need to be pointed people to another place from these articles or videos, and that place I highly recommend be a blog on a domain that you own. In the next few days, I will be putting together extensive material on how to host a blog, update the look and feel, and add significant and important functionality to it. You can do all of this in just a few hours, and don’t need any technical knowledge because I will walk you through each component in videos. Ask me questions about this anytime.  A significant advantage to doing this is that you can monetize your blog in other ways too, so it becomes a "funded proposal PLUS".

7. Social Networks -This is an explosively evolving method, one that will leave not only the internet changed forever, but also the way we connect and communicate with each other at a fundamental level. We are truly just at the beginning stages of this change, known currently as "web 2.0", but which will have a few more stages of development to go through even after this. The concept here is user interactivity, user participation, and user-created content. Blogs were phase 1 of this change, and then came social bookmarking sites (like www.digg.com and www.stumbleupon.com) and social networks (like www.myspace.com and now the ubiquitous www.facebook.com).

I’m just starting to put all this in place myself, I’ll be writing some blog posts about this and linking to them from here. And I’ll add in the most useful reports and resources I find on how to use this too. Two things to leave you with here though:

1. Join Twitter today. Click here to follow me on Twitter, and you can sign up for a free account. When you do that, you will automatically get a report on how to use Twitter e-mailed to you. Twitter is a micro-blog where you can post short 140 character messages, but you don’t send that to just one person, EVERYONE that is following you sees it. Kind of like instant messages to many people instead of one person. It sounds weird at first, but once you use it a little you’ll see how revolutionary it really is. (Kinda like Tivo in that way.)

2. Doug Firebaugh had the best training on social media for network marketers that I’ve gotten so far. It was a great 10 hour call series over 4 nights. As soon as he has that on CD or DVD, I’ll link to it here. He covered a TON of new stuff with it, even if you’ve already been using some of the services and websites he went over. One method that he talks about is really key though, so I’ll outline it here quick:

• First, join groups and find people that are local to you and interested in networking, entrepreneurship, home-business, etc.
• Then, get a local meetup together where everyone can meet face to face
• Then, everyone is a doorway to other people, and you all share contacts and network together. So, you aren’t "pitching" your product or opportunity to a person that you meet there, but use them as a doorway to other people.

8. Information Architect - This is the BIG PICTURE. (And, I coined this phrase too, need to look into copyrighting it…) You are not only using the major internet strategies discussed already, and not just using them together in a specific way, but you are also expanding your business model at the same time. Your sales funnel is: monetize a blog by selling adspace -> refer people to high quality affiliate products and necessary services -> market to them automatically over time by getting their contact information -> establish a relationship with them -> become business partners through your primary opportunity.

In this way, every person that finds you is very valuable to you, because you are valuable to them.

The technique is to establish your own blog, which is the heart of your business and communication center, while also expanding strategically into publishing off-site content, articles, and videos, and tieing it altogether with a well-planned social strategy.

Don’t think that you need to take it to this level in order to be successful. This is more or less my own personal business vision, but if you are looking to get as much out of your time and effort as possible, this may be a business model to study and implement. I will help you every step of the way.