If you are doing online MLM marketing right now, or considering doing it, here’s one thing you must know:
You will have to be a maverick to do it.
Really.
True, there are thousands of websites and online educational programs out there claiming to do online MLM, but they aren’t really doing online MLM. What they are doing is using the online world as one of many channels to funnel information to their warm market. What they are not doing is using online MLM marketing as a way to prospect and recruit product users and business builders.
You’re Kidding Me, Right?
The other day I wrote the web designer of a major company-approved website and asked him why the conversion rates on his online MLM website were so low. His website had thousands of hits, but very low conversions. More importantly, his website is unfriendly to capturing prospect data. I wanted to know why.
Well, I never got a response from him, but I did get a very nice if generic answer from the support department. Their answer? “This website is designed for your warm market and not to be used to prospect a cold market.”
Hello?!?
What is the power of the internet if it can’t be used to reach out and touch the hundreds of millions of people out there who want what MLM has to offer, but don’t know you exist.
Radio and TV as an Analogy for Online MLM
I compare the current use of online MLM to the early days of television. Now most of us weren’t around there, but the analogy still holds true. When people did radio shows, groups of people would stand around each microphone and speak. It worked great. Radio had the equivalent of audio-only sitcoms and people loved them.
Then there was the advent of the television. Now you add moving pictures into the equation. So what did early TV producers do? They did nothing more than make radio people visual. They took moving pictures of groups of people standing around a bunch of microphones and talking into them.
Sure, people could now see the expressions of the actors, but early television producers didn’t take full advantage of the medium of moving pictures. They didn’t realize that people could now move around the screen and didn’t have to be “tied” to their microphones. They didn’t realize that the camera could shoot from different angles, or that you could move from a close-up of an actor’s face to a moving shot of people scooting across the set. They had no idea of the POWER of moving pictures.
Ditto with online MLM. Yes, we have webinars and recorded audios of teleconferences and websites that we can use with our warm markets.
Big whoopee.
What we need instead are intelligently crafted websites that reach out and touch, hold, and intrigue people in our cold online market. We need these websites to offer these prospects such compelling information that they want to know more … that they ask us for more. We want them to ask us to digitally send them more information. We want them to willingly give us their contact information because they are so intrigued with what we are offering. This is what we need, and badly.
That, folks, is the real power of the internet. Yes, by all means use a website for your warm market, but there are dozens of ways to reach the warm market. Online MLM presents the best way right now to reach a global cold market of people who want what we have but don’t know we exist.
An MLM Wake Up Call
This is a wake up call, people. This is a wake up call MLM companies. Wake up, smell the coffee, and see what the internet really can do. See the power that exists there, and use it in company-approved sites to allow and help distributors reach out to a virtually untapped cold market. Realize that we can reach this vast untapped cold market intelligently, with grace, and following the rules and regulations of the FTC and FDA. We can do this. We must do this. We will need to cross this bridge, and the first mover in the MLM market who does it well will inevitably gain the usual first mover advantage.
Do you want to be that first mover? Then wake up!
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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jodiepedia/ / CC BY 2.0
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