Internet Marketing and MLM

Early on in my marketing career, by upline taught me to brand yourself first. This means never mention anything about your MLM business until you have established a solid relationship with prospects. A premature exposure may send your prospects to do an online search about the company with a very high probability that they will join under another sponsor. Keep in mind you are not only competing with other products on the market, but also against other marketers of your product. Affiliate marketing provides an initial and essential anonymity during this personal "branding" stage.

To gain the competitive edge in marketing MLM programs, I've found it to be very effective to first sell affiliate products to the types of people you want in your organization. For example, the affiliate products I sell (ie, Clickbank, Amazon, etc) are primarily targeted for medical professionals, legal specialists, accountants, mechanical/electrical/aerospace engineers, managers in business/industry, academia faculty/researchers, trade associations, churches, civic groups, etc. I've mentioned this before as affinity marketing.

In a nutshell, you are developing relationships with your prospects through a funnel system which includes a series of affiliate transactions with the intended outcome of joining your MLM company. It really doesn't even matter what the products are, as long as they keep your prospects moving along through the process. You should of course be able to add communication channels along the way, such as phone, mailing address, etc. Get to know your customers on a personal basis, and there almost always will come a time when they open up to needing to make extra money. Be prepared to not only teach this system to your new recruits, but also teach them to do the same for their downline. For this to work, it needs to be duplicable.