Network Marketing: Creating Leads

The idea of network marketing was created as a way for home based workers to expand their incomes. The concept, when properly implemented, allows one to not only earn income from the sale of products at retail, but also to recruit other like-minded people into one’s downline and thereby receive income from their sales as well.

However, while the concept is innovative and appears to be full of potential, most first time network marketers face a common problem. Seemingly the sole markets for the products and for the business opportunity that can help them to grow their downline are friends, workplace associates, family members and close neighbors.

What generally happens, at least for more than 90% of network marketing novices, is that after they make their initial sales to their warm market of friends, family and neighbors, they reach a plateau where their prospective market for new customers and new business opportunity prospects has dwindled to a depressingly low level. And so they quit.

So the very thing that attracted them to the network marketing opportunity – the ability to make sales to their warm market – becomes the reason for their business to ultimately fail. And this problem is compounded by the fact that, in the vast majority of cases, the company that established the business opportunity fails to release new products on a regular basis, so that after a short period of time, the network marketer has no new products to offer to his existing warm market.

What exactly is the solution to this common dilemma? Well, there are a select number of network marketing opportunities that have come up with a means of expanding the market for their network marketing participants. This is done in two ways.

First, to solve the problem of having to market the opportunity to the very limited number of people in each participant’s own warm market of family, friends, etc., these network marketing companies create a way to expand the prospect market. This is usually done by having the company itself develop leads and then provide the leads to participants for a small fee. These leads are created through mass marketing campaigns that can promote the products and/or the business opportunity itself. The most common means of doing so are by placing advertisements in popular print media which display a toll-free number for interested readers to call, and by broadcasting television and radio commercials, again with a toll-free number included. In either case, the company takes the leads generated from interested readers and viewers, and then makes them available for the network marketers to follow up on and close the sale.

One especially creative variation on this approach is to broadcast 30 minute infomercials on a national basis, but then, using advanced telecommunications technology, have the phone calls generated from the infomercials ring directly on the telephones of the company’s network marketers. So the latter actually take the hot telephone leads that are generated from the infomercial campaigns.

As regards the second issue - a lack of new products to promote – assuming that the company does have an ever expanding line of new and marketable products, it can create new print advertisements or broadcast new ads or infomercials, on a continuous basis.

The result is that instead of network marketers being limited to marketing the same old products to their warm market, they can actually expand their market to people across the country, for a continually growing product line. In addition, if the company’s nationwide marketing campaign promotes the business opportunity itself, one can actually grow their downline and increase their retail sales dramatically.

Michael Rupkalvis operates the website for Life Formulas, which offers an ongoing diary about his day-to-day activities with ITV Ventures. ITV Ventures combines the impact of infomercials with the breadth and income opportunities features of network marketing.