For the past year I have dabbled in online network marketing
with mixed results. I've found a few great team members
through working on the internet but for the most part I have
spent countless hours reading 'guru's reports and have come
to several conclusions that I would like to share with you
as follows:
There are many talented people teaching Network Marketing on
the internet but for the most part they are teaching instead
of doing. As a good friend of mine says, 'those who cannot
do, teach.' After reading some of these reports which have
been launched with such marketing hype I have found myself
sucked into the world of the marketer, totally buying
everything they say as I go along with them. At the end of
the report there is usually a call to action of some type,
as with any effective marketing. It often takes the form of
a study course of some description which will 'transform
your business' and you will never be the same again. Some of
these courses may cost as much as $2,000, $5,000 or even
$10,000. Usually you will receive many compelling emails
over the next few weeks explaining exactly why you need to
invest in them. Of course these marketers know that most
people prefer to learn than to take action so it is a
perfect recipe for the guru to profit and the desperate
network marketer to go broke.
The ironic thing about this is that many of these gurus talk
disparagingly about the heavy hitters' in your upline who
ruthlessly sell you DVDs and business tools to make money
from you the poor innocent victim team member. Almost in the
same breath they then very artfully move in for the kill
with their own products, which incidentally have very little
to do with your opportunity. The frustrating thing about
this is that people are then distracted away from their job
at hand and totally lose focus on their goal which should of
course be building their own residual income cheque, not
someone else's database!
This leads us into the new report by Rich Schefren about the
Attention Age doctrine. He quite correctly points out that
people are so distracted on the internet by an overload of
information that the online world today is so competitive
that one needs to work much harder to grab a prospect's
attention. I don't disagree with much of the information in
his report but as a sponsor who is committed to helping my
group develop their skills which are relevant to the
business they were introduced to I find it irritating that
so many of these gurus are offering solutions that quite
frankly involve spending a lot of money and offer a way to
create a business model or system which most team members
have neither the time nor the financial resources to be
getting involved with and is completely unrelated to the
business they have signed up for.
I have been a follower of Mike Dillard's Magnetic sponsoring
ethos and find his information newsletters useful and of
interest. The fact that Mike is such a compelling marketer
has of course led to a complete saturation of his materials
on the internet so that he has now changed his approach
which is interesting. His new Online Community is a way to
connect up with lots of other like minded people in our
industry. The catch 22 is that there are now thousands of
network marketers all trying to sponsor each other and
claiming to have a winning system for success. The reality
is that many of them wouldn't have the first clue how to
create a system that others can duplicate. It's all very
well being an 'expert' and being 'unique' and learning how
to create websites to attract people to you but what happens
when you bring someone into your business who has just 10
hours a week to build it and they are not very techno savvy,
nor do they have $1000 to spend on their education? They
have after all just paid to join your business with the
belief that you will be able to give them access to a
winning system. Unless you are a hi-tech whiz, at the most
you will have created a blog or your own website. What
system will you be passing on to your new recruit?
You may come full circle and discover 'The Death of Network
Marketing,' by Mike Filsaime and Ellie Drake. You may think
as I did, 'well it's alive and kicking where I am!' Of
course we are now recommended to spend hours in darkened
rooms with glazed eyes as we learn and apply the strategies
of Web 2.0. No sooner will we have mastered those techniques
and actually started exposing our business opportunity than
we will be told that Web 2:0 is dead and we'll need to sign
up for another report, order yet more courses and e-books
only to discover that we are going back to basics and are
now allowed to actually go out into the real world and
sponsor people over a cup of coffee! Well I don't know about
you but that sounds really attractive to me and I shall be
spending some time in starbucks being sociable and doing
some real life networking.
Randy Gage has mastered the industry and is one of the most
successful leaders in the field. Interestingly enough he
actually is out in the field, not just reporting from the
sidelines. He did spend many years as a consultant where he
helped real people develop systems that could be duplicated
to create passive income for huge teams of people. Now he is
actively working as a distributor and teaching us the
secrets of duplication, he says that to create true residual
and then passive income, the kind which will keep hitting
your bank account when you are retired and sitting on the
beach in Fiji,(regardless of the the latest 'Google slaps')
we need to have a large group of people taking a few simple
actions over a consistent period of time.
So why do we complicate it so?
In all of the reports and online 'manifestos' that I have
read I have not yet once come across something that is
actually simple for a team member to implement and be up and
running and earning income the same day. There are good
strategies… that is for sure, but an actual system? No. I
for one am going to stop complicating my business and am
going back to basics. I am a great admirer of internet
communication systems and I certainly will continue to
leverage the tools that I have access to but next time you
decide to 'go off on one' I urge you to take a little
inventory. Ask yourself some questions such as 'How
duplicatable is this for my new team members?' 'Is this
something that a large group of people can do over a
consistent period of time?' If not then leave the latest hot
report where it is and give your upline leader a call and
ask them to bring you back to the centre line! If your
opportunity is not one that you can be proud of in the real
world then hiding behind a computer screen is not the
answer. Maybe you should be partnering with a group that
have a proven and attractive system for you to follow
immediately, that is after all why we join Network Marketing
in the first place!
Remove the distractions! Find out more about working with a
proven step by step system used by the top field leadership
in the Randy Gage Group to generate millions of dollars in residual
income in under 2 years:
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