Internet Network Marketing – How to Create the Economy of the Future

There are those that feel that network marketing is a dinosaur of the past that had its day in the sun but is either a dead or dying marketing and distribution model. Visions of home and hotel opportunity meetings with people waiting at the door expectantly for their prospects may spring to mind. Other pictures that may crop up is garages full of water filters or people dressed up in sits who strike up conversations with strangers talking about their new biz op. But people who have this concept of network marketing are missing out on a tremendous opportunity that is based on the technology of the internet. Read on and I will try to lay it out the best I can.

The Challenge of Network Marketing

In a lot of people’s eyes, network marketing has a bad reputation. The techniques and tactics used by old school network marketers can be blamed for this. Because network marketing, or multi-level marketing (MLM), has been around for over 50 years, most people think they know everything they need to know about network marketing. As a result, some of the techniques used by and taught by network marketers border on deception (and cross over the border as well). People invite people to dinner and spring a business opportunity presentation on them, pulling out a whiteboard and easel and commencing to draw circles all over the board. Invitations to business meetings are based on vague descriptions of the business opportunity.

The other challenge is network marketers tend to present their business to low probability prospects. They make list of their friends and families, their warm market, and then proceed to somehow beg and cajole everyone on that list to take a look at their business presentation. Most of these people weren’t even looking for a business opportunity or a change. The network marketer therefore faces an uphill battle.

Related to that challenge is that most network marketers don’t do a whole lot of marketing. Most of the effort is spent on “sharing” the business opportunity and trying to move the prospect to a close. The sales and marketing training required to succeed in network marketing just isn’t taught. The powers that be feel that if we concentrate too much on sales and marketing techniques, this will scare off the people that don’t like to sell. This makes for ill-prepared network marketers who get their lunch eaten by prospects.

The Revolution - Internet Network Marketing and Attraction Marketing

Two people came on the network marketing scene and totally revolutionized network marketing by creating internet network marketing. Mike Dillard came out with his Magnetic Sponsoring book and its back-end system. Ann Sieg came out with her The Renegade Network Marketer ebook and its corresponding back-end system.

Both Ann Sieg and Mike Dillard teach attraction marketing and a system to monetize the prospecting process. With attraction marketing you position yourself as an expert by providing valuable content that helps a prospective future business associate to build a successful business. The initial content, your web of content, builds that attraction. Through Web 2.0 technologies and social media such as blogs, Squidoo lenses, Hub Pages, ezine articles, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, social bookmarking, and search engine optimization techniques, your web content will be found by the search engines when a prospect searches for advice and tips on growing their network marketing business. Your web of internet content can thus bring in new prospects to you on auto-pilot. You only follow-up with the ones that have shown that they are really interested in building a business.

As you continue to build your relationship with prospective business associates, you can monetize the prospecting process by offering them your own information products or affiliate products which are valuable resources that you can recommend they buy. If there is a good fit, the prospect, seeing that you are a leader by what you have provide so far, will get into your primary network marketing business. So no more cold calls, no more bugging your friends and family, no more 3 foot rule, and no more stalking in the malls and coffee shops. And you can make money even if the person never gets into your business which helps fund your marketing efforts.

Taking the Revolution Further – Finding a Network Marketing Company That Embraces the Internet Like No Other

I believe the business model and concept can be taken even further. Some people think that if they can build their business with one network marketing company, they can be more profitable by doing it with more than one network marketing company. But it won’t work that way. You will dissipate your efforts and energy by trying to build more than one business. And because of the way most of the compensation plans work, it is in your best interest to recruit all your people into one company. And because your downline will duplicate what you do, they will dissipate their efforts and energy as well. You are going to mess up your business.

I have a better way in mind. Instead of having more than one network marketing company, wouldn't it make sense to have more than one product in your network marketing company to distribute? I know a lot of companies have large lines of products that they produce in the areas of health and fitness, cosmetics, home care, etc. What I have in mind is offering practically everything you can think of by product brokering with different manufacturers to private label high quality in demand products or partnering with retailers to distribute their products. Then set this all up with a web portal powered by the most powerful search engine available (Google) so that customers can go to this destination site to search for the products they want from practically any retailer, do it all in one online shopping cart so that they didn't have to go in and out of different sites, do comparison shopping without doing additional internet searches, and accumulate reward points that are redeemable for additional products. So even if your customer already shops at Dell, WalMart, Victoria's Secret, etc. they will earn reward points for shopping through the web portal. And the web portal can be a destination site or the customers' home page with news feeds, sports scores, entertainment information, email, etc. I think that is the future of shopping and internet network marketing. The one company that I have found that has embraced this model is Market America.

C Doug Mah is an internet network marketing coach whose goal is to teach independent business owners how to use attraction marketing and Web 2.0+ technologies to grow their businesses profitably. Going beyond the old school techniques that are still being taught by some network marketing and MLM organizations, these techniques drive pre-qualified prospects to your business, allowing you to spend more time in business building and training instead of prospecting and recruiting.

If you are interested in learning how to make this vision a reality in internet network marketing or want more information about one of the top network marketing companies, Market America, please join me, C Doug Mah , for some free training and consultation.