Internet Network Marketing - The Future is Now

Network marketing is an amazing product distribution model and business model. It has a storied history with ups and downs and successes and failures. It has been ahead of the curve and behind the curve. But we stand at a point in time where numerous factors are coming together to make this an ideal time to start your network marketing business and in particular your internet network marketing business. In this article I will look back at network marketing's history and then look forward to its future, a future you should take a close look at.

How Network Marketing Started

Network marketing or multi-level-marketing (MLM) as it is also known as, started back in the 1940's. Depending upon who you believe, the first MLM company was Nutrilite which sold vitamin supplements with a multi-level compensation plan. Two Nutrilite distributors, Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel, founded the grand-daddy of all MLM companies, Amway and that's when network marketing took off.

Network marketing was successful at that time because it was a new idea and it was also a great idea. A distributor could get in with minimal investment and sell products to generate retail profits. The company also paid the distributor a bonus based on a percentage of the sales volume of products sold. The distributor could also recruit people into his business (his downline) and any sales volume his downline created would generate additional bonuses to the original distributor, hence the name multi-level. Building a large sales organization would lead to large bonuses.

Because the industry was so new back in the 50's and 60's, people could make money as to everybody it was a new idea. Nobody had ever heard of this way of distributing products and starting their own business. At the same time other companies were getting into the mix, some legitimate, some not so legitimate. The not so legitimate businesses were the pyramid schemes and ponzi schemes you sometimes hear people talking about or objecting to. In these illegal schemes, the money was not made from the sales of products but from the recruitment of new people. The companies had to keep on bringing in new people to pay for the bonuses for the people that came in earlier. This led to a lot of negative publicity for the network marketing and MLM industry.

As the industry moved into the 80's and 90's things slowed down. There were now so many companies in the network marketing industry and so many people that had tried it that it was tough to get new distributors in your business. Your warm list no longer wanted to hear about the latest business opportunity and there was a sense out there that most people thought network marketing was a scam and that they would never want to get involved.

The Revolution - Internet Network Marketing and Attraction Marketing

Now fast forward a few years to the current decade. Two people came on the network marketing scene who 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 are very similar in general concept but differ a bit in the details and their target market.

Both Ann Sieg and Mike Dillard teach attraction marketing and a system to monetize the prospecting process. Attraction marketing is positioning yourself as an expert by providing valuable content that helps a 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 comes up in the search engines when a prospect searches for advice and tips on growing their network marketing business. Your web of content can thus bring in new prospects to you on auto-pilot. You only follow-up with the ones that are really interested in building a business.

As you build up 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. And 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. Talk about win-win!

Taking It Further

But I believe we can take the business even further. Because part of the prospecting is done on autopilot and on the internet, some people think that if they can do it with one network marketing company, they can do it with more than one network marketing company. But I caution you on that. You will dissipate your efforts and energy by trying to build more than one business. Also because of the way most of the compensation plans work, it is in your best interest to recruit all your people in one business. And as your downline will duplicate what you do, they will dissipate their efforts and energy as well. Not a good thing.

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 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.

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 please join me, C Doug Mah at Renegade University. It's free to sign up.