If you are looking at your network marketing company’s glossy distributor handbook, you might think the Internet and network marketing are oil and water. Sure, there is a company website. You may even be invited to set up a distributor webpage there.

But the implication seems to be that your top network marketing companies have the Internet and network marketing thing covered. Nothing for distributors to do here. You need not apply yourself to learning about the Internet and network marketing. Move along.

Instead, you are sent to the offline marketing trenches. Those old-fashioned tactics of harassing friends and family, accosting uninterested strangers, and pounding the pavement with flyers, business cards, and brochures aren’t doing much for you. Your business is stagnating and you’re considering anti-depressants. And the new fangled offline marketing stuff – prospecting the offices of health professionals, manning the booth at the local fair, and hosting opportunity pushing parties – aren’t raking in the results you’d hoped for when you started network marketing, either.

It’s enough to make you tuck your head back in your shell and resign yourself to a life of thankless drudgery at a job that sucks the soul from your body with a cubicle shaped straw. Except things aren’t looking so good at the job, lately. Cutbacks, layoffs, downsizings have got everyone running scared.

Fear is the wrong response to economic upheaval on many levels.   Let’s try just two facts for a minute, instead.  Here’s an interesting fact: Online businesses are acquiring new customers at a 15% annual rate versus 2% for traditional offline businesses Deloitte & Touche USA, 11/2006. Here’s another one: Over 71% of Americans use the Internet to make buying decisions, Jupiter Research. 

Apply those facts to your network marketing business.  Visualize the results you are getting with your offline marketing tactics, and label those results 2%.  Have you sold $100 in product?  Sponsored 2 people into your downline? Now, imagine the Internet and network marketing together and working for you.  Multiply your current offline results by 7.5.  How does $750 in product and 15 people in your downline strike you?  A lot more like a business you want to own, I bet.  Think about the power of that volume compounding for you.  Hello, residual income!  That’s what the Internet and network marketing can do for your existing network marketing business.

That’s the WHY of Internet and network marketing.  You should definitely be heading in that direction.  It’s just solid business sense.

The problem is the HOW of Internet and network marketing. How do you use the Web for your business? You don’t have a glossy handbook about mlm advertising on the Internet. And top network marketing companies and your upline may even discourage you from trying because there are rules about mlm advertising that make it tricky to sell product and opportunity directly.

But you won’t want to advertise your network marketing business directly, anyway. That seems counter-intuitive at first, but pitching your products and opportunity online is as much a dead end as pitching products and opportunity offline. That brings us to the second fact: 71% of Americans use the Internet to make buying decisions.

Here’s a story to illustrate.

My mother’s dryer broke down. She decided to buy a new one. She went online and found the style of dryer she wanted and she found a store that had a special on that style. She was 10 minutes in the store buying the dryer, because she’d found the information she needed online. The store was nothing to her but a payment point. (And only because she’s still afraid of putting her credit card number into an online form. Ironic, since it’s much more dangerous to hand it to a cashier than to type it in to an encrypted secure server webpage. But that’s my mom.)

The key point is that, when 71% of American consumers perceive a need (e.g., a new dryer) they look on the Internet for information (e.g., style and price and retailer). The future for Internet and network marketing isn’t in hard pitching product and opportunity. It’s about how you provide that information seeking consumer with the information they want. Once you give them information they want and need, you naturally become a resource, an authority. The sale just happens as a side benefit, the way my mother paid for her dryer, because she’d already made her buying decision using information she found online.

Consumer education is the missing link in the Internet and network marketing equation.  You will have to deliver information.  It’s THE most valuable quantity in the world today.  That’s the answer to HOW you make the Internet and network marketing work for you.

Still stumped? That’s because there are a lot of details standing between all the passion and information you’ve got locked in your head and an attractive, visible online presence for you and your network marketing Internet business. You can get started on understanding the value of educational information as marketing on the Internet with the free ebook, The Attraction Marketer’s Manifesto.

But what you'll really need is a mentor. Finding a mentor among your current circle of family, friends, and co-workers isn’t in the cards. Even if they were online marketers, they all treat you like a leper since you tried to sponsor them into your downline a couple months ago. You hear about people who work from home online, but they are elusive and mythical creatures to you…like unicorns or dragons. Do they really exist?

Yes, I do. Schedule a free telephone consultation with me, Christine Sheridan, to get your bearings under you for merging the Internet and network marketing. Or, you can go back to your booth at the county fair where people walk in a wide circle around you like you have the plague. Your call. Literally, in this case.