Internet network marketing is truly a dream business. Network marketing provides the leverage from other people’s efforts. The internet provides the leverage from technology. Therefore, embarking on internet network marketing will provide the twin leverage from both technology and the marketing efforts of other people.

With internet network marketing, it is now possible to get one’s marketing message out to potentially thousands or even millions of people. Marketing using email, forums and even articles help turn a cold market to a warm market by building relationships first before prospects say yes to an internet network marketing business opportunity. The biggest advantage is there is no need to do any more cold calling.

However, if you delve deeper, what it takes to really succeed at internet network marketing is not that different from the success factors of the traditional network marketing business. The seven major ingredients to success include the following:

1) Ability to Duplicate One’s Results

While the internet helps to remove the pain of face-to-face rejection to any internet network marketing opportunity, an internet network marketer still has to have a sales and marketing system in place which is easy for his or her internet MLM downlines to duplicate. Whether one’s internet network marketing business is able to experience explosive growth will hinge on the duplicability of the marketing system.

2) Focus And Persistence

With a slew of information about new, promising internet marketing and internet multi-level marketing opportunities coming onto the internet every hour, it is extremely to easy to lose focus and there is a strong tendency for any new internet network marketer to jump from one opportunity to another.

Just like in a traditional MLM business, it does take time and persistence for any internet MLM business to bear fruit. The only advantage of using the internet to do any network marketing is the speed and reach the internet provides. In addition, one needs to persist when embarking on a particular traffic and lead generation strategy and give it some time to be tested before hopping to the next traffic and lead generation strategy.

3) Relationship Building

The adage, “People don’t care how much you know till they know how much you care” still applies to internet network marketing! Even with the proliferation of internet broadband technology and pervasive computing, most internet MLM prospects still require constant contacts via email or other means before they say yes.

4) You Being The Product

When a prospect say yes, it is because he or she trusts you. Therefore, despite the hype that is being offered elsewhere on the internet, whether one succeeds in internet network marketing depends on whether one is able deliver value and help his or her internet MLM downlines to succeed. Leadership and integrity are values one cannot do without. Personal branding also becomes a requirement.

5) The True Benefit Offered By Internet Network Marketing

The true benefit of joining any internet network marketing business does not have any thing to do with how good your company’s products are. Internet network marketing, just like any traditional network marketing business, is actually built on financial hopes and dreams.

The more one is able to help his or her internet MLM downlines fulfill their hopes and dreams, the more successful one becomes in internet network marketing.

6) Constant Personal Development

According to Stephen Covey, to be truly effective in anything we do, we have to constantly be prepared and “sharpen our saw”. T Harv Eker also mentioned in his book, “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind”, our income can only grow only to the extent we do. We have to strive to be the right person in the right place at the right time.

Therefore, to ensure that our internet network marketing income grows, we have to ensure that we grow personally as well.

7) The Core Desire And Decision To Succeed

Lastly but MOST importantly, one has to apply this basic, inner natural law of wealth attraction and success which has been reiterated by countless gurus. Napolean Hill’s “Think And Grow Rich” talks about the need to have the desire to be rich and successful before any turning point can occur.

Bob Proctor says that being rich and successful requires first and foremost a decision to be rich and successful. Basically doing nothing is also a decision.

According to Jack M Zufelt, goal setting and daily affirmations will come to nought without the core desire to succeed. When our core desire is absent, we can write ten goals and most likely we will only achieve one or two goals. The remaining eight goals, we will either miss or not even get started on them! This happens because we did not single out our core desire, and determine what we really want. When we have correctly isolated that core desire, we simply become juggernauts who cannot be stopped!

If you have heard of MLM or network marketing before, do you think of it in positive terms or do you have a negative perception of the industry? When you hear someone such as Donald Trump, or Robert Kiyosaki, or Jim Rohn suggest network marketing is a terrific home based business vehicle for the average person, what reaction do you have? Which side of the fence are you on and more importantly, why?

If you already participate in network marketing, do you sometimes feel embarrassed to admit it? What is it about your beliefs around network marketing that lead you to have these feelings?

In this article, you’re going to get the straight goods about MLM and network marketing as an industry, how it evolved, and where some of the misconceptions came from. That will allow you to put the feelings or perceptions you have about the network marketing industry into some context, from which you can assess whether or not your feelings and perceptions are valid

Modern MLM and Network Marketing

MLM and network marketing is huge. It is a +$100 billion dollar per year industry which offers an accessible way for the average person to launch a legitimate business with the potential of generating very substantial income. It affords you the opportunity to launch a business on a part-time basis, and grow that into a full-time (or more) income. And it requires the least amount of start-up capital and ongoing operating expense of virtually any legitimate business model.

Paul Zane Pilzer, a world renowned economist and college professor, goes so far as to predict that over 10 million new millionaires will be created through network marketing over the next 10 years.
If this is true, why on earth would you feel ashamed or embarrassed to be part of this industry?
Well, as I’ve already hinted, there’s a lot of history behind network marketing.

The Early History Of Network Marketing

Network Marketing as a means of product distribution – which is really all that it is – has been around literally forever.

You can go back through history and the establishment of trade routes and find examples of traders who distributed goods, food, and fur, face-to-face, on behalf of various backers. For example, the Voyageurs established fur trading routes and posts on behalf of the Hudson Bay Company. The Hudson Bay Company itself relied upon the influence of Prince Rupert, who was the cousin of King Charles II, to acquire the Royal Charter which, in May, 1670 granted the lands of the Hudson Bay watershed to “the Governor and Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay.”

In New England, in the mid 1700’s, began the phenomenon of the Yankee Peddler, in which peddlers would travel in their cart home to home throughout the countryside, selling their wares.

From there evolved the concept of the door-to-door salesman. The Watkins Company was launched in 1868, selling a popular liniment. The late 1800s saw the spawning of new companies employing door-to-door salesmen to distribute bibles, books, spices, remedies, perfumes, tonics and the like. The California Perfume Company, which later became better known as Avon, was founded in the late 1800s.

The Fuller Brush Company debuted in the early 1900s and it was Alfred Fuller who is credited with transforming door-to-door direct selling into something different. Rather than positioning himself as a salesman who sold brushes and focusing on the features of the brushes, he instead focused his attention on selling the benefits of his brushes to the consumers.

The early 1900’s also saw the emergence of vacuum cleaner and encyclopedia companies such as Electrolux, World Book and Britannica.

The term “network marketing” specifically is 20th century creation.

It is out of this trend that the term “belly to belly” marketing – or warm market as you may better recognize it – was coined.

A company named California Vitamins came to the realization that many of their new sales recruits were in fact friends and family of their existing sales force. That led the company to recognize it was easier to build a sales force with a lot of people who sell a small amount of product, than it was to find a small number of top sellers who would move mountains of product.

And so California Vitamins designed a revolutionary sales compensation model encouraging their salespeople to invite new representatives from satisfied customers, most of whom were family and friends. This allowed the sales force to grow exponentially. The company rewarded its representatives for the sales produced by their entire group – or network – of sales representatives. And so multi-level marketing was born.

The original party plan was the Stanley Hostess Party Plan, by Stanley Home Products. The focus of the party plan was to demonstrate the myriad of uses and benefits of the products right in the home. Out of the original Stanley dealer roster came the founders of such future marketing program giants as Mary Kay and Tupperware.

The introduction of the multi-level, person-to-person sales program in the mid 1950s coincided with another pair of new giants arriving on the scene: Shaklee and Amway.

The Advent of MLM

The term multi-level marketing, or MLM, became a part of the industry lexicon. And the direct selling industry would never be the same.

The popular notion that MLM companies are illegal pyramid schemes really gained steam in the mid 1970s when the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charged that Amway and its multi-level marketing structure constituted an illegal pyramid.

Out of that court decision, the “Amway Safeguard Rule” set the legal standard for direct selling, multi-level, and network marketing based companies going forward.

The Myth of the MLM Pyramid

Amway and its multi-level structure were targeted by the FTC partly in response to a proliferation of pyramid programs in the 1970s. There was no underlying product or service. It was the emergence of several high profile schemes that led to a rash of regulatory requirements and the ultimate targeting of MLM as a structure. It also led to the clarification of speculative or fraudulent schemes and legitimate direct sales activities.

The Amway Safeguard Rule identifies three key points which ensure the validity of the opportunity. It was the existence of these three points as part of the Amway structure that led the court to conclude the business was not an illegal pyramid.

These therefore are important criteria with which to assess any network marketing or MLM opportunity and establish whether it is in fact legal as opposed to “one of those pyramid scams”.

Does the opportunity require the retail sale of products or services before one can qualify for any recruiting commissions or sales?

Does the opportunity have a mechanism in place to prevent the stockpiling of inventory of physical products with no intention of reselling?

Does the opportunity offer representatives who choose to leave a buy-back provision on unsold, unopened inventory or products?

The term “network marketing” became popular in the 1980s.

Ultimately, direct sales and multi-level marketing are distinct subsets within the overall network marketing industry. Multi-level marketing is where the profit or commission for a retail sale is shared with an up-line (or recruiter). Typically there are also bonuses paid based on recruiting activity, so long as the recruiting is accompanied with ongoing retail sales activity. In Direct sales, typically only one profit or commission for a sale is paid to one person, so there is no sharing of the profit with the up-line recruiter.

MLM and Network Marketing Gains Legitimacy

A number of very well known and respected authors and business people began to lend their public endorsement to the industry. People such as Brian Tracy, Robert Kiyosaki, Paul Zane Pilzer, Jim Rohn, and even Donald Trump began to openly talk about the merits of the industry and, in fact, encouraged people to consider it.

At the same time, network marketing has morphed into a proven, preferred method of product distribution by some of the largest companies on the planet. Corporations came to the conclusion that network marketing, as a distribution channel, offered many advantages, not the least of which is that it’s lower cost.

Commissions are only paid on the sale of product or services and the structure allows the companies to offload much of the time and training requirements onto its representatives, who are incented to train the new representative they recruit. So it’s a very cost effective method of distribution for a business to utilize.

In particular for new product launches, network marketing distribution allows companies to avoid costly traditional advertising campaigns.

Pretty soon telecommunications companies, travel companies, satellite providers, financial services companies, and many other industries joined the party. Today there are literally thousands upon thousands of network marketing based companies operating throughout the world.

What are network-marketing goals?

Network marketing goals are the road map for your future network marketing success, your destination. There is not one network-marketing distributor who wants or expects to wake up and realize he/she has spent $20,000 this year in advertising and product to build his network-marketing business with nothing to show for it.

Every year people spend thousands on advertising and product without realizing an acceptable profit. Ninety-five percent of MLM distributors fail in their new business within the first year.. Does this have to happen? No. Do you get into the car without a route in mind when you are headed to the grocery store? Are you just going to drive aimlessly, or do you make sure you know where the store you need is located? Does your road map have directions or are you riding with your husband /boyfriend? Men don’t generally want to stop and ask directions (all women know this).

Setting Network Marketing Opportunity Goals:

Set short-term network marketing opportunity goals, which can be 3 months to 1 year. Long-term network marketing opportunity goals are normally 2 to 10 years. These time frames can be adjusted and you want to keep flexibility in your plan.

Examples of a network marketing opportunity short-term and long-term goal:

Short-term Goal: I would like to add one new person every month to my business each month.

Long-Term Goal: I would like to achieve ‘master distributor’ level and have built an organization of 2000 people within two years

Break network marketing opportunity goals down into steps:

Research network-marketing opportunities for the “right” one. Take the time to step back and look at your opportunity from an unemotional, purely business perspective.

Research the network marketing industry

Research various network marketing companies

Sign up for your network-marketing opportunity

Set up a schedule to properly train for success in your network-marketing opportunity

Set up network-marketing goals for yourself beginning with the smallest to largest

Implement a plan to move towards your ultimate goal

Aim Your Network Marketing Goals High

What good are setting network-marketing goals if they aren’t stretching your ability? Along with that comes the task of setting realistic goals. What if you are a high school student who has struggled to pull a B or C in Science? Do you think it’s the most achievable goal to become a nuclear scientist? Set a realistic network-marketing goal for you to experience success.

Don’t expect 10K per month in June if you began your network-marketing opportunity in April. Plan to talk to five prospects and make one sale within your first week. You need some network-marketing success quickly and more successes at various points along the way so that you remain motivated.

Now that you are experiencing success, set larger, achievable goals for your 3 to 6 month period in your network-marketing business. For example, your goal may be to have 5 retail clients and 3 business associates signed up within 4 months of beginning your network-marketing business.

Once this goal is achieved, look at your company and set your next goals accordingly. Use a time line in your network-marketing goal setting exercise, but realize there will be obstacles you must over come. The three people you were sure needed your product didn’t buy anything, and the two people who were searching for a network-marketing opportunity didn’t think your business was for them. The new network-marketing distributor you recruited will not implement a plan for themselves. You will have obstacles to overcome. This is the time you turn to your team and their experience to help you keep your spirits up and let you know this happens to everyone if they are in business long enough.

This is a minor setback unless all your eggs were in one basket. If so, you’ll have to start all over. In the case of the high school student, his obstacle is his grades in one of the main disciplines involved as a nuclear scientist…science.

Staying Motivated!

This is hard when there is negative feedback from friends, family and co-workers. You were excited about your network-marketing business. Whether it was intentional or not, you have just had your bubble burst. Family members are normally trying to protect you from getting hurt,and in the process, they step on your dream.

How To Remain Motivated In Your Network-Marketing Opportunity

Talk to your supporters; avoid the rest with news of your network-marketing business opportunity for now.Keep the goal in sight, always thinking of the final outcome.Break it down into smaller pieces so that you have little victories along the way.

Celebrate the little victories.