Congratulations! You started your MLM business and followed the advice of your sponsor. You wrote a list of names, your warm list, of your friends, family and colleagues and showed them your business presentation. Two weeks later 90% of them have joined, you have a thriving downline and have already broken company records for your earnings in your first 30 days. No? I thought not. Don’t be surprised or disheartened at this lack of support, or in most cases, downright negativity, demonstrated by those you consider to be your nearest and dearest. This is perfectly normal. Whatever you do, do not let it get you down. More importantly, do not quit! While it is true a few new networkers do have some success when they show their business to their warm market, let us not forget that they are in a very small minority. This approach may have worked very well as recently as 10 years ago, but now, with the internet and a host of new marketing methods available to networkers, chasing down prospects to join your business has become outdated.

The secret to being successful in mlm today depends on your ability to attract prospects to you. In the business we call this lead generation. It is the lifeblood of your business. Once your warm market has dried up you have be able to generate leads to continue to grow your business. It is simple. No leads equals no business. And please do not take the short cut of buying leads. You need hot leads that have responded to you, not leads that have been stuck on the hard drive of the lead generation company for weeks, having been sold to numerous other distributors from other companies, who have become equally despondent cold calling leads that have no recollection of ever completing some obscure online survey. Buying leads represents a waste of your time and your money.

So what are you to do? If you are just getting started (and even if you are not and have been in the mlm wilderness when it comes to generating leads) there are 3 things you must do.

• 1. Make a 90 Day Plan (this enables you to build momentum)
• 2. Work to a budget
• 3. Stick to both 1 & 2!

Chances are, if you are brand new to network marketing, you will not know what a realistic budget in the beginning is. Any figures I give here are purely arbitrary and based on my own experiences in this business. The important thing is to set a figure you are reasonably comfortable with to start. Note, I said reasonably comfortable. That is not to say stay in your comfort zone. Success in this business comes when you step outside of your comfort zone for long periods of time. Remember, you only progress when you overcome challenges. The more challenges you are presented with, the greater your opportunity to grow, develop a huge downline and residual income to match!

A typical figure for your budget then might be $500 a month. Try to increase this as quickly as you can. The more you can put in, the better your marketing campaigns can be. However, $500 is adequate if you are prepared to spend some time on cheap and free methods of lead generation. Please bear in mind that advertising in the making money / business opportunity niches is highly competitive and therefore very expensive, especially if you do not know what you are doing. I am referring to pay-per-click advertising (sponsored listings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN etc.) here. If you have the money, then fine, do pay-per-click. If not, and your budget is limited, I suggest you try the following methods first. Please bear in mind though that while pay-per-click can deliver results almost immediately, the following do require more time and patience. However, once you have momentum you will be generating an endless supply of free leads for your mlm business.

• 1. Sign up to MySpace or Facebook (or both!) and start to network. This is free. Develop your profile for your business. Yes, these are social networks and people are using their profiles to meet new friends and develop relationships, but let us not forget this is what network marketing is all about. If you are in network marketing you are in the business of developing and maintaining relationships. It is important not to pitch your business straight away to new contacts, but develop the relationship and trust first. Your profile gives you the perfect opportunity to showcase you and your business, just let that do the talking first and let your new contacts follow through themselves. I have personally enrolled new distributors into my mlm businesses using this approach, and the really sweet thing is I did not pay one single cent for them to be my lead!

 

• 2. Start a blog. A blog is an easy way to give yourself an online presence and is excellent for branding yourself. Demonstrate that you are a leader and know what you are talking about and prospects will be attracted to you. People join leaders, they do not join companies. Use your blog to brand and market YOU, not your company. Blogs enable you to get free traffic from the search engines. If you can provide valuable content that is indexed by the search engines you will be ranked in the organic listings. Why pay for ranking (ppc) when you can achieve high rankings for free clicks?

 

• 3. Article marketing. Write articles for distribution across the internet. You can publish your articles on your blog as well as numerous article directories. Ezine publishers are always looking for new content for their ezines and so when they use your article you get the exposure when your article is emailed to their lists. At the bottom of your article is a resource box or author bio which is where you can put your link back to your website. This is a completely free method which can, over time, as you submit more articles, result in an avalanche of free traffic to your website, hundreds of potential free leads.

In such a short article I cannot go into great depth and have only covered 3 free methods for generating leads for your mlm business. With methods like these it is really important to be consistent and follow your plan. Depending on your time available, a couple of articles submitted weekly, regular updates to your blog (fresh content!) and consistent relationship building on social networks, will, without doubt, result in much free traffic and new leads for your business.