When it comes to choosing network marketing opportunities the term "buyer beware" should flash before your eyes. Enron was a publicly-traded company, subject to SEC rules and regulations ... yet, they STILL cooked the books. Same for Worldcom. When you see what these guys did despite all the legal regulation, how much stock can you put in the self-serving promotional statments put out by OTHER companies? It's surprising some people never question network marketing companies and their sales numbers and the amounts being made by distributors. You can't just innocently believe what they say. Now ... I'm sure some of them are telling the truth. But many don't. When a company quotes "retention rate," there are a hundred different ways to figure retention rate. It stands to reason that a company will figure it in a way that yields the result they like best. The only sane action for you is to choose a company based on results that YOU can see or that YOU can actually verify. When you dedicate your life to building your business with a company, you should actually interview a number of distributors with that company and ask about the work they do and the system they use and their actual earnings. Your best plan is to read any company-published promotion with a grain of salt.
Think about your real target market for new people to build your network marketing business. You have a lot of markets to choose from. Successful target the best prospects to mail to. And it's pretty expensive when you make a mistake of mailing to a poorly-targeted list. Successful mailers say that what makes money isn't the mailing piece they send out - it is the names on the list they mail to. You'll probably think this is weird, but the top criteria to be able to predict whether a person will buy is, has this person bought the same thing before? I know that seems very counterintuitive, but it is the truth. Mail order pros only send their mailings to prospects who have already bought the exact same thing, or something very similar. Why would that work? Because you are dealing with someone who has raised their hand and identified themself as a person interested in exactly what you are selling. In network marketing are NOT the general public. %Instead for the opportunity that will give them the success they want.
You can get more details on this information, plus a lot more in Michael Dlouhy's ebook, "Success In 10 Steps." The book has been in great demand from frustrated network marketers, having been downloaded 100,000 times now. Dlouhy especially focuses in on the idea promoted by so many companies that you should begin by recruiting friends and family. That's a recipe for disaster. The high MLM failure rate means you'll wind up with a lot of family members upset or angry with you, and that's not good. Besides, anyone who has big MLM success eventually has to promote to a cold market anyway. So you may as well start there. Your friends & family will be calling you, after you've proven you can build a profitable business. The book is full of very useful ideas.
