A lot of people talk about 80/20 rules and apply them to situations. You’ll hear it often in business as well. In fact, you can also apply the same principle to your network marketing business; 20% will achieve network marketing success and 80% will always fail.

It is sad but very true, and it can all come down to a person’s ability to motivate themselves. In network marketing, this is particularly true because people suddenly become their own boss and can’t adjust to that responsibility.

Self motivation isn’t rocket science, but it is difficult for some people to grasp. To keep yourself motivated, it’s important to have a dream (or even a few). It could be some mansion in the hills, a red sports car, a boat or holiday somewhere special. Some people have many dreams, some short term and others long term. There will be times in your network marketing career when your confidence is low and you have to rely on yourself to get through those rough seas.  A dream or goal is a good place to start, but don’t have it as your only success tool.

It’s A Business So Treat It That Way

Planning is essential for any type of success, not just in business. A goal is just the ‘why’ part of your success, it’s the picture you keep on your wall at home to make promises to each night and remind yourself ‘why’ you’re working so hard. But what about the ‘how’?

In the second Pacific Rim edition of the Fundamentals of Management by Danny Samson and Richard L. Daft, their overview of the chapter on planning outlines examples of how sport applies plans to each individual’s game. It says that, ‘Without a game plan, a lot of random actions will occur, and players would be far less effective than those who have focussed on a plan and strategy.’

Start Your Plan Today

The best way to start a plan is to look at the way organizations do it and then try to apply it to your own situation. A common method is Management by Objectives and is defined by Wikiperia.org as the ‘process of agreeing upon objectives within an organization so that management and employees agree to the objectives and understand what they are in the organization.’

This could be tough when you’re your own boss, but it can be done. Here’s how:

Set Goals: Start with the question of what it is you are trying to accomplish? A goal should be a specific target with a time frame. Your goal could be a number of sales each week.

Develop an Action Plan: Don’t be unrealistic and set huge goals. Start off by working out what you need to achieve to be viable. Then, increase your goals as you grow in confidence. If you need to earn $1000 a week, then work that out in terms of sales and set that goal.

Review: Sit down at the halfway point (perhaps Wednesday if you’re looking at weekly action plans) and review your progress. If things need to be changed do so.

Appraise: Be tough with yourself when you go over your results. But don’t get to the point where you’re hurting your own confidence. The idea is to achieve you goals.

Once you’ve set your game plan, and gone through the process above, you put yourself in the league of the top 20% who will always do what’s necessary to achieve network marketing success.

Prospecting is a big part of network marketing and it means always maintaining a good quality list of people to contact. Running out of network marketing leads is like running out of oxygen in the marketing game, so do whatever you have to do to maintain that list of names. The internet has emerged as a bounty of contacts available for network marketing reps to generate leads. And, it’s a lot better than knocking on doors at random, too.

Here are 4 different ways to find some free network marketing leads on the Internet.

The Blogging Revolution

Blogging is one of the easiest ways to find some leads out there cyberspace. People create blogs for many reasons. Maybe it’s to get the word out there about a new idea they have, maybe it’s to generate income from advertising, or maybe they just feel like they have something to say. Maybe they are trying to offer people a business proposition… just like you are. And, if your blog is good enough, people just might turn to you en masse for information. We’re talking thousands of leads if that happens!

The e-Book Phenomenon

The use of e-books in communicating market opportunities has proliferated in recent years. It seems like everyone is doing it. Offering e-Books as part of a membership or through a website gives individuals and organizations the opportunity to build upon their existing databases of contacts. You’d be surprised how many people will offer their information for a free e-Book. If you don’t have the flair for writing your own content, simply outsource the writing component of your project. Make it clear that you own the articles at the completion of payment and they cannot be used again.

Building a Good Mailing List.

Most prospects won’t buy into any business opportunity based upon a first impression. You need to woo people. Woo them slowly so that they learn to trust you. After all, network marketing is a long term business. You don’t want to use unscrupulous tactics to force people into your network marketing business; it will only cost you as people find that they can’t trust you. You can build a solid relationship with your prospects using a series of follow up E-mail and can keep in touch with them to offer them promotions, tips and latest updates.

Article Writing and E-Zines

Another great way to generate network marketing leads is by creating articles and submitting them to E-zines or even newspapers and magazines. A google search will provide you with a list of E-zines and purchasing directories for the magazine and newspaper market. It’s important that you focus on the right publications for your submissions, so choose wisely.

All of these methods require sitting down and doing some planning. If you’re looking for a long term career in network marketing then that shouldn’t worry you at all. Take the time to look at what everyone else is doing with a quick search of the internet and then think about what you should do the same and what you should do differently to give you an edge.

Building downline is an essential key to network marketing success. For some people, downline comes easy like bees to flower, while for others it just seems to be a network marketing nightmare. To achieve network marketing success, downline building should be a part of your prospect planning, and by adding it to your action plan each week, you should get a good all rounded results.

While the more traditional forms of prospecting (holding group meetings, cold calling and approaching friends and family) might get you by, the real untapped resource right now is the Internet. This is simply because it is the medium people are turning to when they are searching for business opportunities. Think about it, is it better to approach someone when their defenses are up, or wait for them to approach you, wanting to know more about your business?

If you are leveraging on the Internet to market your network marketing business, there are six crucial steps you should follow to build your downlines, best of all, on automation.

1) Creating Lead Capture Page

Building a list of prospects is becoming an art form on the internet. This is done by incorporating an autoresponder within a web page that request for visitors to enter their name and email address, usually by giving away incentives such as a free ebook. Sometimes, it’s also called a landing page or a squeeze page. If your lead capture page converts well, you’ve potentially a 24/7 sales person helping you to build a mailing list of prospects, that you can then turn into your customers through continues communication via email.

2) Harnessing Traffic

Whether you are a shop front in a busy mall or an internet concept, you need people walking passed. It’s called traffic. Getting them to your lead capture page is what you should be good at. Of course, you want to build targeted mailing list, where people visiting your lead capture page opts-in because they want to get more information from you about your network marketing business.

3) Developing Relationships

Building a strong relationship is the key to successful lead conversion rates. People usually buy or join your network marketing business because they like you or trust you. This can be done by following up via email with your prospects that opted in to your mailing list through giving you their names and email addresses.

4) The Pitch

This is the moment, so don’t get it wrong. After you’ve successfully completed the first three steps above, it’s time for the pitch. It’s all about getting a person in the right frame of mind through pre-selling, not because you’re trying to sneak something under their guard, but because people are just so used to saying ‘no’. When your prospect believes in you, it’s time to ask for the sale.

5) Making The Sale

Don’t just settle for your network marketing product. There are plenty of other network marketing tools and courses you can offer to your prospects. Some of which can help them build their network marketing business. Thus, not only will it improve the quality of your downlines, it will also make you extra money in sales.

6) Automate It

The term sales funnel is often used and means exactly what it sounds like. By getting traffic to flow to your website you slowly feed them through your system and nothing spills out. Once you’ve got this thing activated, it just keeps going and going, generating endless leads for you. Once you’ve pushed the autopilot button on an automated site, you no longer have to worry about many of the things you used to and can concentrate on further building your network.

Internet and the process of automation has changed network marketing forever, it continues to evolve and there is no doubt that more changes are on the horizon, by leveraging on the Internet, it now makes building downline easily.