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.

Gone are the days where a network marketer has to scramble for business cards and search for network marketing prospects in the real world. If you want to increase the number of downlines for your network marketing business, you simply learn the art of online prospecting. Internet is a gold mine only for those who know how to harvest its vast resources.

In general, there are two ways to get prospects on the Internet – The free ways and the paid ways. Both ways are equally effective, it is usually dependent on how fast you want to see results, and your budget to determine which approach you are more comfortable with.

Free prospecting techniques usually consist of forum posting, organic search results, article directory submission, blogging, viral marketing, free press release and more.

Paid techniques on the other hand usually consists of Pay Per Click (PPC), CPA advertising, paid banner advertising, sponsored reviews, paid press releases, Co-registration lists, outsourcing and more.

Most people tends to start with free online prospecting or traffic generation techniques because they are testing it out and do not have the stomach for monetary risk. For a start, you can register for a free blog and drive traffic there using the free techniques. However, you should at least invest in your own domain name for branding purpose. Using blog is also a great way to get exposed on the search engines just for posting about your network marketing product or to showcase yourself as an expert in the industry – especially for longer tailed keywords with lesser competition. You can even get additional traffic by submitting your blog articles to article directories, participate in forum and also commenting on other people’s blogs.

When you have made some money using the free techniques, you can start investing in paid traffic. One of the biggest advantages of paid online prospecting techniques is that you can get as much traffic as you want. With Google AdWords for example, you can get traffic in as quickly as 15-minutes to half an hour.  You can also invest in banner advertising on other people’s blogs or websites. You can even sponsor bloggers to write a product review for you.

When you have the traffic going to your blog, you must be sure to capture their names and email addresses in exchange for free e-book or special report that is highly related to your network marketing product. You can then send them a series of follow up emails to pre-sell your business opportunity, and when the time is right, they will in turn become your long term partners.