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.

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.

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.

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.

Many people are in network marketing game for the wrong reasons. They give it a try because they thought they wouldn’t have to sell anything. After all, the advertisement they responded to said,’ No selling’.

No selling doesn’t mean you just sit at home and watch television, though. It should, but is doesn’t…sadly. Life is about selling something to someone else. It doesn’t matter what game you’re in. You will have to close a sale. You could even be at home and have to sell; whether it’s a case of asking a neighbor to come over for dinner, phoning your boss to ask if you can take a vacation or even one of the kids crying because they want an iPhone like everyone else has. Everybody is trying to sell the result they want.

You’re selling an idea when you ask that special person on a date, or when you go to a job interview and want to convince the recruitment officer that you fit the essential criteria for that dream career you’ve always wanted. You’re even selling when you suggest a movie to friend. Humans are born to communicate and negotiate. We’re born to sell. It’s just that you need to understand the different ways it’s done.

Learning to sell the correct way isn’t rocket science. However, you still need to be prepared to put some work into it.

It’s all a matter of continuous improvement; you have to be ready to sell, you have to be prepared to learn and you have to be willing to teach. When you have that done, maybe you can get the kid’s those iPhones.

First things first, you need a great concept or a killer angle. You network marketing business can work no matter what it is you are selling. However, if it’s a great product, life can be so much easier.

Selling a business brand to someone can be challenging and is not helped by some low-brow selling techniques employed by unscrupulous marketers. You don’t need to try and build pressure to sell something. People will buy from you because they like you, not because you’ve managed to back them into a corner.

Once you’ve created an honest and compelling picture of your brand and yourself, you’ll find it easier to convert prospects into sales. Don’t allow yourself to believe that people don’t like to buy things. It’s the opposite that is true; people love to be sold to. It’s just that they want to deal with someone they can trust.

After you’ve converted a prospect, you need to teach them the same things that you’ve learned. This will motivate them. Developing sales techniques and helping them all to learn from their experiences is part of developing teams in your network marketing business. Then, when you have created a sales powerhouse, you need to maintain it. From there, network marketing success will be at your fingertip with sales figures blossoming and your team will be a force to be reckoned with. Oh, and iPhones for everybody!

On the hind side, some of the common things that a network marker does in order to be successful in their MLM business, includes but not limited to:

• Making a list of friends and family to promote the product / business to
• Doing one-on-one business presentation
• Do cold calling
• Sending postcards
• Hold home parties
• Hold seminar at hotel for business opportunity / recruitment talks

The key to success, and also the objective of doing the tasks listed above, is to build a network of people who are committed to building the business. However, the time and effort required can be substantial especially in the first two years of starting the MLM business. Not forgetting the emotional stress when faced with rejections.

With the Introduction of the Internet, the traditional MLM business model has somewhat evolved. Still reaping the benefit of both passive recurring income and time freedom, with this new Internet MLM model, it has made communication border-less, much faster and a whole lot cheaper. Thus, an Internet Network Marketer NO LONGER has to:

• Depend on the list of friends and family members as prospects
• Do cold calling to prospects where even one second seems like an eternity
• Attending meetings after meetings
• Doing long hours of presentations that might end with rejections
• Spending time traveling to meet with prospects

All that the Internet Network Marketer does is just simply spending around 1 to 2 hours a day, right in front of a computer, doing Internet marketing and promoting his affiliate website. No longer is the network marketer restricted by his physical presence to build his network, and best of all, he need not look for prospects, instead interested prospects will look for him asking for more information.

Internet MLM business is truly an attractive Home Based Business, that allows you to work from home at you own leisure, even if you are still in your pajamas. It allows you to achieve success without the limitation of time, distance and your physical self, but simply by the Internet marketing skill that you acquire and put into action, which can easily be taught and learnt.