So I want to talk about the five mistakes I made when I started network marketing, and hopefully with this video/article, I’ll save you guys some headaches and grief and some wasted time by sharing my five top mistakes that I’ve made when I started network marketing back in 2014.
Five – Unrealistic Expectations
So number five is unrealistic expectations. So when I started network marketing, I had no clue how many leads I needed or even how to generate a lead. So I knew I had a landing page to share. And I knew I would get a lead if someone would sign up on my page – that I knew, but I didn’t know the conversion rate of those leads.
I didn’t know how many leads it would take to get one sign up and when I got on a company call one weekend, this woman said that she generated 40 leads over the weekend, and to me that just blew my mind. Because I was so naive when I started network marketing that I thought every lead was going to sign up as a distributor, I was that naive.
So I really thought that that would mean that she would get 40 new signups. I really didn’t know what a lead was. I knew it was a prospect. But I thought since they signed up on the form that they’re really interested and I thought they would all sign up.
Later I found out the real numbers, and if you’re dealing with the cold market, people that don’t know you and and you’re sharing your landing page on the internet and you’re getting leads from the internet. people you don’t know, the conversion rate, the average conversion rate is 2%.
So if you’re lucky, I mean, sometimes it’s 1%. If you’re buying old leads, or crappy leads from Fiverr, it could be a .02 percent. So you’re looking at the average, the average is 2%. So that means two signups out of 100 leads. And it took me about three to six months to realize that I needed to generate like 20 leads a day to get maybe two to four signups a week if I was lucky.
Then later I found out that not all leads are created equal, and I started to get better signups from my blog, because people were finding my articles reading it and they were ready to buy or join because they were searching for a new MLM opportunity and I wrote articles about new MLM opportunities. So it lined up great with new prospects, and they would sign up. So that was Mistake number one. We’ll call that the fifth step.
Four – Money-Driven, Not People-Driven
Moving on to the fourth step. The fourth mistake is I was money driven, not people driven. So when a lot of people, when they start network marketing, they just want to make money. They’re like, I don’t care about you, or Tim or Bob, I just want to make money.
A lot of people think it’s like a lottery ticket, and they’re just like, let me get the money, and they’re still being focused on themselves. They’re being self centered, and that’s how normally the business world works is that you know, the corporate world, people step over each other to get to the top. It’s all about me, me, me.
But network marketing is counterintuitive. You actually want to help your team succeed before you do. I didn’t know that and I didn’t care. I was an ex alcoholic, self centered, just thought about myself and I needed money. So I signed up in network marketing and I was like, where’s the money and realized that, you know, I had to recruit people.
Okay, I learned how to do that. I started generating 20 leads a day and I was getting some good signups working my way up to maybe four signups a week. But I didn’t reach out to my team. I didn’t give them any tools, I gave them a welcome letter that was kind of really long and hard to implement and It wasn’t duplicatable.
I experimented with different welcome letters for my team, but I never reached out, I never called them, and they couldn’t copy what I did. They didn’t want to blog. They didn’t want to do YouTube. But I thought I could make good money just by recruiting a lot of people.
But it turns out, I can make a lot more money by teaching my team how to recruit their own people and get duplication. So, I also learned that Zig Ziglar’s famous quote is, if you help enough people succeed, you can have all the success you want. So you help people first in network marketing, it’s all about a network.
But I tried doing it as an affiliate marketer, just getting tons of traffic to my websites, without really any human contact and I didn’t make any money because I was chasing the money. You’ll get more money when you do what you love. The money is just a byproduct of what you love doing. Because if you just do any business for just money, you’re going to burn out before you make money.
People are going to see right through you. They’re not going to sign up with you if they sense that you’re just after the money, you have to have a goal, you have to have a mission and the mission has to involve a team. You want to help a team get to the finish line in network marketing. You have to be passionate and you want to help people.
I was a lone wolf in network marketing. It was all about me, me, me. I was in fight or flight. I was pretty new to sobriety and just thought about myself. I was decent with internet marketing, so I thought I could just do that with being a network marketer. But it’s a people’s business.
And I hate to say it, but, you know, I’m still learning how to deal with people and be more compassionate and caring and reach out to people more and build friendships. So that’s pretty much the journey of network marketing.
As Eric Worre once said, network marketing will either reward you or punish you, depending on your past, and network marketing definitely punished me because it mirrored who I was. And I was, like I said, a selfish, self centered person in fight or flight who just wanted money.
I got punished because people didn’t join me. They didn’t reach out. I didn’t reach out to them and it was very hard in the beginning. Moving on to mistake number three.
Three – Impatience
I didn’t have any patience. People always told me that network marketing was a three to five year plan, and sometimes it was even longer – seven to 10 years before you get success in network marketing.
I watched a lot of great network marketing success stories where the guys were like, yeah, I struggled for eight years until it took off. And I didn’t really want to hear that I wanted it to take off within a year.
I was always impatient with my blogs and my YouTube. I was constantly deleting or changing my articles around on my blog, and that screwed up the SEO on my blog, and then I had all these broken backlinks because I was deleting articles and changing them around. Then I was deleting YouTube videos and then I would know, I was just all over the place trying new things.
Deleting these things and, you know, the impatience was working against me. You know, I would grow something, I would start to grow something pretty good, then I’d be like, Oh, no, that’s not working and just delete it all and start over. And every time I deleted something, it hindered my SEO. It made it worse. My blog started to get less traffic because I was changing it around. All my marketing, I was changing around and trying new things. There is no one secret in network marketing.
A lot of new people that join network marketing, they’re like, what’s the secret? There is no secret. It’s hard, consistent action every single day, for many years, until you start building a team and you get the mindset of a leader.
But people are like, what’s the secret? Like it’s just gonna instantly or they think that if they sign up with a big leader, that they’re going to instantly have the same success as the big leader. However, that leader has been in 10 different MLM companies in the last 30 years.
They know what they’re doing. They have teams already established from many, many years of relationship building. So, if you don’t have a following or contacts, you’re not going to get the success that these 30 year veterans are having.
You have to put in the hard work in the beginning, just like everyone else, I mean, I’ve been doing this for six years straight, and it’s still a daily grind. You know, and I’ve recruited over 1800 people, and you still have to keep recruiting because people quit.
You have to keep recruiting and recruiting and recruiting and teach people a duplicatable system so they stay in and start getting a paycheck. You want people to get a paycheck. That’s one of the last points I’ll get to.
Two – Have a Simple System
So number two. The second mistake is I didn’t have a simple system for my team to copy. It wasn’t until two years into network marketing that someone on my team was generating lots of leads and getting signups and I was like, Hey, what are you using? He’s like, oh, Craigslist. And I was like, Really? I thought we couldn’t do MLM on Craigslist. He’s like, Well, I’m not doing MLM I’m doing, CBD. I said, Can I use your ad? And he’s like, yeah, so I was like, great.
This is the first thing that I showed my team that anyone can do, and that worked great for about two years. I had several people on my team running ads every single day and our team was blowing up.
But then I started to get a lot of objections from people because they’re like, they didn’t have any extra money for Craigslist. It’s like $20 to $45 an ad, and there were a lot of people that were like, I’m sorry, I don’t have any extra money for ads. So I’m like crap, what am I going to do? I need something that my whole team can do.
Then, I realized that most of the big leaders in network marketing have free prospecting techniques for their team. Typically Facebook scripts, or how to grow your team on facebook, facebook is free. Most of the leaders tell you to just blast this message to everyone you know, and they give you a script, and everyone can do it because everyone’s on Facebook. That is the fastest way to grow your team. It’s free. It’s Facebook.
I just don’t use Facebook, so I always avoided it. But, you know, most of the leaders just use Facebook. So that’s free. So, if I had a system back in 2014, if I had scripts, and I had a Facebook business page that people could plug into a training page, like a lot of leaders will have a private Facebook group. And when you sign up with a leader, they allow you to join the private Facebook group. And then there’s all the scripts you need to grow your business on Facebook or other social media inside that private training.
So I didn’t have that back in 2014. I was using Twitter. People were using Facebook, I was on Twitter, and Twitter did work for me. But I was following like 1000 people a day to get that direct message out to enough people to get signups and it wasn’t duplicatable, you know if I told people to follow 200 people a day, they might try it for a week. Then be like, I don’t want to do that.
So you have to have a very simple lead generation system for your team. And the simpler, the better if you can get your whole team doing the same thing, that’s the other mistake is that people just start doing their own thing, and then pretty soon your whole organization they’re doing, you know, a group over here is doing this technique, a group over here is doing that technique, a group over here is doing this.
Your organization is not going to grow as fast if everyone’s doing their own thing. So try to get your whole team plugged into a training portal. It could be a Facebook group, it could be video training. You can create a playlist of training videos like I do, so my team can just pick what video they want to watch. I teach them how to generate leads on Google, Bing, YouTube, Facebook, you know, and they can choose.
So I didn’t have that system in the beginning. Yeah, I was just all over the place. And I was looking for the secret just like a lot of newbies. So the very last mistake number one is duplication. It’s also called GTR. Get them results.
One – Duplication
So you want your team to recruit their own people. You don’t really have duplication until the people you recruit, recruit their own people because the name of the game in network marketing is duplication. Like you can’t recruit enough people by yourself and make a ton of money, you have to recruit people that learn how to recruit their own people.
You want to recruit Business Builders, people that want to build a team under you. That’s where all the income is. So if you get, let’s say you bring in Bob. Now, if you teach Bob how to recruit just two to four people, then those four people can turn into 8 and so forth, and it can multiply and you can get exponential growth.
But you have to teach Bob a very simple lead generation technique, and then you get to see that he recruits someone, you want to get your team results, you want each new distributor that joins you, you should really overlook them, and follow up with them and teach them a way that they can start getting their own people within a week or two. Get them results. That’s number one you want duplication.
When I first started, I could recruit four to 10 people a month. But my income was still very small because no one on my team was building their own teams under me. The money is when you get hundreds and thousands of people on your team all doing something, that’s when you can start making 10,000 a month 20,000 a month 50,000 a month and up is because you have people on your team that are building their own teams.
You’re not gonna get that just bringing in customers and promoting the products. I lead with the business opportunity. I want people that want extra money, which is pretty much everyone. But if I lead with the product and say, Hey, join this, this is the best CBD oil out there. They’re gonna be like, Oh, I can buy that down at the gas station. Why should I join you?
And then you get into product debates and then you have to convince them to join you because your CBD is better than their gas station CBD. I don’t do product debates and I don’t convince anyone to join me. If anyone is like, Oh yeah, why should I join you? What’s so good about your CBD oil? They won’t hear from me. I just move on to the next person. It’s not about the products.
I mean, it was about CBD when it first launched because it was brand new to the mainstream, and everyone was buying it. My business exploded. But they were just customers, and most of them are gone now because they weren’t network marketers.
I want network marketers on my team, and network marketers can move any product because they lead with the business income opportunity. It’s about making extra money. It’s not about your fancy product. People are like, I don’t care about skin cream, I need an extra $500 a month. That’s what I need. That’s how most people are.
So I never lead with the product unless it’s a weight loss product and I can document my weight loss. Sure. You know, I’ll plug in my diet shake opportunity if it’s a diet video, if I’m talking about getting shredded and losing weight. I’ll put my link under there for the diet shakes.
But mostly, I want people that are looking for an automated MLM that they just need to generate leads to and they can get signups and make extra money. That’s my thing is to automate an MLM as much as possible because most people are busy. And if you make it look really hard, they’re not gonna really want to sign up with you. Like, if you’re doing all this really complicated long webinars and long emails every day to them, they’re not gonna sign up because they’re gonna be like, oh, wow, I have to do that to grow my business?
You want to make it so simple that anyone’s gonna go, Oh, I can do that. Oh, you just post an image on your Facebook, I can do that. You gotta keep it really simple. If you’re like, hey, let’s get on some three ways and then you gotta do this 10 page script. And you know, do all this, you know, they’re gonna quit or ignore you.
So I like to keep it really simple and that gets duplication. And that’s where all the money is. It’s not what you do, it’s what your team does. So I hope this helps. That’s the five mistakes I made. Hopefully I shave some time off of your learning curve.
