All right, so here’s the deal. You want to start a network marketing business. I got all the tips and strategies for you. So stay till the very end because we’re going to drop some nuggets and you’re going to get a lot out of this.
So I’ve been doing network marketing since 2014. I designed a business that I wanted. I was an introvert. I was a recluse. I didn’t have a warm market. I didn’t have friends and family that I wanted to talk to about my business.
So this is what I did. I went right into the cold market, aka strangers. I went on the internet, and I got people in my business. In fact, over 1600 people have joined me in the last six years. I didn’t know a single soul.
So how did I do that? You gotta cast your net out very large if you want to get a lot of fish, right? So this is what you do. You brand you, you’re the brand, okay? Because products come and go and companies come and go. So you got to stay light, you got to stay nimble. You have to stay on top of the game.
The industry is great, it’s empowering. But there can be drama. Companies sue each other, and big distributors quit companies. You know, it’s just like any other industry, things happen. So you’re the brand because you are never going to defeat yourself. You’re never going to quit on yourself. You’re the brand.
When you brand yourself, you can promote any product, any company, even if they’re changing, because you are still YOU. So cast your net out there. How do you do that? You put your name on every social media platform. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram. You do all of those platforms. You can even use the same profile if you want. Then you put your link to your opportunity under every profile. Okay?
Start a blog. It could be a one page blog, make it nice. You’re gonna have a bio on that blog. It’s going to talk about what you do and what you did, and why you turned to network marketing. And again, put your opportunity link at the bottom of your bio so they have a place to go and check out your business.
That’s how I generated most of my leads. It was a blog or some kind of lead capture magnet on my blog and I generated leads. They found me on the internet.
So that’s the other thing is that you want people to come to you. You don’t want to be pushing your opportunity on people. You don’t want to be stalking people on Facebook. You don’t want to be emailing old leads. You don’t want to be calling numbers out of the phone book. That’s not how you grow your business.
You know, I tried that for like the first year. I pushed my opportunity on people. That’s not how you build a business. It’s not sustainable. That’s what gives MLM a bad name – people pushing their opportunity on people that aren’t really looking.
Yeah, you’ll get signups if you do that enough, but how many people did you piss off to do that? So this is what I did. I created content. I created videos like this. I created a website, I started writing articles, and then they started to find me. It took about two years for people to start finding me.
So it’s not easy. That’s why the leaders say start with your warm market in the very beginning, they say talk to your friends and family. Get them in, because they’re the easiest market to get in, because they know, like, and trust you.
You want people to like you. You want to get trust. So if you do enough of anything, people are gonna start to trust you. They’re gonna start to follow you. So you want to stay consistent. You don’t want to just come in and post once a week and then leave for two weeks. You don’t want to just be erratic because people will be like, Where did you go? He was doing great. He was posting a video every day and then he disappeared for two months.
So you want to be consistent. It’s gonna take time. You just do one hour a day. That’s all I do. Every single day I’m adding a little bit more to my content. It’s equity. It’s equity in content.
All of these little pieces of videos and blog articles and Facebook posts, whatever, LinkedIn posts, Pinterest boards, all of these are little crab pots, and they’re collecting leads around the clock. All right, every piece of content you have is a crab pot collecting crabs, aka prospects. So get enough crab pots out there, and you’ll start getting leads around the clock.
In the meantime, while your content is growing, because it will take a while, you can do paid advertising. Get that ball rolling, generate leads, work your way up to 50 leads a day. All right, stretch your imagination, stretch your perception on what you think it needs, what it requires to grow your business.
When I first started, I thought three leads was a lot. You know, this woman was on our company call over the weekend, and she was like, Yeah, I generated 40 leads over the weekend, and this was like my first six months in network marketing. I was like 40 leads. That’s crazy!
Now, 40 leads is nothing, I could generate 200 leads a day – and I’ve generated over 60,000 leads since I’ve been in network marketing. So structure the blueprint of what you think you need to grow your business. Grant Cardone said that you need to lower your expectations and greatly increase your output.
When he got sober, he put all his energy into his business. He wrote 700 articles, did 1000 videos and wrote five books in like eight months, and today he’s worth $300 million. He put all that energy into it.
So you got to really want this. This isn’t some little weekend hobby thing. If you want to make good money in network marketing. You have to be everywhere. You have to be seen and heard everywhere, because you want to capture a tribe. These are devoted fans. These are people that will buy anything you suggest. It takes time because you have to establish trust.
So, I’m all about the cold market. I’m not about bugging friends and family. I’m not working 14 hours a day on non-income producing activities. You know, spending three hours on making an image for an article or a thumbnail for your video is ridiculous. Just put it up there. Don’t even look at your stuff.
I watch my videos just to make sure that the sound is working and I publish it because every single time I am working on myself more. I’m refining my message. I’m going to tell you guys every single day, if you’ve been watching my channel for a while, you’ve heard this message hundreds of times, but I’m gonna keep saying it because it helps me refine my message.
And one day, I’ll have a video that goes viral, semi viral and gets thousands of likes. It might take two years. Might take five years. But all it takes is one big video. One big article. If you don’t believe me, I had one article quadruple my income in about six months. One article. This is 2018. Our company just launched CBD oil.
No one was really writing about it. So I was like alright, I’m gonna do a CBD MLM review. And I found two other companies that were selling CBD. There weren’t many, especially network marketing. There’s only three I could find at the time I reviewed all three. I didn’t bash them. It was just an honest neutral review – somewhat neutral because at the very bottom, I said take a free tour in our number one CBD MLM business.
That link led to my landing page to my company, which then captures a person’s info and then they start getting emails from the company. It’s all set up for us. The sales funnel is already set up for us. All I gotta do is generate leads.
So people read the review. They read the review when they found it on Google, and guess what happened? I started getting signups every day, because they found me first when they were looking for CBD. They we’re looking for a company to join that had CBD oil. I had that article and it was ranking on Google. They found it.
One day I got eight signups and didn’t talk to anyone. I had hundreds of people sign up with me the next year. I didn’t talk to any of them. I sent them a welcome letter, because you want to get your reps going. You want to teach them your number one lead generation technique, because it’s all about leads. You have to get leads for the next three to five years consistently.
You got to teach your team how to generate their own leads. Then hopefully after two to five years, your content is getting leads for you, so you’re not spending hundreds of dollars every week posting ads and doing pay per click.
The leaders do this, they all do it. So if you want to be a leader, you have to create content, and you have to cast out your net big. You have to be everywhere. You have to be on all social media platforms. You have to have a blog, you have to have a YouTube.
And here’s the thing with YouTube. You don’t have to do product videos. Don’t do that. That’s spammy and scammy – people don’t care about your products. Okay? Now you can document your weight loss. Let’s say that you do a product that’s great for weight loss or your skin. It’s okay to document that with video. That’s fine. But don’t do a video that sounds like an infomercial for your products. No one cares about your products. They care about your life and how you’re transforming.
So become the product of the product, but I don’t even talk about my products anymore. I talked about CBD for a little bit in 2018 and I got slapped by our compliance department. I had to delete hundreds of pieces of content about CBD because I was talking about the benefits. And that’s a big no no.
I don’t care what company you’re in. If you’re saying that your product can cure cancer, you’re gonna get fired, or the FDA is gonna come after you. So I don’t touch products. It doesn’t matter. They’re all good. They’re all good in MLM because that’s what makes MLM companies grow. If they have a crappy product, they’re not going to last.
So, I talked about the income. I talked about the business. I talked about everyone needing extra income, and our business is turnkey. Okay. These are some keywords: it’s turnkey. You can earn up to 50% commissions. There’s an automated email recruiting system that helps you recruit, there’s a high definition landing page, cutting edge products, paid weekly, and monthly car bonus.
That’s what people want. They want money. They want a new car, they want a new house. They want to not work so hard at a dead end job. That’s what I promote, and I can talk about that all day long.
And if I lose weight on a product, I’ll document it. I did a video two weeks ago about getting down to 179 pounds for the first time in five years. I was excited. So I did a video about it. But I wasn’t holding it up saying this is the best product in the whole world. That’s what MLM newbies do. They make the industry look bad because they think that their product is so life changing and it’s ridiculous.
They think if they bend the truth more, they’ll make more money. Then they get into ridiculousness with their claims. And they’re like, Oh, this product has changed my life. No one wants to hear that crap. Do you really talk about other products you buy that way? You know, the coffee you buy on Amazon? Do you do videos about it and say, this coffee has changed my life. No, you don’t do that.
Now you can recommend it to friends if they ask. But don’t just be like, but you gotta try this. It changed my life. No one talks that way. So if you’re doing that crap, stop it. Because it’s fake and you look desperate.
Someone messaged me on facebook last week. Mind you, I don’t use Facebook at all for my business, and I hate it when I get random messages. That’s the other thing that makes MLM look bad is that most sponsors tell their downline to just plaster everyone on Facebook, some random message saying, you know, Hey Erik, it’s been a while. I was just curious if you would be open to extra side income working from home.
It’s like Dude, I don’t even know you. I can’t believe I even followed you. You haven’t talked to me ever, and we’ve been friends for five years. And you’re just randomly saying, if I’m looking for extra income, yeah, Get the f out of here. You know, I blocked them.
I don’t have any tolerance for people like that. And yeah, you’re probably going wow Erik, it was just a message, and I’m like no, because they don’t want to be friends with me. It’s annoying. All they want to do is get me in their business.
If you want to get me in your business, just say,` Hey, I heard you’re a leader Erik, you want to join my team? Just say that – don’t be all like we haven’t talked and you’re in my network. Are you looking for extra income? You know? No, don’t do that.
If you want to see all the MLM hate out there because of that crap, look up anti-MLM and you’ll find hundreds of videos, people bashing MLM because it’s been done wrong.
I have the new school network marketing for you, and it’s called attraction marketing and you attract people to you. It takes longer than spamming and being desperate, but it’s done ethically, and people come to you. It’s the best feeling in the world to have people come up to me, not come up to me literally, but they messaged me, or they just signed up.
But they come to me. They’re like, hey, Erik, so how’s this thing working out for you? And I’m like, great sign up. Really? Is it good? Do you think it’s gonna last? I’m like, yeah, it’s good. Sign up. I’m in it. That’s easy as it gets, right? Half a minute, and then they sign up.
You know, I have people they’re like, yeah, so I’ve been looking at the comp plan and the products. How do your products differ from other companies’ products? And then I say I don’t do product debates. Our products are great – sign up.
Then I don’t hear from them for a day, and then boom, they sign up. Because I don’t play their game. I don’t go, you know, ours is made with farm cold pressed barley grains and no one else has that. I don’t get into product debates. They’re all good, just say that they’re all good, because you’re signing up with the person, you’re not signing up for the products, you’re signing up for a leader that will take you to the finish line.
That’s what you want. Doesn’t matter what kind of CBD it is, or what kind of you know, diet shake it is. Well, sometimes it does, but I’m not going to talk about it. I’m not going to email more than three sentences. And I don’t like the phone. I don’t want to be on the phone, if someone’s like, hey, let me call you up, I got some questions. I’m like, here’s a video. email them a YouTube link. Because I don’t want to get on the phone.
I designed my business my way, and that’s how you can do it too. If you like being on the phone, slap up your phone number everywhere, if that’s what you want. But you’re gonna get tons of people from India calling you asking if you want a website design.
So I partly do my business this way because I don’t want to be spammed. I get five emails a day from India, and I block them – every single one I block. So these are all fresh from new people. And they all want to do my website design.
You know, a couple years ago, it was SEO – they we’re all SEO consultants in India and Pakistan, wherever. Now they’re all website designers. And I don’t like spam. I want my inbox empty. I have like 10 emails saved in my inbox. Some emails go all the way back to like 2016. I got like 10. That’s it.
So when I get a new email, I really know I got a new email. It’s not buried with spam emails, because what if I get an important email? I don’t want it buried with spam because then I’m like, Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t see your email because I get 100 spam emails every day.
No, you want to stay on top of that. Just like you clean your house. You don’t want dishes piled high in your kitchen. You want to stay up on top of it. Isn’t it easier to wash a pan right after you use it? Then you have only one dish, but if you postpone it, and you don’t do dishes for a month, guess what? You have to spend four hours doing dishes on a Sunday. And it wipes you out and then you’re pissed off and then Monday you got to go back to work and you’re mad because you had to do chores Sunday. No, stay up on top of it, stay organized.
So that’s network marketing for you. You gotta be yourself and you gotta be unique. Why should people join you? There’s hundreds and thousands of people in your company. Why should they pick you? They pick me because they know I like to automate my MLM as much as possible.
They’re busy professionals. They don’t want to spend more than one hour a day on their business. It’s hard work, I’m saying you still have to be consistent and work at it every day, but once you get a library of content up you know the equity I was talking about, content is equity, once you a library of content up, and it’s generating leads for you, then you can scale it back to one hour a day.
But in the beginning, yeah, you should do everything, get your leads up to 50 a day, and don’t just go over to Fiverr and buy 100 leads. Those are crap. If you join my team, I have the best lead generation tips for you. I’m not gonna give you crap because I want you to succeed.
So you sign up with me. I give you what works. But you have to follow everything, because if you do something wrong, and it costs you $200 in one day, you can’t blame me. Because I tell you exactly how to do it. You can spend $5 a day, you can spend $30, you can spend whatever you want.
But you have to do it right, marketing takes skill. The other thing is once you get your business going and it pays, you can be watching these guys go into work at 8am monday morning and you’re just on a walk. That’s the beauty of network marketing. I get paid every single month from work I did years ago. It’s called residual income. That’s the whole reason to do network marketing. So you can get your life back.
Who wants to go out right now and wear a mask at a job? I mean that sounds horrendous. I mean, look at this. I mean, this is my backyard. I’m just walking with you guys talking. If you do enough videos, you’re gonna get really good. You’re gonna refine your message. Just keep doing it. Just keep doing it, and you will get a very refined message. And YouTube will say, this video is great. People are watching over 60% of it, and it’s got 2000 likes. We’re going to put it at the very top.
Pretty rare but it does happen, there’s some MLM videos out there that have over 500,000 views. Just think if like 1% or half a percent of those people signed up with that guy or that girl, they’d have thousands of people on their team just from one YouTube video, just like my article, eight sign ups in one day. I didn’t talk to one of them. They found me first.
That gets you away from the tacky, spammy, pushy MLM that is so prevalent still today. I don’t want any part of that. I don’t want to be on the list of the anti-MLM haters. They won’t find anything on me because I’m not making product claims, or making medical claims.
I’m not on Facebook all day randomly messaging people saying, Hey, we haven’t talked before, but would you be interested in extra income if it didn’t interfere with what you’re already doing? I mean, I’m like, Where did you get that script from? Is that Ray Higdon? They’re like, Oh, no, no, I made that up. I’m like, Okay. All right, buddy.
No, you don’t want any, you know, screw scripts. You don’t need scripts. You need to be you and be real and create content every day. I mean, I’m getting this out of the way early. I’m going for a walk. I love walking. I’m getting this video done. If you work just three hours a day for the next 10 years you’d have 10,000 hours. Malcolm Gladwell says that’s what it takes to become a master – you would be a master in 10 years if you do three hours a day – and right when you get enough money, quit your job.
Start doing this full time. Study the Masters, watch my videos, and then watch Eric Worre’s videos and then watch Todd Falcone videos and then watch Matt Morris videos, take notes and then shoot your own videos. That’s what I did. The first 200 videos sucked and I deleted them eventually, because I was like, Oh, I can speak way more authoritatively now. I have more experience. I’m going to redo those videos. But don’t delete them. You know? Don’t delete any of them. I deleted several I wish I didn’t – leave them all up.
I watched this other guy. He’s not about network marketing. He’s a young guy, and he talks about sobriety. Don’t ever prejudge anyone you know, because I was like, Oh, he’s just a kid. He can’t teach me anything. But I’ve been learning a lot from him, and he’s got 2200 videos. Grant Cardone has 4800 videos. What if you did three videos a day? You’d have 1000 videos in one year, you’re bound to have a couple of gems in there.
And then yeah, leave them up or do whatever but thousand videos working for you. If you have a link to your opportunity under each video, don’t just say thanks for watching. lead them somewhere. Say Hey, click the link under this video, check out what I’m doing. At least have a link under your video. Sometimes you don’t even have to mention it. They’ll just find it. You do enough videos you can experiment.
Some days you don’t have to say anything. Just leave the link and they’ll find it, other days say check out what I’m doing. Click the link under this video. It’s your call.
When you create a lot of content, you’re the boss of it, you own it. That’s what’s exciting. I can go back in, I can change blog articles around, I can change my header. I can delete links and change links and add internal links and External links and I can change titles on my videos.
I can change whole product lines with just changing one website link, because I have free MLM tour com. So let’s say something happened to my company. This is back to branding yourself and what if something happens to your company, you don’t have to change if the company goes down.
All I have to do is go back in and change that link. Go back into free MLM tour. dot com and change it to a new company, and that would instantly change probably 300 locations. So when you do a lot of content, don’t worry if something happens to your company, just change the link.
So buy a generic link that you can forward your opportunity link to. I can do that on my blog, I can change companies in five minutes on my blog, change two links in the notification bar at the top and the pop up and I’m done. That’s the other reason you don’t want to really mention product names.
Going back to the CBD oil, I had to delete 100 articles and tweets and videos and that’s why I like to stay away from products. You know something could happen, they could change the formula and you hate it. You know, if you’re doing a diet shake, have a backup, have a backup diet shape company, so if something happens to the first one just do a little switcheroonie and put in your second one, and that’s internet marketing.
You can’t just be a network marketer these days, you have to be everything. You have to be a content creator. You got to be a YouTuber. You have to get really good at Pay Per Click ads and Facebook and whatever else. You have to do the designing, the marketing, the advertising. You have to do that because you’re the brand. I’m Erik Christian Johnson, I am not just a distributor.
If any company was like, Hey, you can’t do that because, you know, you work for us and you can’t say that and I’ll say, All right, I’m not going to work with you, then I’m going to do it my way.
I’m in one company, and they’re like, Oh, you can’t use pay per click ads for it. And I really wanted to stay in the company so I got over it. I was like, Alright, the only way I can promote this company is with YouTube videos. That’s fine.
But normally, I’d be like, Alright, well, I’m out. I’m not doing your company. If we can’t use pay per click how do you grow your business? It’s like oh, Well, we just want you to talk to your family and get them in and two friends. I’m like, isn’t that spammy? Isn’t it better to use Pay Per Click ads and get strangers that are already looking for a product like yours? They’re like, sorry, compliance said you can’t run ads. Like Alright, okay. I’ll do videos.
I’ll lose massive weight and become the product. I’ll become the product because I love these products. I’ll do a pay per click for my other companies, that’s fine.
So I hope you got something out of this video/article. You got to be everywhere and you have to be unique and you don’t want to be salesy. The best way to do that is create content. And eventually they’ll come to you and build it and they will come. That’s very true.
There’s going to be slow months, and don’t think it’s the company. All right? Don’t be like well, maybe the company is going down in flames. No, it’s called summer. Everyone’s out playing. So it’s gonna be frickin dead. You got to ride out the slow periods just like sailors ride out the calm what’s it called when there’s no wind? Kinda like the lull. They get to their destination eventually. Even with no wind.
They ride it out though. If you don’t ride it out, you go insane. Or you’re in seven different companies by year end. Who’s gonna join you when you’re jumping companies every two months? Don’t be a jumper. It just makes you look bad. Stay committed. Just like with your spouse. You’re not getting a new girlfriend every two months. If you are, that’s fine in your 20s. But if you’re doing that in your 50s they’re gonna be like, Oh, he’s just a player. You don’t get any respect. You look like a sleazeball.
So stay committed to one company and stay faithful. You can do other companies, but they can’t compete with each other. All right, they gotta be different industries, different niches. That’s why I can do a couple companies. They’re all completely different.
And one day, if you get some really popular videos, and you get 1000 subscribers, then YouTube will even start paying you. So success builds upon success. But you got to show up and do the work every day, create content, create a library of content. You’ll be proud of yourself after a year. If you do three videos a day for a year, you get 1000 videos in one year. You’re like, yeah, look at my YouTube.
If you’re only doing one video a month, just give up. If you’re only posting once a week on Facebook, just give up. If you’re only doing one blog article a month, give up. Just don’t even bother. There’s people that are destroying it. You have to out-create other people, in your genre, in your company.
And yeah, I’m an introvert. You know, ideally, you like people and you want to connect with people, then talk to them, use Facebook, be on chat all day, call them. The more contact the better.
However, I’m talking to people that want to automate it. They might be too busy to talk to people. They might be introverted. They might have social anxiety. They might want to just do this like affiliate marketing, where they just generate leads. That’s what I want. That’s why people join me.
They’re like, Yeah, I like your style. Erik, you automate it. You only work one hour a day. You just get leads, right? And I’m like, yeah, just generate, work your way up to well, in the beginning, I say work your way up to 20 leads a day because if I say work your way up to 50 leads a day, and they just joined, they might get overwhelmed and be like, wow, that’s too much.
So I say work your way up to 20 leads a day, and this is how you do it. These are the best leads. And they’re like, Okay, thanks, Erik. That’s how you do it. That’s how I do it. If you’re an extrovert and you love people, and you want to be very hands on, go for it. That’s even better.
Content is king, but it’s not King in network marketing because people, most people want to get to know you. They want to talk on the phone. I’ve gone through a lot of people to find my tribe. Let’s just put it that way.
But now the people that are on my team, they’re all like me, most of them. They’re like, yeah, you know, they run ads every day, and it works. I wouldn’t tell you guys to run ads if it doesn’t work. But you got to run them a lot. You can’t just do it once a week, you run them every day. When you wake up, run an ad, run two to three ads a day.
Then work your way up to 20 leads a day, and then 50 and this is while your content grows, and then do it all: content, paid advertising. Keep your leads up, and ride out the slow seasons, like Christmas, and summer. Don’t jump companies because it’s slow and you’ll be fine.
And brand YOU – don’t brand the products. You can talk about them once in a while, but you have to stay away from claims. And you can’t even talk about CBD oil in our company. So you got to do something else. I think you can say that it generally makes you feel happy, which is a joke so I don’t even talk about it. It’s not even about the products. leaders can join any company and make it work. It’s not even about the products. It’s about you. So, love you guys. We’ll talk to you soon.