Is Internet Network Marketing a Complete Waste of Time to Build Your MLM?
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 at 08:58PM
Is internet network marketing a complete waste of time to build your MLM?
If you ask many upline distributors and even some MLM companies, they will tell you that the answer is absolutely YES.
While there are certainly many distributors who are having an incredible amount of success with internet network marketing, it’s certainly understandable why some upline distributors and companies frown upon the concept.
From a company standpoint, many network marketing and MLM companies have been around for years, some of them even decades.
Their standpoint is what has worked to build their company is the time proven traditional network marketing strategies and techniques.
Why should they encourage and promote using the internet when many of its top income earners had success without the internet?
From a distributor’s standpoint, it’s also understandable why many upline distributors frown upon the concept as well.
If you take the average network marketing company and look at the roster of top distributors, you will find that the average distributor has been with the company for at least 10 years.
If a distributor has been with a company for that long of a time period, there is a good chance that the distributor built his or her business without using the internet.
From this distributor’s standpoint, why should he or she recommend something that seems unproven over what that distributor already used to reach the levels of success achieved?
Many leaders in network marketing haven’t come to a full understanding of the concept of web 2.0., social media and how powerful it can be used as a relationship building tool.
They see the internet as an advertising tool and if advertising worked so well, the company wouldn’t need the Multi-level marketing distributors’ right?
Other leaders feel downright threatened by the internet.
Because they don’t understand how it works, they are afraid that it will distract their organizations from using the time tested strategies that these leaders used to build their organizations.
You should see some of the responses that Ann Sieg, one of the chief proponents of the attraction internet and network marketing business model received as a response to her book “7 Lies of Network Marketing”
For more information on this, check out an article I wrote on this controversy of The 7 Great Lies of Network Marketing:
To be fair to these leaders, some of these concerns are absolutely justified.
Many distributors believe that the internet is the “magic pill” to solve their problems related to building their network marketing business.
It’s not.
If you don’t go into the business with the right mindset and invest in yourself and your own self development so you can become a leader worthy of success in this industry, you are going to fail regardless of what strategies and techniques you implement in your business.
The internet can also serve as a major distraction for distributors who don’t know or are not disciplined enough to use it effectively to build their network marketing businesses.
For instance, you can spend a lot of time on non productive activities like chatting on message boards and forums.
The key to successfully using the internet and network marketing is to have a step by step plan that all distributors can follow so that they know what productive activity is and what not productive activity is.
By following such a program, distributors will spend their time only on productive internet and network marketing strategies and not be deceived by things that are time wasters.