If you have read any of my various articles, you have probably noticed that I continually harp on the problems with typical methods used by most people in network marketing. About how they are inefficient, ineffective, and just plain do not work. As a result, over 90 percent of people who start a network marketing business or MLM business fail to make any money. Ever.

What exactly is the problem with these methods, though? Simply put, they have little if anything to do with marketing.

An Example

My wife works for a consumer products company that manufactures food products. If I gave the name, you would know them. Consider two potential ways that her company might promote their products:

1) Employ a team to call all the individuals in a particular area, inform them that they are increasing their distribution in that area, and ask them (directly or indirectly) to buy the product.

2) Market the product through an advertising campaign designed to increase consumer awareness and identify the uniqueness and benefit of the product. Individuals who wish to purchase the product would then come to them (in this case, go to the grocery store) to do so.

I know this seems ridiculous, because any consumer products company wishing to stay in business would never employ option number 1. Instead, they would employ the practices of marketing. Why? Its much more efficient.

Because only a small percentage of people will ever purchase from you (at most 10 percent for a product, less than 1 percent for a business opportunity), it is a big waste of time to go about talking with people on a one-by-one basis. You would have to speak with a huge number of people to see any significant results.

This bears itself out in network marketing. I personally know people who spend 3, 4, or more hours per day on the phone calling people to (maybe) get one result per week. Many rarely even see that one result.

Sales vs Marketing

The first option in our example is a sales-based approach. The second is a marketing-based approach. This difference has largely been lost in the network marketing industry. In fact, while it might be called network marketing, very few in it actually perform any marketing at all.

But, the name is network marketing, not network sales.

This implies that, like my wife's company, the preferred, more effective, and more efficient approach would be the marketing approach.

How do you do that?

A Marketing Approach

In the past, performing any real marketing was pretty much not within the capabilities of the typical person in network marketing. It required far too many resources to promote your business in this manner. This is one big reason why all these ineffective sales techniques were first developed. In the past, 20 or 30 years ago, they may even have worked. Today, however, they are grossly out of date and completely out of touch with the times.

Today, a person in network marketing can easily market their business or product on a scale previously unprecedented. The growth of the Internet has created this opportunity, and it is a very large one indeed. Especially when you consider how few people are actually doing it.

And how few is that? Consider that it took me over 10 months of active research to even find anyone with the resources to teach Internet marketing to me as it relates to network marketing online. Yes, there are a lot of people trying to do network marketing online, but in reality very few are doing it in a way that produces results.

The key is to forget for a minute that your business is a network marketing business. Instead, treat it like an Internet business, and use the same standards and practices that other Internet businesses do, regardless of the industry they are in.

In business, the fundamentals do not change just because your business uses the MLM model. No. The fundamentals remain the same and, if you do not learn and apply them, your business is probably doomed from the start.

In other words, when you start a network marketing business and promote it using the principles of Internet marketing and attraction marketing, then you are applying the fundamentals of how to market your business online. Timeless fundamentals of marketing, not ineffective one-on-one selling (usually to someone who was not interested to begin with). Fundamentals proven over and over again to work across many different types of business.

Fundamentals that will attract the right people to you, rather than the other way around.

It's About the Content

The interesting thing is, when you apply these fundamentals, you won't be doing any selling at all! Gone is the web site filled with a big sales pitch. In its place, you create valuable content for your web site visitor. You spread content around all over the place, in fact, all designed to bring people to your web site where you deliver...more content.

In fact, we could probably revise the title of this article. When doing online network marketing, its not really about the marketing, its about the content. The more value you deliver through good content, the more visitors your web site will attract, and the more of those will contact you with interest in learning more.

This way of doing business is completely alien to anyone practicing what most companies teach you about how to do network marketing. It almost seems counter-intuitive. You give away a ton of free content, don't have any sales pitch at all, yet expect that people will come to you? Yep. That's exactly right. And it is amazingly effective.

In fact, people will flock to you and your business given that you take the time to learn how to do it right and put in the effort to get it going. Many in network marketing may promise easy money, but that bit of hype is never true. Business requires work. Anyone who uses their brain to think for even a moment will realize that. Income is a reward for effective effort, not for doing nothing. But, when done right, that reward can be substantial.

So, which is it for you? The ineffective sales-oriented stuff, or a true marketing business?

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About the Author
Scott Simon spent 17 years as a business consultant in Corporate Finance and Investments. He holds an engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Michigan.

Scott now publishes Online Network Marketing Today teaching Internet Marketing to network marketers.

http://www.OnlineNetworkMarketingToday.com