8 Questions to Find the Best Network Marketing Opportunity

Keyword for this post:
Best network marketing opportunity

The network marketing group sounds huge: over $40 billion in annual sales. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it. In truth, it is less than one percent of all sales in the US. Sounds pretty small, doesn't it.

It's easy to say that the best Network Marketing opportunity is the one that works for you. But you may not know which one works for you. So, here are some guidelines

1. Make sure the product is real.

Don't buy an "opportunity".

2. Make sure you are paid mostly for your product sales, not for "selling" others on the "opportunity".

3. Make sure that mandatory costs aren't draining your income.

4. Don't pay more than $300 to $500 for your initial costs.

5. Watch out for high income claims. The "best" is not necessarily the one who can shout the loudest. Often it is the quiet company. And those huge dreams are just that -- dreams.

6. Don't buy product unless the company will buy it back.

7. Look for an established company

8. Make sure there are complimentary products and/or services you can feature on your site.

Article Marketing Generates Real Traffic -- Absolutely Free

Article marketing is the key to most network marketing success. It’s not going to do you any good to just create a website. You’ve got to get people to visit your site.

Having a website with out traffic, is like having a McDonalds in the middle of the desert. If there are no roads to get there, your drive through is going to have no business. It doesn’t matter how good your products are or how good your company is, no one will visit your site unless you have a way for people to get there.

Haven't got a lot of time? or money? Well here's the answer for you ...

I write articles that help people in their business, and in return I get traffic back to my site from here. It’s a win-win-win. YOU get information that can improve your life, the ezine directory sites gets free content for their website, and I get free links back to my site. Free Links means I get Free TRAFFIC!

How does article marketing work? Well, one week I wrote 5 articles and got 50 people reading my articles right away. Is that good? You Bet! Out of those 50 people do you think anyone visited my site? Yes, Absolutely.

These are not articles for this website, although that is good too. No, these articles were for article directories like EzineArticles.com . There are dozens of article directory sites out there. Each one will post your article for free. People read that article and click through to your website. That is article marketing at its best.

On a side note, Let’s say my articles are available for a whole year. Can you see how having thousands of people potentially reading my articles could generate traffic to my website? How much extra work did I do? None! Once you put an effective online marketing strategy in place, it works 24 hours a day.

This is one of the most effective, cheapest ways of generating solid leads that I have every known. It is available to everyone. Right now. So go write your article and start generating traffic!

Online Business Plans

Online Business Plans

Still not sure where to start? Well, here are ten great ideas for your consideration. Each one would make a great online business.

1. Cosmetics. Women seem to have an insatiable appetite for looking beautiful. Choose a topic and a product that is a specialized niche, like mineral make up, and your sales will be much stronger than if you generalize for all types of makeup.

2. Natural products. Everything natural had its real hey day back in the 1960s. Surprisingly, there is a new surge in natural stuff. Natural cosmetics, natural clothing, natural vitamins, natural food. Everything.

3. Retirement options. Yep. All those people need places to live. They need products that make their lives easier and ensure their mobility. Even tours designed for retired people are a good option – 70 and 80 year old don’t usually move as rapidly as teenagers, and they appreciate a bit slower paced travel event.

4. Vitamins and age-defying products. The world is getting older. No one likes to look older, or feel older. There is a big market for products that can rejuvenate and provide a barrier against aging.

5. Designer clothing for large women. People are becoming super sized. Women in particular, no matter what their age, like to look sharp. Present great options for stylish attire. This is definitely a top network marketing product idea.

6. Parties. Kids parties. Retirement parties. Birthday parties. Quincineras. Bar and bat mitzvahs. All kinds of parties need decorations, ideas, and all kinds of network marketing products.

7. Children’s clothing and toys. There are soon going to be lots more grandparents than grandchildren. That means that lots of grandparents are going to lavish their grandkids with lovely toys, clothing and goodies.

8. Self improvement products. The market for gaining self-confidence and friends and jobs has never waned. This has been a top network marketing product area for many years, and will likely be so for many more years to come.

9. Movies. We are all still replacing our old videos with the new CD format, so there are millions and millions of movies yet to be sold. Pick your topic, and get a great selection for your clients to buy.

10. Auto accessories. Guys still have more love affairs with cars than with ladies. I don’t even know the names of all the doodads they put on their cars, but there are lots of them. And there is lots of money to be made with these top network marketing products.

BUSINESSES ONLINE: AND THE BEST ONE IS …..

The envelope, please. TA DAH! The best one is most likely the one that you enjoy the most. You will be devoting hundreds of hours to developing this new business. You have got to enjoy what you are doing. Not only that, but the visitors to your site need to capture your enthusiasm. With that touch of magic, most topics will be very profitable. Without the magic, it’s a dreary dungeon.

There are lots of tools to help you pick just the right topic. But first you need to focus your sights on the general area that tickles you. So sit down right now and start jotting down all the possibilities. You will amaze yourself.

Choose Your Passion Wisely

There is a story in one of the "success" books about a family that wanted a house more than anything in the world. This was not a rich family, so they knew they would have to really focus on their goal. So they gave up new clothes. They gave up movies. They gave up eating in restaurants. They moved into a cheap trailer. All so they could save money for their house.

The kids in this family went to poor schools because they lived in a cheap neighborhood of trailer parks. The family had constant fights due to living in such close proximity with each other. But they wanted that house.

And they got it.

I'm not suggesting that you give up everything you know as "life" to follow your passions. But I am suggesting that you choose your passion wisely.

Network marketing is a strange bedfellow. It is easy to get seduced with promises of big payouts and huge deals. Make sure you are comfortable with the company you are choosing.

Network Marketing Skills

What skills do you really need to be a successful network marketer? It is not for everyone, in spite of the hard sell tactics that you hear. Here are the real skills you need in network marketing:

REASONABLE WRITING ABILITY

You will be building a lot of pages for your website. Hiring people is possible, but it is much better (and much cheaper) if you can build the site yourself.

COMFORT ON THE INTERNET

Someone who has a hard time sending an email is going to have a hard time building an income on the net. You need a basic understanding of search, and be able to do Google searches.

A REAL INTEREST

So many people with websites just want to sell something. Anything. At any price. Whether it is any good or not. If that is you, please stay away. We have enough lousy websites already. Your network marketing site is going to succeed in large part because you will be promoting something that you believe in. So believe in it. Have a real interest in your product and what it can do for people. You will be absolutely amazed at how that translates into sales.

HTML?

No not needed.

SITE BUILDING EXPERIENCE?

No not needed.

WHIZ DIG, WHAM BANG SELLING EXPERIENCE?

No, please go away.

Basically you need to be a reasonably intelligent person who has real interests and has used the internet. After that, it is a matter of diligence.

Got that? Welcome to my world!

Top Network Marketing Products

There is a perception that network marketing involves vitamins and energy drinks. While that is true, there are hundreds of options for outstanding products. As you are looking through your options, keep a few things in mind.

First, and most important, is this a product that you can be proud of?

Second, is this a product that you use? If not, why not?

Third, can you create a theme-based website including this product, or does it fit into your existing theme-based website?

Remember: Your clients are not your friends and neighbors (although they could be). Your clients will come from the whole world of the internet. Each client will discover your site because you provide so much great information. They will keep coming back because you offer such great products.

For the Ladies

Makeup companies are hot commodities when it comes to network marketing product, and there is a lot of money to be made if you can reach the clientèle or build up a strong downline to be able to see some revenue from this. Mary Kay is a superb example of a successful Network Marketing company that builds strong down lines.

Products for Children

There are so many companies that provide children's products. This is a great niche. If you run a daycare, have a lot of kids, or even if your kids have grown up and flown the coop—passion is a great feeling to inject here.

Home Decorating Products

If you love Pampered Chef, you will love what decorative items, cookware and kitchen items can bring to your life as a network marketing product line.

Home and Garden

It's hard to imagine a Network Marketing product line without something from the home and garden area. The products are so diverse, and the quality is so high, that they are hard to resist.

Cruelty Free Products

ONE stands for Organic and Natural Enterprise Group, and is a popular one of the cruelty free companies. This is a company based in Australia that specializes in crafting personal beauty and health care products that are 100 percent cruelty free. There are a number of other companies like this one too.

If you are a passionate animal rights activist or even a vegetarian and have convictions for this industry, you could inject a lot of passion into a cruelty-free network marketing product.

Coffee and Tea and Chocolate, Oh My!

Gourmet clubs of all sorts are very popular as Network Marketing product lines. There is gourmet candy, gourmet pies, gourmet cheese, gourmet nuts, gourmet meats, gourmet jerky, gourmet baby food. If you love it, it is probably there.

This is barely touching the surface. For lots more opportunities, check out the Direct Selling Association, where you will find listings for sporting goods, travel, utilities, plants, legal services, crystal, group buying service, artwork, books and lots, lots more.

The SEO Specialist -- Me?

It is hard to believe that you can learn SEO when you don't even know what SEO means, isn't it? But you CAN.

"SEO" means "search engine optimization". When you do a search in Google, a whole long list of results turns up. Those at the top of the list have strong search engine optimization. The search engines like that site and that page. Using SEO techniques, you can put yourself at the top of that list.

Basically, SEO says that you need to put your keyword in some very strategic locations so that the search engines can find it and index it.

There is a handy dandy free ebook that I use for my SEO activity: Let's Go Fishing. The book is free, and you can remove yourself from the ezine mailing list any time you want. So it is a win-win.

There is one more step to SEO that most gurus won't tell you about. It is the "long tail" of network marketing. It is fine when someone searches on "health", but honestly neither your site nor mine will ever reach the top ranks for that keyword. There are just too many very, very strong sites already out there that rank for the keyword "health". So we don't even try. What we DO try to rank well for are the hundreds and thousands of searches done on all the "long tail" keywords, like "natural health vitamin", "vitamin D and health".

It is not that difficult to rank well for hundreds of long tail keywords. This is a skill that most people can learn fairly quickly.

So, yes, you CAN indeed by an SEO specialist. Soon. And do it very, very well.

WAHMs are Hitting The Network Marketing World

Keyword: WAHMs, home business

The Balimore Sun reported that women are leaving corporate America in droves, and ending up with dyanmic home businesses, many of them network marketing based:

According to the Virginia-based Center for Women's Business Research, the number of women-owned businesses increased 32 percent from 2002 to 2008. During the same period, revenues generated by those businesses increased 48 percent and employment by such firms went up 27 percent.

Working from home and capitalizing on low-cost marketing tools such as the Internet to build their companies, some have all but abandoned the corporate world. Meanwhile they try to ensure that their family lives don't suffer; some even involve their young children in the creative process. As they are not among the millions currently looking for work in the private sector, the entrepreneurial moms may end up helping to turn around the economy.

All while leaving time to get dinner on the table.

We've been watching this phenomenon with network marketing WAHMs for quite some time. Most of them prefer to NOT be called "network marketers". It sounds so sale-sy. But that indeed is what they are.

These work at home moms create websites, sell goods, become affiliates, and make money in innumerable ways. THIS is what is so glorious about the internet. It makes home business so doable. And not penny and nickel stuff. This is real business. Done on your terms, on your time, with ideas and products that you enjoy.

What a life!

Connecting Online -- 3 Quick Tricks in Network Marketing Training

Being a nameless, faceless entity is all too common online. In fact, it is all too common in all sales, even in-store sales. How often do you feel that a sales person particularly cares a whit about you, or about what you want? Most are selling what they've got, and you happen to be the recipient of the sale pitch.

That leads us to Trick #1 in Network Marketing Training: Listen. So you've not there with the person? Yes, you are. Your client is looking right at your website. You know what your clients' questions are, or you should know. Answer them. Tell them everything you know. Be informative. Tell your stories. Connect on as personal a level as a hard computer screen will allow.

Trick #2 in Network Marketing: Don't do those stupid videos unless you are good at it. (You will note that there are none on this site. I admit it -- I'm not good at it.) There is a real talent to sounding sincere. It is more than actually being sincere. It is something else. If you MUST have a video, do something that doesn't show you, like you see on this business plan site.

Trick #3: Do follow up. Make it easy with an ezine. Capture the absolute minimum amount of information that you need: an email address. If they would like to give it, ask for a first name. That is absolutely ALL that you need to keep in touch for as long as you want to keep in touch.

There are a lot of other things you can do, too, and we'll be talking about them over the next few weeks. But this is a superb beginning. If you can do this much, you are well on your way to creating a strong network marketing website.

Pulling The Rug Out, and Other Network Marketing Tips

Janelle is a recruit for an MLM business I was involved in a couple of years ago. I have left the business, but Janelle stuck with it, and she has done pretty well. She called me in a panic yesterday. Seems the company is going to terminate her. They gave some reason like she wasn't selling enough product. I don't know the real reason. Nor, I suspect, does Janelle. At any rate, she was in a panic. "Can they really do this???" she asked. "Well, yes," I replied, cringing as I said so. "They probably can."

Can They Boot You Out the Door?

Many, many contracts read that Yes, they can boot you out the door.

The very best network marketing tip anyone can give you is to read the contract.

Be aware that if the company can cancel your distributorship with or without a reason, your business can disappear in a month. Even if the compensation plan allows you to continue receiving income from distributors after you retire from selling yourself, a company that has the ability to terminate your distributorship on a whim can effectively steal that income.

Relying on a company that has this clause in its agreement means you are relying on integrity that may not exist. It is very important to limit your risk of losing your business by taking note of this important marketing tip and choose your company and opportunity very wisely.

However, if we don’t act on good, reliable information all we’ve done is waste our time. Don’t ignore this network marketing tip. Read contracts carefully before signing up and make sure you are not disadvantaged by a network marketing company’s payment criteria. Their goal is to maximize their profits. Your goal needs to be to maximize yours.

Cover Your Backside

The easiest way -- and the best way -- to make sure you are not going to lose the business you have built is to have multiple streams of income and not to be dependent on any one Network Marketing or MLM business opportunity. After all, no matter how careful you are in evaluating a network marketing business, things can go wrong. Having your eggs in more than one basket just makes sense.

Making Money Online

The Internet Advertising Bureau has just announced that internet advertising increased 19% over last year. That sounds immense, but those of us who work online every day know this to be true. And why not? Online advertising is probably the cheapest form of targeted advertising that a company can do. How else can you target people planning on going into business, or those looking to purchase a refrigerator? The internet does it, and does it very well.

This is just what you can take advantage of when you join the internet world. Just think of all the ways you can make money online. Here are just a few:

EBOOKS. Write your own, or go to ClickBank.com and see what others have written. You usually get a pretty good commission with ClickBank ebooks, so it's worth checking into. You can also do both: write your own AND feature ebooks that others have written.

ADSENSE. These are the ads that you see along the right hand column. They are easy to set up. Google maintains them. All you do is decide how you want the ads to look, and place the code in the right spot. Easy peasy.

AFFILIATE MARKETING. Another company has a product you like. You see they have an affiliate program. That means that you can show it on your site. Every time you make a sale, you get a commission. The money transaction is handled by the merchant, so you don't need a shopping cart. Check out CommissionJunction.com for a slew of affiliate based products. You will need to sign up, but it is free to sign up.

Those are the most popular ways of earning money through a Network Marketing online business, but there are lots more, like ....

CREATE A MEMBERSHIP SITE. Do you have special knowledge in a unique field? Let members pay to join and offer them premium knowledge, products and networking.

BRING EBAY INTO YOUR WEBSITE. You can set up your own eBay store, featuring the types of products that your visitors would like. A cake decorating site could sell molds for devils on the page about devils food cakes! eBay has so much to offer that they sky is the limit.

CREATE AND SELL YOUR OWN TRAINING PROGRAM DVDs. Sometimes visual works better than written material. If that is the case for you, create your own training program. You can sell them as a download, or in hard case DVD, or both.

CREATE YOUR OWN SHOPPING MALL. Thousands of different kinds of products lurk in different shopping malls, from teddy bears to samurai swords. Track down your vendors and create your own very unique shopping experience.

JOIN A TRAVEL COMPANY. For all travel sites and geographically oriented sites, this is a must. And it's a nice source of income. TripAdvisor.com is an excellent one, but they get filled up quickly. If you see an opening, take it.

PROMOTE YOUR SERVICE BUSINESS ONLINE. From massage parlors (the legit kind) to dentists to attorneys, there just isn't a corner of the business world that couldn't benefit from a good website. Have online coupons for your customers, both from your business and from affiliated businesses.

SELL YOUR OWN PRODUCT. Do you create jewelry? Write children's books? Design stained glass doors? The internet is made for you. Nowhere else can you reach such a wide audience, at such a low price. And it's not just for "creative" folks. One of the most successful webmasters I know sells kits for people to set up their own concrete contractor business. Honest.

GENERATE FINDERS FEES. Real estate finders fees may or may not be an option in your area. But if you bring an artist a new client, that should certainly generate a finder's fee. Look for companies in the same general area of interest as your website and cut your own deal.

ACT AS AN AGENT FOR OTHERS. A very successful lady books rooms in local inns in a remote island, and earns very nice commissions doing it. Her site attracts the guests, and she forwards the requests for rooms to her clients. Another webmaster books trips to Australia. He doesn't actually do the booking himself; he just forward the request to other agents, and collects his commission.

SELL ADVERTISING ON YOUR SITE. Unlike a newspaper, you've got all the space you want. So sell some of it.

CREATE YOUR OWN AUCTION. When you've got a specialized product, let others bid on it. Setting up a whole auction site like eBay is very expensive, but you can do "blind bidding", i.e., let people submit bids without knowing what others are bidding. Results can be quite nice with this approach.

So? What's stopping you? Go get it. Your corner of the internet is sitting there, waiting for you.

Sales vs Downline -- The Highest Paid Network Marketing Affiliate

Keyword: Highest Paid Network Marketing Affiliate

Here is where traditional MLM and the new Network Marketing really take separate roads.

In traditional MLM, the focus is on new members, New Members, NEW MEMBERS!!!! There is no emphasis on sales, except for those that you are required to buy yourself. It is extortion in the worse sense, creating a stressed out environment where nobody makes anything. (Did you know that less than 2% of all MLM-ers actually make a profit?)

Network Marketing is a whole new world. This is the world where you first believe in your product mix. Yes, there can indeed be more than one income stream, and probably are several. THEN, and only then, do you introduce your products to others so that they can sell them as well.

So, with Network Marketing you've got your own sales from online sales of various products, perhaps AdSense, or ebooks or any number of other items. AND you may have a downline doing the same thing.

So who's making the money?

Well, Network Marketing is innately more profitable than traditional MLM. Lots of people make very nice livings with Network Marketing. I know several thousand of them myself.

And which are the highest paid Network Marketing affiliates? Well, that's tougher. You see, lots of them are high earners. In all kinds of categories: business, children's products, health and beauty, travel, and just slews and slews of other topics. Don't believe me? Take a look here. Here are several hundred real winners, each with his/her own niche.

So. What's your niche? You could be on this list too.