The Dangers of Network Marketing

Posted by admin on December 4th, 2008 filed in General

Things to Avoid In Network Marketing

Ever heard the old expression, "The only way to find out how to do it Right is… Do It Wrong"?  And… as the great Jim Rohn says, "But don’t let it take too long".

Well I’ve had sufficient misadventures in the world of MLM & Network marketing to have arrived at a basic understanding of the landscape, so to speak.

The Old-fashioned Method
Most people have heard of Amway, Nutrimedics, Herbal Life, etc. and they are very much, product-based companies where members/affiliates had the following tasks to earn a commission:

• Find and enroll new customers
• Chase up all customers for each monthly order
• Take delivery of all customer products each month
• Deliver monthly products to customers
• Harrass customers for money each month

As you can see, many of the above tasks are guaranteed to keep you away from the beach, your kids, the squash court, not to mention greatly reducing quality time spent with ‘your significant other’. They also required all affiliates to purchase product every month regardless of need for said product.

The Newer Networking Modus Operandi
Then new ground was broken by Melaleuca Inc. with their Direct-to-Customer approach, whereby once the affiliates had done the initial work of presenting and introducing the company’s products, and signed up new customers, the new customers dealings for monthly product orders were direct to the company.

Naturally this was a huge improvement on the old system. However it still had the major drawback of requiring you, the affiliate, to order regular monthly quantities of products. Frequently, the required monthly product order escalated sharply in accordance with the affiliate’s commission.

Qualities Needed to Become a Product Networking Guru
Yes, you can make 5 figure monthly incomes from schemes like http://www.melaleuca.com/, however the company will never tell you what minute percentage of affiliates earn average wage, replacement incomes. From my experience with several hundred downline customers, it is far less than 1%.

The people I have met that are very successful, relentlessly carry out the following tasks on a daily basis:

• Do a sales pitch every day to anyone who will stand still & listen
• Harrass family and friends (eventually finishing up with ‘family-minus-friends’
• Will hound you into providing them with a list of all family, friends and even the remotest acquaintences, then in company with you will ring the entire 100+ list and invite them round to your place next week!
• They will do their presentation and after they have managed signups for the few ’suckers’ who are easily persuaded, they will then harrass every single person for their list of all-vaguely-known-contacts
• They will then repeat the harrassment process until all of your recent visitors have capitulated and agreed to host an in-house sales presentation.
• Repeat the above procedure every day of their lives!

And YES…. if you have a hide thicker than a bloody rhinoceros, this method does work. However if you are like most normal people, you would move suburbs to avoid that type of business activity.

Conclusion
Fortunately (or unfortunately!) I’m not like that, and neither are most people I know. Also, the major stumbling block I always encountered was, "But hang on… you mean I have to spend $100+ every month whether I need to buy anything or not". And, this was extremely hard to promote.

Therefore I have searched & researched and reviewed a host of affiliate/networking schemes in the past 6 months and have discovered several systems that have none of those conversion problems and pay handsomely without the need to make unwanted purchases of goods and/or services each month, but more about that later…..

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