Promote Your Network Marketing Business Online

First, let’s talk about the usual way of getting started with online network marketing. You find a good opportunity and sign up. Your company provides a web site with your name at the top but otherwise it looks just the same as the web site that all the other distributors have.

If your company is fairly comfortable with the Internet scene, they may allow you to put up a personal site to promote your business in your own words, within certain guidelines. Many network marketing companies, however, do not allow you to mention the company name or products on a personal web site. Thus, if your goal is to directly promote your business opportunity with your own web site, your options are restricted.

The best thing to do is not put up a web site promoting your specific company at all. Why? There are a number of reasons for this. Bear with me.

The Down Side of Branding Yourself to a Specific Opportunity

You may have found the perfect network marketing business for you. You might become the next mega superstar in the company and enjoy a long and prosperous relationship. What I am talking about here has nothing to do with loyalty or focus on a specific business.

Things are changing rapidly on the Internet. A few years ago, before most of the world was active online, it was no big deal if a few distributors put up personal web sites promoting their specific opportunity. The company leaders, for the most part, were not Internet-savvy and probably didn’t see the revolution that was coming.

As Internet usage expanded, and more and more independent distributors started to go online with personal web sites, some problems started to creep in.

• stupid income projections and silly hype
• outrageous product claims
• quality sites that rivaled, and often passed for, official company sites

For these and other reasons, company management teams began to sense danger. It became apparent that misguided independent distributors could put up and promote web sites that had potential to damage the company reputation, pass for official company sites, even result in legal issues.

Thus, “Internet Policies” were born. Rules and guidelines went into place to help protect the company image and reputation from harm. Replicated company sites became common, and Internet policy guidelines strictly regulated what a distributor could do or say from a personal (non-company provided) web site.

I’m not against network marketing companies establishing “Internet Policies”. It’s perfectly understandable. However, it can be painful for distributors who have put significant resources into developing good lead-generating sites that must be modified (or taken down) whenever policies are changed.

So, good reasons for not promoting your specific company on a personal web site (even if you are still free to do so):

• company Internet policies may change, forcing you to make substantial changes to your site (painful if you have developed and promoted a site that generates good leads for you)
• not pleasant to think about, but if your company hits hard times, most of your work might go down the drain
• if you come to a point where switching to a different network marketing opportunity makes sense, your site(s) may be unusable or require significant modification

You can avoid all these problems, and build a web presence that will transcend any company policy change or issue, by focusing on promoting the key part of the whole equation - YOU!

Why Branding YOU is the Smartest Thing to Do

To promote your business online, put up a site that focuses on YOU and on the concept of network marketing as an attractive home business.

People don’t like to join companies, they like to partner with people they believe can help them achieve success in their business. If a prospect visits your web site, they are more likely to return or contact you for information if they feel like they know you a little better.

Have you ever been to a site promoting a network marketing opportunity that talked about the business, had a web form you could submit to learn more, but NO CLUE as to who was behind the site? I’ve seen lots of these, and if I ever submitted a form on one of them, it would be a fake name and a throwaway email address because I wouldn’t feel comfortable otherwise.
Some Smart Moves to Consider

• use your site to tell your story, and focus on having potential prospects learn a bit more about you. Avoid the anonymous approach. This makes prospects more comfortable and more likely to contact you.
• talk about the power of network marketing and MLM, and offer some good information on how it works. Brilliant Compensation is good for this.
• encourage people to subscribe to a mailing list to learn more about your specific business.

This way, you’re coming across as a real person, not an anonymous marketing robot somewhere, and you’re explaining the power and concept of network marketing in a general way that people can relate to and grasp.

On top of that, you now have the focus where it should be - on you, what you can offer, and the benefits (in general) of network marketing.

Love your company, use the tools, use the web site they provide you appropriately, but don’t tie yourself and your future entirely to someone else’s brand. Brand yourself - it’s smart - you won’t regret it.