The Mind of Vatke
Thoughts, Musings and Advice by Andre Vatke

There is a mantra that is heard in network marketing companies large and small that network marketing is not like traditional business.

Yet to hear some popular trainers talk about it, you would easily confuse traditional business marketing with network marketing.

I believe that’s one reason the failure rate for network marketing entrepreneurs is going up, not down.

You see, the confusion comes from the fact that while the principles of traditional business (providing benefit, customer service, understanding prospects) transfer into network marketing, the practices of traditional advertising and mass lead generation do not.

Here’s why…

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The most important factor in network marketing success is duplicatability.

The mass marketing strategies of traditional business are just not duplicatable. The reason why starts with cost – it can be costly to advertise on your own and there is a steep learning curve to be effective. There is also the all too real issue of saturation.

Just a few years ago we were limited in our advertising choices to a handful of opportunity magazines. It was common to see several full-page ads and dozens of smaller ads for the same company. The problem was that the more ads there were for a company the less effect each of them was. The only people to profit on this scheme were the magazines themselves.

Thanks to the Internet we now have more options for promotion than ever. Yet the rules of saturation still apply. However in the abundance of misinformation it’s also a lot easier to get lost and make mistakes.

In a recent e-mail, a popular network marketing guru claimed it was ridiculously easy to generate leads by simply posting a video on YouTube. This person even used out of context statistics to convince her readers that they could learn how to do this (by buying a new training product of course).

While YouTube is certainly a phenomenon, it is far from the free and easy lead generation panacea evangelized by less than ethical publishers and trainers. We covered the real statistics to the public in a free web clinic last November. But let’s just look at the logic of how this would duplicate…

Just imagine for a moment that 1 out of every 25 Melaleuca distributors were to post just one video on YouTube. Quality and strategy issues aside, this would result in over 30,000 video’s promoting the same company! Which ones would get watched and for what reason? A valuable resource perhaps, but hardly the easy lead generation tool for the masses as claimed.

In contrast, if just 1 out of 25 Melaleuca distributors sold a single product (or line) to a single retail customer it would generate over $1,500,000 in income! Amazingly this can be done with almost ZERO promotional cost and it’s not in any way limited to 1 in 25 or to any particular company!

Which one is 100% duplicatable?

Want to learn more about doing more with less? Watch the video of our most recent web clinic on our site...

This is the kind of real world research driven training that keeps Leaders Club subscribers ahead of the mainstream network marketing game. So take 30 minutes a watch for yourself- you don’t even need to fill a form!