Tips for Finding the Right Network Marketing Home Business

Network Marketing is also known as Multi-Level Marketing or MLM for short. If you are just starting out or thinking about getting into network marketing then this article is for you. There are certain things to look for in a network marketing home business that will help keep you from choosing a bad opportunity and certain failure. Let's get some bad news out of the way right now... Most businesses, both online and offline, fail within their first five years and the same holds true for network marketing home businesses. But if you find a good network marketing opportunity and know how to work your business the right way, it can be best business in the world!

Below I have given some tips for you to help in finding a good network marketing business so you can get a head start on your home business success:

A good network marketing opportunity will allow you to start with little cost. You should avoid programs that have high sign-up fees and expensive frontloading where you have to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars just to get started. Do not get involved in a network marketing business where you have to buy your way to the top of the pay plan, purchase large volumes of product to qualify for your check, or have to stock inventory yourself. Stay away from any opportunity requiring you to do those things.

Do not be lured in by outrageous claims such as, "get rich quick" or "easy money" or "make money with no work" or any other ridiculous hype. In network marketing it is possible to have people placed below you without having to do much, as long as your upline is doing a lot of work and your compensation plan is a forced matrix or power leg binary. This is called spillover, but you can't count on getting rich, or even making any money at all, from spillover. Anyone joining with that expectation will be very disappointed. Even worse, don't ever get involved with a network marketing company that is offering a business opportunity with no product or service to sell other than the opportunity. These are called pyramid schemes and you need to stay far away from them! Always, thoroughly research any company before you join.

Marketing, sales and distribution are the backbone of business. Most of us are more familiar with direct sales. This is where the products of a company are promoted by a salesperson who receives a percentage of the money made from each sale as commission. That is the basic traditional sales approach. The salesperson may also be paid an hourly wage or a salary, or even paid per lead as long as they meet a certain sales quota, but the source of income for the business is always sales driven.

Network marketing has proven to be a much better way in most cases, both for the companies and their product distributors or salespeople. You are still selling a product or service for the company but you also are looking for people who want to do what you are doing, which is selling the company's products and making money doing it. You are building a team and that helps the company's sales and earnings because they get more and more people selling for them. The company gains many new distributors and in return you get paid not only on your own sales, but also on the new distributor's sales as well.

That is why it's called, "Multi-Level Marketing" or MLM. Because when the distributor you brought in on your first level brings in another new distributor for the company, you also get paid from the work of that new person. If that new seller on your second level brings in someone else, then you have a third level, and so on. You can have a team building under you, making sales for you, making money for you, and it can all be happening without any extra effort on your part! The payment plans in MLM typically include binary, breakaway, matrix, stair-step, and unilevel.

Network marketing is about referring and soft selling. You shouldn't have to give people the hard sell to be successful. You simply use the company's product or service and recommend it to others. It helps a lot if you are passionate about it and truly believe in it. Most company's will provide marketing resources such as; websites, sales letters, ebook, brochures, recruiting calls, recorded messages, flash movie presentations, DVDs, CD's, free samples, magazines, etc... They should be persuasive materials that put forth the benefits of the product or service to the prospect without having too much hype, and should also include plenty of testimonials.

The company should have a valuable and desired product or service that people will really want to purchase. It should be good enough that people would buy it even if there wasn't a compensation plan attached to it. It's also better if the product is unique and manufactured by the company itself. You want the service to be a continuing monthly service or the product to be a consumable one, so that you get recurring purchases every month and a residual income from each customer.

As a network marketer you will not just be making one-time sales, you will be building a residual income that keeps coming in month after month, year after year. After enough time and effort you should be able to work less and earn more. It is the perfect way to build a retirement income. And the company you join up with should ideally be debt free and have been in business for at least 5 years, so that you know it is solid and will be around for the long haul.

After you have found a network marketing opportunity possessing the qualities listed above, you then present the business opportunity and the product to as many people as possible. You can do this a number of ways, including: article marketing, ezines, blogs, websites, joint ventures, coops, classifieds, advertising online and offline, buying leads, talking to your warm market, forums, PPC's, word of mouth, fliers, and pretty much any other way you can think of to get your business opportunity and product in front of interested people.

There you go! Now it's time to get out there and find a solid network marketing opportunity for you and spend your time getting it in front of as many targeted prospects as you can. Treat it like the real business it is and you will go far. In a couple years you should be working much less but still enjoying a full-time residual income that grows all the time.