Whatever the opportunity in MLM, build a squeeze page and stick that in front of your affiliate page so that you can collect the leads and house them in your own autoresponder. Add stand out to the offer by giving away to your visitor marketing tools which are over and above what the company is offering. Be generous, be different, grow quicker.
One of the problems with MLM is that you can do loads of networking for the so-called business opportunity work only to end up with a matrix of nothing very much at all. Because your downline's worn thin.
The big problem with this model is that your link goes to a web property that you do not control or own. So whenever someone hits that page, they sign up to your ‘opportunity', not to you. You are just a username, a link in the chain; you mean nothing to them. True, you can email them from your back office and get to know them that way, but that takes time and effort and isn't all that productive.
Worse still, your downline is not on a list in an autoresponder. Just try adding those names and emails to your Aweber account. Aweber are very picky about how you came to acquire a person's email. I've been having problems getting them to add customers, never mind downline leads!
So what do you do?
You build a squeeze page and stick it in front of the website that your link goes to. And you direct potential prospects to your squeeze page, not the link you were given when you signed up.
In your webform you go into Settings and under Thank You Page you paste the sign up link you've been given – this is your redirect, i.e. the page your visitor will be sent to directly after signing up to your list. You switch Confirmation from ON to OFF, because you want your potential prospects to go as quickly as possible to the sign up page – or they might lose interest.
By using a squeeze page this way, not only are you building a downline you can mail updates to re the primary business opportunity you drew them in on, you can also email them about similar business opportunities in the future.
Here's an example. Let's say you were to sign up to the new hot opportunity with FantaZ, signing up under your sponsor's link, of course. You are then given your own link (username + fantaz in the url). And this link would send your prospects to your sponsor's page. He would net the names via an optin. So would you. But here's the thing: his data is going to an autoresponder, yours is going to the back office of your FantaZ page. Well that's not good enough. Because when you now want to get in touch with people in your downline, you'd have to email each one of them individually. If you had them on your own list in your Aweber account, you could do one broadcast and that would be it – job done for your entire downline.
So you build a squeeze page to put in front of your sponsor's page. Yes, it makes the journey a little longer for prospects, but it introduces them to you (as their sponsor) and, for serious parties, I don't think it's a big deal anyway.
As an added incentive, on that same squeeze page, as well as talking about the business opportunity very briefly - in this case, play games for points and cash - you offer to provide everyone who signs up with some marketing tools to make their job of building a downline that much easier: you give them the very squeeze page they came in on, which they could download as a zip and edit however they wanted, plus an email swipe they could send to their downline to keep them motivated. So you are making it totally worth their while by asking them to sign up to your list.
So this is the model I urge you to follow if you are doing anything like MLM.
If you don't have that squeeze page in place for this or any other scheme you get involved in, you're missing out on leads - which is proverbially known as ‘leaving money on the table'.
