Is Affiliate Marketing The Savior Or Scourge Of MLM? You Decide

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 6:35 pm

Affiliate marketing. Why would anyone want to do that?

There are people that absolutely despise affiliate marketing, others who think you can’t do without it, and the furthest extreme are people that do nothing but affiliate market! What does it all mean?

There’s good, and bad ways to use affiliate marketing. Everyone has their ideas, and everyone is entitled to their opinions, likes and dislikes.

I’ve heard people complain that affiliate marketing is not what you want to do to build your MLM. The argument is that it can distract you from your true purpose, which is to build your MLM business. I’ve also hear the stats that most people won’t make more than 1-2 sales in their affiliates.

While this can be true, I feel people may be losing sight of the intention of using affiliate marketing. It’s purpose is not to consume your entire focus, but rather to be a secondary stream of income that allows you to pay for the advertising you’re doing for your MLM business.

3 considerations about affiliate marketing:

1. The Primary Objective Of Affiliate Marketing is to keep reps in positive cash flow. When used properly, affiliate marketing provides needed income while the person using it is learning how to build their MLM business. Instead of all their commissions going back out to pay for marketing, they can put their MLM income in the bank and use their affiliate payments to market.

2.. Learning to be a good networker takes time. And because it takes time to learn how to be an effective network marketer, reps need something to get them in positive cash flow. By now you’ve likely seen the stats that most network marketers quit by 90 days (the average amount of time a rep stays in a business). This is because there is more money out than money in.

Also mentioned is that the average affiliate marketers will only sell 1-2 affiliate products. Lets put this in perspective: Most networkers are not trained on effective marketing, and don’t stay around long enough to succeed, so how will they stay around long enough to sell affiliate products?

This problem is due to lack of training and assistance from their sponsor. It’s an entirely different rant I could take off on, but lets leave it at this: affiliate marketing can allow the new rep a the time to learn what it will take to build a business. Most people joining an MLM do not have experience enough to get anywhere without training. This can at least give them a chance IF they have decent support and training.

3. Affiliate marketing allows new reps the opportunity to build their skills. They get the opportunity to call perfect strangers to see how they can help them with the product they just bought. This sounds strangely like great MLM training! Again, they’ll need some guidance from their sponsor, but it becomes real life experience, and helps them gain confidence without the pressure of selling. For the average networker, this is extremely important.

On the far extreme, there are people that do nothing but affiliate market, and if they’re good at it they can make a killing online. To be clear, these people are not network marketing, they are simply marketing. Nothing wrong with doing that.

Affiliate marketing can be a good tool for the committed but not entirely experienced or confident network marketer. With such a tool they can start to create some skills working online while they actively continue to build their business skills in the off-line world.

Before you just throw the idea out, consider all the angles and reasons, and for whom tools like this are intended.

Warren Smith

http://mlmgrowthexplosion.com

406 490-2556

Ok, no hidden agendas here… one of the best affiliates out there is Mike Dillard’s content. On it’s own it pays for my monthly online advertising and then some. Check it out http://insanesponsoring.mlmgrowhtexplosion.com

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