My mother always told me never to make promises I couldn’t keep. My upline MLM sponsor tells me not to make “pie-in-the-sky claims” about this business that are not true. She (Ana Gabriel Mann) says, “Be realistic.”
Online MLM Realistic? Hah!
The promotion of MLM online is still, well, taking baby steps. It’s like when television first came out as a form of media. Instead of taking full advantage of its visual effects, television producers just made radio shows visual. They put a bunch of people around a microphone and broadcast it. They called it television. That wasn’t television. That was visual radio. Today we have television, with constantly changing visual angles, zoom-ins, and tons of visual effects. In other words, it took television producers a few decades to figure out the power of the tellie.
Well, it’s gonna take MLM marketers a while to figure out the power of online promotion. Right now, most MLM folks who have moved to the internet are simply taking the in-person Denny’s presentation (you know, the one with the little circles drawn on napkins) and putting them online in webinar or website form. That’s one branch.
The other branch is sheer hype. It’s a 19-page online sales letter filled with pictures of people giving testimonials about their overnight success with a particular MLM company or online marketing system. True, there’s the little disclaimer at the bottom that says, “This person’s results are not typical.” Oh goodie.
It’s also true that the letters carefully don’t promise that you will make the same thousands of dollars overnight as the people in the sales letter. But it is heavily implied.
So much for realism.
Be Real. Be Like My Hay Guy
Being a zen cowgirl, everything basically boils down to farming and horses. I learn a lot from both. I’ve learned a lot about being realistic from my hay guy, Eddie T. Every year Eddie cuts and bales the hay on my field. Eddie’s been a farmer a long, long time and he has forgotten more about making hay than perhaps I’ll ever know.
Every year I ask Eddie, “How much hay do you think we’ll get off that field this year?” Every year, Eddie takes his hat off, scratches his head, and says, “It depends. We’ll just have to see. Too many variables to predict.”
Eddie’s being real. Some years, we’ll get 3 tons of good hay off the field and some years we’ll get 9 tons. As Eddie says, it just depends. It depends on the amount of rain, sun, and irrigation water we get. Anything can happen.
Being Real With Online MLM Claims
Online MLM marketing works the same way. I can bring someone into the business and teach them the basics of online promotion, but as for how much success they have or how big their check will get, “It depends.” There are too many variables, including the person’s work ethic, how fast they find their online voice, their level of consistency, and maybe 15 other variables.
So it’s perfectly OK to say, “It depends” when someone asks you to predict their potential level of success. You can’t predict their level of success, nor should you. It’s not your job. It’s your job to teach them the basics, let them know about all the resources that are available to them, and then set them free to do as they will!