On the face of it, network marketing should be very effective. You buy a product, recommend it to all your friends and earn a commission on what they buy. This ‘word-of-mouth’ advertising is what the big TV advertisers most fear: your product endorsement to your friends actually carries much more clout than an expensive tele-ad.
So, you earn a few pennies or bucks on each sale. But the big money comes (or is supposed to) when you recruit your friend to do as you have done – to recommend the product to all their friends – and recruit them into the network, too. And you get a few bucks on their sales, and as your network grows exponentially, so does your income. So why doesn’t it work? Why do 97% of network marketers fail?
There are two main answers. First, the compensation plan. To earn anything at all you have to shift product. Suppose that you get $1 on average for each order that flows through your downline. That means that you and your team have to make 100 sales to make you $100. That’s not much. To live the life you dreamed of, to give up your day-job, to spend more time with your family, to pay off your mortgage and car...