Attraction Marketing – Can Building An MLM Business Be This Easy?

There is a lot of talk about attraction marketing in the network marketing industry lately. Although I’ve been working with Ann Sieg, author of The Attraction Marketer’s Manifesto for a number of years, I still get excited about building my mlm business this way.

I guess it’s because I had struggled for too long trying the embarrassing, old school ways of building my mlm business.

These days I really enjoy my work, the tense feelings that were a result of chasing friends and family or cold calling 2nd rate 3rd party mlm leads are gone. I now enjoy building my business based on more orthodox  business building practices.

Here’s a video explaining why I feel attraction marketing is the best way to work

The Days Before Ann Sieg’s Attraction Marketing Formula

I have wasted countless dollars on purchasing leads from mlm lead sources, I swear I will never go there again. It’s not just the money that I spent on these leads, it was the time spent calling them. It’s such grueling and sometimes humiliating work.

These people are usually extremely unqualified; they either don’t know why your calling them or they thought they could make a few extra bucks on the side doing data entry.

They may even be interested in the concept of making money from home but when you mention they actually have to invest a little money first…they run for the hills.

I preferred calling third party mlm leads over stalking friends, family and acquaintances (as did my friends and family I’m sure).

I went through a very short spell where I couldn’t help having a conversation with someone without thinking in the back of my mind, “they’d be perfect for my business”.

If I knew people were thinking like that every time they related to me, I’d be turned off in an instant…it’s just no way to relate to people (in my opinion).

Even worse is using your friends contacts as a prospecting opportunity *cringe*.

I remember years ago, I was accosted by my house-mates friend. She got me in a corner and said she needed to book a time with me because she had something to show me.

Now I didn’t even really know this girl, so what was it I thought…

I said to her;

“Tell me what it is you are going to show me and perhaps I’ll meet you (bad prospect I was, very uncooperative). She wouldn’t tell me because, ‘it wouldn’t do it justice’.

I said to her straight out; “Is it Amway?”

Even then she wouldn’t say and I remember thinking thinking to myself, what’s the big secret?

I told her flat out if it was Amway, don’t waste my time as I wasn’t interested…we never meet.

Now this poor lady wasn’t doing this naturally, she was taught to do it this way. I felt really annoyed by the way she had treated me. This was certainly not the way I appreciated being treated and is certainly not the way I would want to treat other people.

I’ve had people come to my acupuncture clinic ‘for a treatment’ only to be pitched on their mlm opportunity at the end of the session. Funny how they never come back once I expressed no interest in their mlm business opportunity.

The techniques that people are taught to build their mlm businesses range from plain ridiculous to completely off the wall.

People will go and purchase items from a shop and then return them just in order to have a chance to pitch the sales clerk on their mlm opportunity.

Some will strike up a seemingly friendly conversation in a supermarket while waiting in line, “what do you do so and so?” Really, that’s interesting, I’m a wealth creation expert, I help people become financially free while working from home…would you be interested in that? Here’s my card, call me some time.”

Oh my gosh, I’m feeling sick in the stomach just writing this. Is it any wonder that mlm is often the butt of many jokes around the dinner table?

The concept of network marketing is great, in fact it makes perfect sense and even some very respected business minds agree on this point but the way people have been taught to do business in mlm is just crazy.

==> Here’s a video by Mark Fuller with some more ideas

Really, I’ve been in my own business for nearly 10 years now and I haven’t even come close to trying any of the methods that many network marketing distributors taught to do.

The closest I would get is when I’m at a social function and someone asks me about acupuncture. I answer their question and never suggest that they ‘should come and try it out’.

If they ask me for a business card, I give it to them and that is it…new conversation.

When I first joined a mlm a few years back I really like the concept of residual income and felt that the model of network marketing made perfect sense. In order for me to make it work, I figured that I had better do it the way that they said I should…yep, the dreaded names list!

For a short while all commonsense went out the window and I started chasing friends and family. Luckily for me a good friend who had known me for a long time said; “Dude, what are  you doing? This is not you!”.

Yes, I could have said he was just being negative and a dream wrecker (and I wholeheartedly advise steering clear of these types) but I was becoming the girl who had ticked me off so badly 7 or 8 years earlier.

I have my friend to thank for that reality check.

In some circles people will tell you that you have to just get over that and do what it takes, evolve into the sponsoring machine that you need to be (never mind how many friendships you burn on the way, after all  you will meet much better, like-minded friends at the top when you are successful).

Recently Ann Sieg interviewed Mike Klingler from The Renegade University (a training site for network marketers wanting to learn how to use the Internet to attract prospects to them) and he spoke about the discomfort he went through for nearly 15 years using the old ways of building an mlm.

He said in this interview that he felt there was something wrong with him, that he needed to evolve, learn more, do more. It didn’t matter what he did, he just didn’t feel comfortable with those mlm prospecting methods.

He has since cottoned onto Ann Sieg’s Attraction Marketing Formula and he says that he is attracting more prospects than ever and at the same time is completely comfortable in his own skin.

You can watch the entire interview with Ann Sieg and Mike Klinger here. I found it a very compelling and inspiring conversation.

You may have heard the spiel, you have to leave those negative friends behind and just move on, it’s the only way to succeed, you must surround yourself with like minded people.

There may be elements of truth in this but hitting on all your friends and then writing them off and calling them negative because they were offended because you treated them like a prospect,  as well as THEIR friends and relatives is probably not the best thing to do.

What is worse is your upline may try and convince you that these people are just negative and you don’t need them in your life; “your on you way to the top and some people just get left behind, that’s life”.

What a load of rubbish.

*Disclaimer* – I know of people that build network marketing businesses the old fashion way but don’t employ these kind of tactics and so not every network marketer that is not using the Internet can be viewed in this way. There are probably loads of very professional network marketers that quietly build their businesses so I mean no offense. The problem is the people using these hard sell, high pressure, just meet me and I’ll show you what it’s about tactics,  make it very hard for these people trying to build their business in a more professional manner.

I came across a site that was very harsh on the topic of mlm, you can read it over at http://vandruff.com/mlm.html. I will warn you that the augments they put forth about mlm almost made me give up completely, it’s very hard reading if you are in mlm.

Fortunately for me, I didn’t believe what they wrote on that site and I started to dig around to see if my dream of financial freedom through mlm could be salvaged and that is when I ran into Ann Sieg.

Thanks to Ann I’ve learned that you can actually build a mlm business without any of the negative impacts on relationships with friends and family.

In my mind, I proved the authors over at the Vandruff site wrong. I can read this page and know for sure that I don’t do any of what they say.

Ann Sieg recently wrote a report called The Attraction Marketer’s Manifesto. It’s a free report that outlines how to build a network marketing business in a more business like manner.

In fact, once you apply the principles that she teaches in this report to your network marketing business, you’ll feel you are truly running a business instead of chasing after people. The best part about this is you can build your business like a professional business person and still get the advantage of leveraged income.

I’ve been enjoying building my business based on Ann Sieg’s Attraction Marketing teachings and I love it. I highly recommend reading her book and seeing if you can relate to that way of working.