How to Build Your MLM Downline into a Powerful Recruiting Team

Most people who join an MLM program are under the mistaken assumption that their most important job is to do a lot of recruiting. So they spend a lot of time and money trying to sponsor scads of people - and no effort at all on TRAINING those people once they join.

Too many supposed online gurus do the same thing. You get a different email from them every week touting their latest and greatest program.

But if you join under them, one thing becomes very apparent: they spend absolutely NO TIME at all trying to help their downline build their own businesses. That is undoubtedly why they spend so much time recruiting - their own dropout rate is exceptionally high!

Sponsoring new people into your MLM organization is a very important part of this business. However, I want to stress that this is not all you need to do to succeed. Just as important as sponsoring is what you do AFTER a new member has joined.

It's all well and good to have 25 new business partners. But if these people just sit there and do nothing, they don't help you grow your business quickly. They may earn you monthly commissions, but they could be causing a recruiting explosion in your downline, enabling you to earn many times the commissions they put in your pocket!

Even worse, if they just sit around and don't make any money, they're not going to stay with the business very long. And if your people are constantly dropping out, you're going to be spending all your time replacing them - not watching your organization duplicate and expand exponentially.

Sponsoring is just half the job. The other half is training your people to DUPLICATE what you are doing. In fact, in some ways, this job is even more important than sponsoring. If you do an exceptional job of training your people, you won't need to sponsor hundreds of people on your own to have a fast-growing group. Believe me, when everyone does a little, much more is accomplished than when 1 person does it all. This is what leverage is all about!

Let's look at a simple example. Let's say your MLM program pays you $10 per month per person in your downline. You want to earn an income of $3,000 per month. That means that you need 300 people in your downline.

Doing all that work by yourself is going to take many months, to say nothing of the advertising and promotion expense.

But what if you were to sponsor just 10 good people in a few months, and then train THEM to duplicate you?

You will undoubtedly have 300 people in your downline a LOT faster than if you did it yourself. And the cost will be just a fraction! That's why duplication is such an important part of building your MLM business.

If you are working several hundred good prospect leads every month without fail, and then doing great followup work, you should be bringing plenty of people into your group. But what you do with those new people is what will directly influence how large or small your commission checks will be.

Most of us simply cannot afford to buy thousands of prospect leads in a short time to build an organization all by ourselves. But if you have 10 people each working several hundred prospects a month, your whole group WILL be contacting thousands.

And the people that come in as a result of that work will be in your group and show up on your commission checks. This is really the big secret of making money in MLM. It is not how many people you can bring into the program all by yourself. MLM is about the huge income you can earn when everyone in your group is doing a small amount of work.

Your big job is to make sure that everyone in your group is contributing to this effort. Unfortunately, the vast majority of MLM'ers seem to forget this step and never make the kind of income they could if they would just remember that they have to DUPLICATE themselves in their downline.

Here is something else to consider: when someone joins an MLM program in your downline, they are going to immediately check out what kind of sponsor you are. If you completely ignore them, they aren't going to stay with you very long. And they're not going to duplicate.

This is why it is doubly important that you make absolutely sure that you are doing everything possible to make sure that your members succeed. You are not going to build a large residual income if these people never learn how to be successful!

I've seen many people find this out first-hand. They have enrolled a large number of new members and sat back and waited for the money to roll in. And they have found out, to their dismay, that the people they enrolled are not interested in working their program, and they only stick around a couple of months! Why?

Because these sponsors have not only never contacted them or offered them any help, but they didn't even bother to let them know that they are their sponsor! If this is what you are doing, I would urge you to think again! You are not in business to see how many emails you can send out each day. You are dealing with real human beings who want to make money. Just getting people to join and then forgetting about them is not going to do that for you!

On the other hand, we have members who do such exceptional work with their groups that almost every person they enroll starts duplicating. This should be your goal. Why spend all that money enrolling people if none of them eventually build a business? It is absolutely essential that you spend as much time working with your group as you do in recruiting them. This is a primary ingredient in MLM success!

Does that mean that you have to spend a lot of money or all your time on the phone? No. It will probably cost you very little money to train and work with your downline - particularly if you do most of it online.

In working with our own downlines, for instance, we build a member support website for every program we seriously work. We will it with training articles to help them learn how to sponsor people online, and how to work with their members. We provide sample recruiting letters, a co-op advertising program to help them find prospects inexpensively, and we produce a regular newsletter. We give every member of our downline our personal email address and encourage them to contact us.

That takes up a lot of our time. But in the long run, this is what makes us a lot of money!

Training your people to succeed in your MLM program is the difference between YOUR success and failure. The best way to build a large group fast is to make sure that everyone in your group understands the program, that everyone understands and is doing the minimum amount of prospecting, and that every new member (no matter how many levels deep) is trained to do the same thing.

Every person you sponsor becomes your Business Partner. How many of you would go into a traditional business with someone and then completely ignore them? Unfortunately, this happens all too often in MLM, and it is one of the big reasons that people fail. You've simply got to do more than send out a bunch of rah-rah emails. MLM is very much a hands-on business. You cannot do it anonymously and succeed.

Let's get down to some specifics and some tools you can use in managing your downline.

Welcoming Your New Members

I am quite often shocked at how many new members are never contacted by their sponsors at all. This is absolutely essential! If you cannot do this much, you might as well quit right now and not waste your money. You will not be successful in MLM. Not now, not ever!

The minute you know you've sponsored someone, you should immediately call that person or send them a welcome email letter.

Your welcome letter should include the kind of information that will help your new member get started quickly: where to get help and training; information about the services your company offers; and any support services that you offer your downline. Beyond that, you need to introduce yourself to this new member and make sure they know what you will do to help them build their business. Encourage them to contact you any time they have questions.

Be sure to detail all the services you offer to every member of your group. If you offer a bonus to your new members, make sure they get it right away. If you offer a newsletter or member support site, be sure to spell this out in your welcome letter. Ask them to let you know when they enroll new members and offer to help them train THEIR new members. In short, tell them all the services you will provide them as their sponsor and upline. Let them know right up front what they can expect from you.

One of the most important pieces of information you should include is personal email and possibly even your phone number!!! And don't just give your phone number, tell that new member when you can most likely be reached.

I am appalled at the number of people who never give their members any way to contact them at all. Everyone you personally enroll and every member in your first levels should have your contact information and be encouraged to get in touch with you anytime they need help or have questions.

Most people are not going to call or email you continuously every day with problems and questions. The newest people will contact you the most.

Contact Your Downline on a Regular Basis

Your welcome letter is just your first contact. You should continue to contact every member of your group regularly - at least once every couple of weeks. You can do this with a newsletter/ezine, or just a special letter from you.

In these letters, you can cover some of the information that new people usually have about your program, and reiterate what they should do to get started.

It is essential that your new member understands exactly how the program works and what they must do to start making money. Go over it with them again. The more clear your member is on the programs and what they need to do before they ever get started, the more they are going to be successful.

When you contact them, continue to stress what they need to do NOW to get started. Explain the minimum amount of promotional work they should be doing each month. I have stressed this several times in this article for a very important reason - if every member in your group just does the bare minimum, you are going to have a very large and profitable group in a shorter amount of time than you would believe possible!

You may want to set up regular time intervals for checking in with each of your new members. You can then check with them each time to see what they have done, whether they have questions, and whether they have new members. Once your member has new members of their own, you need to make sure they welcome THEIR new member and go over this same material with them.

Don't assume that they will know to do this. Be sure and walk them through it and make sure that they do. If you want a large and working sales organization, it is absolutely critical that every new member is welcomed and worked with in the early stages. The early stages are very, very critical. More new members drop out in this stage than any other. And it is so easy to prevent!

How can you insure that every new member is properly trained? To begin with, make absolutely sure that you work with every new person you personally sponsor. If you do this correctly, you will already have trained these members to work with their new people. Be sure you stress this in your training.

Something else you should do is ask every one of your personally enrolled members to always let you know when they enroll new members. You should then send each of these 2nd level people a welcome letter from you, their upline sponsor.

This letter should again welcome them to the program, let them know what they need to do to be successful, and offer your support. Always refer them first to their own personal sponsor, but let them know that you are also available. This will insure that you don't have anyone downline who is not getting personal help. You may have a member who is not working with their group. If you want these people to be successful, you may have to do it for them. This extra work will show up on your commission check.

You may think that this is going to be an awful lot of work and letter-writing. And, yes it is. I've never told anyone that being successful in MLM doesn't require any work. It requires a lot of work, but the rewards are almost unlimited in potential income. If you want to make the big bucks, you have to put in the legwork. You have to do the little things that produce BIG results. And when you do it better than most of the other MLM'ers in the business (which shouldn't be hard if you follow these suggestions), you will make more than 99% of all MLM'ers.

However, it doesn't have to be as hard as it sounds. Once you have sat down and wrote a good welcome letter, save it in a file. Depending on what email program you use, you may be able to save it as a template that you can call up and use anytime you sponsor a new member.

Believe me, people do respond to personal attention and support. When you can offer every member of your group the support of yourself and people several levels above them, you are going to have some very successful people below you. And they will be doing the same things with their new members And when they are successful, you are going to be extremely successful!

You will find that in MLM, every bit of help you give to your downline will come back to you multiplied many times over. When you help people sponsor new members, you will increase your commission check. When you help them get into profit, you will have a happier, harder-working group that won't drop out.

Those of you who have worked MLM programs before know that one of the biggest factors in your success is in keeping your dropout rate low. The personal help and service you give to your downline will directly influence this.

This is the secret to the awesome money-making potential of MLM - multiplication and duplication. First, you need to multiply the amount of work you can do on your own by bringing a lot of people into your sales organization. And then you need to duplicate this multiplication in every single member of your organization. Simply recruiting a lot of people is not enough. You must also show them how to duplicate what you have done.

Doing exceptional support work with your new members will insure that each new member duplicates what you have accomplished. One of the oldest adages in MLM is that you are only as successful as the people in your downline.