Advertising in the MLM World

There are legal issues involved with advertising opportunities that you need to be aware of. There are often issues involved with using a company’s name, product name, and product likeness that you also need to be aware of. At this point, I am not going to go into detail about what you can and cannot do or can and cannot say, but I will say that your company probably has published rules or approved advertising. Bigger upline organizations will also be well aware of company rules and can help you out when and if you want to advertise.

You can choose to promote your product or opportunity in advertising by avoiding the company name (i.e. Amway) and such, but you do have to be aware of the laws involved with advertising. I personally feel comfortable with an advertisement if I am telling the truth and am giving the reader realistic expectations. I have seen bigger business people fail the second test and get in trouble. I mean, sure you can make $1 million a month, but nearly all distributors will fall short of this amount. Even using possible, i.e. $1 million a month possible, does not let you off the hook for setting high expectations. Even if you quote your own commissions, you may still be setting unreasonable expectations so be careful.

For an advertisement to be successful, there has to be something delivered or desired in return for the effort to respond to the advertisement. Free information is ok to use, but free information about what? Free information containing secrets about multi-level marketing. That is more substantial. But do you actually have secrets about MLM that others do not know? Again, we do not want to create unfulfilled expectations.

An important part of advertising is filtering. We not only want to attract people interested in the opportunity, we also want to filter out people who will waste our time, sign up and do nothing, or generally be a problem for us. Setting reasonable expectations helps, but we need to craft our advertisement to attract good people while avoiding others. For instance: “Easy money in MLM. Make money while watching TV.” This would not be good. Try this instead: “Hard work in MLM is rewarded. Free report.”

Your follow up information must fulfill your advertisement and generally should be a presentation for your product or opportunity. You could use a two step approach, giving a bigger advertisement on the first mailing, then delivering the presentation on the second. You could also do a one step or two step with a personal presentation at the end. Because the presentation is going to be specific to the company or the company’s product, you should use the company’s materials or have your materials approved by the company. A cover letter on letterhead is generally ok, but anything that goes into detail should be company approved.

I am going a little long with this blog and there is so much more I want to say about advertising. I guess we will have to continue tomorrow.