16 Compelling Reasons You Need a Blog for your Network Marketing Business

Don’t use the internet to build your Network Marketing business! It doesn’t work, it’s not duplicatable and you’re just wasting your time!

Have you heard that one before?

When Jenn and I first got involved in the Network Marketing industry, we used to jump around from company to company thinking “this will be the one”.

During this time of “shiny object syndrome”, we had several different upline sponsors. One thing they all had in common was they didn’t leverage the power of the Internet as part of their business building strategy.

One in particular (I’ll call him Stewart) stands out because he was so adamant that it was IMPOSSIBLE to build a Network Marketing business using the Internet.

He felt that using the internet was only going to be a distraction and to just stick with his time proven “old school” way of building.

You know what I’m talking about. The home meetings, cold calling, contacting friends and family, hotel meetings, the 3-foot rule, and so on.

Now don’t get me wrong, we were successful using these methods (when used appropriately) for years before going online.

And for thousands of others as well over the decades.

But looking back, I believe Stewart had that belief for the simple reason being, he just had no clue how to generate prospects online.

And to admit that would undermine his authority as a leader. After all, you can’t be a leader in something you know nothing about. So he just stuck to what he knew.

Now, there are a lot of Stewarts out there and I’m sure many of you can relate.

But I’m going to tell you that it is absolutely possible to build your business online. You just have to learn how.

And a great way to start online is by having a blog. So here are my 16 reasons why you should get one going now.

1. You Can Help People.

In 2016, the Direct Selling Association said there are over 20 million people currently involved in Network Marketing in the U.S. That’s over 5,500 new people who join everyday.

While many beginners are fortunate enough to have solid upline support and training, there’s a larger number who aren’t as lucky.

There are many occasions where new distributors get uplines who quit suddenly and leave them to fend for themselves. Or, their upline sponsor is just as clueless on how to build a successful business as they are.

For these unfortunate ones, it’s an endless cycle of rejection and disappointment that leads them to eventually quit the industry.

But, for the few with the resolve and determination to continue, there’s a good chance some of these “lost souls” will go online to search for ways to solve the struggles that they face.

This is where having a blog comes in. With a blog, you can help these struggling individuals. You can help them by sharing your knowledge and expertise through blog posts and training videos.

If your content resonates with them, it’s more than likely you will earn their appreciation and respect. And when you create this content, it will stay online for a long time to help others in the future as well.

You can train your team more efficiently.

It’s nice to be able to train your team members one-on-one. But let’s face the facts. It’s time consuming and inefficient to teach the same thing over and over and over again to each new member.

Yes, there will be times when you will need to meet with them one-on-one. But when it comes to teaching the fundamental skill-sets, you can send one or groups of people to your training articles, videos or online courses. And the best part is, you’ll save a lot of time on your end.

2. It Will Establish You and Your Brand as an Expert.

Your brand is important. It’s what makes you unique in the marketplace and sets you apart from everyone else. This is how you will appear and be perceived by your audience.

Well written blog posts that provide valuable information, shows them that you are a knowledgeable person. Topics that resonate, and solves “pain points”, will establish you as an authority and a reliable source of information.

This will be key in building the trust factor that is so important if you are selling a product or service. Especially on the internet as people generally feel a greater sense of risk when buying online.

The more you can show that you are well-versed in your field, the more likely your audience will trust you to be a main source of information and will buy what you have to offer.

One thing I need to point out is, the product or service that you offer will only be secondary to your audience’s needs. What they really want to know is whether you can guide them to success. Remember, people don’t join companies. They join PEOPLE!

3. You’ll Develop Valuable New Skills.

In this day and age when everything is going online, as a Network Marketer it would make sense for you to do the same.

Aside from the skills necessary to set up a blog, you will also need to learn how to market your blog and personal brand on the Internet.

Remember there’s the word “Marketing” in Network Marketing.  :=)

Learning valuable skills like traffic and lead generation, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), email marketing, content marketing, and social media will give you a huge advantage over distributors only building offline using traditional methods.

4. It Can Grow Your Network Marketing Business.

One thing we can never get enough of is new leads. And by having a blog, you will have a great platform to do just that.

Generating Leads

Think of generating leads like fishing. Each blog post you create is like casting a small net to catch fish. The more nets you cast (blog posts), the more fish you’ll catch (leads).

According to Hubspot, the more pages you have on your site, the more traffic, and therefore leads you will generate.

And the more leads you generate through your content, means more form sign ups, email opt-in rates, engagement, and ultimately more people interested in joining your Network Marketing business.

I’ll get more into leads in number 10.

5. It Can Bring People that are in Line with Your Philosophies and Business Practices.

Wouldn’t it be great if the people interested in joining your Network Marketing business actually had the same desire, hunger, mindset and determination to succeed? And the best part is, they will come to YOU instead of having to chase them down!

Gone are the days of headache inducing, blood pressure rising attempts at trying to convince your friends to join your business.

And the days of trying to get your brother to a meeting who would rather stay at home to play video games? Gone!

Or your mom who joins only because she feels sorry for you. You get the picture.

Instead, with a blog, you will get people hungry to learn, contacting and asking YOU about your business opportunity.

Why you ask? Because you earned their trust. And the reason you earned their trust is because your content helped them with their challenges.

And the best part is, they will be higher caliber business partners. You’ll already know that they are willing to learn because they’ve been consuming your content.

You’ll also know because they went through your pre-qualification funnel that filters out the unmotivated, entitled, “Get Rich Quick” people, that you don’t want in your business anyway.

6. Gives You Valuable Insight Into Your Audience.

The ability to keep track of your audience’s “surfing” habits while on your blog has many advantages. With the use of analytics and site stats, you would be able to monitor what topics they read, view, share and comment on the most.

You would be able to track how many visitors you get to your site and what days and times get the most visits. This would come in handy when deciding when to publish your new content to get the most views and engagement.

7. Supports Your Social Media Initiatives.

A big misunderstanding beginners make is thinking a social media outlet like Facebook is enough to promote their MLM business. While it is an important aspect to help grow and engage your audience, the main goal is to get them to your site.

Think of social media as a funnel and your blog as your content factory where all your posts, articles and videos are created. Then when you have a new piece of content, you promote it by posting on your social media platforms.

If your content is something your viewers are searching for, there’s a good chance they will click and visit your site. There’s also a good chance they will share it, which will help your social network profile grow and bring you even more traffic.

This is where you’ll get the opportunity for them to opt-in to your email list. From there, you can get in front of their faces, build relationships and trust, and convert them down the road.

8. It Brings Your Knowledge Base to a Higher Level.

There’s and old latin proverb Docendo discimus, which means “we learn while we teach”. When teaching a subject, one is forced to analyze it, then break it down so it can be taught in a logical order.

The Learn, Do, Teach method.

In Network Marketing, both offline and online, we follow this methodology, but we also add taking massive action into the mix. We first learn a concept, apply that concept by taking action, then teach that concept to our team or online audience.

Without the “taking massive action” part, you’re only teaching theory and not fully understanding what it is you are teaching.

In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class, when we are first taught a technique we start by practicing slow and not full strength. We’d repeat the technique over and over again with our training partners, also going slow and letting me apply the technique.

After practicing the movements a number of times and feeling comfortable, I might think that I could actually teach it to someone.

But once we start sparring (taking action), and my training partner is now using full resistance against me, that technique I thought I knew and could teach, all of a sudden doesn’t work like I thought it would. At least not at first.

Eventually with more practice, I’d be able to apply the technique successfully, but there are so many important little details and nuances I would have missed had I not actually experienced it fully.

That’s why taking massive action in the Learn, Do, Teach method is so important. Without the doing part, you wouldn’t be able to teach those little details and nuances and would only be half preparing them.

With a blog, once you learn a topic, and then apply it with some success, you can teach it through your content with more confidence. And your audience will benefit from your knowledge.

Helps you stay ahead of the curve.

When you have a blog, you will need to keep coming up with fresh content on a consistent basis because your audience will keep you accountable. If not, they’ll go someplace else.

This will push you to keep learning and stay up to date with what’s going on in your industry. This will also push you to implement what you learn. And by teaching what you learn, you will establish yourself as a leader and not a follower.

9. Will let you Engage and Build Relationships with Your Audience.

Blogs provide another source to deepen the connection with your audience, to build the “Know, Like and Trust” factor.

Providing valuable information that solve problems, lets your audience engage with you, and you with them. A two-way conversation. It encourages interaction, feedback and comments. Always make sure you reply to those comments!

This dialogue also allows you an opportunity to ask questions which can give you new insights into their struggles and needs. With this insight, you can then create content that offers solutions.

10. It will Increase Search Engine Traffic

And we’re back to leads again. Like I said before, you can never have too many leads, and without traffic to your site, there won’t be any leads. Believe it or not, your future team members ARE out there looking for you. They just have to find you first.

There are over a billion websites today on the World Wide Web and new ones are popping up every second. So how are your future team members going to find you? Through traffic generation.

There are paid and free methods to generate traffic. If you’re just starting out or don’t have a budget for paid traffic yet, you will want to learn as much as you can about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO activities are the things you will need to do to get your content found by people looking for information and resources to solve their challenges. YOUR information and resources.

SEO is a broad topic and beyond the scope of this article but here’s a few things you can do when you first get your blog going.

1. Start creating valuable content that will serve your audience. Blog posts (like the one you’re reading), videos, photos and infographics are some examples. Every time you write a blog post for example, it’s one more indexed page on your website, which means it’s one more opportunity for your post to appear when people search for that topic. Remember our fishing analogy?
2. Posting regularly also tells the search engines that your site is active, and sites that add new pages at a higher rate may get noticed more from Google than sites that add content less frequently.
3. Share the new content on your various social media platforms.
4. Send it to your email list which I’ll cover next.

11. Allows you to build an Email List.

You may have heard the saying, “The Money’s in the list”. 

For traditional offline Network Marketing, this is true. Your active names list is the lifeblood of your business. The same holds true for your online email list. Without an email list, you don’t have a business.

Going back to social media, you may for example have a Facebook audience with thousands of fans. Aside from having access to their profiles, you don’t have access to their contact information, like email.

In order to reach those fans, Facebook wants you to pay for it. So to get their contact information, your goal is to get them to your blog and opt-in to your email list.

Once they’re on your list, you’ll have much more control and can communicate and market to them anytime you want. Within reason of course.

And to top it off, you OWN this list, and Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. can never take that away from you.

12. Let’s Your Uniqueness Shine Through.

Blogging is one of the best ways to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

There’s only so much information one can write about on a certain topic. Can you imagine if all the Network Marketing/Internet Marketing blogs out there all wrote the same way and in the same style?

How boring would that be?

You have the opportunity to let your personality come out. To provide your own unique experiences, thoughts and insights on these same old topics.

Your uniqueness will attract the kind of people that relate and resonate with your personality and style.

The type of people that would rather work with you over somebody else, and in turn the type of people you will want to work with.

13. It Will Help Organize Your Thoughts.

This is more a personal reason to blog but it might help others who have this problem.

I’ve always loved to read. Fiction, non fiction, articles, you name it. I can’t remember when I haven’t spent at least a few hours a day reading something.

I can easily watch one hour or longer training videos and take notes. I’m constantly learning every single day. The problem for me is that I’ve never been much of a writer and am really bad at putting these thoughts down.

All this learning and information tends to get jumbled in my head. When I write, I’m forced to sit and break down these ideas and insights into structured sentences and paragraphs.

Blogging on a regular basis helps to bring out more clarity and organization to the mess that’s going on in my brain. Maybe this could help you too?

14. It Will Help You Become a Better Writer.

Everything you’ve learned about Network Marketing and will continue to learn, you will want to share to help others.

Obviously, to do this, you’re going to have to write. This was and still is my biggest challenge when it comes to this blogging and internet stuff.

But like anything else, the more you practice by doing, the better you will get!

15. It Shows People How Serious You Are.

Maintaining a blog and creating content takes time, work and effort. It’s not something you do only when you feel like doing it.

When people visit your blog and see that you are providing value on a consistent basis, they’ll see the time and effort you are putting into it and they’ll know that you are serious about your business and are here to stay.

16. Creating a blog IS Duplicatable!

I saved this one for last because it’s one of the main objections upline leaders will give about using the Internet.

Maybe 5 or 10 years ago I would have agreed with this argument. Back then if you wanted to have a website or blog, you would either have to learn how to build one yourself or hire someone to do it for you.

Today, advances in technology have made it possible for the average person to create their own blog. Whether it’s for personal use or business, using a platform like WordPress makes it very doable.

Is there a learning curve involved? You bet! But there’s going to be a learning curve when starting anything new worth pursuing. Especially if learning these skills will contribute to your success.

The good news is, you don’t have to be a tech person, programmer or graphic designer to do this. Setting up a blog is not rocket science and you CAN learn how to do it. Here’s our article on how to get your blog set up.

There are even systems out there, that will be give you your own pre-made blog and training to go with it that’s catered to Network Marketers and designed to be duplicated so you can share with your team members.

Conclusion

By now I’m sure you have a pretty good idea why you should be adding a blog to your business building efforts. If you’re serious about your Network Marketing business, you might want to get going on that blog ASAP!

Can you think of other reasons why having a blog is important to your business? Let others know by commenting below.