If there’s one thing you need in order to succeed with MLM/Network Marketing, it’s leads. Without leads, you’ll never make much money regardless of your company, the pay plan, your upline or anything else. You’re also going to need a lot of prospects since there’s no way you’ll sign everyone to be an agent. How many you’ll need depends on several factors such as your skill and your business. Not to mention, if you have a lot of leads, you won’t have to feel like you have to sign everyone.

It’s a lot easier to say no to having someone that doesn’t match what you’re looking for if you have 20-30 people waiting on your call. There are other factors involved in succeeding, but if you have leads and use them, that’s a big hurdle passed. Call everyone you know and ask for referrals. Tell them about the great business you have and how they can benefit from either being a customer or agent. If you’ve chosen wisely and believe in your company, you won’t see a problem with this. If you aren’t sure you have a great business, maybe you should keep looking.

A great way to decide if you have a good company is to ask yourself if you’d sign up your best friend or valued member of your family. Or, ask yourself if you’d use the product if there was no pay plan involved. If the answer is No, maybe you should keep looking. Build lead capture pages and get them listed high on search engines. This will generate leads that are interested in your company. However, anyone who has worked at getting a site listed high will tell you this is time consuming and far from easy, and it’s not an overnight job either.

You could spend a lot of time working on your site and never break the top 100. You can advertise your lead capture page on Pay Per Click (PPC) search engines. The largest sites are Google and Yahoo. These are the ads that show up at the top or on the right when you search. This is the quickest way and depending on the key words you’re bidding on could be cheap or very expensive (some keywords cost over 100 bucks) and there’s no guarantee you’ll get a single lead. It only guarantees that someone will see your page.

If you’re going to go this route, do yourself a favor and either get trained on how to do it or start slow or both. You can easily blow hundreds or thousands of dollars before you know it. You can print flyers and post them on bulletin boards around town and put them on doors and cars. If you figure a 1-2% success rate, you’ll get 1-2 leads per hundred flyers and then depending on your closing rate, you can figure out how many flyers you’ll need to hand out consistently to reach your goals.

Also figure in printing costs. Even if you’re printing these at home, you’ll have to pay for ink/toner and the wear and tear on your printer, not to mention the time and gas it takes to drive around and post the flyers. You should also get permission from property managers if you’re going to put them on doors or cars since some people will throw them on the ground. One other thing to be wary about is car alarms.

You can spam the world with one of those “e-mail 16 million people for 29.95″ spam messages you get every day. Do us both a favor and forget about that. The best you can hope for is to not get blacklisted or in trouble with the feds. The odds are that you’ll be visited by the feds and/or have your ISP shut you down. The way these are collected is by sending a little robot spider to crawl the web and collect e-mail addresses from forums, news groups, blogs, web sites and anywhere else they can find them.

These are just bad news and may get you kicked out of your company since they could be black listed because you didn’t follow this advice. An easy way to tell if they are real leads or harvested is the price. If they’re unbelievably cheap or don’t include i.p. address, they are probably harvested.

Cold Calling – This is just as it sounds. You pick up the phone book and start calling. This is the cheapest way to generate leads and if you have a thick skin may work for you. The thing to remember is that those people may be on the Do Not Call List and it may get you in trouble. The best thing to do is research the legal requirements before attempting this.

You can buy leads from a company that generates leads for you. But even these aren’t created equal. Some companies sell the same lead to 5, 10 or more people; even people in the same company as you and sell them for weeks, months or longer. You could end up with a lead that is 5 months old and been called by 10 or more people and is just plain tired of talking to people or has already joined a company and is quite happy with it.

Some are also overpriced and use shady tactics to get people to sign up such as contest sites. Or you could join a lead Co-Op that only sells the lead to you and generates it after you order meaning they are about 1-3 days old and only sold once. You want to make sure the company is reputable, been around for awhile and truly cares about their customers/members. They should offer multiple lead packages, training on how to effectively contact those leads, multiple autoresponders to make contacting them for follow-up (the fortune is in the follow-up) and training them easier and a presentation to explain what network marketing/MLM actually is in case the person has never heard of the concept or your company doesn’t offer a recruiting site.

It would also help if the company has a pay plan so that as you refer your new downline to the great leads you use, you can create an extra income stream (or at least get them for free) and so can your downline.

The thing to remember is that regardless of how the prospect was generated these people asked for information on starting a home based business and you should make it your responsibility to get them the information as soon as possible. Unless you didn’t take my advice and used a spam CD; then you’re on your own. Another thing to think about when choosing a method is will it be duplicatable to your downline and get consistent results? But that’s a subject covered in a previous article.

Read more about leads on line for free and free ways to generate leads to increase your income.

Access realistic information about website traffic – welcome to your own guide.

I’m sure you know that advertising is essential to the success of your work from home business, whether it’s large or small, new or old. If you don’t advertise and market your work from home business, it simply will not succeed or last long at all.

Most offline advertising costs money, which is why online advertising is the way to go. Whether online or offline, word-of-mouth advertising can do wonders for your work from home business. It is, in my opinion, the best advertising you can get, and it’s free. It also tells you that your previous customers or clients were happy and are spreading the word about your business. They’ll usually tell they’re friends, family and coworkers which will bring in new customers and more business for you. Another benefit from this type of advertising is that it provides credibility to you and your business.

A great example of this would be my Proofreading and Editing Services where I provide a professional proofreading service for many different clients from all over the world. I strive to keep my clients 100% satisfied because I know they’ll use my service again and also tell others about my service. It’s completely free advertising for me.

Having people spread the word about your work from home business is great, but it shouldn’t be the end of your advertising efforts. Some offline options include television spots, radio spots, billboards and print media. These are all effective advertising methods, but for a small work from home business they’re usually unrealistic and quite expensive.

A more economical and yet very effective way is online marketing and advertising. It doesn’t matter if you provide a service, product, or sell other people’s products or services as an affiliate, such as my work from home site. Online advertising can reach a huge audience as the World Wide Web is now an integral part of daily life for most people. You can reach an audience of literally millions of people.

There’s many forms of online advertising, and many are free. Don’t underestimate the power of free, though. While the saying, “you get what you pay for” may apply to some things, it couldn’t be further from the truth when it comes to marketing your work from home business on the internet. I’m not saying paid advertising isn’t worth it, though. Paid advertising can bring in a lot of return if you know what you’re doing, such as Pay-Per-Click advertising.

No matter what you’re trying to sell or promote, you must advertise and get the word out about your work from home business. You can’t just “build it, and they will come.” Your business will fail with that kind of mindset.

Here are a couple of online marketing resources you may find useful:

• Free Online Marketing Newsletter
• Internet Marketing Strategies, Tools and Tips

Everyone has their own preferred methods of advertising their work from home business. Let me know some of the advertising and marketing methods you’re using to find success on the internet. Are you using offline or online methods? I’d love to hear your comments!

In my last post I discussed about finding success in your work from home business. Today, I want to go over the ingredients for work from home start-up success. If you apply these steps, you’ll find long-lasting work from home success.

Over at SmallBizBee.com, Matt shared with his readers 10 must-haves for business success. Take a moment to go over them and also watch the video. I know these tips may mostly apply to a traditional business, but I feel most if not all can also be applied to your work from home business online.

Of course, these aren’t the only ingredients for success. I’ll provide you with what I feel are necessary when first getting started with your work from home business.

My Top 5 List for Work From Home Start-Up Success

• Find a mentor or group of mentors
• Read and learn everything you can
• Apply what you learn
• Become an expert at 1 or 2 things – Never try to master everything!
• Continually build your business – Never give up!

Motivation and determination play a very active role in the success of your work from home business. Be sure to check out my other posts on the topic:

Can You Really Make Money Online?

Expectations When Starting A Work From Home Business

5 Tips to Stay Motivated and Focused with Your Work From Home Business

Hopefully this will help you have a better understanding what it takes to find  success, whether you’re just starting or have been working hard at it for a while now.

Remember, the worst thing you can do is give up. I know it’s hard when you’re first starting out. I’ve been there. Information overload kicks in, and you don’t know where to start or what to do next. Take it slow and at your own pace.

I’ve touched on the topic of success in the past, but it never hurts to provide tips and strategies that you can implement to find success in your work from home business. For the most part, success begins with you.

Over at SmallBizBee.com, the owner, Matt, attended a conference on special event management, and the keynote speaker focused on the 5 elements to a successful event. As Matt pointed out, and I totally agree, these 5 elements can be applied to your work from home business.

The first element, which I believe is the MOST important of them all, is having passion for what we do. This would almost seem like common sense, but many people ignore this factor. Think about it for a minute. Why would you want to do something that you truly don’t have passion for?

A work from home business is different in that you have a choice in  what you do, unlike a JOB. Having passion in your work from home business will give you the drive and determination to see it to fruition.

The other elements in that article are just as important. If I could add another element that would determine the success of your work from home business, it would have to be one’s mindset. I’ve written an article on this subject before. When you get a chance go read it… You Must Have the Right Mindset to Succeed With a Money Making Home Business.

Remember, it doesn’t matter what work from home business you have. You will find success when you apply these elements and realize that it all comes down to one person… YOU.

The launch of SFI 3.0 is finally here. The new changes took place on Monday, January 5. Now, you may be asking what SFI 3.0 is, so let me explain.

SFI (Strong Future International) has made a lot of recent changes to the site, structure and compensation plan and also added some very cool new features as well as a brand new internet store. They’re calling it SFI 3.0. This is fantastic news for those that are seriously thinking about starting a home based business.

The changes are way too comprehensive to list here, so if you’re interested, go to SFI 3.0 to learn more.

This is very exciting for me as a home based business owner, and it should be for you as well. SFI has been around for a long time… over 10 years in fact! They truly care about their customers and affiliates. The new changes open up a lot of new possibilites.

SFI is one of the most honest and legitimate companies I have seen in a long time, with tangible products and services. The new store is better than ever. Affiliates will now make even more money for their efforts with the new restructuring of the compensation plan.

I have been saying all along that 2009 was going to be big, and SFI is reassuring me of that.

I urge you to check out the changes and see what SFI is up to. Then, if you want to start your own 2009 success path, sign up with SFI for free and realize the true potential.

This is the perfect time to think about your future and see that the current economy isn’t going to get better anytime soon. Put in place today the steps that are going to set you financially free tomorrow.