The Magic of the Autoresponder and the Long Tail (Part III)

In The Magic of the Autoresponder and the Long Tail (Part II), I promised to get into exactly why the MLM I chose was wrong, why I quit, and what the long tail is. I also promised to talk about how to use an autoresponder series like I did, and what elements you need for it to be successful.

I had mentioned in my earlier post that I made several other online marketing mistakes during the building of my 3,000 member downline. One of the biggest of which was that I chose the wrong MLM. So many people are confused over what MLM is, and is not, that it's no wonder that people really do not understand how to choose one.

To clarify a bit, I will say that if you have a great online marketing strategy, you could probably be successful with almost any MLM. I'm not talking about the MLM's marketing strategy, btw, I'm talking about yours. Their strategy is simple... quickly get as many people enrolled and using product as possible for as long as possible, rinse/repeat.

Your marketing strategy, however, needs to be a little more complicated than that. You need more finesse than that, and you need more individuality than that. How else will you distinguish yourself amid the thousands of marketers, all showing the same presentations, the same brochures, the same compensation plan, and the same products via the same web sites?

Read the above paragraph again and you will learn in an instant what it took me 10 months and $10,000 to learn... you can't win by following the herd.

One of the things I figured out, after looking at one of my checks, was that the people that I recruited were not at all following my lead and being as productive as I was. I was helping them to recruit using my own system, and at one point, I refused to personally recruit any more people (this is seen as a mistake by some, but there are shades of grey here that are outside of this discussion). The key point here is that while duplication with my fully automated system was completely within the realm of possibility, people just weren't doing it.

The other thing I figured out was that the MLM that I chose had several major flaws. One, if the people that I had recruited had duplicated what I had done, I would have been earning LESS money, not more! This is even with a much larger downline volume than what I currently had. Ooooops... lousy compensation plan.

The other thing I realized was that in order to get even close to my level of success, each of the 17 people I had personally sponsored would have to recruit at least 10 each. Each of those 10, in turn, would then have to recruit 10, and so on.

Possible? Yes, using my autoresponder series system and the Internet, but... you remember I said that people weren't doing it, and if they did, by the time you get a few levels deep, you're talking over 1 million distributors. Very few MLM companies will pull those kind of numbers, and if they do, they have certain elements that this company did not have.

Now here is perhaps the most important part related to that. All told, at my level of participation, I was spending about $100 per month on product and associated marketing costs (not my marketing costs by choice, but costs I was required to incur by the MLM). With a 3,000 member downline, I was netting only about $10 to $20 per month profit, and that was never a sure thing because I would earn less if the people I recruited did better than expected!

The only way I was going to make any real money with this company, was to stop helping my people, and recruit as many people as I could as fast as I could and let the chips fall. I refused to do it, and so I quit.

There were other factors too... the company didn't have unique products which produced measurable, visible results, their prices were too high (IMO), and they just didn't have the spunk that I was looking for. There's more, but that's the core of it. There are far better MLM's out there, with better pay plans, better products, and a better overall situation.

For another, I realized, long before I had even heard of the "long tail of marketing" that I needed a long tail approach. I had proven to myself that developing something unique of value was a key success element, instead of being one fo the crowd. But I also knew I needed something that wasn't always trying to catch up to itself, something repeatable, lasting, and, as it turns out "long tail."

In subsequent posts, I'll talk about the long tail approach a bit, and how to use an autoresponder series to enhance any online marketing effort.