Contrary to popular belief (or what most MLM people would prefer to believe), online MLM promotion campaign is somehow different from an offline MLM promotion campaign. You can not simply try to apply the same successful offline MLM campaign online and hope that it will be as successful online.

There is basically one major difference between offline and online MLM promotion: one-on-one approach versus one-on-many approach. In offline promotions, one-on-one approach and follow up on each lead is a very crucial factor. If you can follow up on a prospective lead and succesfully educate him about you MLM program, you'e got yourself a downline. If not, you'll have to wipe the tears off your eyes and try your luck with the next prospective lead.

An ideal online promotion in the other hand, relies very little on one-on-one follow up. With the power of the internet, it is possible to find people who are already interested in MLM, willing to spend money on promoting it and train them about your MLM program all automatically. This way it is possible for you to have many prospective leads at the same time, train them all at the same time automatically and therefore makes your chance of recruiting downlines significantly bigger.

To do a successful online MLM promotion, it is best to know first what to avoid in doing it. Here are the wrong ways most people are doing in promoting their online MLM program:

1. Promoting an online MLM in an offline media

By offline media, we mean regular magazines or newspapers you usually subscribe to or sold on bookstores. Some people may think that if they promote their MLM program in TIME magazine or Wall Street Journal, they will instantly get thousands of leads who will easily turn into downlines. Anyway, almost everybody read TIME magazine, right? True, but to tell you the truth, almost nobody who is reading a magazine or a newspaper will put down whatever it is they are reading, dash frantically to the computer and type the URL you promote to check it out.

Most people will think "This may be OK to try. I'll browse the site when I get to my computer" then read on. When they finally get to their computer a few hours later, they most probably have totally forgotten about your ad.

2. Promoting an online MLM in an online classified ads site

There are two reasons why this is a bad move: First, because there are now literally thousands of classified ads sites on the internet. None of them is a major player in the field, which means you must try to post to all of them for maximum exposure. Second, because most of the sites dont charge anything to put ads on their sites, a lot of other people are also promoting there.

To get a decent number of people viewing your ad, you must put your MLM promotion ad in at least several hundreds classified ads sites. There are softwares out there that can do this automatically, but if everybody's using a specialized software to do this, then your ad will be competing against tens of thousand of other advertisers' ads, and as soon as your ad appears it will be pushed downward by other ads from other advertisers. The chance of the right kind of lead seeing your ad in the right time and the right mood is very slim if you try this approach.

3. Promoting online MLM using free safelists

Unlike online classified ads sites, there are not as many free safelist sites out there. The companies who run safelist sites has actually spent the time to collect the names and email addresses of people interested in a specific topic (in our case MLM/online business) and these people are willing to receive offers related to their interest. When a paying advertiser put an ad, his ad will be sent to the email of all people in the safelist. Considering that all the people in the list are targeted, this concept is actually more powerful then two we discussed above.

Unfortunately, when you put your ads in these safelists using their free trial mode (most of them offer free trials), your ads will only go out to the other advertisers who are also using free trial mode. In other words, your ad will only go out to other persons who are posting ads themselves. These people don't expext to read ads from other advertisers. That's why most of them use disposable email addresses like yahoo, hotmail or the like. Your ad will stand almost zero possibility of being read, let alone acted upon.

4. What could make all those 3 mistakes even worse: using long and forgettable URL

This 4th mistake can only make the previous 3 mistakes even worse. If you are very lucky and an eager lead finally reads your MLM ad and decides to visit the URL you're promoting (let's say it's something long and ugly like http://www.yourmlmcompany.com/cgi-bin/prospect1.cgi?sponsorid=1192349&message=1192). If he decides to sign up right there and then after reading the promotional material, you are to be congratulated as one of the luckiest MLM distributor in the history of the industry.

However, if he doesn't sign up directly (which is very normal), he may want to revisit your site later after some deep contemplation. Unfortunately for you, he may not remember your long URL when he gets back from his contemplation. He may only remembers the www.yourmlmcompany.com part and type it in into his browser. This will bring up the same exact page he visited, but this time you won't be his upline if he signs up. Sad, isn't it?

After looking at the wrong ways to do an online MLM promotion, let's take a look at the correct ways of doing it below:

1. Promoting an online MLM in an MLM/Internet business related ezine

An ezine is an electronic publication sent out by its publishers on a timely basis via email to its readers. Readers of MLM/Internet business ralated ezines are very interested in the topic, and they are a very responsive market to your MLM ads. Your ads will be put before/after or between articles, depending on how much money you are willing to pay.

Put your ads in one of the MLM/Internet business related ezines, and you are guaranteed many qualified leads who will be easy to convert into downlines if your MLM company has a good follow up system.

2. Promoting an online MLM with pay per click search engines

This is one of the most powerful online MLM promotion method known today. Many well known search engines such as Google now "rent" a portion of their search result page to be used by paid advertisers to put their ads on. For every "click" to your site, you must pay a certain amount of money (starting from as little as 5 cents).

With this promotion method, your MLM promotional ad can show up on the search result page of Google if somebody types in MLM related queries in the search box. Imagine the power of it. A lead wanting to join an MLM program, typing in the word "MLM program" into Google, and reads your ad when the search results are displayed. Will he click to find out more? Most likely.

3. Promoting an online MLM with paid safelists

This method is much like the free safelists method discussed in the wrong ways of promoting in the first section of the article. The only difference is with the paid service, your online MLM ad will be sent to the actual eager readers who actually opted in to read your ads.

Paid safelist is almost as powerful concept as ezine advertising. The main difference is paid safelists' readers will receive much more ads than ezine readers. This will normally dillute the effectiveness of ads in paid safelists compared to ads in ezines.

4. What could make all those 3 right methods even more successful: using short and memorable URL

Which URL is more likely to be remembered by first time visitors to your MLM site: www.yourmlmcompany.com/cgi-bin/prospect1.cgi?sponsorid=1192349&message=1192 or www.myownmlm.com?

It is possible to direct every prospect visiting www.myownmlm.com to www.yourmlmcompany.com/cgi-bin/prospect1.cgi?sponsorid=1192349&message=1192 without they ever knowing the difference. This way, your prospect can remember your URL much more easily, and whenever they visit your URL again, you'll still be their upline of they sign up.

This very useful feature is now available from as cheap as $8 per year on the internet. Just search in the search engines for "cheap domain name with frame forwarding" (without the quotes) and you'll find many options to choose from.

CONCLUSION:

Most of the wrong ways of doing online MLM promotion are free methods. Avoid this seemingly money free methods. They seem to be free at the first glance, but in the end they bring you very little result and consume very much of your time.

All of the right ways of doing online MLM promotion are paid methods. Most beginners in MLM try to avoid these methods, yet they bring in the most result with no wasted time on your part.