Two weeks ago I suggested the idea of network marketing as an alternative to a miserable job. I had been in a miserable job and ultimately network marketing proved to be my exit. I continued that idea last week in a post about why network marketing is better than a job. This week I will help you figure out how to choose the best network marketing company.
Once you decide to do network marketing, your most important decision is choosing the best network marketing business to join. You want to choose the right company for you so that you can get busy building your future.
How Do Network Marketing Companies Work?
Before we talk about how to choose the best network marketing company, you need to know how do network marketing companies work and how they make money.
A lot of people think that network marketing companies are somehow different than other companies. They really aren’t. Just like everyone else, they make money by selling a product or service. That’s the only way to make money.
Network marketing companies actually offer both a product and a service. They offer a product to customers and an account maintenance service to registered distributors.
Of course, where they differ is that they have minimal marketing and sales departments. Instead, they allow independent distributors like you to sign up and fill those positions as independent contractors.
Which is the Best Network Marketing Company?
There is no such thing as a best network marketing company. “Best” depends on what you want to get out of your network marketing business. The real question is which is the best network marketing company for you?
There is a network marketing for just about anything that you can think of. There are so many categories:
- Wellness products
- Financial products and services
- Phone service
- Gas and electric utilities
- Travel
- Cosmetics and skin care
- Consumer goods
- Essential oils
The list goes on and on.
What is the Best Network Marketing Compensation Plan?
If you want to know how to choose the best network marketing company, you have to look at the compensation plan. The compensation plan tells you how you make money, and it can be outrageously complex. There can be several ways that you can earn retail profits, commissions and bonuses.
The first thing to look at with a compensation plan is the structure. Some of the common structures are unilevel, binary, matrix, and stair step breakaway. They all serve to limit the number of people that you get paid commissions on.
I’m not a fan of binary or matrix plans because I see them as too limiting and easily corrupted. Take a binary system for example. You can only have 2 people directly under you. Everyone else who joins you has to be placed somewhere farther down in the structure. You have to play games to keep the structure balanced because you only get paid based on the weaker leg.
I prefer a flat structure where I get paid on everyone who joins me directly.
Like I already said, some compensation plans are really complex. They can use one structure for one part of the plan and another structure for bonuses or something else. It can be really crazy.
How to Choose the Best Network Marketing Company
You have to take the above information to figure out how to choose the best network marketing company with a workable compensation plan.
The most important thing to look at first is the product or service. To be successful you need to choose a company and a product or service that you will use yourself. When your prospective customer asks you if you use the product yourself you have to be able to say yes.
Profits, Commissions and Bonuses
Once you have a few companies on your list you can look at the compensation plans. The most important part of the compensation plan is retail profit. Regulators are cracking down on some companies because they want to see that at least half of the product sales are from outside of the organization. You have to have customers who are not also distributors.
Then figure out how much you can earn in commissions from your own retail sales and from the people who join your team. That’s the biggest benefit of network marketing over something like affiliate marketing, you can get paid a percentage from the sales of your team.
Advertising Policies
The third thing to consider is the company’s advertising policies, specifically where it comes to the Internet. What can you say about the company and its products on your own website and on social media?
I also look at the ordering process. Do they give you a portal where you can send your customers directly to a particular product so that they can order it themselves online?
An Example
The network marketing company that I chose works very well for me. They are in the wellness product niche and I use a lot of the products myself. I would use them whether I was a distributor or not, so it’s a good fit there.
Compared to some compensation plans I have seen, this one is pretty simple. Officially it is a stair step breakaway. I earn 20% in retail profit on everything that I sell to a customer. The commission percentage starts out at 0% and increases up to 20% as you move up through the ranks. On my teammates, I earn my commission level less their commission level. For example, I am at the full 20% commission and I have a teammate at the 10% level, so I earn 10% (my 20% less his 10%) commission on his sales.
The breakaway part comes in when someone reaches the level of Silver. We are both maxed out on commissions so my commission less theirs is 0%. Now I get a flat 6% commission on their non-breakaway team. As I continue to move up the 6% commission extends to deeper levels of breakaways.
The company I chose also allows me to market and sell the products online, which is all I do in my business. I don’t have to do any meetings, events, cold calls or anything else.
Disclaimer
I make money in network marketing because I do the work. There is no guarantee that you will make a dime and most people end up spending more than they make, if they make anything at all. I think it’s because they aren’t willing to work, but that’s just my opinion.
What Would You Choose?
There are a lot of things to look at for how to choose the best network marketing company. I chose a wellness company that lets me build my business exclusively online and focus on retail sales. What would you choose?
Leave me your thoughts in a comment below and please share this post with your followers on social media.