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WHAT are you marketing? WHY are you marketing what you're marketing? WHO are you marketing to? HOW are you marketing?

The answers to these four questions can make or break your network marketing business. You need to be clear about the answers yourself, AND you need to be able to convey those answers to your prospects.

Of course, it's obvious to you WHAT you're selling, and you probably have a pretty clear idea of WHY you're selling what you're selling. (Something to do with a beach house in Jamaica, right? Or is it Maui?)

I'll bet you're really good at explaining the WHAT when you're recruiting, too, giving out an abundance of info on your products and services, your company, and your compensation plan.

I'll also bet you know that to be an effective enroller, you need to explore your prospect's WHY, encouraging her to open up and share with you all her frustrations, hopes, and dreams. You want your new recruit to be motivated, after all. And you want to be able to demonstrate how your opportunity can help solve her frustrations, and turn her hopes and dreams into reality.

This is all good.

But when we come to the WHO and the HOW, many network marketers fall flat on their faces.

Your prospect needs to be able to see herself doing this business. She wants to know exactly HOW she's going to market your company's products and opportunity and WHO she's going to sell them to.

I'm sure a prospect has asked you this before. "What, exactly, will I be doing?"

What do you tell her?

If you give her the usual lame explanation that she'll be "sharing" with her "warm" market of family and friends and that she needs to make a list of everyone she knows right away, chances are you're going to lose her.

Anyone who's already done network marketing or whose brother-in-law or coworker ever hounded her to join a business is already hip to the fact that this approach will take her down the road to humiliation and social isolation. No one wants this.

Plus, there's the dirty little secret that hardly any of the highly successful people in network marketing got there by recruiting relatives and friends. I'm not saying it never happens, but in general, you can't rely on the warm market strategy to get you where you want to go. And recommending it to your prospects just compounds the problem.

So what IS the HOW? And who IS the WHO?

What will you tell your prospect if you don't really know the answers to these questions yourself?

To cast some clarity on this, let's take a look at another group of professionals - real marketers. In other words, professional business people who actually make a living marketing products and services.

You don't see them hitting on their family and friends. Or putting flyers on windshields, or tacking up posters on coffee shop bulletin boards, or dropping their business cards in restrooms, or inviting their neighbors over for product parties.

This is the scatter-shot, if-I-just-shoot-enough-bullets-in-that-general-direction-maybe-I'll-eventually-hit-a-duck approach. You're going to run out of ammo long before you see any results. You do these things if you want a hobby, not a business.

On the other hand, professional marketers know exactly WHO makes up their target market - people who already see a need and have a desire for the marketer's products or services. Their HOW uses laser-focused, highly effective strategies to reach that target market.

If you really want a business that will allow you to quite your J.O.B, to allow you to retire comfortably, to give you the lifestyle of your dreams... then you need to treat it as a real business and start using the marketing strategies that real, successful businesses use.

You need to discover how professional marketers reach thousands of prospects and sift and sort and qualify them so they only talk to the best ones?

If you learn how to do that, and teach it to your downline, can you imagine what it'll do for your organization?

I realize -- it takes digging, and researching, and lots of reading to learn real, effective marketing techniques. Fortunately, there are lots of resources out there to help you. And when you're done with your basic research, you'll want to try things out and experiment to see what works best for your business.

You'll be climbing a very steep and exciting learning curve for a while. But believe me, you'll think it's SO worth it when you've joined the ranks of the really successful network marketers and you're sipping Mai-tai's in Maui.