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Congratulations! You've got a strong direct sales downline or are beginning to build one! This is one of the best parts of being a direct sales consultant, - the fact that you can share your passion for your business with others, help them to earn a little extra money and get paid for helping grow your company as well.

Now that you are a leader of a team, you'll need to build a strong relationship with downline members to not only help them stay strong in their business, but to help your business grow stronger as well. A strong downline relationship will be one that's mutually helpful and everyone benefits.

But you may be wondering how to insure that downline members feel cared for while still maintaining some type of balance with the rest of your life. Here are 5 easy tips for maintaining a great upline/downline relationship.

1. Start off with a bang. When a new recruit first signs up, it's vitally important that you communicate often with her. One thing that I have found very helpful here is to develop a series of emails to send to new downline that talks them through those first days "on the job".

It will help them feel like they are connected to the company and to you. Each day while your new recruit is waiting for her kit she should hear from you. This is very easy to do with an autoresponder system, but can also be done by just copying and pasting into an email message every morning.

2. 15 minutes a day. Set aside fifteen minutes of each workday for downline phone calls. Use those minutes to call one to five members of your group for a quick "just checking in" call. Leave a message if you get voicemail. The idea is to let them know that you're thinking of them and giving them a chance to hear your voice. This is a great time to ask how they're doing with their non-business life as well and get beyond your direct sales company to show you care about them.

3. A downline website. Creating a simple website for my group has been the best thing, by far that I did to keep communication open and strong with my group. We have weekly topic discussions, contests, upload important files and just have fun with the whole group. Through this many relationships between members of my group have blossomed just because the website allowed them to "break the ice".

4. Meetings and/or conference calls. This is another great way to foster unity and strong relationships within your group. Many of you probably have downline that are out your area, so have a quarterly conference call with everyone just to touch base. There are many free teleconference services via the internet that make it very easy to do. And if you can, have a face-to-face meeting once in a while as well. Some group leaders have meetings monthly or quarterly. Others do a once a year get together with everyone.

5. Ecards. I love ecards for celebrating birthdays, achievements etc. First of all it's FREE, which is great, but it's so convenient and just plain fun. Use one of those Internet calendar functions to keep track of birthdays. Once a month go through the upcoming month and set up the ecard deliveries for the birthdays and company anniversary dates for the next month or more. You can set these up to deliver up to a year in advance! It's a wonderful thing. There are hundreds of sites for free ecards on the Internet.

The key? Communicate in any and every way that you can. You will find that your direct sales team members will stay with your company much longer when you've fostered a strong relationship by keeping in touch! Have fun and happy team building!