Now I don't know about you but I've tried buying a list of leads and cold calling these leads to tell them about my business opportunity, and to be honest have had awful results. Why? Because firstly I don't enjoy doing it one bit, and secondly I'm just not very good at it. I have my strengths but selling my network marketing opportunity to people over the phone is not one of them.

Thankfully in this day and age, you can still be wildly successful in the network marketing industry without having to cold call leads. How? Well through the internet of course.

The internet really is a fantastic recruitment tool. There are so many excellent online promotional methods you can use to promote your business. Listed below are some of the methods that have worked for me:

Forums:

By posting in popular forums that allow sig files (the few lines that appear at the end of each post), and that relate to the program you are promoting, you can indirectly advertise your network marketing opportunity every time you post a comment to a forum. This can be very effective. Just make sure you only write quality posts, and try and offer helpful and useful information to help build your reputation, as this will inevitably lead to more people clicking on your sig file.

Creating A Website Or Blog And Optimizing It For The Search Engines:

This is a long-term process but can deliver exceptional results over time if you can get your site, that promotes your program, ranked highly in the search engines. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is too big a subject to discuss here, but by developing your knowledge of this area, you really can achieve phenomenal results.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising:

This can be very expensive, especially if you're new to this form of advertising, but paying the search engines to place your promotional website or affiliate link in their sponsored results can be a great way of recruiting new members. Your ultimate aim should obviously be to get the maximum amount of click-thrus for the minimum cost per click. This is easier said than done, but if you can discover some cheap and yet highly targeted and relevant keywords, then you could see some good results from this form of advertising.

Advertising On High-Traffic Websites:

This is pretty self-explanatory, but is another promotional technique that has worked well for me in the past. I recommend buying text links rather than banner ads, as this will allow you to use your main keywords in the link text, which will help you rank higher in the search engines.

Ezine Advertising:

This is one of my favourite forms of advertising because you can reach a large targeted audience for a relatively low cost in most instances. Although you can place ads in the actual ezines themselves, I recommend purchasing solo ads as these will get the undivided attention of the ezine's readers because your email will be sent separately from the actual ezine.

Viral Marketing:

This is simply where you create a free informational product and offer giveaway or resale rights, so people can distribute it all over the internet, creating a lot for publicity for you as the original author of the product. The actual product itself could be an ebook that relates to the product or program that you are promoting, or it could be a simple one page article. I regularly write articles myself and distribute them to not only all the major article directories, but also directly to ezine publishers, who are always looking for new articles to publish in their ezine. You really can get huge exposure using these techniques.

There are other forms of promotion you could use to promote your network marketing business such as advertising on list-building sites, safelists, and traffic exchanges, but in my experiences these sites are not as effective as those methods outlined above.

Hopefully by now you can see that it's no longer necessary to go through the laborious task of buying leads and cold calling them in order to build your downline and grow your business. There's nothing wrong with this promotional method, but the internet has opened up so many other avenues to promote your business and find leads, that you don't have to talk to a single person if you don't want to.

So if you do join a network marketing company, and the dinosaurs running the company tell you that you have to hit the phones to grow your business, remember this article and use promotional methods that are right for you.