Ok… first of all, company websites almost NEVER do a good job of “selling” the product or the opportunity. If cannot tell within 5 seconds, from their site, what it even IS, then it isn’t going to work to persuade people to join or purchase. Generally, if all you are using to promote your direct sales business is the company website, you are losing every person who goes there without having a personal introduction from yourself. In fact, that is the only thing company websites are good for  – to send someone to once they ALREADY want it. They aren’t good for anything else.

Search engines will never index your company site either – to them it is the company site, not yours, and yours is the same site. Many promotional sources won’t allow you to promote there either. Kinda hampers your ability to get the best free traffic.

So… My first advice is sound, even though I am a web designer.

Get a website of your own. You’ll have to research company policy on this, they’ll have requirements to meet, and they vary widely from company to company. If you work with a web designer, they need to know what those requirements are too, and they need to help you comply with them.

Use this website for the following purposes:

1. Introduce the BENEFITS, which should be two concise and meaningful statements, one about the product, one about the opportunity.
2. Talk about what YOU like about it, and why it makes sense to you.
3. Discuss comparisons of this program with other business programs.
4. Present relevant and current information which supports claims made by the company.
5. Introduce YOURSELF, and begin the relationship building process.
6. Your pages are all linked in with a “go get it” type button, which leads them to the company website, and tells them to use the signup button, or to view product listings (best if you take them right to where you want them to be, if you can). YOU do the pre-selling. Just let the company be there at the END of the process.

Once you have that, you can then feed ALL of your social networking traffic to that. Not only that, you can interlink a website WITH your social networking, operate a blog if you want (right in the website), and you WILL get additional marketing benefits from it IF you do it right.

You can build an entire marketing network if you have your own website, and the website sits as the hub of the wheel, with other things coming into it, and linking together.

Without it, your marketing efforts end up fragmented, and separate, and you chase yourself around trying to drive people here, or there, and not knowing where to send them, or how to initiate contact.

With it, you can focus on about FOUR basic marketing efforts, and they work together synergistically. Those four efforts are:

1. Regular Tweets, which are piped into your FaceBook Profile, or updates to your FaceBook Business Page, which are then piped to Twitter, and then to your FaceBook Profile. Social networking WORKS, when you do it professionally, and when you focus on relationships and not on advertising.
2. Regular Blog Posts, which are piped into Twitter, then into FaceBook, and which are posted automatically in the sidebar of your website. Blogging also works, when you focus on building relationships, giving value, and not on advertising.
3. Answering questions on Forums, or Linked In Answers, and just being a real person, helpful, etc. Your choice where you do this, do it where it works. It works when you are helpful and interesting, and kind.
4. Building Backlinks – good quality directory links, high quality swaps, and article marketing links. You choose which suits you best, we usually recommend doing these in a specific way to simplify it. Backlinks work when you learn what constitutes a quality backlink, and don’t try to take shortcuts that sabotage the effort.

You may optionally use a newsletter – a good website can have a newsletter manager built into the site, where you can send newsletters to any number of groups, and which allows a signup box on every page to politely invite people to sign up. You don’t need to bribe people or push them into signing up, when you do it right, an invitation works wonderfully. An opt-in list is NOT required for ANY successful business (in fact, more than 50% of successful business owners don’t even know what one is, and only about 2-3% of successful business owners actually USE one), but it is one that can work for people with the skills to operate one effectively.

It is not a FAST process. But it is very POWERFUL. Lay the foundation right, and your website becomes the center of where you do business, even though you don’t spend any more time there than anywhere else, the website becomes your virtual sales person.

There are rules and skills about making each of those things work – you have to do them right, but if you do, they gain power over time. If you do them wrong, you’ll beat against a wall and never make headway.

We’ve worked with hundreds of people in direct sales, MLM, network marketing, etc. This is the method that works to promote online with this kind of business. The ones who get this working are the ones who can eventually break out of the “I have to contact every prospect individually in order to make every sale”. If you want people to eventually come to YOU, you need to have some permanent, search engine indexable presences out there working for you.

If you can WRITE competently, you have a tremendous asset. If you use it creatively, and maybe differently than you have thought, you can bring people in to teach them, and they’ll learn to trust you. But you can’t always do it in the way you first think about doing it. If you can’t write well, then you will need to hire more services, and investigate methods of networking which depend upon it less.

It is actually HARDER in many ways to promote a direct sales business than it is to promote an independent business. But if you think of your business MORE as an independent business, and treat it more like one, you can be more successful. I don’t mean ignoring the company requirements, just that you need to WORK it like a business, and MARKET it like a business, and not expect that everything that the company hands you is all that you need. It never is.

Choose a reputable company, commit to it, and then invest in the necessary foundation for marketing. Do it right, and you’ll never regret it.