Network marketing is simple, but not easy. Each year, millions of people venture into network marketing, also known as MLM. Sadly, most of these same people end up quitting within 60-90 days.

At one time, I was one of those people. I was first exposed to MLM in 2002, when I was 25 years old. What attracted me to MLM was the opportunity to earn a residual income. Based upon the plan I saw, I only had to find 6 highly motivated people. Deep down, I new I could do that.

So I started. I made a list of everyone I knew and began talking about my "business opportunity." I was excited. I sponsored some new distributors and achieved some success. I did everything my upline taught me. I bought tapes. I drove 1,000 miles to attend "leadership conferences." I prospected people at the mall. I bugged and hassled everyone I knew. The list goes on and on.

After 2 1/2 years of failing, I got burnt out and quit. I made a vow to never do MLM again.

Well, that didn't last long. Within a few months, I joined another company, AND FAILED. Then I joined another company and failed again. And you know what, this is what happens to most people. They achieve zero success or minimal success and then decide to QUIT their company and find a better opportunity. They think the grass is greener on the other side. Unfortunately, when they get to the other side, they fail again.

After they fail a couple times, they run back to their friends and family and job (comfort zone) and tell everyone they were ripped off. Truthfully, I don't think they were ripped off. No, they were just misinformed.

You see, most of these people were employees who never had any entrepreneurial experience. They also didn't have any sales or marketing experience. Or business experience. When they joined, the blindly followed the advice of their sponsor or upline (who probably didn't have much sales, marketing, or entrepreneurial experience either).

When they didn't achieve the results they wanted, they QUIT. They didn't really fail. They just chose to QUIT, rather than learn the required skills it took to succeed.

What most networkers don't understand is that to succeed in network marketing, you need to do things differently than most people. To achieve success, you need to develop sales and marketing skills. And you need to have a "marketing system" that you and your downline can use.

This SYSTEM must do several things for you. At a minimum it must:

1. Have a website / capture page that promotes you, not your business

2. Have a web-form for visitors to leave their name and email in exchange for a free report, download, etc.

3. Have an auto-responder and pre-written messages to send to your prospects

4. Offer generic "affiliate products" to sell that help offset your advertising costs

5. Serve as a "sales funnel" which weeds out tire kickers and people who want to waste your time.

6. Automatically promotes your business opportunity on the back end so interested prospects can call you with their credit card in hand asking you to sponsor them.

This is the type of system all successful network marketers use. The days of promoting a generic company website, hassling friends and family and trying to pitch your business to complete strangers at Borders and Best Buy are now over.

Your objective is to either find a system or create one. Creating your own system will take months and thousands of dollars to create. Finding a system is much easier. There are several great systems available on the line. You can use these systems to promote any opportunity.