Deep Secrets of Marketing Psychology I Discovered in MLM
I’ve written lots of emails & newsletters about my Multi-Level Marketing days. “My life as a naive enthusiastic Ambot,” my notoriously unsuccessful career in Amway and all that. Mostly they’ve been rants and they’ve been kind of negative.
But there’s a different side to that story and I’ve determined to reveal it in a new email series. My Director of Alchemy, Jack Born, has been prodding me to do this and I finally decided:
It’s time.
My MLM experience made a HUGE contribution to who I am today, what I do and how I do it.
In this series I separate the dirt from the gold and reveal:
- Why MLM’ers Make the Best Marketers (there’s a twist for ya)
- Why Most MLM’ers Fail – And Why They Don’t Have To
- Why Being an MLM’er Prepared Me to Dominate Adwords
- Secrets of marketing psychology that the network marketing industry teaches better than anyone else
- Even if you have no experience with MLM (and never intend to), what skills and lessons can you “borrow” from the MLM industry to become a more successful marketer?
- Were you in MLM years ago, and left the whole experience behind? I’ll put my finger on skills you acquired that currently lay dormant – and activate them
I don’t know how long this series will run. I know there’s at least a couple weeks worth of HOT material here. For the most part you can expect to get a message every day. I may be adding new twists for months.
But in any case it will be some of the most important content I’ve put out in the last couple of years.
Oh, and one more thing: I will never, at any time, promote any MLM program nor accept invitations to do so. This email series is a permanent “no MLM pitch” safe zone.
If you’re in an MLM program now, you can safely refer your friends and business associates. If you’re not in an MLM program and don’t want to be in one, you have nothing to worry about. You’ll get nothing but penetrating insights, I promise.
To Your Success,
Perry Marshall
About the Author
Entrepreneur Magazine says: "Perry Marshall is the #1 author and world's most-quoted consultant on Google Advertising. He has helped over 100,000 advertisers save literally billions of dollars in Adwords stupidity tax."
He is referenced across the Internet and by The Washington Post, USA Today, and the Chicago Tribune.
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Emotional Widgets – that was awesome.
The strange thing about them in my experience is that the guts it takes to sell something of value and the bravado it takes to sell something of little value, they’re very close cousins.
Or at least, you don’t get released from demons of “Holy Crap, can I (or your product) really do what I just said it could do in that killer copy?”
I remember John Carlton talking about that – Once you’re comfortable with what your product can do, then you go balls to the wall in your copy.
You build those emotional widgets Dangit. And like Carlton says, in his great pieces of copy, by the time the person’s done reading it, they feel like they’re already thin, already rich, already more attractive.
But, it doesn’t have to be limited to those niches. People need to feel that they’re already an adwords expert, that they’re already a better trader, that they’re already a youth counselor, or dog trainer, or dog owner, or dog groomer, or whatever.
But, I think it still scares the heck out of people to do it. It scares me when the copies getting really good. Can I really change someone’s life?
Answer: Absolutely.
Perry,
Will this information also be available on your blog? Or can it be accessed through email only?
Paul
Eat Well. Live Well.
PurpleGreenPops.com
Email only.
How do I know if I want to join this email series or not:
You failed to tell me what a Multi-level Market/er/ing actually is.
You failed to tell me how it differentiates from single-level marketing.
You failed to tell me what benefit MLM could have for me.
I don’t even know if it has relevance to my business. Why would I want to sign up for this email course without knowing this information?
Kevin,
I assumed everyone knew what network marketing was. I’m guessing most people do, a few don’t. It’s businesses where sales people recruit sales people and get paid many levels deep. Search “MLM” and take a look.
This almost certainly does not directly apply to you. You may learn from it though.
Perry
Perry,
I commend you in every manner. You are straight and never have a hidden agenda. This email series I am responding to is a great example. I’m on your list(s). I responded and I’m in – no double opt in. You can sort respondents on your time and not mine, and decide how to laser-focus campaigns without hitting me with redundant spam from every campaign I opted in for.
Why don’t more marketers respect our time and stop putting us on countless lists (bigX, littleX, mediumx, xxx, xyz, and the lists go on and on) and then spam us using each campaign address as an optin? Tellman Knudson and Shawn Casey do this all the time. It obviously works, but it doesn’t make it right.
Thanks for not being obnoxious.
Regards,
Richard Posner
Gurus in the Buff (blog)
Success in Japan
Law and Disorder (blog)
The Judge Rules (blog)
Perry,
I gotten two emails from this series, and I’m lovin it. Killer content. Really gets into the deep psychology of selling. Of personality.
Guess its time to fill up the emotional bank account with this series after pushing the adwords and auto-responder series. I’m sure it will.
By cutting your MLM shame vein and bleeding out all the gory emotional memories , its somehow healing to me to hear of how you bought into the dream, woke up broke, and then managed to become better because of it.
Adam
Hi Perry,
Quick question please: Are all MLMs bad in your opinion? Or is it rather just the company that can ruin the model? I am told that the model is highly effective but it’s just certain companies who bastardize it. Aren’t Pampered Chef and Avon reputable and effective in this same way?
Garrett,
I think any MLM that has a realistic retail sales model where entry level people can make real money selling real products to real customers is fine. Pampered Chef comes to mind. Discovery toys comes to mind as does Creative Memories. In my experience the ones oriented around ‘party plans’ are the most viable in this regard. Someone can sign up, get a friend to host a party and go home with $100 profit in their pocket. I think that’s great.
And I agree with the Attorney General who investigated Amway back in the 1970′s where if the retail side is weak at best and the accent is on non-stop recruiting, it is to some extent a ponzi scheme and an abusive situation. One of the things that put the nail in the Amway coffin for me was, they finally put in place a shipping and recurring order system that allowed customers to be serviced by the company and get things on a monthly autoship basis. And I tried all kinds of ways to get real retail customers out of this and they just didn’t see the value. If someone’s trying to make actual money selling Amway products at retail it’s one of the worst businesses I can think of.
Perry
Personal Question here Perry:
Can you describe the difference your success has made in your relationship with Laura – specifically in relation to the struggles you both suffered through in the beginning?
Perhaps this isn’t the place for that. I don’t know. I’ve put a lot of stock in how many positives there will be when I’m standing looking down on a successful, controllable, profitable venture.
I guess there’s just a part of me that wants to reconcile all of the “money can’t buy happiness” and “life is about learning to dance in the rain” stuff with the fact that I know there’s a giant weight on spouses of entrepreneurs who are “just about” to make it big.
Obviously turning the corner of entrepreneurial success will bring changes. But what changes I don’t know.
To be clear, I’m not asking for marital advice. Julie and I are rockin’ and rollin’ into our 11th year over here thank you very much.
I guess I’m just looking for that bigger picture answer to what difference it really makes to get on the other side.
Everyone that ever told me the grass is always greener was just using it as a way to justify why they’re still standing on the wrong side of the river.
Nick,
This is a real interesting question.
People say “money can’t buy you happiness.” Well actually it can. Up to a point.
And yes I would say that when things finally loosened up financially and we stopped looking over our shoulder all the time and got out of debt it was a HUGE HUGE relief. Much better after than before.
That sense of relief lasted for 2, 3, maybe 4 years. Eventually it started to just feel ‘normal.’ Like, after enough time goes by you don’t keep pinching yourself saying “Wow I am really self employed now and I don’t have a boss.” It was a good kind of normal. Then eventually you start wanting to conquer new mountains and I have.
Once I got accustomed to being out of the dilbert cube I became aware of a few things:
-Me having a nice business didn’t keep 1 billion people in the world from having to subsist on a dollar a day. It made that more frustrating because it made me feel as though I should be able to do more about that than I actually can.
-Money doesn’t solve the deeper questions of the heart and in fact it adds frustrations to those other areas because if you’re struggling with money it is, in an odd way, way to anesthetize yourself against any number of other things that you might still be in denial about. It distracts you from less obvious, less pressing problems in your life. Once money problems are out of the way you start noticing the other things. I think those ‘other things’ whatever they may be, for some people result in husband and wife sitting and having bitter arguments in expensive restaurants. There are certainly a lot of miserable rich people in the world.
-If you have some sort of deep feeling that you’re not good enough or can’t seem to ever achieve enough, or please your father or mother or spouse or yourself, money will NOT solve that. It will make it worse. Because before you thought that your insecurity was about money. Turns out it was really about your own self.
-Changing circumstances brought a number of issues to the surface for me and Laura and we’ve both had our respective versions of working through those things. Becoming comfortable in our own skin.
One of my greatest ambitions was to get to a place in my life where I could pursue the kind of intellectual rabbit trails and forms of inquiry and satisfy my curiosity about things. That has been very rewarding. But then it challenged me internally in unexpected ways too. There’s not just an outside world, there’s an inside world.
What I guess I’m saying is that money reveals who you are and what your real priorities are and whatever it reveals will give you things to face and work on yourself to do.
Perry
Money as a hastener and multiplier. Sobering and challenging indeed. Deep introspection now to follow
A very sincere thanks for your time and thoughts on this personal but still universal entrepreneurial phenomenon.
I think this piece can add some more material to this post – ENJOY! — Joey
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MLM mockumentary available on DVD.
“Believe,” a comedy about multilevel marketing, tells the story of Adam Pendon, a steel mill truck driver struggling to support his family.
When the mill closes unexpectedly, Adam’s life looks grim until he is approached by a slick salesman who offers a business opportunity and quick fix to Adam’s sudden financial problems. Despite his wife’s concerns, Adam joins Believe Industries and begins to succeed despite himself. He rockets to super-stardom as his wife grows increasingly concerned with how the business is changing him.
When Adam realizes Believe is misleading his fellow Believers at the company’s convention, he has to decide whether turn a blind eye and enjoy the wealth and fame he is amassing or to walk away from it all.
***The movie is based on actual experiences by writer-director Loki Muhlholland during years of undercover research.***
In addition to being funny, it is a wake-up call for MLM enthusiasts, their families, their friends, and their prospective customers.
[Barrett S. Believe-A hilarious movie about multilevel marketing. MLM Watch, April 29, 2008] To order or sample the movie, see http://www.mlmwatch.org/02News/believe.html
hey perry, i first exposure to mlm was just after i graduated from colleage in singapore. man, i was sold by that ‘brilliant compensation’ flash presentation…and while i have close friends who have become multi-millionaires through mlm, i dont envy them, i like my online business more…i get my leverage behind the screen from anywhere at anytime.
mlm past was not a completely waste of time, it taught me sales and marketing..the hard core style…no regrets…
Paul Pilzer belives that hundreds of new American millionaires will earn their fortunes online in this new decade. I believe that’s true.
While MLM won’t account for all of that, it will certainly account for a large portion of it – at least HALF, IMO.
But many hundreds of thousands will develop sustainable online incomes this decade through MLM. That’s just a fact.