If you’re thinking about using TikTok to generate leads for your network marketing business, I’ve got some real-world numbers that might interest you.
I generated 535 leads from TikTok after consistently posting more than 300 videos.
Sounds pretty good, right?
Here’s the part that doesn’t sound so good:
Those 535 leads produced one sale.
I didn’t post a handful of videos, get discouraged and quit. I gave TikTok what I believe was a legitimate test. I posted every single day for about four months, usually one or two videos per day and sometimes three.
And what I learned completely changed the way I think about generating leads online.
Why I Chose TikTok for Network Marketing Lead Generation
I’ve been building businesses online for more than 20 years, and I’ve always understood the power of video.
Video gives people an opportunity to hear your voice, see your personality and hopefully develop some level of connection with you before they ever join your email list or look at your business.
TikTok seemed like a particularly attractive place to do that because the videos didn’t have to be long.
Most of mine were somewhere between 45 seconds and a minute. Some went a little longer than a minute, and very few approached two minutes.
That seemed doable.
So I committed to it.
What I Talked About in My TikTok Videos
I wasn’t simply posting videos saying, “Join my business.”
I’d usually start with a hook addressing something my potential prospect might relate to:
Tired of working your 9-to-5?
Can’t stand being told what to do?
Feel like you’re not getting paid what you’re worth?
From there, I’d tell pieces of my own story.
I’m legally blind, and years ago I was looking for a way to make money from home. I wasn’t specifically searching for affiliate marketing or network marketing at the time. The opportunity essentially fell into my lap, I decided to take a shot at it, and it changed the direction of my life.
Within roughly six months, I had built my online income to more than $5,000 a month.
I eventually purchased a new home in 2007 and paid it off completely in 2015. I also haven’t paid a penny of credit-card interest since 2002.
Those were the kinds of real-life experiences I shared.
At the end of the videos, I’d invite people who wanted to learn more to visit my website.
And people did.
TikTok Actually Generated Network Marketing Leads
This is important because I don’t want to claim that TikTok “doesn’t work.”
It worked remarkably well at one part of the process:
Getting people to opt in.
People would arrive at a simple capture page offering free training about making their first $3,000 online.
They entered their name and email address and were then taken to a page with a video from me. I introduced myself, told more of my story and explained what they were about to see.
From there, they could watch a presentation explaining a different approach to combining affiliate and network marketing.
The leads kept accumulating.
100.
101.
102.
Eventually more than 500.
But there was a problem.
My TikTok Leads Weren’t Engaging
I started noticing this relatively early.
My email open rates from these leads were less than 5%, with very few—and sometimes no—clicks on my follow-up emails.
That’s terrible engagement.
Once I had generated around 200 leads, I was already starting to question whether this strategy was going to produce the results I wanted.
But I’ve been doing this long enough to know that it’s easy to draw conclusions from too little data.
I’ve always considered approximately 500 leads a much more meaningful test.
So I kept going.
Every day.
Even though I was beginning to suspect what the final result was going to look like.
I Didn’t Quit at 200 Leads
This is probably one of the most important parts of my experiment.
Had I generated 25 leads and stopped, I wouldn’t feel comfortable drawing much of a conclusion.
Even 100 leads can leave a lot of room for randomness.
So despite the poor engagement, I continued posting until I exceeded my 500-lead benchmark.
By the end, I had generated approximately 535 leads from more than 300 TikTok videos.
And those leads resulted in:
One sale.
Even more telling to me is what happened afterward.
It’s now been almost a year, and those people have continued receiving follow-up emails from me approximately once a week.
There hasn’t been a flood of delayed conversions.
There haven’t even been a few more.
That original single sale is still the only one.
Why Were My TikTok Leads Converting So Poorly?
Here’s where I want to be careful.
I don’t know with 100% certainty.
I don’t think my experience proves that TikTok leads are bad. There are clearly people successfully building businesses using TikTok.
But I developed a theory while watching my own results.
TikTok is largely an interruption-based platform.
Someone can be sitting on the couch scrolling through funny videos, entertainment, news, sports or whatever else interests them.
Then suddenly I appear saying:
“Are you tired of your 9-to-5?”
Maybe I get their attention.
Maybe something about my story resonates with them.
Maybe they’re curious enough to visit my website and enter an email address.
But that’s different from someone going to a search engine and deliberately typing:
“How do I generate leads for my network marketing business?”
That person has identified a problem.
They’re actively looking for an answer.
And they found me because I provided information directly related to what they were already looking for.
That’s a very different interaction.
TikTok Requires a Different Marketing Skill Set
There’s another lesson I took away from my experiment.
Knowing how to build an affiliate or network marketing business doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be good at TikTok.
TikTok itself requires a particular set of skills.
You need to grab someone’s attention within the first few seconds.
You need strong hooks.
You need to interrupt whatever they were thinking about before your video appeared.
And then you need to establish an emotional connection very quickly.
As I studied people who were successfully generating business through TikTok, I started noticing that many were extremely good at that.
They weren’t necessarily providing the deepest training or possessing more knowledge about building a business.
They were really good at connecting with people through short-form video.
That’s a legitimate skill.
It just happens to be a different skill from knowing how to build an affiliate or network marketing business.
For me personally, I also began feeling like succeeding on TikTok required me to become more of a performer than I naturally wanted to be.
That’s not a criticism of the people who are good at it. Some people genuinely love that style of content and are fantastic at it.
I simply began questioning whether it was the right lead-generation model for me.
535 TikTok Leads Taught Me That More Leads Aren’t Always the Answer
This was probably my biggest lesson from the entire experiment:
Generating leads and generating highly targeted leads are not necessarily the same thing.
If I told you I generated 535 leads in four months, you’d probably think my lead-generation strategy was working.
Technically, it was.
But if I then told you those leads opened fewer than 5% of my emails and produced one sale, you’d probably reach a very different conclusion.
That’s why I’ve become much more interested in intent.
I’d rather get in front of someone who is already asking a question I can answer than continually interrupt people and try to convince them to become interested in something they weren’t looking for.
The Other Problem: TikTok Was a Daily Grind
Even if my TikTok leads had converted somewhat better, there was another aspect of the strategy that bothered me.
The work didn’t compound.
I was posting every single day.
One video.
Two videos.
Sometimes three.
And I realized something pretty quickly:
The day I stopped posting, the leads stopped too.
After several months, I was burning out.
I was putting considerable effort into generating content every single day, yet very little of yesterday’s work seemed to help me tomorrow.
That’s the opposite of what I ultimately want from an online business.
Why I’m Focusing More on Evergreen Lead Generation
Today I’m much more interested in evergreen lead generation.
I want to create a useful piece of content today that has the potential to bring someone into my business tomorrow, next month or even next year.
That’s why I’m increasingly interested in answering specific questions people are already searching for.
If a struggling network marketer is asking:
“Why am I not making money in network marketing?”
“How can I generate leads without chasing friends and family?”
or
“Why are my network marketing leads not converting?”
I’d rather create genuinely useful content answering those questions and allow that person to find me while they’re actively looking for help.
It doesn’t mean TikTok can’t work.
It means I’ve learned what kind of lead-generation strategy I want to build.
So, Does TikTok Work for Network Marketing?
Based on my experience, the answer is:
Yes—but generating leads isn’t the same as generating good leads.
TikTok proved to me that it could generate volume.
More than 300 videos produced 535 leads.
But for me, those leads had extremely low engagement and produced just one sale.
Someone who excels at short-form video, emotional connection, attention-grabbing hooks and building relationships through TikTok may have completely different results.
My experience shouldn’t convince you that TikTok can’t work.
But hopefully it convinces you to measure something more important than how many names you’re adding to your email list.
Pay attention to what those people do after they become leads.
Do they open your emails?
Do they click?
Do they consume your content?
Do they respond?
And ultimately, do some of them become customers?
Because 500 highly targeted leads can be worth considerably more than 5,000 people who weren’t particularly interested in the first place.
Better Leads Are Only Half of the Problem
If you’re struggling in network marketing, I believe learning how to consistently generate highly targeted leads is one of the most important skills you can develop.
But there’s another problem that most network marketers never address.
Even when you get better at generating leads and building a team, the economics of many traditional network marketing compensation plans can make earning meaningful income much harder than most people realize.
And simply building a bigger team doesn’t necessarily fix it.
What if the answer isn’t simply building a bigger team?
I’ve put together a free guide that explains why—and shows you a different approach to building income and freedom through affiliate and network marketing.
It also shows you the numbers behind one marketer who went from building a team of approximately 600 people and earning around $1,200 a month to earning approximately $7,200 a month with a team roughly one-tenth the size.
If you’re already working hard to generate leads, I think those numbers are worth understanding before deciding that the answer is simply finding more prospects.
Click the button below to get the free guide and see the numbers for yourself.
