If you ask 100 struggling network marketers what they need to grow their business, you’ll probably hear a lot of different answers.
They need to get better at recruiting.
They need a better compensation plan.
They need better products.
They need to become better at closing.
They need to improve their social media.
But after more than 24 years of generating leads and building businesses online, I think most of those problems eventually lead back to one thing:
They need more targeted people to talk to.
In other words, they need leads.
When I first started online in 2002, one of the most valuable things my sponsor taught me was not to obsess over the compensation plan or even the products.
He taught me how to generate leads.
That changed everything for me.
By March 2003, my online income had grown to more than $5,000 per month, and I was able to quit my part-time job.
Over the years, the methods I’ve used to generate those leads have changed dramatically.
I’ve used bulk email.
I’ve purchased leads.
I’ve blogged.
I’ve experimented with safelists.
I’ve created more than 300 TikTok videos.
Now I’m moving heavily toward evergreen content through blogging and YouTube.
Some strategies worked incredibly well.
Some worked for a while and eventually stopped working.
Some generated leads but weren’t something I wanted to continue doing.
And some taught me what not to do.
But one lesson has remained pretty consistent throughout all of it:
If you can learn how to consistently generate targeted leads, you have a skill you can take with you almost anywhere in business.
Where Should a Network Marketer Start With Lead Generation?
If someone came to me today and said:
“Nate, I have no idea how to get leads for my network marketing business. Where do I start?”
I would tell them to do two things.
First, get the basic system in place to capture and follow up with leads.
That means having your own capture page connected to your own third-party autoresponder so the leads you generate are being added to an email list that you control.
Second, choose one lead-generation strategy and learn how to do it well.
That could be:
Social media.
Short-form video.
YouTube.
Blogging.
Or another strategy that fits your personality and the kind of business you want to build.
I personally recommend getting plugged into a training and tools platform like the one I use, where you can get your capture page and autoresponder set up while learning a lead-generation strategy.
I also think having access to coaching and masterminds is extremely valuable.
The platform I use gives me access to mastermind sessions five days per week where I can ask questions and get help from people who have already been down the road I’m traveling.
Why does that matter?
Because there’s a learning curve to all of this.
You’re going to make mistakes.
You’re going to create something that doesn’t work.
You’re going to generate leads that don’t convert.
You’re going to have questions.
Instead of sitting there for three months wondering what you’re doing wrong, it helps tremendously to be able to show somebody what you’re doing and say:
“Here’s what I tried. Here’s what happened. What am I missing?”
Someone with more experience may be able to spot the problem immediately and shorten your learning curve considerably.
Pick One Lead-Generation Strategy First
I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is trying to do everything at once.
They’re posting on Facebook.
They’re making TikToks.
They’re starting a YouTube channel.
They’re trying to learn SEO.
They’re buying leads.
They’re posting Instagram Reels.
And they’re not doing any one of those things consistently enough to become good at it.
If you’re starting out, I’d rather see you choose one strategy and give it a serious effort.
How do you know which strategy is right for you?
Sometimes you don’t.
You have to try it.
People often resist video because they don’t want to be on camera. That’s understandable, and there are faceless approaches to video if that’s what you prefer.
But sometimes the only way to know whether a strategy fits your personality is to actually do it for a while.
I like giving something at least 90 days before making a decision.
And here’s the bigger question I would ask:
Can I see myself continuing to do this week after week, month after month, and potentially year after year?
Because the best lead-generation strategy in the world isn’t going to help you if you hate it so much that you quit doing it.
My 535-Lead TikTok Experiment Taught Me This Lesson
A good example from my own business is TikTok.
I decided I wanted to get back into video marketing, but I was a little uncomfortable with the idea of creating longer videos.
TikTok seemed like a good place to start because the videos were short.
So I gave it a legitimate shot.
Over approximately four months, I created more than 300 TikTok videos and generated 535 leads.
And I made one sale.
I could have looked at those results and simply said:
“TikTok doesn’t work.”
But I don’t believe that’s true.
There were plenty of things I could have done differently.
I could have improved my messaging.
I could have gotten better at creating videos.
I could have learned to attract a more targeted audience.
I could have given the TikTok algorithm more time to understand who should see my content.
The deciding factor for me wasn’t really the one sale.
It was something else.
I realized that most of the work I was doing today was essentially dead within 24 to 48 hours.
If I stopped making videos, the leads largely stopped.
That wasn’t the kind of business I wanted to build anymore.
So after four months and 535 leads, I decided I’d given it a fair test.
It was back to the drawing board.
The Best Lead Strategy Is One You’ll Keep Doing
Twenty years ago, I wanted something very different from my business than I want today.
Back then, I was extremely competitive.
I wanted to be at the top of the recruiting leaderboard every month.
And many months, I was.
If generating more leads required me to work harder that day, I worked harder.
Today, I’m more interested in creating freedom.
That changes the kind of lead-generation strategy I’m attracted to.
I’m willing to grind for months or even a year or more building something.
But while I’m doing that work, I want to see lead momentum.
I want the work I do today to have the potential to produce a lead tomorrow.
And next week.
And next month.
And maybe next year.
That’s why I’m currently focusing more heavily on blogging and YouTube.
My ideal system looks something like this:
I create useful content answering questions people are already searching for.
Someone finds an article through Google or discovers one of my videos on YouTube.
They get value from the content.
They join my email list.
My autoresponder begins following up with them automatically.
I continue creating more content, which creates more opportunities for people to find me.
Over time, the lead flow compounds.
Then if I decide to take a week off—or eventually even a month or three months—the entire thing doesn’t come to a screeching halt.
Maybe traffic slows down.
Maybe lead flow slows down.
That’s fine.
I just don’t want it to stop because I didn’t punch the clock that morning.
I want to build residual lead flow on the front end and leveraged residual income on the back end.
That’s the business I’m interested in building today.
You Don’t Need 50 to 100 Leads Per Day
When I talk about my early years online, I need to put this into perspective because I don’t want anyone thinking they need the numbers I was generating.
From approximately 2003 through 2008, my primary strategy was bulk email.
I purchased lists of people who had opted in to receive information about home-based businesses and used email to generate leads.
That strategy doesn’t work today the way it did then, so I’m absolutely not recommending that you go out and start sending bulk email.
But at the time, it worked incredibly well.
On a bad day, I might generate 50 leads.
On a good day, I could generate more than 100.
And I was relentless about it.
If my lead flow dropped below 50 per day, I worked harder to get it back toward 100.
Again:
You do NOT need 50 to 100 leads per day to build a successful network marketing business.
Not even close.
I was doing that because I was extremely competitive and wanted to recruit at a very high level.
Today, if someone is generating highly targeted organic leads through something personal like blogging, YouTube, or social media, I think 3 to 5 targeted leads per day is a fantastic initial goal.
That’s roughly 90 to 150 targeted prospects per month.
Do that consistently and you’ve got something to work with.
Eventually, 5, 10, or even 15 good leads per day could potentially build into a substantial income over time, especially when duplication and leverage begin kicking in through your network marketing organization.
But don’t look at somebody generating 100 leads a day and decide your three leads don’t matter.
When you’re brand new, generating your first lead is a milestone.
Then generate another.
Then figure out how to generate three consistently.
Then five.
Each stage will require testing, tweaking, learning, and improving.
I Wasn’t Always the Most Talented Recruiter—I Generated More Leads
There were people in the companies I built who were more talented than me.
They were better on the phone.
They were better speakers.
They were better on video.
Some probably had considerably more natural influence than I did.
But during those early years, many of them couldn’t out-recruit me.
Why?
I was relentless about getting in front of more people.
One philosophy I’ve lived by for years is something I learned from Jim Rohn:
Make up in numbers what you lack in skill.
There’s also the law of averages.
One person might need 50 leads to recruit one person.
Someone else might recruit 10 people from the same 50 leads.
Everybody is different.
Your personality is different.
Your communication skills are different.
Your level of influence is different.
Your experience is different.
That’s why I’ve never liked obsessing over somebody else’s conversion percentage and assuming mine needs to be identical.
If I’m solid on the program I’m building and I can see that other people are getting results with it, I know the offer can convert.
At that point, I have two basic choices.
I can become considerably better at my messaging and increase my conversion rate.
Or I can generate more targeted leads.
Ideally, you do both.
But I’ve always leaned toward:
Generate more leads.
I’m not claiming to be a master marketer.
I’m not claiming to be some world-class copywriter.
I’ve simply tried to provide value, build relationships, connect people with what I’m offering, and make up for my weaknesses by putting myself in front of more people.
That’s worked pretty well for me.
Stop Looking for the Easy Button
If I had to name one of the biggest mistakes I see people make with lead generation, this might be it:
They’re looking for the easy button.
They don’t really want to learn how to market.
They don’t want to create content.
They don’t want to develop a skill.
They don’t want to spend months getting better at something.
So they think:
“I’ll just buy leads.”
Or:
“I’ll buy some clicks.”
I’ve done plenty of that myself over the years.
And increasingly, I don’t think it’s the best place for most beginners to start.
You purchase a list of names or buy traffic from people who have no idea who you are.
They don’t know you.
They don’t trust you.
They may be getting bombarded with offers from other marketers.
And some of those marketers may be considerably more skilled than you.
What looks like the easy solution can become one of the hardest kinds of traffic to convert.
Generating leads online isn’t easy.
It takes work.
It takes time.
It takes effort.
You have to develop skills.
There isn’t a magic traffic source where you insert $100 and 10 distributors pop out the other end.
If somebody finds that machine, please let me know.
Why I’m Leaning More Toward Free Organic Traffic
Over the last five to seven years, I’ve increasingly leaned toward organic lead generation.
Especially if you’re working with a limited budget, I wouldn’t recommend jumping straight into paid advertising.
Paid traffic can work.
There are people who are extremely good at it.
But I think it’s better suited to marketers who already understand conversions, funnels, follow-up, upsells, downsells, and the economics required to make paid traffic profitable.
That can get complicated quickly.
Organic traffic has several advantages I really like.
First, obviously, it’s free.
You’re investing your time instead of paying for every visitor.
But that’s not even the biggest advantage.
Organic traffic can also create a much more targeted prospect.
Think about someone finding this article.
They didn’t randomly see an advertisement while scrolling through Facebook.
They may have literally searched:
“How do I get leads for network marketing?”
That’s intent.
Then they read an article where I share more than two decades of my own experiences generating leads.
If they decide to join my email list after reading it, they already know quite a bit about me and how I think.
Video can take that relationship even further.
Someone finds one of my YouTube videos because they’re searching for help.
They watch me.
They hear my voice.
They get a feel for my personality.
They hear my story.
If they click a link and become a lead after that, there’s already some level of connection.
Compare that with purchasing an email address from somebody who has absolutely no idea who you are.
Which lead would you rather have?
I’ll take the person who found me while actively searching for help.
Don’t Pitch Network Marketers—Help Them First
If your goal is recruiting business builders, I think one of the best audiences you can attract is other network marketers.
But I wouldn’t necessarily start by pitching them your network marketing company.
Think about what struggling network marketers actually want.
They want to recruit more people.
And underneath that problem is usually another problem:
They need more leads.
So help them solve that problem.
Offer tools.
Offer training.
Teach lead generation.
Teach recruiting.
Share what’s working for you.
Share what’s not working.
Help people get what they already want.
Then, over time, some of those people may become interested in what you’re doing.
That’s essentially how I’m approaching my business today.
I’m not trying to scream:
“JOIN MY NETWORK MARKETING COMPANY!”
at every person who lands on my website.
I’d rather help someone become a better marketer first.
You Don’t Need to Be an Expert to Generate Leads With Content
This is where people sometimes get stuck.
They think:
“Who am I to teach anybody? I’m not successful yet.”
You don’t have to be a master marketer.
You don’t have to be a millionaire.
You don’t need to have recruited 10,000 people.
You could literally be one step ahead of somebody else.
And there are thousands of people who haven’t taken that step yet.
One of the simplest content philosophies I’ve learned is:
Learn. Do. Teach.
Learn something.
Go do it.
Then teach what you learned.
You could get plugged into a coaching platform, learn a strategy, apply it to your own business, and then share your journey.
Maybe it works.
Talk about why.
Maybe it fails miserably.
Talk about that too.
There are thousands of people experiencing the exact same frustrations who may relate to your story.
Your journey itself can become your lead-generation strategy.
That’s essentially what I’m doing with some of the content on this blog.
I generated 535 leads from TikTok and made one sale.
I could hide that because it doesn’t make me look like some marketing genius.
Or I can write an article explaining exactly what happened and what I learned from it.
Which one is more useful?
I’d argue the second.
There’s Another Way to Generate Leads: Lead With the Product
Everything I’ve described above is primarily how I think about attracting business builders.
But there’s another completely legitimate approach.
You can build your lead-generation strategy around the products your company sells.
Suppose your company sells a weight-management product.
You don’t necessarily have to create content about network marketing at all.
You could create content targeting people who are actively searching for information about weight management and the specific problems the product is designed to address, while staying within appropriate product and health-claim rules.
If your company sells products positioned around general wellness, your content could answer relevant questions people are already searching for and explain the products accurately without turning every conversation into a business pitch.
That’s an entirely different funnel.
You’re reaching outside the network marketing industry and attracting potential customers.
Your content might focus on:
Product information.
Ingredients.
How you personally use the product.
Frequently asked questions.
Customer experiences where appropriate.
Your own experience with the product.
The goal isn’t necessarily to recruit that person into the business.
It’s customer acquisition.
Some network marketers prefer recruiting business builders.
Some prefer finding customers.
Some do both.
Your lead-generation strategy should reflect which audience you’re actually trying to attract.
How Long Should You Test a Lead Source Before Saying It Doesn’t Work?
One of the first things I’d ask somebody who tells me:
“I tried generating leads. It didn’t work.”
is:
What kind of leads did you generate?
My guess is that a lot of people would tell me they purchased leads or clicks.
That immediately tells me something about the situation.
My second question would be:
How many leads did you generate?
If you purchased 20 leads, got no sales, and concluded that lead generation doesn’t work, you haven’t learned much.
For a purchased traffic strategy, I personally like seeing somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 to 500 leads before making a strong judgment.
With a higher-quality organic source, I still want to see at least 100 to 200 leads if possible.
These aren’t magical scientific thresholds.
They’re simply the kind of numbers I personally want before I start drawing conclusions from my results.
If somebody told me:
“I generated leads through YouTube and blogging and it didn’t work.”
I’d want to know how many.
If the answer is 10, you didn’t prove that YouTube or blogging doesn’t work.
You barely got started.
Measure More Than the Number of Leads
Obviously, the first thing you need to measure is whether you’re actually generating leads.
That’s step one.
But once leads start coming in, you need to look deeper.
Are they opening your emails?
Are they clicking your links?
Are they looking at your offer?
Are they communicating with you?
Are you eventually producing sales?
Open rates and clicks can tell you quite a bit about the quality of a lead source before you have enough sales data to draw meaningful conclusions.
If nobody opens anything, you’ve got a problem.
If they’re opening but nobody clicks, you’ve got another problem.
If they’re opening and clicking but not buying, now you need to start looking farther down the funnel.
Maybe your messaging needs work.
Maybe your follow-up needs work.
Maybe the presentation needs work.
Maybe the offer simply isn’t right for that audience.
But don’t immediately blame the lead source because 50 people didn’t make you rich.
Follow the numbers through the process.
If Leads Are Coming In but Sales Aren’t, Don’t Panic
If you’re generating leads and not getting sales, the first thing I personally look at is my email open rates.
Are these people engaging with my follow-up?
Then I look at clicks.
Are people actually clicking through and looking at what I’m offering?
If those numbers tell me that people are engaging, then I know the leads aren’t necessarily the problem.
From there, things become more complicated.
The offer matters.
The presentation matters.
Your messaging matters.
Your influence matters.
Your relationship with the prospect matters.
But here’s something else I consider.
If I’m confident in the program I’m building and I can see other people successfully recruiting into the exact same program, that’s evidence that the offer can convert.
At that point, I don’t automatically decide I need another opportunity.
I need to improve what I’m doing.
Maybe I work on my messaging.
Maybe I build better relationships.
Maybe I get coaching.
And maybe I simply generate more leads.
What Should You Do After You Start Generating Leads?
Once you have a consistent flow of targeted leads, the next step is building relationships with them.
Provide value.
Help them.
Give them information about what you’re offering.
Answer questions.
Help them work their way through the sales process.
Again, I’m not going to pretend I’ve spent 24 years writing sophisticated psychological sales funnels.
I haven’t.
I’ve always taken a fairly simple approach.
I do the best I can to provide value.
I share my experiences.
I build relationships.
And then I plug interested people into the program I’m promoting and let the information do a lot of the heavy lifting.
That’s also why I believe building your own email list is nonnegotiable.
I’ve written an entire article about that subject, so I won’t repeat the whole thing here.
But the basic principle is simple:
Don’t spend all your time generating an audience you don’t own.
Platforms change.
Algorithms change.
Accounts can disappear.
The ability to continue communicating with the people you’ve attracted is enormously valuable.
Persistence Doesn’t Mean You Can Never Change Strategies
There’s a difference between quitting because something is difficult and making an intelligent decision that a strategy doesn’t fit the business you want.
My TikTok experiment is an example of the second.
I didn’t create 10 videos, get discouraged, and quit.
I created more than 300.
I generated 535 leads.
I gave it approximately four months.
Then I made a decision based on what I had learned.
Compare that with what happened during my bulk-email days.
When I first started, the process was incredibly simple.
I could purchase a list of people who had opted in to receive information about home-based businesses, sign up for a $10 autoresponder in a few minutes, load the leads, and start generating responses.
Then spam filtering became more aggressive.
Autoresponder services started disappearing or shutting down.
The strategy became considerably harder.
I could have said:
“Well, I guess this doesn’t work anymore.”
Instead, because the strategy was producing so well for me, I figured out how to keep it going.
Eventually, that meant purchasing my own email servers and installing my own autoresponder software.
I had to learn technical things I’d never dealt with before.
Setting up servers.
Installing software.
Setting up cron jobs.
Managing the backend.
What once took me five or ten minutes suddenly required days of setup and learning.
But the strategy was working.
So I learned.
I adapted.
I kept going.
That’s the difference.
With TikTok, I decided the daily grind wasn’t compatible with the business I wanted anymore.
With bulk email, the strategy fit exactly what I wanted at that point in my life and was producing tremendous results, so I fought through the obstacles.
Persistence isn’t blindly doing the same thing forever.
It’s knowing what you’re trying to build and being willing to work through the problems required to build it.
Discouragement Is Usually a Signal to Get Help, Not Quit
You’re going to get discouraged.
That’s business.
Network marketing requires self-motivation.
Nobody is sitting behind you every morning tapping you on the shoulder saying:
“Okay, time to go build your business.”
You have to want it.
And you have to be willing to work through failure.
Suppose you decide YouTube is the lead-generation strategy you want to master.
Are people successfully generating network marketing leads through YouTube?
Of course they are.
So if you’ve given it a legitimate effort and it isn’t working for you yet, the question shouldn’t immediately be:
“Does YouTube work?”
A better question might be:
“What am I doing differently from the people it’s working for?”
That’s where coaching becomes valuable.
Show somebody what you’re doing.
Explain your results.
Ask questions.
Make adjustments.
Try again.
When discouragement starts setting in, that’s often the perfect time for a little coaching and tweaking.
Don’t sit in discouragement for six months.
Troubleshoot the problem.
Eventually, Diversify Your Lead Flow
I recommend starting with one lead-generation strategy because you need enough focus to actually become good at something.
But I don’t think you necessarily need to rely on one source forever.
There are no guarantees online.
Platforms change.
Traffic sources change.
Algorithms change.
Strategies evolve.
Once you’ve gotten good at one source and it’s producing consistently, adding another can give you some protection.
This is especially attractive with evergreen strategies.
Suppose you’ve spent a year building a YouTube channel and old videos are continuing to generate views and leads.
You don’t necessarily need to stop YouTube to start something else.
You might maintain your YouTube channel while beginning a blog.
Now you potentially have two different sources feeding the same email list and funnel.
If one slows down, you’re not completely dead in the water.
And if both grow?
Your lead flow increases.
The Business I Want to Build Today
My philosophy about lead generation has changed as my life has changed.
Twenty years ago, I was perfectly happy working my butt off every day generating leads because I was competitive and I loved watching the numbers climb.
Today, freedom matters more to me.
But that doesn’t mean I’m unwilling to work.
Quite the opposite.
I’m willing to put in a tremendous amount of work over the next several months or even the next year building a system.
The difference is that I want today’s work to have the potential to keep paying me tomorrow.
That’s why I’m building this blog.
It’s why I’m moving toward YouTube.
It’s why I’m building my email follow-up.
I want someone to search a question six months from now and find an article I wrote today.
I want someone to discover an old video while I’m sitting outside enjoying a beautiful day.
I want that person to become a lead.
I want my autoresponder to follow up.
And I want that entire process to continue whether I’m sitting at my computer that particular day or not.
That’s my definition of a lead-generation asset.
So, How Do You Get Leads for Network Marketing?
If I had to simplify everything I’ve learned over 24 years into a basic plan, it would look like this:
Choose an audience you genuinely want to help.
Figure out what they’re already struggling with.
Choose one lead-generation strategy that fits the kind of business and lifestyle you want.
Learn that strategy.
Get coaching when you’re stuck.
Create content or marketing that helps solve the problems your audience is already trying to solve.
Capture those prospects onto an email list you control.
Follow up.
Build relationships.
Track what happens.
Improve.
And keep generating leads.
Don’t spend six months looking for the perfect strategy.
Don’t jump to another opportunity every time something doesn’t convert immediately.
Don’t generate 10 leads and declare that marketing doesn’t work.
Don’t look for an easy button.
Develop the skill.
When I started online in 2002, I had no idea how important lead generation would become to the rest of my life.
But looking back now, it’s probably the single most valuable marketing skill I learned.
Products change.
Companies change.
Compensation plans change.
Traffic sources change.
Technology changes.
But every business still needs people.
Learn how to consistently put the right people in front of the right offer, and you’ll have a skill you can carry with you for the rest of your business career.
And if you’re wondering where to start, that’s exactly why I recommend the same kind of system I use today: get your capture page and autoresponder set up, choose a lead-generation strategy, get plugged into training and coaching, and start learning by doing.
Because you don’t need to become a master marketer before you begin.
You just need to get started, generate that first lead, learn from what happens next, and keep going.
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