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Multilevel marketing (MLM) is a form of direct selling where sales people will receive commission on both their sales as well as the sales of the people they’ve recruited to join the company. People often get this confused with a pyramid scheme, but that’s false. Pyramid schemes are fraudulent, because they have no product. MLM has a product or service.

Did you know that nearly 8% of Americans have participated in MLM? Not only that, but a survey showed that 25% of participants made money. That’s not bad! Consider that against blogging where only 5% earn a full time income, and 20% of businesses fail in the first year.

If you are thinking about getting into MLM (or already are), a great way to boost your sales and leads is to utilize solo ads.

Why get into multilevel marketing?

If you aren’t into MLM, you should know that it’s big business. Globally, the industry has a market size of $189.6 billion, and employs 125.4 million people as independent representatives (source). So, for those that believe MLM might just be a big scam, should consider that lots people are out there making money – and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

There are many reasons to try to get some of the MLM pie:

1. Low barrier to entry: Getting started takes minimal or no upfront investment.
2. Flexibility: With MLM, you generally are working for yourself. While meeting the demands of your clients can be time consuming (and of course the effort to generate business), you can set your own hours to fit your lifestyle.
3. Diversify your income: If the last two years taught us anything, it’s that the economy is unpredictable. Having a second income stream and take a lot of stress away when the economy goes south.
4. Long-term residual income: Because you earn money from the sales of the people you’ve recruited, you can make money passively for years to come.
5. Networking opportunities: When you work in MLM, you push yourself to market yourself. This includes utilizing your own network (i.e., network marketing business), as well as continually building your contact list.

If you are interested in signing up for an MLM program, here is a list of top MLM companies.

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Why use solo ads for MLM?

Solo ads is simply when you work with an email vendor to send a marketing message on your behalf to their list (you can check out our deep-dive article here on solo ads). What’s great about solo ads is that the vendors you work with carefully vet their lists to be very engaged buyers of a particular category.

A good solo vendor won’t just have a random list of people, but people who have bought a product before and are interested in new products in that category. Those categories can include health, finance, marketing, mobile, social, crypto, and much more.

The fact that solo ads are vetted buyers and categorized makes them particularly great for MLM products. MLM products are often consumer products, related to nutrition, beauty, personal care, and much more. So if you work with a solo ad vendor like Udimi (our preferred solo ad vendor), all you need to do is search for a solo ad vendor who works in your MLM product category and get started.

Solo ads are also great because they are scalable, use a PPC model, and direct-response nature of email. By scalable, once you find a solo email vendor that works for your product, the sky really is the limit. Regarding a PPC model, you only pay for clicks (as opposed to a CPM model where you pay for how many emails are sent). PPC model makes it much easier for you to be profitable (just align the PPC price to the ROI). Finally, people just happen to buy (and buy immediately) from email, compared to other channels like social media or display. Using a top-of-funnel channel like social media or display, you would expect to need to have you product ad seen 5-10 times per buy. Email, it can be one and done.

Steps to generating results with multi level marketing solo ads

Udimi is our preferred vendor to use for solo ads, because they have huge marketplace of sellers who are vetted for quality. Searching through their sellers by category is very easy, and you can talk directly with sellers to best understand how to use their services. While the process of using solo ads for MLM will be similar across all solo ad vendors, we refer directly to Udimi.

Step 1: Research the solo ad vendor. A value of a solo ad vendor is in their list. That is, how ready their list is to buy, and what kinds of products their list likes to buy. With Udimi, you can easily search vendors using keywords related to your product. Health is a very popular category for both MLM and solo ads, and this category would likely do quite well.

If you are not sure if your product is a good fit, definitely ask the solo ad seller. While they are incentivized to sell their email placement to you, with Udimi, you can also see the percentage of emails that get a sale and you can see their average rating from other solo ad buyers. This means that, although they will want to sell their ad to you, they also don’t want to sell a solo ad that won’t work well for you. That quality control is a key benefit of Udimi.

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Step 2: Consider the right flow, and develop your landing page. With solo ads, you have to make a key decision. Do you want the email to link directly to the product page, or do you want the email to link to a “squeeze” page that will capture the email address of users. The benefit of directly linking to a product page is that you may get more sales directly, but you lose the potential customers who weren’t ready to buy just yet. With a squeeze page, you capture that user’s email, and can follow up with that person for eternity regarding this product or another product you have to offer.

With solo ads, the best practice is generally to use a squeeze page to maximize the ROI and to grow your customer base. That way, even if the sales aren’t quite where they need to be, at least you are always growing your business. But, managing an email list is a lot of work, and may not be something you want to focus on. Additionally, if you can make a direct flow work, that’s quite a turnkey way to make money.

Whatever path you choose, your landing page experience is key. If you are developing a squeeze page, less is more. Here’s a more in-depth guide, but essentially, you just want to tease at the value of the product so that the user will sign up to learn more. If you are going to the direct product page route, you should focus on compelling copy, clear images and video, and social proof.

Step 3: Get the click tracking right. Udimi will show you how many clicks your campaign receives in their dashboard, and the solo vendors typically over deliver by 10% or so. That said, especially if you aren’t going the Udimi route, you really should have your own tracking to ensure the solo vendor is not selling you bad traffic. ClickMagick is a product we like for this.

Step 4: Plan for split tests. If you have the budget, you should take the opportunity to split test the budget across multiple landing pages, messages, and vendors. Perhaps you can do this over time or once you start making a positive ROI with solo ads, you will greatly maximize this channel with split testing.

Step 5: Send the solo ad vendor your email copy (or not). When you work with a solo ad vendor, they may not know your product best, but they will know their audience best. So, you may want to opt to send them email copy that you feel will work best for your product, but you can also lean on the solo vendor to write the copy. Like mentioned earlier, Udimi solo ad sellers are incentivized to help you get purchases, and have experience writing to their audience to generate sales. If you don’t feel like you are a strong email writer, you may want to lean on the solo ad seller to write the text.

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Step 6: Analyze the results. Thanks to the direct nature of email marketing, you should see the bulk of your results in the next 48 hours (especially if you went with the direct to product page route). With the right tracking in place, you should have a good sense of what you paid per new lead, per conversion, and be able to compare that against other channels. If the campaign wasn’t quite a success for you, figure what went wrong. Again, you can speak with the solo ad seller to get their insights. In many cases, you may need to (1) vet the sellers a bit better, (2) work on your landing page, or (3) if you went the squeeze page route, work on the email nurturing flow.

Conclusion

MLM and solo ads really are a perfect match, with so much opportunity. If you are interested in learning more about solo ads, we write about them quite a bit on our website. Some useful articles include:

• Understanding the Difference Between A Good and Bad Solo Ad
• How to Use Solo Ads to Grow Your Online Business
• Solo Ads vs. PPC Ads
• Beginner’s guide to selling solo ads

Good luck! I hope you make a lot of money.