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What is network marketing? Unless you understand the term itself, it will be impossible for you to appreciate the positive lessons that it can provide for your business.

Network marketing is about connection; developing a marketplace for your product by meeting with other people, getting them to engage with your product or service and then sending those people out to engage with others, thus spreading the word about your business to a much wider network of people, increasing the benefit to you as this happens. It is like through a small stone into a lake. Whilst the initial impact may be small, the ripple effect grows larger and reaches further afield within seconds, increasing the coverage of that stones impact. The same is true of networking a business. If you talk to five people and they then proceed to talk to another five each, the network of people that know about your business, from that small start, will grow at an increasing rate.

However, to be truly effective, there are a number of positive lessons that to be learned about network marketing. The first of these is to focus your efforts. It is all too easy to say "I will talk and connect with everyone because they will all want my product/service." This is blatantly not the case. You need to be more focused than this. To achieve focus means asking some simple questions.

1. Who really wants my product and why do they need it?

For example if your business is selling country garden products, building a network of town flat dwellers is not going to be the most effective way of achieving sales. In this instance, you will need to concentrate you efforts on people who have a reason for needing your product.

2. Is network marketing hard selling?

The short answer is no. Network marketing is about building lasting relationships with people, relationships that will encourage others to both buy your product and want to sell it to others, to sell to their own network of colleagues, friends and acquaintances. Positive networking is about building the trust and confidence of others in you and the product or service you are offering. Only by this method can you achieve the ongoing successful ripple effect for your business.

3. Should I keep the benefits to myself?

One of the main positive effects of network marketing comes from sharing. Therefore, it follows that keeping all the benefits to you is not the best way forward. If you want people to pass on the good news about your business to others then there must be a benefit to them, no matter how small. Simple examples of the success of this formula can be found with party plan organisations where the host, in exchange for inviting his or her friends into their homes so that you can display your products, will receive a free product as a thank you. In the larger business environment, franchising is another form of network marketing that works because the franchiser offers the franchisee the opportunity of benefiting financially from the process of spreading, or networking, the product or service.

The most important positive lesson to learn from network marketing is that, it is a process of building close business relationship based upon trust, confidence, mutual benefit and understanding. In effect, it is the ultimate expression of the law of giving and receiving. If you give to the network, you will receive multiple benefits in return .

Learn more about this author, Paul Lines.
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