The Death of Rejection, The Dawn of a New Age

I remember how terrified I was the first time I tried to cold call from a leads list. The first time a very rude woman told me to take her name off my list and never call back, I thought I'd never recover.

The truth is, most network marketers fear prospecting because of the rejection factor. And even though I eventually overcame my fear, I know many marketers who didn't, and subsequently quit the business because of it.

Now for the good news: The old ways are dead. Yep, you heard it first here. Cold calling, hotel meetings, hounding family and friends, and the 3-foot-rule died a slow but welcomed death.

Gone are the days when the preferred action was to buy lead lists for hundreds of dollars a month and cold calling, fishing for that one soul who could see the big picture.

Good riddance, I say.

And what mongrel murdered the dreaded tactics we so despised. Why, his name is Internet, of course.

Think about it: Network marketing is a people business. Where can you reach more people than the Internet? People all over the world, 24/7, are surfing somewhere.

The Internet has removed the rejection factor. No longer do we network marketers need fear picking up the telephone. We don't need to feel guilty because we missed the Thursday hotel meeting, or went to the supermarket today and didn't pitch our business to a single soul.

Imagine that.

No, now our websites handle all the rejection. That's OK, because they're emotionless creatures. You can call them names, they don't care. You can tell them their products suck, and still they're unaffected. Best of all, they keep at it, 24/7, and need no breaks of any kind.

Now, like everything else, there is a right way and a wrong way to use the Internet. The wrong way is to put up a website, list your products or try to sell your opportunity, and expect success. "Build it and they will come" is the motto of the Internet fool.

There are many right ways to use the Internet, but all of them revolve around generating traffic, that is, visitors, to your site. Traffic has been called the life blood of a website. Without it, the website serves no purpose.

There are some purists who argue that Internet marketing is inferior to face-to-face methods because it's difficult to build relationships. I couldn't disagree more.

I personally have made many, many more friends on the Internet than I ever could by going to some hotel meeting or handing out flyers at Walmart. The key is to remember that the Internet is only a tool.

Yes, you still need to develop relationships, and yes network marketing is still very much a people business, but that initial contact is much more comfortable when it occurs online. At least, that's been my own experience.

In days past, marketers had little choice but to attend meetings and cold call. Nowadays, we have webinars and teleconferencing, where you can talk to people on the other side of the world without leaving your home. How awesome is that?

I for one am glad to see the old ways disappear. My phone weighs a lot less, I don't feel guilty because I didn't ask Uncle Fred to do a 3-way call with my upline, and I'm making a lot more money since my downline has no problem duplicating what I'm doing.

Life is good.