The goal of any advertising campaign should be results. Unless your business is Coca-Cola, you probably can’t afford to launch massive advertising campaigns that promote your brand, but don’t necessarily result in more sales.

With us network marketers, it’s pretty simple–our advertising efforts must either result in more distributors or more product sales or we’ll be out of business.

Unfortunately most of us are taught advertising methods that don’t typically yield the types of results that we need. Buying leads or buying clicks from Google Adwords aren’t necessarily bad methods. In fact, in right person’s hands, these methods can produce outstanding results.

But for the brand new network marketer, these methods probably will not be effective immediately. Some of us may be able to afford buying leads or clicks while we learn how to prospect. But if you can’t afford it, then you really shouldn’t be spending your money learning the wrong way to do something.

It’s easy to get lured into these traps. “If I buy 200 leads, all I need are 2 new distributors to make my money back. That’s only 1%, I can do that.” or “If I get 1000 visitors to my website from Adwords, I’ll only need 2 new distributors to make my money back.”

If you’re brand new to either of these methods, you might get lucky and meet your sponsoring goals and break even. But most likely, you won’t know what you’re doing and you’re going to end up with no results.

So you buy more leads, or you buy more website traffic and now the voice in your head says, “Well I lost money on the last one, but if I get 4 new distributors, then I’ll break even. I learned a lot from the last batch and I won’t make the same mistakes again.”

So this time, you make a whole new set of mistakes and end up with no results again. You keep going.

“This time, I need 6 to break even”
“This time, I need 8 to break even”
“This time, I need 10 to break even”

and so on…

Meanwhile you’re just waiting for the time when you get “lucky” and start sponsoring. This sounds familiar–It sounds like my friend Shawn playing the blackjack tables in Vegas and it sounds like my grandmother playing the lottery with scratch tickets. If they just get “lucky” they’ll make their money back, and if they get REALLY lucky, they might win it big.

But what if you never “win big” and you run out of money, what then?

The problem with these activities is that they aren’t leveraged and they aren’t repeatable without paying more money.

If you’re new to the industry, or even if you’ve been around for a while without getting any results, then you need to invest in acquiring skills that will increase your leverage when you’re building your business.

What if instead of that first batch of leads, you invested in some training materials that taught you some phone skills so you could better talk to prospects?
What if instead of that first batch of clicks, you invested in some training materials that taught you how to do keyword research and write good headlines and compelling offers?

Do you think the results would have been different?

Unlike leads or clicks which are gone once they’re gone, investing in yourself is something that will keep paying off. Having more knowledge will increase your value to your prospects and automatically position you as a leader in their minds. This in turn will make them want to join you and your opportunity.

There is a really great free training video that explains this entire concept in more detail. It’s the second video in the Building on a Budget series. You can sign up to get it here.