How's your relationship?

I'm not prying into your personal life, so no need to worry. it's just that lately I've noticed something about most network marketers which got me thinking.

Let me start with some background on these thoughts I had. One of the reasons an internet business seems so attractive is because of the ease with which you can communicate. This lends itself well to marketing, and in particular network marketing.

With me so far?

So we all jump into network marketing and mlm style business opportunities online to seek our fortunes, but this is where it all seems to go wrong.

The thing I've noticed myself and a lot of others doing online is just promoting our businesses.

We don't build relationships.

Network marketing is about networking with others, and I have heard it referred to as relationship marketing. But are we doing enough to build those relationships?

A recent example was a new style messaging system I was introduced to at http://www.profitmessaging.com/invite.php?f006bcd3bb . There you can invite "buddies" to message you, and add other buddies from the system to your buddies list. Then you can send them all a message safely from within the system. An Ideal opportunity to build a relationship or two.

Instead of getting to know each other, almost everybody jumped in and sent each other an advert for their business.

The result?

No one reads any messages.

No new relationships are formed.

It becomes another wasted opportunity to form relationships. There were one or two more savvy marketers who attempted to build relationships, but their efforts got lost in among the hundreds of "make more money than you can spend" ads.

In our personal lives we create many relationships, but for some reason once we start an online business, we forget to speak to people and instead send ads through the machine. We stop building relationships with people.

This has got me thinking, and I am going to try to break some habits, and start marketing myself, instead of the opportunities I am involved in.

I'm going to start building relationships.

It won't be easy, almost every other article, or ebook seems to be about how to promote your website, or your business, but rarely how to promote relationships. But it is possible, and we have all the tools to start building relationships.

For starters, we all have email addresses whhich could be used to start a conversation with someone. We have instant messengers, Yahoo, MSN and AOL to name a few, you can even use the software from Imvite http://www.imvite.com/dougyt which has a payment plan built in and can access most of the other networks anyway. And then there's Skype http://www.skype.com for voice chat which is as clear as a telephone, and free to download.

So we have the tools to form relationships, lets start doing it.

It can only be good for business to get to know each other and form friendships, partnerships, and trust. In the offline world you wouldn't dream of greeting a new potential customer by saying "Earn Millions Today" so lets stop doing it online.

Doug Titchmarsh
Online marketer, and real life person.