The glue that holds your Network Marketing group together.

It's important to understand what keeps your downline staying around and what keeps active customers in your Network Marketing business. Failure to pay attention to this can result in a group that quickly evaporates, leaving you with little to show for all your efforts.

There are only two types of glue that will keep your team members locked in - the products and personal relationships. Money isn’t one of them! There are many examples of people walking away from large incomes because the relationship with the company or the rest of the network marketers failed.

If you can get both working for you then you're going to have a solid team.

First, lets look at the products or services that your company supplies. If your team members find using them a valuable asset in their life they’ll continue to buy, even if they don't recruit new business builders or gather more customers. At the very least then you’ll benefit from having a steady, residual income stream from this.

For this to happen, the products or services do need to be special. If they can get almost identical goods elsewhere, and especially if they can get them cheaper or more easily, then they may not stay. From this you may think it’s fair to assume that a good way to build your business is by leading with the products.

This can be true. However, do remember that there’ll also be business builders in your downline whose primary focus is making money. The products are less important to them than the opportunity you’re providing.

The second Network Marketing glue is formed by social relationships within your team. The more relationships people have, and the deeper they are, the stronger the bond that will hold your team together.

It can be simple to encourage these relationships. Imagine there are a few people in your team who enjoy sailing. All you need to do is introduce them to one another. This gives an extra relationship between them so they now have a common interest in sailing and a common interest in your company.

This also works well for people who could be potential business partners. When they’re deciding whether to work with you are not, you can introduce them to other people in your team who have similar interests to them.

Because of this they’ll have extra bonds with people in your team before they join. And as you may well be aware, if people feel something is familiar and friendly, they're more likely to want it. What also happens to your potential new business partners is that they’ll see others who are similar to them, building a business. This helps them to see themselves building a business too.

One of the reasons people don’t join a Network Marketing business is that they don’t believe they can build it themselves. So, by seeing that others with similar life experiences to themselves are already doing it, you can go a long way to overcoming this limiting belief.

Retaining people in your team for longer is an essential step to building a stable business. It takes time to learn how to build a Network Marketing business, so people have to stay around for long enough. It can typically take somebody from six months to 18 months to grasp it, so if there’s nothing keeping them in your team, they're not going to stay around for this long.

A different way of looking at this approach is to view it as building a new community. You have a group of people within your Network Marketing group who have many interests in common and want to keep an active connection with the other people.

There are many outcomes for you by having this approach. A major benefit to you is that it positively gives your new team members a way of painlessly introducing their potential business partners, without using sales techniques. All your new people need to do is find others in your Network Marketing group who have similar interests to their potential business partners. Then the whole team building is immediately starting to repeat. This is no different from ordinary social life where we find different groups of people overtime.

To make it even clearer for you - and you’ve probably realised it already - automated tools do not grow these relationships and communities. It takes people talking with people. Ideally, it takes people being with people. Automated tools may have their place in keeping connections bit it isn’t the tools that make it work.

If you were to take only one idea from this whole website, then I'd urge you to take this one. This alone will transform your business; downline retention increases and productivity will also increase because nearly everybody can introduce new people to a social group. There will be no hard, aggressive sales techniques needed - so you don't need to be a ‘salesperson type’ to succeed - and that means that ordinary people can run their businesses this way.

It's important to be aware of the things that keep people a part of your Network Marketing group and active members of your downline. Ignoring these important social elements could cost you the residual income and financial security you're looking for.