If you have been sponsored into a multilevel marketing company through word of mouth, the traditional way, you must be familiar with the following pattern. You join, sign the papers and congratulations you are now and officially a distributor and you are ready to start building your “fortune", I mean business. So what's the first thing to do? Meet with your upline, of course, to learn the tricks of the trade. You show up to the appointment and you are instructed to make a list of Everyone you know with a capital E for emphasis.

So you leave, go back home and your get your hands and pen to work. You open all those diaries, agendas and photo albums and with their aid you start filling whole sheets of paper with names and phone-numbers. Now, a couple of hours later you are finished and you end up with a huge list. You get excited and you start dreaming all of them becoming your downline so you can start getting those checks with the very long numbers. But then you come back to reality and say to yourself “OK my sponsor told me only a 10% of them would be interested to start their own home business." But then you think “what the heck even that 10% is still a large number".

The training day approaches. You meet your upline again and you do practice on the phone-script. You get some encouragement, then practice, some more encouragement and practice and finally you are ready for the big moment. You pick up the phone and dial. First prospect first no. Then second one, surprise, a no. A few more names down the list the same story goes on. No and some occasional hang ups.

Suddenly you start realizing that it doesn't work as you were told. The 10% seems like a 1% and less now. Unfortunately this is true when it comes to calling your friends and relatives. Unless you are already successful and respected there is little chance that they will join your Network Marketing business or even buy a product.

So it turns out to be a waste of time to follow that route, which is a contradictory thing since the industry that advocates how valuable your time is, to trade it for money in a job, pushes you to lose it for nothing or a negligible return in customers or distributors.

MLM albeit a unique business model doesn't stop being a business. If you want to succeed in it you should treat it as such. What every entrepreneur does is finding out what his target market is and then try to reach that market with his offer. Begin relatives and friends is not a serious model to implement in your effort to build a home based business and your chances to succeed by doing so are dim.