Why You Should Start a Blog for Your MLM Business

If you love your direct sales business but can’t seem to stand out from the crowd, I highly recommend you start a blog for your MLM business. Keep reading to find out why.

One of the reasons I love blogging – and why I specifically target this blog to women, although anyone can read it, of course – is that it provides women with an extra way to make money. Blogging can be a flexible opportunity for women who need or want to stay home for whatever reason, and it can be ideal for anyone that’s just not cut out for your everyday 9 to 5. Anyone can start a blog and make money. Not everyone will, of course, but it is possible.

While blogging is my preferred “work from home” option, I know many women who choose to work with multi-level marketing companies, otherwise known as MLMs. Like blogging, MLMs can be a great way for women to make money from home. There are myriad MLM companies out there, so no matter what you want to sell, there’s likely a company for you. For instance:

• Stella & Dot is a great option if you’re passionate about on-trend jewelry and accessories. Ditto for Chloe & Isabel. (By the way, both of these companies also have affiliate programs!)
• If you want to sell one of the best-known beauty brands in the world, you might consider becoming a representative for Avon. Or there’s Younique or Mary Kay or Lipsense. Of course, if you’re more interested in skincare, there’s always Rodan + Fields.
• If clothing is more your thing, you might gravitate toward companies like LuLaRoe, Black Sheep Legging, or Agnes & Dora.
• Then there are the health and wellness-related MLMs like Beachbody and Advocare.
• Essential oils are an essential item right now. Companies like doTERRA and Young Living are two of the biggest oil companies and two of the biggest direct sales companies in general.
• My favorite of all of the MLMs, though, is Usborne Books. I love getting their books for my little ones!

This is just a sampling of the myriad multi-level marketing companies. I’ve never worked for an MLM; it just doesn’t interest me. What has always struck me as odd, though, is that that almost all representatives I’ve encountered tend to focus their selling on social media. Social media is great, but it is also limiting for various reasons, including:

• The shelf life of any post on social media is rarely more than a few minutes.
• You are reliant primarily on your social networks for business, which can be annoying to those people in your social networks and it can be hard to find new people.
• Social media often feels saturated with sales posts.

Assuming that you want your business to be successful and stick out from the crowd, I’m going to suggest something not-at-all radical: Start a blog for your MLM business.

Why you need to start a blog for your MLM business

I know that for many people the thought of starting a blog is terrifying, though it shouldn’t be.

You are already putting yourself out there and trying to sell products you love. That’s the hard part. Starting a blog for your MLM business will just give you an additional platform to meet more people and talk up the products you love. You’ll be able to write in-depth about specific products and include hundreds of photos if you want. You can write posts comparing two similar products or write about why you prefer one thing over another. Tired of answering the same questions over and over? Write a post addressing each of those different topics! Share news about upcoming releases or product retirements. You could even share awesome pictures that some of your users send to you (with their permission, of course). Essentially, the sky is the limit and there’s no right or wrong way to incorporate the products you sell into a blog.

One blogger I think does this exceptionally well is Carrie Higgins from Making Lemonade. While Carrie blogs about all sorts of topics, she also does an amazing job of unobtrusively incorporating her Young Living essential oil business into some of her blog posts.

For instance, check out How to Organize Essential Oils in Every Room in Your Home. This post is subtly salesy in that it shows you a ton of different Young Living products that can be purchased, but the focus is really on storage options. This isn’t a salesy post, as she’s talking primarily about essential oil storage. That said, the post is incredibly helpful if you have a collection of essential oils at home and is the type of post people would want to read and would be inclined to share with their essential oil loving friends. While the bulk of the post is about storage with no links to Young Living to be found, Carrie shares a little bit of information about oils and directs you to her post about how to get started with Young Living at the very end of the post. Like Carrie does, you should always include a link to the product you’re trying to sell, but you don’t need to bombard people with a wall of links.

The biggest benefit to you in starting a blog for your MLM business is that not many people are doing it. Since so many people in direct sales are focusing the bulk of their energy on social media, there are so many new shoppers that could head your way if you take the time to write high-quality blog posts.

Starting a blog is NOT hard

If you’ve never started a blog before you might think I’m out of my mind. I promise you, though, getting one up and running is easier than you think and it can even be done for free!

Here are a few different posts to check out that will walk you through getting everything set-up:

How to start a blog for free: Everything you need to know to launch your blog without spending a dime – If you’re not sure that this whole blogging thing is for you, I would start here! This post *truly* walks you through how to launch your blog for free.

How to start a WordPress blog in 10 easy steps – If you’re ready for the big time, WordPress is the best!

How to choose a name for your blog – You wouldn’t believe how frequently I am asked for advice on this topic. If you’re stuck, my recommendation is to go with your name. You want people to trust you so that they buy from you. Using your name is an easy way to connect with people.

Tip: Since we’re talking specifically about how to start a blog for your MLM business, remember that all of these companies like have trademarks on their brand names. This means that you should shy away from something like, “Lisa’s LuLaRoe Love Fest” that has a URL like “LisaLuLaRoe.com” because this is probably trademark infringement.

Of course, you can talk about LuLaRoe in your posts and use their brand name as you try to sell their products, but you shouldn’t use brand names in your URL or blog name because the company may well sue you for trademark infringement. Using their name in your blog URL might give off the impression that your site is part of theirs, which, of course, it is not.

SEO is the key to standing out

Search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO, is a term that bloggers and people who work online talk about frequently. There’s a bit of a learning curve when you’re first learning about SEO, and your eyes may already be glossing over, but I promise the idea behind it is fairly simple. SEO is, more or less, the idea of targeting your posts to the things people type into search engines. Ideally, if someone searches for something on Google, you want to try to be on the first page of the search results because not many people go much further than that. What this means is that you want to try to be as precise as possible with the search term you are targeting.

Keywords go hand-in-hand with SEO. Keywords are the words or phrases that you target when you want a post to do well in the search engines. A keyword can be one word, although that’s not really recommended at this point in time because nearly every single word is going to be impossible to rank for in any search engine. For instance, the word “cookie” yields 2.1 BILLION search engine results. If we use a more targeted keyword though, like “peanut butter marshmallow cookie recipe,” then there are only 3.9 million results. OK, that’s still absurd, but hopefully you get the point that a keyword can be more than one word and the more specific the better.

As you write your own posts about the products you’re selling, you will most likely want to focus on brand + product specific keywords. For instance, if you sell LuLaRoe, perhaps you’d write a post about “LuLaRoe Mickey Mouse leggings,” where the words between the quotations are your keyword phrase. If you sell Young Living oils, perhaps you’d have a post about “uses for Young Living Royal Hawaiian Sandalwood oil,” or something along those lines.

Not everything you write needs to be SEO-optimized. You should definitely write posts like, “Why I love Young Living essential oils,” knowing that you’re probably not going to rank well for that post. That’s totally OK. Sometimes your readers just need information and you shouldn’t overlook the basics.

Stella & Dot SEO Example

Let’s say you are a Stella & Dot consultant. A general Google search for the term “Stella & Dot” yields more than 36 million results. Yikes. Let me be blunt: You will NEVER rank on the first page of Google for the term “Stella & Dot.”

But, let’s say that you, as a consultant, really love the Stella & Dot Simonne Sunglasses. What you could do is write a post showing off a few different ways that you would style the sunglasses, or perhaps demonstrate how you would pair those sunglasses with other items sold by Stella & Dot, or whatever else strikes your fancy.

When I change my keyword phrase to “Stella & Dot Simonne Sunglasses,” a Google search yields only 26,600 results and the vast majority of them have nothing to do with the sunglasses.

Here’s an awesome post demonstrating exactly what I’m talking about, actually using the Simonne sunglasses:

https://whitneyfields.blogspot.com/2018/05/this-just-in-new-stella-dot-simone.html

In the post, Whitney Fields uses her link to sell the sunglasses, show off a couple of different pictures of the glasses, and talk about how they were featured in Rachael Ray Magazine. A post like that is literally ALL you need to do if you decide to start a blog for your MLM business.

You can tell that Whitney was targeting the keyword phrase “Stella & Dot Simonne Sunglasses” because it’s in the URL for her post, the title, and appears once in the text.

The only suggestion I would make is that all blog posts should be a minimum of 300 words and I think hers is less than that, but hey, she’s still on the first page of Google! The reason she is on the first page of Google and may well get new people to purchase items using her consultant link is that these glasses are brand new so there’s little to no search engine competition. This is exactly what more direct sales consultants need to do!

Don’t be afraid to start a blog

I work with a lot of bloggers and one of the things I regularly hear is that people are afraid to put themselves out there.

Let me be blunt here: You’ve already chosen to go into direct sales. SELLING to people is the hard part. Writing about how much you love whatever it is you’re selling should be easy. You can gush about the products and share the same pictures that you do on your social media outlets, but blogs have a bit more longevity that will put you a step ahead of the competition.

The worst that can happen is you find out you hate blogging and stop immediately. The highs, though, definitely outweigh that. A blog can be your secret to new customers, more exposure, and increased profits.