Network marketing is by far the most lucrative business model available on the planet. It is the only business vehicle that requires very little up front investment yet has the possibility of earning you more money than you could ever imagine, giving you the time and financial freedom that most of us dream of.

However the road to mlm prosperity is not an easy one. So if mlm is so great why do so many people fail?

Let's take a tour of the different stages a Network Marketing Distributor goes through.

Stage 1 - Network Marketing the good old fashioned way: We all have come across this one. This is where a new distributor is asked to go out and make a list of family and friends, get them to invite their friends and hold in house presentations at their homes or in hotels.

Now before I come off sounding cynical here, I would like to add that there is nothing wrong with this strategy but I believe it to be very ineffective. Network Marketing is about building relationships. The problem lies in the sheer scale of this endeavour.

Do you realise how many frogs you have to kiss before finding the prince's that will ride with you into the mlm prosperity sunset? Most mlm veterans will advocate that you need to be speaking to anything from 5-30 leads per day! depending obviously on how fast you want to move your business.

When you have run out of family and friends, supposedly your warm market, then you have no choice but to look outside your circle of influence and start to approach strangers i.e. cold market prospects.

This here my friends is where it ends for a lot of people because it leads to frustration because most people are not comfortable with approaching strangers or don't know where to start. They will most probably have been given a false expectation of what it takes to succeed in mlm and they walk away from the business often labeling it as a scam.

For those that still hang in there move onto the next stage.

Stage 2 - Direct Marketing - These are any paid methods used to find prospects from offline direct advertising in newspapers and magazines to online methods such as PPC (pay per click).

This now gives distributors the scope to expand beyond their friends and family, giving them more time leverage and a way to have more targeted prospects.

Stage 3 - Attraction Marketing - Financial Freedom This is when we start to enter the Ninja stage in a distributors career. This is where you no longer need to chase people because people start coming to you. You now have something of value to offer and you have now branded yourself as a leader. This is what all distributors worth their salt should aspire to.

Stage 4 - The Mentor - When you reach this stage you no longer need to recruit. I have had the pleasure of meeting a few of these in my mlm career. These are the ones that are invited to presentations and seminars as guest speakers to mentor and inspire. They show us that mlm success is not only possible but that it is also achievable.

You will reach the status of mentor when you truly achieve 'financial freedom'. Most people I have spoken to who are in this position have found that it has taken them an average of 10 years to go from stage 1 to stage 4 where you are earning $50,000 - $100.000 per month.

Now this doesn't seem like a bad investment of your time for the rewards you will eventually receive. However the power of the Internet now has given us the possibility of even greater leverage and if used correctly can vastly decrease the time it takes to achieve mlm success and the financial freedom that dreams are made of.