One of the worst mistakes you can do when you are trying to build your downline is to send your traffic directly to the website you are advertising. Let me be blunt: this is wasted traffic!

You work hard to get people's interest. Do not waste your advertising efforts, your time, your money or perhaps more importantly, their clicks! What you need is your own website so that you can promote yourself and give your visitors an opportunity to sign up to your mailing list. When they join your newsletter, they will get to know and trust you, you can build a relationship with them and later advertise other opportunities to them. This can prove to be priceless as time goes by and your list grows.

See, when you don't send people to your website, you advertise an affiliate link to send people to the website you want to promote, and when they buy something there, you make a commission. That's great! But what if they do not buy? What happens is that when they leave that website, they are gone forever. You don't have their info, so you cannot follow up with them to tell them about all the features of the product you are promoting or present other products to them. Sometimes, they sign up at the site where you sent them, but just because they want more info, not because they want to buy. At least not at the time. Then the owner of the site has their info and can follow up with them, but you can't! Thank you very much!

Statistics have proven that the majority of people (more than half) will not make their move until they have been presented with the same offer several times. It can take up to 7 and even 10 times or more before your visitors convert to buyers. Sometimes, they can take months to make a decision. That's why you need to be able to stay in touch with them and remind them of your offer.

So you need your own website in order to build your list. But if you want to build a downline, you do not want just any website! You need to have a system, a model that your downline will be able to use as well. If you can refer lots of people to a program, but your referrals don't know how to refer, you will have to do all the work yourself. Your referrals will get discouraged and will eventually give up. You will then have to start all over again. Use a system that will simplify your downline building.

You need a system that is easy to duplicate. This system should of course include a landing page where you give your visitors a taste of what is inside. This should be just a short summary. However, don't let them in before having them sign up to your mailing list. Granted, some people will not want to give you their details. That's not a problem, because if they are reluctant right from the start to even do something as trivial as giving you their name and email address, they would probably not join your opportunity anyway. Concentrate on the prospects that are really interested in what you have to offer.

Once you have people subscribed to your list, you should have a series of autoresponder messages ready to be sent to them over a certain amount of time. You could have, for example, 10 messages that will be sent every two days. In those messages, explain what your website is all about, and especially what it can do for them.

You should also add a twist to your website. For example, tell your prospects that they will get an exact copy of your money-making website if they join two of your programs. For better results, these programs should have a monthly fee, so that you will have residual income that will come in every month. They should also be multi-tiered programs, meaning that you can have a downline several levels deep. This will give your income a great exponential curve.

You should also be willing to help your downline with any questions that they might have. You will not always know the answers, but you can ask around or search the Web to find them. Be supportive and patient.

The bottom line here is that you should never send your hard-earned traffic directly to someone else's website. On the contrary, send people to YOUR website to sign up to YOUR list.