Distributors who are thinking of building of their first Website, as well as those who already have one will find in this 3 parts article answers to the following questions:

1. What is the goal of a recruiting Website?
2. What should be my first step?
3. What are the criteria of an effective Website?
4. What is the secret of a successful Website?
5. What are the available options for building such a Website?
6. What are the costs and expenses involved?

1. What is the goal of a recruiting Website?
A most important prior clarification: A recruiting Website does NOT recruit distributors for you!!
The Website cannot do your job for you, there is no such a miraculous solution in existence yet.
The Website would establish your presence on the Net, save you money and time and attract prospects that may become your down-line.
However, a Website cannot substitute the human touch, a person to person contact that can make the difference between a prospect and a distributor.
A good Website is the most cost effective way to achieve the highest qualified leads and would help you to grow your organization in the fastest way possible.
Such a Website may make all the difference between success and failure.

2. What should be my first step?
Once you understood that a recruiting Website is a necessary basic tool, and the decision to have one has been made, the first question you may ask yourself is: what's now? where to begin?
The huge variety of Websites and options may be confusing and paralyzing. Most of us lack even the basic Internet knowledge needed to specify such a Website, build it or have it built for us, do not know how much should it cost and even how to use it.

A good way to start is by asking distributors in your company who already have their own Websites, and collect information such as recruiting Websites addresses, development companies, costs, structure, problems they may have, etc. Learning from other people experience is always a fast and economic option.

Your next step would be to surf the Net and check that information. Then, in order not to depend only on information given by people you happen to know, it is advised to read additional staff like this article. The internet is flooded with reading material about this subject and a short research would be very useful when forming your own view.
This preliminary work is very important, because for an issue with such importance to your business you cannot afford making decisions based on partial and unbalanced information.

3. What are the criteria for an effective Website, or the "facts of life" of a recruiting Website.
The success and effectiveness of a Website is determined by two main criteria:

a) The number of leads received out of the total number of visitors to the Website (i.e. the "conversion rate"). In other words: The percentage of people that submitted their details out of the total number of visitors.

b) The relevance of these leads. i.e. does the Website present the business idea in such a way that only those seriously interested, would fill the application form? Or, what is the effectiveness of the Website in screening out low quality leads?

a) Conversion
It may surprise you to know that statistically the conversion rate of Websites in which visitors are asked to leave their personal details (leads) is averaged 1 to 2 percent, meaning, only 1 or 2 people out of 100 visitors would leave their details in your Website.
Let us say we would like to get an average number of 3 leads per day. This means we should bring at least 150 visitors per day to our Website. Increasing the traffic to the Website (the promotion work) is not a simple task and involves both money and time.
For example, if by investing 300$ in promotion we have succeeded to bring 200 people to our Website per day, then each visitor cost us 5 cents. If 4 people from those 200 visitors left their details in the Website, then each lead costs us 2.5$.
Now, a good recruiting Website may reach conversion rate as high as 6 7 percent. This means that for the above example the cost of each lead could be reduced to 0.5 0.8$.

b) Relevance
If we follow the above example and assume we have managed to get 4 people per day, then within a month we will have about 100 120 prospects. Each of these prospects requires time and other resources (money) until they either join our organization or decline. Naturally you would want to deal only with potential distributors rather than waste your time with curious non-relevant people.

Once we understand that a price tag is attached to every lead we get, it becomes clear why both conversion rate and relevance of the leads are the only criteria for an effective website.