The Complete Home-Based Business Guide for Beginners. All You Need in getting Started and Achieving Success.
If you are interested in starting a Home-Based business, there is no better time than now. With our economic uncertainty and inflation increasing and hourly wages going down we crave to find supplemental income, more time with loved ones, and the ability to set our own working hours from home.
Why a Home-Based Business?
Our economy is unstable, food stamp users are on a dramatic incline, and student loan debt has surpassed credit card debt. By the time we reach 50, we only have around $50,000 in savings and depending on social security to support us in the retirement years is a joke. It won’t be there for us.
We live paycheck to paycheck and sometimes credit card to credit card. We simply don’t make enough money to do the things we want with the people we love the most.
If money is not an issue, than you are probably working long hours and have no time for friends and family. Either way, starting a home-based business can remedy all of these problems by giving you more income and allowing you to work less at a job.
Joining a network marketing company allows you to become a home-based Entrepreneur. It is a low-cost, low-cost entry point into the world of global, internet commerce.
What is Network Marketing?
Network marketing, also known as MLM or Direct Selling, is a business model that companies may use to cut out the middleman and useless traditional advertising and rely solely on people to spread the product or services of the company via “word-of-mouth,” hence the term “word-of-mouth marketing.”
Network marketing can be very lucrative because “distributors” are compensated not only for their efforts, but for their entire team of personal recruits.
Network marketing has been around for over a 100 years but has only been widely recognized since the 50’s. It’s now a 182 Billion dollar global industry with $75 Billion in Gross Sales in the US alone in 2014. There are 18 Million distributors in the U.S. with 175,000 people per week enrolling into a network marketing business. The network marketing industry is larger than the NFL and movie industry combined.
What is MLM, Pyramid and Ponzi?
MLM stands for “Multi-Level Marketing” which is another term for network marketing. In the MLM business model, you create your own organization of people that use your product as consumers, or people who promote it as a business opportunity.
There’s a lot of misconceptions of what MLM actually is. Some people feel MLM is a scam because they think all the people at the top make all the money, but this isn’t true. Everyone starts at the bottom in MLM. What makes leaders rise to the top is exactly that: they are leaders, worked hard, helped their teams duplicate and grew successful organizations. This takes time and consistent, hard work.
People assume that people at the top of MLM just miraculously got their because of luck or timing. Timing is unimportant in network marketing. You can make just as much money in an established network marketing company that’s been around for 50 years, as you can with a company that’s just starting.
The real scam are corporations that pay their CEO’s millions of dollars a year and the guys at the bottom make $8.75 an hour.
What is a Pyramid Scheme?
A true Pyramid Scheme is a company or “internet deal” that grows by recruiting people and paying them solely on recruiting new people. The biggest indicator of a company being a Pyramid is that they have no product or viable service. A Pyramid is similar to a Ponzi Scheme, where new money coming in has to pay the oldest members of the organization to keep everyone happy and keep the Ponzi going.
What happened to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme is that he couldn’t bring in enough new people to help pay the dividends to his older clients and the structure began collapsing and whistle blowers started whistling.
There’s hundreds of scams online. If they offer 100% commissions and have no consumable product or viable service, watch out.
Finding the Right Company
Finding the right network marketing will be based on what your needs are. If you want to lose weight, you will want to find a weight-loss product; if you want better sleep and focus, you would want a brain supplement.
There are hundreds of solid MLM/network marketing companies out there. Do your research. You want a company that encompasses everything you need to become healthy and successful if you chose to be a business owner.
When you decide on a company, you will need to find someone to sign up through. The whole dynamic of a network marketing company is that the CEO and staff of the company cannot enroll you. You have to find a “distributor.”
In some rare cases a CEO or staff member could guide you to a distributor, but usually you have to search the internet for a distributor within the company you chose. The CEO usually can’t play favoritism within the company because it would be unfair and unethical to other distributors within the company.
Love your Product
Network marketing products are recognized as being far superior than products in a retail store. Network marketing companies spend millions of dollars on research and development on their product lines, which ensures not only satisfied customers with life-changing results, but gives the entire industry a competitive edge.
Once you order through your new sponsor, they will usually introduce themselves and welcome you to the company. They might have a “quick start guide” to email you, in case you want to learn how to become a business owner and distribute products yourself.
Once you receive your product, start using it or taking it, if it’s consumable. The biggest factor in joining a network marketing business is loving the product you take or promote. The rule of thumb is that you love your product so much you would share it with your mom
Your ‘Why’
One of the most powerful marketing tools in your MLM arsenal is your personal testimonial story. All great leaders have a very strong, almost “rags to riches” type of story.
Your story begins with how you were living (before the product) and how you live now (with the product). Some of the stories I have heard within the industry are transformative and so inspiring. This industry builds people up with stories like this, rather than tearing down others in a competitive environment, like in Corporate America.
“People love stories and the more vulnerable you are practicing humility, the faster you will grow into a leader who can transform lives.”
Your “why” is your personal story. People love stories and the more vulnerable you are and practice humility daily, the faster you will grow into a solid leader who can transform the lives of others. Network marketing has changed millions of lives for the better, all through selfless leadership and superior products.
Leadership
It’s very important to recognize the leadership within your new company. Who is your sponsor? Who’s their sponsor? Who is the CEO? How many years experience does he or she have?
Your sponsor is the person to get you connected into the leadership within your company. Get plugged into all of their training events, webinars, and calls. You should feel safe and not pressured by your sponsor or anyone else in the company.
Company Tools
Your company should provide you your own personal website and “capture pages” with your referral identity embedded into the website. So, when you promote your page on the internet and someone enters their name and email on to your capture page, you should receive an email that someone visited your site. Real good companies will have an automated email system which will email your prospects for you, urging them to upgrade. Here’s a sample “capture page” or “Lead capture page”:
Capture pages are powerful internet tools if used correctly. Usually when you receive these from your company they will be in long form, like: www.username.yourcompany.com. You want to shrink this link down before placing it with some content to post on social media. You can use services like TinyURL.com, Buffer or Bit.ly to shorten your links so they look like this: tiny4583.com.
Your company should also have a control panel or dashboard that you can log back into to update your payment info and direct deposit, and get your sponsor details, Geneology and your personal website links. Everything you need should be within this control panel. That’s why, as a network marketer, you could be anywhere in the world where there’s wifi and be able to operate.
Compensation Plans
There’s many types of compensation plans. One of the most prevalent and powerful compensation plans today is the Binary Compensation Plan.
In the old days, compensation plans were complex and hard to make money from. Some plans required you to recruit 15 distributors before you got paid in a monthly check. Today, you can get paid weekly and you can earn monthly recurring income from just putting one personally recruited distributor on your left and one on your right. These rights and lefts are called your “legs.”
The most compensation I have heard of being paid out in a Binary Compensation plan is 75%. If you get one personal “Independent Business Owner” (IBO for short) on your left and one on your right, you can earn up to $15 a cycle. A cycle happens when one left is matched with one right.
This is the power of network marketing and earning job-replacing income. With this model, you would earn $150 a month from having 10 IBO’s on your left and 10 on your right. The thing to remember is that you don’t have to bring all these people in. One of your legs in a binary handles the volume of your sponsor and anyone else above you. You could have 100 IBO’s above you putting people down your left leg. All you have to do is match that volume between both legs, so:
10 IBO’s (Both on Left and Right Legs) = $150 a month in Residual Income.
100 IBO’s = $1500 a month.
1000 IBO’s = $15,000 a month.
It wouldn’t be unrealistic to say that in 2 to 5 years you could have 1000 IBO’s on both legs and be making $15,000 a month in residual income. Residual income means leveraged income from the efforts of your entire team, not just you.
As your team grows, your paycheck grows. Even better, your checks grow with or without you working. If you have a few solid leaders on your team and they are bringing in their own IBO’s, your income will grow whether you are sleeping or driving down a country road. This is the true power of network marketing, but only the top 10% actualize this reality, because unlike a Pyramid Scheme, if you want to be in the top 10% you have to put in some serious work and time.
Is $15,000 a month worth 2 to 5 years of hard work? I think so…
Mindset
In order to succeed in network marketing, the first thing that needs to happen is clearing out old, limiting beliefs. If you think that wealth is unachievable or that rich people suck or you think “money isn’t everything”, then you have limiting beliefs which will stifle your path to success.
For many years, my role models were selfish drunks. My favorite authors romanticized about being hobos and drinking wine under the stars. I thought creating wealth was not possible and I wanted to be the opposite of my successful father…
Things changed when I hit rock-bottom and had a heart-attack at 32. I knew my ways of living were killing me and I did a 180 with my life. I started reading books on success and leadership, starting with Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.
Books and positive affirmations changed my life and increased my wealth. Opportunities to achieve more wealth began to present themselves. “Whatever the mind can conceive it can achieve.”
Books are an integral part of network marketing. All leaders are copious readers. They devour books. Don’t worry about buying physical books. Download the Kindle App and buy some eBooks from Amazon.
Here’s a few powerful books to kickstart your network marketing mindset:
Go Pro by Eric Worre
Go for NO by Richard Fenton
Recruit and Grow Rich by Dale Ward
These three books alone will give you so much of a head start, which will reduce the typical setbacks of starting an MLM business.
Branding YOU
The biggest mistake new network marketers make is slapping their company logo and product all over their social media, then they write in their bios: “Distributor #3679594 for (company name)”
This is the biggest mistake. People join YOU before they join your company. Network marketing is a “people business” so putting a bottle up of skin cream instead of your head is a big mistake. Thousands of distributors do this and you will look like just another distributor.
Be authentic. Add a little info about who you are in your bios. Include your hobbies and what you like to do. Don’t even mention your company’s name.
Why?
Because if they see the name of your company guess what they’re going to do? They will go over to Google and research it and you just lost them. Do you think they will come back to you to be courteous? No. They will find an awesome website on the first page of Google and join that person.
You can’t win that way, but you can be an awesome person that people want to know more about. Then, once you create dialogue with that person and uncover their problems you can provide a solution, whether that be your product or the business opportunity.
Again, don’t mention your company name in your conversation. This is where you give them a link to your capture page. Tell them it’s free to look. If they don’t want to sign up through a capture page, send them over a 2 to 4 minute company video. Set a time to check back with them, like in 15 minutes, and ask them: “What did you like best?” If you ask what they did like, instead of asking did you like it, you direct them into a positive response.
Objection Handling
Some people are going to say “No” no matter what. It’s better to cut your ties quickly and move on to the next prospect. Don’t take a “No” as a personal rejection.
Think about a waitress with coffee. She walks around all day asking customers if they want more coffee. She doesn’t cry after the second NO. She goes through the customers and fills the cups from the customers who say “YES.”
This is the type of indifference you want in your business. You don’t want to be cold about it, but give off a feeling that you’re in a hurry, because successful people are in a hurry, and your feeling should convey, “hey, i’m doing this with you or without you. I would like for you to join me, but if you decide not to that’s fine also.”
Teaching Your Team Duplication
The quickest way to grow your team of personal IBOs is to have a simple duplicatable system in place. You don’t want to solve your downline’s problems every time from scratch. You need systems and third-party tools in place to help your team. This will save you tons of time when your team gets bigger.
Let’s say one of your new team members didn’t get their product. You simply say, “I understand. Let me forward your email to support.”
This takes you two seconds to forward the complaint to headquarters. Third-party tools are usually created by your company and/or sponsor. All you need to do is point people in the right direction. You are not customer service.
Third-party tools can be videos created by your company or sponsor on how to prospect, or how to explain the product, or how to handle objections. It’s important to get your whole team or downline on the weekly webinars that your company puts on.
“People who plug in, stay in.”
Starting your new IBO’s with too much information will lead them to do nothing out of confusion. Have a simple quick-start guide that a third grader can understand and make sure your entire team teaches their new distributors exactly the same methods. People tend to want to reinvent the wheel. Keep them focused and keep sharing the same third-party tools for everyone.
Content Marketing
It requires more skills these days for new distributors to make it online. In order to stand out among the millions of other distributors, you need to blog or shoot videos.
Setting up a blog is easy and writing your first post can be done your first week in MLM. You can also shoot short 2 to 4 minute videos on YouTube. Talk about who you are and what your interests are. Don’t just be an infomercial for your product. Provide insight and ask your viewers questions, like “Have you thought about joining a network marketing business? Well, I have and here’s what I think.”
Engaging with your audience and asking them to share your content on social media is powerful. If you thinking writing is hard, then shoot videos or vice versa. Pick any online platform and stick with it until you master it and you will do well.
Most people jump around too much, lose focus and quit. Have a long term vision of how you want to look like as an online brand and keep doing it no matter what. The first year will be hard, but it’s a lot easier than 40 years at a dead-end job.
I would rather blog three times a week, than die a slow death working for someone else. If you keep consistent with content marketing, you will be primed for getting leads.
The best leads come from organic traffic from the search engines. This is called “Attraction Marketing” and it’s the best way to get free qualified leads. You don’t need to buy a course on “Attraction Marketing” because I just told you the jist of what it is.
The last thing is this. Network marketing is a powerful vehicle which changes lives, but the money is little in the beginning. Keep your “why” close to your heart and focus on the 5 year plan, not today. Visualize your dream home, not worrying about bills and being in the best shape of your life and you will succeed.
Thanks for reading.
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