Diversify My Income

Network Marketing, especially Wellness Network Marketing, is a great way to build a supplemental income, and eventually a primary income.

This is the perfect time to think about starting a network marketing business.  These days everyone is worried about the economy.  Banks are going under as well as other large businesses.  Thousands of people are becoming unemployed.  Network Marketing is the perfect answer to this problem.  I know people who are doing Tupperware, Shaklee, Arbonne, Juice Plus, Ambit, Ignite,  Xango, and SendOutCards.  I am with Nikken, a wellness network marketing company.  None of them are worried about losing their job.  Once they have been doing it for a while they aren’t worried about their next paycheck either.  My upline has been with Nikken for better than 15 years and is not worried at all about the economy.  They have created their own, very robust, economy.

You hear about the people during the Great Depression who struggled to put food on the table for their families.  Those stories account for something like 25% of the peole during that time.  While it is a large percentage of the population, it isn’t the larger part of the population.  Most people were doing ok while some people were prospering.  How would you like to be part of the group who will be “doing ok” regardless of what the world’s economy does in the future?  Or, better yet, how would you like to be a part of the group who is prospering to the point where they can freely give back to help the people who are struggling?  I will bet you that a large part of that prospering group will be people who started a home-based business, and in many cases who started a network marketing business.

Right now I’m in the group that is doing ok but I will soon be in the group that is prospering.  Anybody care to join me? Please leave me your comments.

Wayne Woodworth
Wellness Network Marketer
Future Giver of Prosperity

Persistence is the key to building a prosperous home based business.

There are two points to persistence when building your business.  The first is the persistence to stick with your business over time and the second is the persistence it takes to convert your prospects into customers.

Most people trying to build a home based business give up after a couple months, but in most cases it will take a few years to get a business to the point where it is self-sufficient.  When starting with network marketing companies you hear about how this certain person went out and after only 2 weeks signed up 20 people and made $10,000.  Those people are incredibly rare and to have the expectation of hitting those levels in a short time is unrealistic.  When starting any new enterprise, you have to have the persistence to stick with it for a long period of time and give it a real chance to grow.

The other persistence you need is in converting prospects into customers.  When building a home based business it is easy to let your motivation slip and not do all that you know you should do.  You don’t feel like picking up the phone today, making the little tweaks to your website or writing that blog post.  To be successful, you need to be persistent with your prospects.  In my leads meeting last week several members talked about how making just one more phone call to a customer finally closed the deal.  You will find out, if you haven’t already, that most people will say “no” the first time you make your offer.  “No” usually just means “not yet” and if you give up on a prospect after hearing “no” that first time, then you will probably never get anywhere in your business.  Check back with them on a regular basis to just ask how they are doing.  You don’t have to pitch your product or service every time.  Just build a relationship over time so that when they are ready for your offer, you are the one who comes to mind and who is going to get the business.  Sometimes all it takes is you calling your prospect one more time than your competitor.  This is a great way to stand out because most people will give up after the first or second call.

Wayne Woodworth
Persistent Network Marketer

Do you have a relationship marketing strategy?

You have probably heard a lot in the past couple of years that traditional methods of marketing no longer work, or at least don’t work as well as they used to, because your customers are bombarded with way too much information from a variety of sources. So once you have successfully acquired a new customer you want to do everything in your power to keep them. One way to do that is with relationship marketing.

To build a long-lasting relationship with a customer you want to keep in touch with them periodically to let them know that you are still there and thinking of them. You can do that with a simple email, or better yet, send them a card or postcard. Most people enjoy receiving cards in the mail because it takes more effort and thought on your part and it is something that they will take more notice of as they flip through the mail and again later when they reorganize the papers on their desk or table.

A good way to start building a relationship with a new customer is to send a card a couple days after they receive their first order to thank them, make sure that they received it in good shape and they are not having any problems. Then every so often, send another card to say hello and make sure everything is still good. Maybe you will do this after 1 month, then again at 6 and 12 months, or whatever is appropriate for your product or service.

For example, on of my products is a point-of-use water filter, so I will send a card to arrive about the time my customer receives their order to thank them and offer some advice on how to use the unit efficiently. After 1 month, 3 months, and 6 months I will send another card to say hello and make sure they are enjoying the unit. Then I will send a card annually to remind them to order the replacement components to keep the unit in working order. I am providing a service to them by giving them the reminders that they need as well as keeping my business in their thoughts on a regular basis.

It works for other industries as well. A real estate agent can send a card when a client moves into their new home congratulating them on their new home and thanking them for their business. Then send another card periodically through the first year, then annually for the next several years on the anniversary of moving in. The client will remember how thoughtful the agent was and will be more likely to use them again the next time they buy a house or recommend them to friends.

Here is the service I use to send my cards.

Wayne Woodworth
Internet network marketer
Sender of cards

Do you have an MBA? I don’t mean a Masters degree in business. I mean, do you have a Massive Bank Account? I heard the term most recently from Loral Langemeier who created the Cash Machine concept that I talked about last time. You could say that you get an MBA by majoring in your cash machine.

You need to have a massive bank account for several reasons. The most obvious reason right now is the economy. Gas prices have come down in the past couple months but it looks more likely that they will go up in the long term. Rising gas prices coincide with higher heating costs for your home because they are both based on oil, either directly or indirectly depending on whether you heat with gas or electricity. Higher has prices also translate into higher prices for goods that you purchase because the companies have to cover their transportation costs. Having a lot of money allows you to absorb these rising costs without having to significantly change your lifestyle.

Another aspect of the current economy is rising unemployment. Hopefully you will never have to experience being laid off from a job. If you did have to experience it though, a massive bank account can make it a whole lot less stressful. Having enough money saved up to cover your expenses for several months gives you the luxury of either taking the time to find the right job or to really take control of your finances and create your own business.

The last reason for why you need to be rich is for your own personal growth. Wallace Wattles says it best in his classic book The Science of Getting Rich published back around 1910.

Whatever may be said in praise of poverty, the fact remains that it is not possible to live a really complete or successful life unless one is rich. No man can rise to his greatest possible height in talent or soul development unless he has plenty of money; for to unfold the soul and to develop talent he must have many things to use, and he cannot have these things unless he has money to buy them with.

A man develops in mind, soul, and body by making use of things, and society is so organized that man must have money in order to become the possessor of things; therefore, the basis of all advancement for man must be the science of getting rich.

So, do you have an MBA? To summarize, you need a Massive Bank Account to help you ride out the ups and downs in our economy, to protect your family financially, and to have the tools to grow as a person. What are you going to do to create your riches?

I spent 3 days last weekend at Loral Langemeier’s Cash Machine Workshop and it was the best seminar/workshop that I have ever attended. The days averaged 12 hours long but flew by.  I never even  once checked to see what time it was during the weekend except to make sure I returned from the breaks on time.

I learned of Loral from the movie The Secret where she appeared as a financial strategist.  During the seminar she said that she was taped for 5 hours for The Secret and only a few minutes of it was actually used in the movie.  We found her Millionaire Maker books and started reading her material. Her company is Live Out Loud and her tagline is “The Millionaire Maker”, hence the title of her books, The Millionaire Maker, The Millionaire Maker’s Guide to Wealth Cycle Investing and The Millionaire Maker’s Guide to Creating a Cash Machine for Life.

Loral teaches you to start creating money by using your fastest path to cash.  That is the idea behind a Cash Machine and the point of the Cash Machine Workshop.  You take skills that you already have and create a business around them.  To start off it doesn’t matter if it is something that you like to do or not.  You can do what you want to do later.  For now you focus on making money doing what you know how to do. Once the cash is coming in then you can learn new skills to do the things you want to do and build a new Cash  Machine.

She puts a lot of emphasis on building a team too.  You cannot keep your focus on what you need to do if you are spending all of your time on more mundane tasks like cooking and cleaning, unless those are things you like to do, in which case you might consider them as a basis for your Cash Machine.  In your new business you also want to dole out the more mundane or specialized tasks like making phone calls, bookkeeping, or tax preparation so that you can focus on growing your business.  You Cash Machine needs to be in an entity, like an LLC or a corporation so that you can get the full tax and limited liability benefits.  You will probably need to find an expert to create your entity.

We were expected to make money while at the seminar.  The first day was about what a Cash Machine is and anyone who didn’t already have one was supposed to figure out what theirs was by the end of the day.  Once we knew what our Cash Machines were we had to figure out what we wanted to sell during the Market Place on the third day.  The rest of the seminar was dedicated to building the Cash Machine through marketing to generate sales, joint ventures, and referrals.  An hour and a half of the third day was for the Market Place where we were to practice and refine our pitch and sell our product to the rest of the room.

For us, we went in knowing what our Cash Machine is.  We split it up so that Michelle sold 5 minute massages for $5 and I sold Nikken’s magnetic insoles for $60.  Loral told us that if we knew what we were selling we should start selling immediately.  Some people made money during the first break on the first day.  We took in our massage chair on the second day and got started making money.  Michelle worked during breakfast and lunch doing 5 minute massages while I talked to people about sore feet.  She never got a break only got to eat during the dinner break.  It went pretty well for both of us as we deposited better than $500 in the bank once we got home.  One person at the seminar said he made $6000.  That’s pretty darn cool.

She offered Cash Machines in a vendor expo area for anyone that had trouble coming up with one on their own.  One of them was a facilitator program for her Millionaire Maker board game.  We have a copy of the game and have played it several times just the two of us.  On Saturday night at the seminar we got to play the game in groups of six, which was a whole different experience.  On one hand it was a little disappointing because I was the only one at my table who had played before so it went pretty slow as everyone else figured out how to play.  On the other hand I saw how fun it can be when I get the opportunity to play with a group of people that know how to play.

As a facilitator for the game we will be able to hold our own game nights and invite others in our area to come play.  If anyone likes the game and buys a copy we can make up to 50% commission on the sale.  They also will teach us how to sell the rest of her programs and events, and that training will care over on how to sell our products effectively.

If you see the value of a Cash Machine and would like to take a look at mine then see my Nikken network marketing opportunity.

I’m going to take a break from the string of posts I have been writing to talk about something that has been bothering me lately. Over the past few months I have been reading conflicting stories on CNN about the economy, gas prices, and other things that seem to affect us on a daily basis. You hear from one expert that we are in a recession, from another one that we’re not in a recession, or even two experts arguing about what the actual qualifications are for a recession. We all probably agree with the experts who say that high gas prices are bad for the economy. Well, I read a story recently from an expert who said that falling gas prices, as they are now, are bad for the economy. It appears that they are and indicator of a coming recession.

The point that I want you to get out of this is that you can find evidence or news stories by experts to support any view of reality that you want. You can find some experts that will tell you that you need to stay away from real estate because prices are dropping due to all the foreclosures. On the other hand, other experts say that now is the perfect time to get into real estate for the very same reason, so many foreclosures make prices low. People are selling off their stocks and leaving the stock market because prices are falling. I heard from another expert that now is the perfect time to get into the stock market because every time in our history that stocks have dropped like this, the market has increased by better than 50% in the next two years.

Instead of letting other people define your reality, pick your own view and go find evidence to support it. I will give you a few examples of people or companies creating their own reality.

I had a prospect back in June join my team in my network marketing business. She had already paid the money to join and received the business kit. She was a physical therapist and had just started working at a wellness center and thought that the Nikken products would be something that she could recommend to her clients. But she said she was really busy with the end of the school year and hoped to get to the business kit in a week or two. Well, I tried unsuccessfully to reach her until finally I got her on the phone at the end of July. Consistent with her belief that she is too busy, she never got around to even opening the business kit. In addition, she has quit the wellness center because she wasn’t getting any work. She said that the economy is bad and that people are not going to wellness centers. She admitted though that she didn’t do any marketing for herself, so is the lack of work because of the economy or because nobody knows she’s there because she never marketed herself. Her belief that she is too busy and that the economy is bad has created that reality for her.

The next example is the company that I work for (yes, I still have a JOB). They are a small company that competes against monster companies like Allen Bradley and Siemens to sell PLCs and other automation products. The company president knows that the economy is in recession but also believes that a recession is the company’s time to really shine because our products are much less expensive than the competition. So even though the economy is supposed to be bad and July is generally one of their slower months, they had the highest sales in their 12 year history. I’ve heard from the day that I started that this company is the company of choice when times get tough in the automation industry. That is what they believe and that is the reality that they are currently living.

The last example is of me and my network marketing business. For the longest time I limited myself by believing that people wouldn’t buy the more expensive items that are offered through Nikken, the network marketing company I am with. Also, like the lady I mentioned in the first example, I didn’t do any marketing. And sure enough, I didn’t sell much. In the past several months I have been learning how to market on the internet and that big ticket items are actually the best products to have because when you do sell them they make you a lot of money. They have to be worth the price and deliver the benefits of course. During June I really got busy with marketing, mostly with pay-per-click advertising on Google, and in the middle of a bad economy, sold almost $2000 worth of product which netted me a check for a little over $400. Not bad for someone just starting out. I changed my reality by changing my beliefs.

So, what reality do you want to create for yourself? Do you want to believe that the economy is shot to pieces, that you are too busy to make positive changes in your life, and that you will never make enough money to do the things you want to do? Or do you believe that life is good, the economy is improving (at least your economy), and that you can have money if you chose to make some changes?

There are two things you need to create a business, a product or service, and a marketing plan. Affiliate marketing lets you shortcut your startup time by allowing you to plug into somebody else’s product or service, and so far all of the affiliate programs I have found are free to join.  All you have to do is drive traffic to their website and they take it from there. You don’t really have to worry about a marketing plan either because once you have directed traffic to their site, they have all of ad copy to promote the product already in place. All you need to be concerned with is directing traffic and collecting a commission, which is usually a percentage of the selling price. I have seen some affiliate programs offer commissions up to 33% of the selling price.

To get started in affiliate marketing you will need to first find a company that offers an affiliate program. They are pretty easy to find, like Amazon.com for example. I am interested in personal growth and network marketing and I was able to find several companies with affiliate programs in those fields. Once you have found an affiliate program you want to join, you will have to create an account so that the sales you generate can be tracked and credited to you. Keep in mind that this is a business, so you will have to provide your Social Security Number so that they can report your earnings to the IRS and send you a 1099 to file with your taxes. I am not a tax professional or accountant so you may want to talk to a professional to fully understand the ramifications of starting your own business. I have been filing a Schedule C, the self-employment single-proprietor tax form, for years and it is pretty straight forward.

Now that you have an account, you are all set to begin directing traffic to the company’s web site and generating sales for them. There are several ways to get that traffic. One easy way is to include a link in your signature on every email you send. A better way to reach more people is to add your links to your profile on websites such as Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter. If you are a blogger, you can write a blog post about the product or service and add your link to the company website. Sites like Squidoo that let you create pages are another great place to write something about the product or service and post a link.

The second part to driving traffic is the link itself. When you created your account you were assigned an id that they will use to keep track of everything for you. They will also give you instructions about how to create your links to include your id so that clicks can be tracked and recorded properly. A lot of companies make this easy for you by giving you the link already formatted properly or, as in the case of Amazon.com, give you a tool to generate the link. Either way, you just have to copy the link from their page and paste it on yours. They might also provide you with banner images to help draw attention to the links on your page.

The last thing to affiliate marketing is keeping track of your sales. You will probably receive an email from the company every time you generate a sale. Some also provide you with an account page where you can login to look at some statistics about the traffic you generate. They might show you how many unique visitors you have generated and how long the visitor stayed on the site. You will also see how many sales you generated and how much you have earned in commission.

To see some examples of affiliate marketing at work, check out my Resources page. Just about everything there, all of the books and personal growth programs, are links to products from companies that I have an affiliate account with, including Amazon.com. The nice thing about affiliate marketing is that I can make some extra money by helping to get the word out about companies and products that I believe in, and would be promoting whether I made money or not.

Affiliate marketing doesn’t usually generate a lot of income. Next time I will talk about a home-based business that is like affiliate marketing on steroids where you can make enough money to live comfortably.

Last time we talked about how a “job” is a dead end.  JOB = Just Over Broke.  The problem is that your income is ultimately limited to the number of hours in the day.

What else is there?

There are three broad categories of ways to make money.  The first is to trade time for money, or have a job.  This also applies to some people who start their own business. For example, when someone starts a restaurant they feel that they need to cut costs by doing all the work themselves, which makes for some excruciatingly long days. They have to begin work very early to prepare food, work all day serving customers, then after the restaurant closes at night they still have to total all of the receipts, order supplies, and any of the other office-type paper tasks of running a business. As a massage therapist, I know that this is where a lot of therapists fail to make ends meet. They want more money so they keep adding more sessions during the day until they end up injuring themselves from overwork. At the end of the day, for both the restaurant owner and the massage therapist, there is very little money left over after expenses. That’s way too much work for so little money, not at all my idea of the American Dream.

The second way is to trade money for money, or to invest. I think most people do this to some degree, usually through a 401k plan through their job or with an IRA. I also think that most people have no idea what they are doing when they put money into their account. You need to do a lot of research to successfully invest money in stocks, or you need to have someone you trust doing the research for you. I don’t know about you, but I don’t take the time to be an educated investor. I look on my pay stubs to see that money went into my 401k then hope that my quarterly statement will show an increase in value. While some people do make a lot of money doing this, Warren Buffet for one, most people don’t do as well. Some people lose everything they have (think Enron). The problem with trading money for money is that you have to have money to start with and you have to have enough money to be able to weather the market fluctuations. And it is very risky. Most of us are probably too young to remember the Great Depression but we probably do remember the .com bust, Enron, and the very recent collapse of Bear Stearns which involved a lot of speculative investing in sub-prime mortgages.

That brings us to the third method, which is to leverage other people’s time for money. This is usually called MSI, or Multiple Streams of Income. You may have also heard the terms “residual income” or “mail box money”. This is how most, if not all, of the wealthy people created their wealth. Basically, since you only have so much time available, you use other people’s time to make money. An example that you are probably very familiar with is the person, or group of people, who own the company that you work for, assuming that you currently have a “regular” job. They have hundreds or even thousands of people, including you, doing things that make them money. The restaurant owner who was doing everything himself can turn his business into an MSI by hiring some employees to run the restaurant, which will free him up to focus on activities to build his business, such as marketing, and eventually opening up more locations and/or franchising out to other people. Our massage therapist friend, or my wife and I, can rent out some space to do massage and contract with another massage therapist to do the work. The owner only works on select clients herself and uses the rest of her time to work on marketing and attracting more clients. Then she hires more therapists to handle the growing client base and eventually opens more locations.

That’s how MSIs work in a traditional business world, but it still takes a lot of up-front work to get the business started. There are easier ways to get started that don’t require all of that initial effort. I will cover a handful of them here very briefly and cover them in more depth in separate posts in the near future.

Affiliate marketing is the easiest that I know of. With affiliate marketing you sell someone else’s product for a small commission. You can create an Associate account with Amazon.com then add book links to your website or in your email signature. When someone clicks on your link they are taken to Amazon.com where they can buy that book and you get a share of the proceeds.

In network marketing you can create full-time income with part-time effort. Take an established business (some of which have been around for 30 years or more) with established products (usually higher quality than you can get anywhere else) and start selling them. Sounds like affiliate marketing, right? Well, with network marketing you generally get better commissions and keep the profit from the difference between retail and wholesale prices (effectively buying at wholesale and selling at retail but without the headache of actually handling the product). Network marketing companies generally offer incentives too. For example, the company I’m with will make my car payments once I reach a certain level, and at a higher level will make my house payments too. That is all in addition to the money that I earn.

The real money-making opportunity in network marketing comes from getting other people to join your team. That’s what makes it an MSI. In the company I’m with, I get paid on up to six levels deep. That means I get paid on the activities of the people I sponsor, the people they sponsor, and the people they sponsor, up to 6 levels. Put another way, if I sponsor 6 people and they each sponsor 6 people, and everyone on down each sponsors 6 people, I will get paid on the activities of 55,986 people. Now that’s what I call mail box money.

Next, you can write a book or e-book and sell it online. With the internet and Adobe’s PDF format, you can self-publish and self-market your own books. You are no longer dependent on big publishing houses and major bookstores. As an author and publisher, the internet gives you complete control of how your information is presented to your reader. And you keep all of the money. You won’t get that from a traditional publisher. So, if you have something to say, say it online.

Last, you can start an on-line business. Everything I’ve mentioned so far can be done as an online business, but there are other things you can do too. Just use your imagination. I’ll give you an example to get you started. How about an eBay store. I know of people who go out and buy things, usually from outlet stores, garage sales, or auctions where they can get them cheaply, and list them for sale on eBay. People will buy just about anything on eBay.

If you want to learn more about network marketing right now, see my page on Squidoo or check out my opportunity. For some recommended book, see my resource page.

The word “job” is really an acronym for “just over broke”. Too many people toil their lives away at a job for 45 years and end up having to get by on Social Security or work as a greeter at Walmart. I have nothing against greeters at Walmart, but by the time you retire you should have a choice about what you want to do with the rest of your life. If that is to be a greeter at Walmart because you enjoy the social interaction, then that’s great. It shouldn’t be because you need the money.

But we are doing exactly as we have been programmed to do. We are taught that we need to study hard in school and go to college so that we can get a good job making a good salary. Once you have accomplished that you’re set for life, right? I don’t think so. The first thing you do when you get your paycheck every month is pay the bills. There isn’t much left over afterwards, is there? Maybe enough to take the family out for dinner or to see a movie. If an emergency comes up then it goes on the credit card. Now there are more bills for the next payday and even less money left over.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You just need to learn about money. How to make it and how to use it. Our school system doesn’t teach us how to make money, and it isn’t designed to. You wouldn’t go to a drowning person to learn how to swim, so you can’t expect a teacher, who is paid only a little, to teach you how to get paid a lot. And you deserve to make a lot of money. We live in a world that has a lot to offer, but you have to have money to experience it.

Before we go any farther we have to get one thing clear. Money is not the root of all evil. The love of money is. Money is a tool and nothing more. You shouldn’t love money any more than you would love a hammer or a pencil. Money is also how we keep score in our society. You make money by providing a service. If you aren’t making much money then you aren’t providing enough service.

Don’t forget that.

Now for what this blog is about. For the past couple years I have been studying people who are making a lot of money and I want to share what I have learned. I am really just getting started on this journey and I will use this blog to share what I have learned and how it is working for me. I want you to join me on this adventure and to share your comments with me and everyone else.

Will you join me?

Next time I will write about Multiple Sources of Income.