I met someone yesterday who has an excellent reason to look into a home-based business. She is the manager of a local department store photography studio.  The corporate office dictates the hours that her store is open without any input from her or feedback on what her customers need. She had to lay off all of her employees because the store isn’t open long enough to justify paying anyone and they aren’t making much money because the store is only open during the hours that her customers are at work. Talk about being a victim of Corporate America.

What she would like to do is go into business for herself doing photography but she’s worried that she wouldn’t be able to get enough clients. She probably also has a “no compete” clause in her contract which would make the jump to independence difficult. She also can’t go looking anywhere else for work because the people she let go are all still looking for work So she feels trapped.

A home-based business, like network marketing, could be a great opportunity for her if she has the motivation to make it work. She can do it part-time and still have time for her family and her current job, which is only part-time anyway. Once she gets going, it will help her bring in some extra money to make ends meet. Eventually she can start generating enough of an income to be able to quit the job and do the network marketing business full-time while she rides out the “no compete” period then start a part-time photography business if she still wants to. Then the network marketing income becomes the financial security for her to pursue her true passion.

Do you know anyone who is in a similar situation to this lady, or even that of her former employees? Have them read this and then at least take a look at network marketing.

Wayne Woodworth

You hear all the time right now about unemployment.  People are going through layoffs, downsizings and rightsizings as companies seek to find a way through the current economy, or give up entirely and close their doors.

On the other hand, if you travel in small business / entrepreneurial circles, you hear people talk about being unemployable.  I’m not talking about people who have no skills and no ambition.  These are bright people with a lot of skills.  So why are they unemployable?

Because they choose to be.  They are of the mindset that they cannot be employed by another person because they have chosen to set their own course, take responsibility for their own results, and not allow any external agency to set limits on what they can accomplish.

I first heard this term in August 2008 at one of Loral Langemeier’s Cash Machine Workshops.  If you have never heard of Loral before I suggest you take a look at what she teaches.  She has come to be known as The Millionaire Maker and her best selling books are published under that title.  One of the things she teaches is that everyone should build a Cash Machine, a way to quickly make money with skills you already have.  Once you do that and have money coming in based solely on your own efforts and ideas you will understand what it means to be unemployable.

So, what are you going to do?

Wayne Woodworth
I’m becoming unemployable too.

You’ve heard about self-made millionaires before, right? Have you ever met one? Were they really self-made, as in they did it all by themselves?

I’ve been studying Loral Langemeier‘s programs again and she puts out the idea of team-made millionaires because you cannot really become a millionaire all by yourself. In reaching that point you will run into things that you don’t know how to do or things that are better left to others so that you can stay focused on making money. You need a team to take on those tasks, such as bookkeeping or cleaning your house, so that you can stay focused on the tasks you need to be doing. Besides, you are supporting other businesses in your area by hiring out those tasks.

I see this as a big problem in network marketing. To be successful we need to treat our network marketing as a business and teach our downlines to treat it as a business too, which means creating a team to take care of things so that we can spend our time prospecting and creating new business partners and selling our products or services.

For more business-related info, checkout by revenue modeling post at www.diversifymyincome.com.

Wayne Woodworth
Network Marketer
A home-based business is still a business

The company that I currently work for has an upside down pyramid for their corporate structure.  The customers are at the top because a company cannot exist without customers.  The next layer down has the regular employees who support the customers by taking orders, providing technical support, and handling accounting issues.  The next level are the team leads whose job is to support the regular employees.  They provide the employees with everything they need to get their jobs done.  Below them are a handful of team captains who support the team leads.  Then at the bottom is the company captain.  As you can probably guess by now, his job is to support the team captains.  The company is doing well even in this recession because they have very loyal customers and extremely low turnover in the workforce.  The company exists to provide good service to the customers and give the employees a great place to work.

Imagine what the world would be like if all companies were like this.  Every where you went you would see smiling faces offering excellent customer service.

This inverted pyramid is also how the successful groups in network marketing work.  They don’t describe this structure exactly but this is the way Nikken, the network marketing company I joined, encourages the teams to work.  For my upline to be successful they need to support their downline, me, and I need to support my downline.  For me to make a lot of money with Nikken I need to support a lot of partners who can make a lot of money.

So maybe instead of calling my sponsor an “upline” I should call him my “downline”.

Wayne Woodworth
You future network marketing downline?

It is much cheaper to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one.  With that in mind, you need to create a process to keep your customers interested in your products and repeatedly draw them back.  One method is to create a sales funnel.

You create a sales funnel by introducing yourself and your products to your prospective customers through something inexpensive, or even free.  Introductory offerings such as ebooks or other inexpensive items work very well.  Your goal is to give your customer a taste of what you have with only a small commitment from them so that you can build their trust.  Through successful delivery of a quality product it is easier to get your customer to come back for more expensive items because you have already established a relationship.  Once a customer has tried your entry-level product you work on upselling your interested customers to your next tier product and so on up to your high-end products.

The personal growth industry does this very well.  I will pick on James Ray because he does this very well and has excellent products and programs.  Currently he spends most of the year traveling around doing FREE 2-hour seminars.  Once you are there you get quality content for 2 full hours.  Near the end he will introduce his books and learning systems and offer them at special event pricing, taking you from the free level to the $20 level for books and the $100 level for learning systems.  Then he will tell you about his 2-day programs at the $1000 level and so on up to 5-day programs.  For the first two hours he has been building your trust in his quality, for free, so that you will be more likely to buy into his products and events.  They really are quality.  Check James Ray out if you are interested in personal growth.

The same thing will work in your business.  I’m in network marketing with a wellness company that sells magnets.  Not many people know what magnets can do, so I will create a sales funnel for the magnetic products.  To get prospects started in my funnel I sell, or sometimes give away, a small button magnet to help people with their aches and pains.  Most people are curious enough that at $2 a piece people are willing to try them out.  Once they feel the benefits it is easy to upsell them to a pair of magnetic insoles, then massage tools, and finally a complete magnetic sleep system.

As a network marketer, I can do the same thing to get people interested in the business side as well.  I can start with a free report about the potential tax benefits of having your own business or a book about starting your own business by someone like Loral Langemeier.  Once they see that they really should have their own business I introduce them to the different levels at which they can start their business with me.

As you can see, a sales funnel is easy to set up and makes it easy for your prospective customers to get to know your product and through that process they get to know you so that you can build that all-important relationship and have customers who return to you again and again.

Wayne Woodworth
Home-Based Business Owner
Internet Network Marketer

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

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.

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.