For those of you who don’t know me or happened to “stumble upon” me somewhere out there on the Net, I’ve been working from home for more than 14 years, starting out part time and over the past few years, it’s been more of a full time venture spending more hours in my home office marketing my various websites (and my husband’s) to supplement our disability incomes.
But I’ve always had an underlying interest in network marketing and even at 16 years old tried some kind of selling with a pretty well-known company that will remain un-named on my blog.
Unfortunately that company left a sour taste in mouth when it came to network marketing and even after hearing about a new company that launched back in 1998, although I was sort of curious, that one bad experience soured me for the next decade.
So for the last three or four years, I’ve tried my hand at building a couple of information websites with AdSense and Amazon affiliate marketing. I built three that I eventually sold and made my money back plus some profit. But I couldn’t see myself doing that on a continuing basis – building sites, selling sites. It’s great for some people but it’s not something I really want to do for the rest of my life. If I stopped building and selling those websites, the money would stop too.
I was doing general transcription for quite a few years but started having problems with my wrists and fingers. And so, stop transcribing, stop making money. But for health reasons, I recently completely retired from the transcription field.
My current primary business is the-bookmarks-store.com – and even though I love designing and selling bookmarks, if I don’t make bookmarks, I don’t make any money. Even with our eBay store and my husband’s businesses. If he doesn’t make and sell his crafts or we don’t make any money from selling products on eBay, we don’t make any money.
Now, I have a pretty solid knowledge of building websites, setting up WordPress blogs, doing article marketing and keyword research, all that fun SEO stuff. But when you’re working by yourself and you’re a one-man-band so to speak, once you stop doing all of that, your website or your blog might start slipping because visitors want fresh stuff all the time so they have a reason to keep coming back.
Enter the concept of outsourcing. Okay, but that takes capital. And when you’re working on a shoestring budget, that capital isn’t always there.
It takes away from your time. And if you have a family emergency or decide to take a vacation, unless you want to take a working vacation, your business is going to sit and go stale while you’re away unless you’re paying a VA (that’s virtual assistant) to handle things for you.
So after giving this some more really serious thought, I decided to revisit the concept of network marketing. And as Robert Kiyosaki, best-selling author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad” explains, network marketing really is the business of the 21st century.
The concept is pretty cool, actually. You sign up with a network marketing program, learn the ropes, and then get more people to sign up under you and do the same thing.
And it’s probably the only business model out there that gives you the opportunity to literally stop working but still make money – residual income, passive income, that you built up during your first few months or first couple of years. “Set it and forget it” I’ve heard some people say.
But you have to be careful with the companies you sign up with. Some of them want a monthly fee every month and how you make your money back is getting people to pay their fee to sign up, and you make money off of their sign ups. The residual income is when they continue to stay in the program and pay their monthly membership fees.
But what if you don’t have that initial sign-up fee? What then? You’re broke, for all intents and purposes, and you’re looking for something that will allow you to EARN while you learn, not PAY while you learn to build up the business.
And then if you can pay the registration/membership fee, once you get “on the other side” or “on the inside” as so many marketing gurus are coining the phrase today, there’s even more money to pay out! Yup!
Upgrade to get the “free” website; upgrade to get access to the “best” marketing materials, upgrade to get access to their “special” autoresponder tools, and the list goes on. By the time you’ve upgraded or pay even more membership fees for these “necessary” tools, you’ve about spent your week’s salary and you don’t even have a clue what you’re supposed to be doing to make that money back.
And guess what? The guy who signed you up makes his commissions off of all the tools you just “upgraded” to! And what you now have to do is get tons of people to sign up under you and make sure they upgrade to all of these “special” tools so you can recoup your registration “investment.”
Shady way of doing business? No. That’s pretty much a good way of explaining what I’ve seen done with a lot of affiliate marketing programs.
So you just need to be careful. Do some research. And if you do end up signing up with what may look like a good program only to find out that there’s one hoop after the other that you have to go through once you’re “on the other side,” and each hoop is going to cost you more money, STOP. There are plenty of ways to do things the FREE way that are just as good, if not better, than spending all that money.
1. You can build a blog for free. And if you know how to do SEO, you can format your articles and pages without worrying too much about not being found online.
2. There are free keyword research tools out there that are phenomenal. You don’t need to spend money on them.
3. There are free autoresponders you can use to get started that work just as well as the ones that charge you a monthly fee.
4. And there are even free sites to host your email contact forms for you.
5. There are free ways to advertise and market online without spending a fortune. You don’t have to pay for the PPC ads and you don’t have to pay for traffic exchange sites either.
6. Yes, it’s always advisable to register your own domain name but that’s a really cheap investment, like less than $15 a YEAR. And some web hosting providers, like GoDaddy, which is where I’ve been registering my domain names and hosting my sites for the last seven or eight years, will give you free or really cheap hosting with the purchase of a domain name. Can’t beat that!
So, back to the point – Network Marketing, and why I decided to give it another serious look – it is the only way to build a business that will keep going after you retire, continuing to provide you passive, residual income.
And I figured okay, I have some good Internet marketing skills under my belt, having driven a few websites up to top position in the search engines, enough so that when I sold them, I was able to make some nice profits. And marketing is marketing, whether you do it alone or within a network, right?
But the best part about network marketing is that you’re not going it alone! You have an upline – your sponsor and his/her sponsor and above, that wants you to succeed and they will help you to succeed. Why? Because they’ll earn more as you earn more. And as you build your team, you’ll continue to earn more, and so on.
There is no competition within your own upline and downline. It’s a team effort so that everyone succeeds!
So I decided to put that former company out of my mind and go searching again for a network marketing company that had a good and long-standing reputation behind it. And that’s when I came up onto SFI (Strong Future International) Marketing Group, for not just the second time over the past decade either.
This company has been around since 1998 and they keep getting stronger. And – there is absolutely NO FEE to sign up! There is nothing to purchase – literally, there is nothing to purchase or upgrade to in order to work the program and be on the team. You just need to be serious about your part of the business and take the time to learn.
Their auto-responder system is free. Their internal email system is free. You get free landing pages for your business that you can set up through your own domain and sub-domain. Their marketing tools are free. Their learning base “on the inside” is phenomenal – point, click and learn!
And with the backing of more than 13 years in network marketing, I know I’m betting on a sure thing.
I’ve already been through the SFI “launch pad,” and I’m ready to move into the Basics. My sponsor saw my enthusiasm and reassigned five of his team members to me so I can start earning my revenues based on what they do.
I have a good bit to learn about the program, but I’m excited to get started on the marketing and advertising end, setting up some stuff to sell in their online store and looking forward to having people partner with me on my team too!
So thanks for stopping by – thanks for reading this and if you’re interested in getting into a solid, well-respected network marketing company that you can start building while you’re working full time with just a couple of hours a week, Partner With KSMusselman and between me and my sponsor and the rest of the team, we’ll help you get to where you want to be in your future!
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