Beginning Of The Network Marketing Business Opportunity

The network marketing business opportunity has evolved over the past 60 years however it has always been a business based on building relationships with people. Some people were able to build enormous networks and earn a substantial residual income however there a lot of people who failed to achieve this success.

The Network Marketing Business Opportunity From The Beginning.

This business model was introduced in the 1950′s with a vitamin supplement company called the California Vitamin Company.

What they had noticed was that most new sales representatives were brought into the business by friends and family of existing sales representatives. The main reason for this was they wanted to buy the products at wholesale prices.

If this type of network marketing business opportunity could be done on a major scale the company could make more money by having lots of sales representatives selling small amount of products rather than a small amount of sales representatives trying to sell lots of products.

The costs to join the network marketing business opportunity as a distributor were very low compared with traditional bricks and mortar type business, and the company gave their distributors bonuses for good product sales volumes.

Distributors would recruit new distributors into their network marketing business opportunity usually from family members, friends or satisfied consumers of the company’s product. It was much easier to do this with a warm market where they had a circle of influence.

How the network marketing business opportunity worked was that a direct sales company markets and sells products directly to the consumer through people who join as distributors. These distributors commonly called independent distributors are paid on the product sales volume of their personal retail customers and well as the product sales volume of people they recruit into their team.

The incentives of team product sales and volume in the network marketing business opportunity are commonly referred to as the compensation plan. The best compensation plans focused on helping the distributor to build a business and earn a residual income.

There were little to no advertising or marketing costs to the company as all this was done by their distributors on a one on one basis. The best way to sell something is to get a good recommendation from someone you know and trust rather than a complete stranger who only wants to get into your wallet.

Many traditional companies spend millions of dollars on advertising and marketing to ensure their name or brand is well-known to consumers. Companies understand the value of multiplication of ongoing personal referrals and use this to get their name well know to consumers.

More and more direct sales companies saw how well this was working and decided to use this network marketing business opportunity business model as well. Many more network marketing companies appeared with a range of products and services for the consumer.

Throughout the twentieth century the network marketing business opportunity was promoted as a business based on building relationships with people.

Some people were able to build enormous networks and earn a substantial residual income which allowed them to retire at an early. This changed their lives as they were now in charge of their lives as they were financially free.

Failure And Success With A Network Marketing Business Opportunity

There were a lot of people who failed to achieve this success. These people usually lacked sales and marketing skills. This was not the focus of the old model of network marketing business opportunity training because of the costs of advertising and marketing.

These costs were not possible for the average person that they were targeting as suitable prospects. Instead they focused on personal development as this was inexpensive, it was easy to teach and duplicate with their downline.

The people that succeeded were the ones that understood the value of targeting the right people as suitable prospects.

Things have changed over the past 60 years and the methods that may have worked once are not longer effective.

To be successful with a network marketing business opportunity you will need to know what the things to avoid are as well as what are the things you need to do, read below, and click on the link for more information.

Marketing: Cost VS Value

We all default at looking at things from a cost perspective. Regardless of what we are buying cost is always an overriding issue for most of us, think about it when was the last time the cost of something didn’t enter your mind as a major initial consideration. When considering your marketing efforts it helps to move away from the cost and consider the actual value of the proposed efforts to see if it is worth doing.

Cost is relatively simple to calculate you consider the resource demands (time, money personal, etc.) and estimate what the project’s demand will be. So if your considering a direct mail campaign and you will be designing the project in house you would add the cost of the campaign and the cost of your personal’s time who has to handle the design and reach a cost factor.

Value is harder to calculate. The value of a campaign considers the return on the investment, how much new revenue you will generate for your resource expenditure. You should be able to estimate the return on any marketing effort before you do it, better said if you can’t estimate the return don’t do it. Marketing is part art part science and if you want to build your business more focus has to be on the science, your not making art for art’s sake you’re trying to make money.

So how do you estimate revenue from your marketing efforts? Start with some industry standard numbers. For instance:

Email Marketing- click through rates average from 2% for B2C unfiltered list, to 20% for B2B highly filtered list. If this is your first time sending to your list figuring a 5% click through rate is reasonable, if you bought a list figure on 2%. You use click through rates because that is really the point of the email blast. Clicks are all you can ask from your marketing whether or not they contact you is determined by the landing page engagement not the email marketing effort.

Direct Mail – generally direct mail will get a 1 – 5% response. If you can get a consistent 3% response rate you have either an outstandingly executed campaign or a very well scrubbed and responsive list. If this is your first contact with this list figure on 1%.

Radio & TV advertising - both are very difficult to track from an ROI perspective but using a special promotional code or message can help you track people who contact you because of these ads. Both of these types of campaign require significant budgets to be effective since you need to repeat the messages over and over to get any results.

Print Media advertising – again difficult to gauge return and again promotional codes help. Print media also requires a larger budget to make an impact since your buying access to eyeballs and the more valuable and targeted those eyeballs are the more you can expect to pay.

Online Ads - online ads are easy to track (most platforms like Google have great dashboards to monitor your results) and are very flexible to your budget. The average conversion rate (sales from click through) tends to be in the 2.5 -3% range however you want to work to getting up to the 10% range which is practical since you have control over every aspect, the audience your ad is appearing in front of the ad itself and the landing page the prospect ends up on. One of the most attractive aspects of online ads is the ability to make changes that can immediately improve your conversion rate. When we changed our contact from to an easier more modern one our conversion rate almost doubled & has maintained that rate ever since.

Intentionally I skipped a couple marketing vehicles: social media, trade shows, and networking events. I love social media, use it, in fact there is a good chance you are reading this because of our social media efforts, and I still wouldn’t pay for advertising on social media. I consider it being the guy who shows up at a house warming party trying to sell everyone tires, while you may have the best tires in town, and sure everyone needs tires nobody wants to hear about tires at the party. Tradeshows can be great or they can be giant wastes of resources depending on how they are done, who does them, how they manage the booth, etc., way to many variables to consider. Networking events, like trade shows have way to many variables to calculate.

Once you can estimate your return you can see which marketing efforts should generate you the most bang for you bucks. Obviously your budget will greatly dictate what avenues you attack. But regardless of the budget make sure you can estimate and track the performance of all your marketing efforts tracking is key to identifying what is working and what needs changing and if you cant track it you really have to consider whether its worth the efforts.

Article Income – Direct Monetization Model For Your Articles

There is more than one way to monetize your articles. You can go beyond getting traffic and build credibility. In this article, I’m going to cover direct article monetization model.

With direct model, you use the articles to promote a product or service, whether it is yours or other people’s products through your affiliate links.

How could you do this? First, you give information pertinent to the product. Tips and how to information are valuable and compelling for the readers. You can also write reviews or presell the readers by revealing a few ideas in the product.

Preselling is the art and science to warm up the prospects and increase the likelihood of them to actually buy the product. Concentrate on the benefits of the product and give reasons why they want to buy it.

The resource box is the part where you’ll ask the readers to take action, get more information or buy the product you write. Although you can usually better if you make use of other marketing strategies like email marketing to do the follow up, direct selling is known method that works.

You can do many things with the traffic but if you channel it directly to earn your money through ads or sales, you are using the direct monetization model.

You can also use articles as a revenue source if you integrate ads into the page. Ad networks such as Google AdSense allows you to serve a large amount of ad inventory without having to maintain all the administrative work and get advertisers. So that certainly a working model if you want an extra revenue from your articles.

Self Directed IRA Custodians

Why is it so advantageous to have a self-directed IRA? Because it gives you many times the control over traditional work-sponsored 401k’s and Roth’s; it also gives you far greater control over your retirement fund(s). Self directed IRA custodians act as middle-men, if you will. They hold your money (your investments-your portfolio) and they administer it – making the best investments on your portfolio, along with your input, that is in your best interest.

Take control of your future – no, own it!

That’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to self directed IRA custodians. When you find a good, trustworthy and reputable IRA custodian (and you are advised to do so), they help you invest your fund(s) and should let you have control over the diversification as well. This type of IRA is in stark contrast to the regular, run-of-the-mill 401k accounts or whatnot. You have very little control over those, and you have no say in where Your money is being invested at.

Any decent self directed IRA custodians will let you invest in items of your choosing. Some may require that you go with their “advice” and investments in part, but that’s normal. However, you would have to be almost crazy not to invest in certain things such as real estate shares and even gold bullion. When you pick the right real estate investments (even if the real estate market is not good) they will always give you a positive return-regardless of the market. Also, it’s pretty hard to go wrong with gold. The key here, however, is savvy investing.

There are many more key benefits in the realm of self directing. Don’t overlook the fact that you could save thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of dollars on self-directed investing because most of the funds you and your custodian will invest in are tax-sheltered. That’s right; you get to forego the tax man-well, most of the time.

Invest wisely: find the right people to “hold-on” to your money + make it grow

Furthermore, when you choose self directed IRA custodians, you can be sure that your money is in the right hands (considering you have done your homework on the company). They are licensed financial advisors. And because the IRS requires that you have a custodian or trustee for your self directed IRA, that’s all the more reason to acquire a good one. Besides, knowing and implementing the hundreds of IRS rules and regulations, and administering all of that paperwork – well, it would be virtually impossible for any one individual-let alone one who has a full-time job!

You may have investments through your local bank. If so, it would probably be in your best interest to roll it over to a self directed IRA. The bank will more-than-likely try earnestly to keep your money with them and try to convince you that rolling your funds over to self directed IRA custodians would be bad-that they, your bank, can save you money. Don’t fall for it.

I don’t care how persuasive their argument may be-unless you know for a fact that they are not charging you excessive fees (which, most are; think “hidden-fees”), then you would come out far better rolling it over to a self directed custodian. Yes, they charge fees too-but, the advantages to switching to a self-directed retirement fund-well, are usually enormously better.