Gone Full Circle to the Network Marketing Business Model

I’ve had a varied career online, and finally gone full circle to the network marketing business model – which has always been the most profitable way of running a home business for me.

Because according to Albert Einstein: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Source: Brainy Quotes

But so have most people, I guess. The thing is to make sure you learn something new from each mistake, and move on.

So, I’m going to use my experiences and new skills to change direction a little. To learn why, I’ll give you a brief history of my online business history.

Why I Started An Online Business

Well, the short answer is to find a retirement business idea to earn an extra income to supplement poor pension prospects. But why online? I already have a successful offline business, and I would probably be better advised, and earn more money, by expanding that. But it has two big limitations:

• Geographical
• The number of hours in my day

To find clients beyond my local geographical area and to leverage the number of hours in my day (without the burden of employing staff) I turned to an online business.

How To Start An Online Business

I was interested in a nutritional service at the time (long ago!) when there was very little competition, so I decided to market this online.

Producing my own website in HTML/CSS etc was beyond me – despite my background in computing. I hired someone to do it for me, but whenever I tried to make changes the site ended up looking like a dog’s dinner!

(Hmm – Bailey can eat faster than I can take photographs!)

However it was a short step from HTML to discovering blogs, although I did have a few false starts with the blogging platforms and tools I chose.

Finally I settled on self-hosted WordPress.org (like this blog) and tried a few different models for generating an income from a blog.

• Some people swore by putting adverts on your own blog – I managed to get myself banned by inadvertently breaking Adsense’s T&Cs
• Others recommended Affiliate Marketing – this is a good choice, but needs plentiful sources of interested traffic – AND products that make a decent return. $10 a sale won’t cut it!
• Many people told me I “must have a digital product of my own” – and because I enjoyed writing I decided to produce my own eBooks, and still get a little income from sales of books I wrote years ago.

Here are some of the ways I have made money online, and the experiences I have gained.

Produce Your Own Product

This was actually my first serious online venture and although I learned a lot from it, I was in complete overwhelm and never produced enough sales to even cover the cost of the course.

Then there was a period when the market-place seemed to be flooded by a complete blitz of marketers being coached to produce digital products.

It seemed as if day after day the same tribe of marketers would blitz the Internet promoting the next new product, and trying to out-do each other with the shiniest and glossiest bonus to clinch the sale. And the joke of it was everyone seemed to be promoting to each others’ lists. I just unsubscribed from the lot of them.

There were good products, and I reviewed some of them. Others were so flimsy I couldn’t have written a good word about them. What was overwhelming was the number of emails all promoting the same or similar products – day after date, week after week, launch after launch. All really low cost – which is great for the buyer, but not for new authors.

Who wants to develop new eBooks to compete with such a relentless onslaught of low cost but glossily produced products?

Affiliate Marketing Training

Rather than produce my own products it’s far better to cut out the costs and risk of production and take a commission on products someone else has created. (Amazon is one of the best known affiliate networks – although many people don’t even know it’s an affiliate platform.)

However, even affiliate marketing needs skill, and you need to know the pitfalls to avoid.

Here’s training from a couple of well-respected marketers who can help you: Click here to learn more.

Income From Blogging

It’s by no means a route to instant wealth, but I enjoy it.

I do know some people are doing very well from blogging, and these successful bloggers have generously shared some great tips. So I have had some successes of my own.

• I’ve made some sales from products I’ve reviewed
• I’ve been paid to produce blogs for other people
• People have even paid me to place adverts on my blog
• I’ve been paid to write article on my blog

But I have to face facts and say that, because my blogging is part-time alongside my main offline business, I need something else that doesn’t consume too many hours in my working day.

Blog Problems

When I taught myself (big mistake) I also seemed to hit more than my fair share of technical problems.

• One day my blog was displaying the sidebar widgets in the footer – turned out to be because I was using GoogleSpeed caching system. Huh?.
• Another time there was another technical problem – I’ll write about it when I’ve found how it can be fixed. It’s not as obvious to the reader as the last one was!

But the point is, I enjoy writing, so I don’t just want to spend my time fixing technical problems and feeling out of my depth. I do coding in my offline business and that’s enough challenge for me.

And what if these technical problems had happened to one of the paid blogs I had produced for clients? I’d feel obliged to fix it! (One client rang me at 1am – yes – one in the morning – to ask about a problem with her blog.)

So although I still blog enthusiastically, it’s not my best earner.

If you are interested in blogging, I encourage you NOT to try and teach yourself.

Here is a site where you can be properly trained and have support from experts when any tricky problems come up.

 

So those are some of the stages in my online journey.

And some of the reasons why I have gone back to ….

Network Marketing Disaster

Round about 2010 I was earning four-figures a month from a Network Marketing business after focusing on it completely for five years.

Then disaster – the company closed, and as I hadn’t kept my own email list of subscribers, so I was right back where I started, at zero. (Happily I had used the earnings to refurb my house, so there was a bright side.)

As you can imagine I went ‘off’ network marketing for quite some time and instead explored the options above – with varying degrees of success.

But really, the disaster was that I hadn’t build my own subscriber list!

Also, having ‘lost the lot’ you will probably understand why I now insist on having muliple streams of income.

Network Marketing Success

Remembering the success of 2010, and older and wiser, in the summer of 2023 I went back to my roots with network marketing.

That is the model that – of all the businesses I have done on line – has made me the highest and most consistent income ever.

But this time I know all the pitfalls to avoid.

Update May 2024

I am still working on the same network marketing company as I joined in the summer of 2023, and it’s still paying me out.

Here are the reasons I chose it:

• A unique home-biz model because this is a digital product that no-one can pick up at the mall
• No need to compete with 25+ health and wellness opps (and the mall)
• 3 ways to get paid, with a 20 year old company that cares
• Your market place? Everyone who has a phone or PC!

If you’d like to find out more, read my review here.

I’ve had regular payments since the summer of 2023, even when I wasn’t especially working on it. Now there has been an upgrade in May 2024:

• New, simpler compensation plan
• Faster product

This business is here to stay, and they’re planning to work more on the Retail side of the business to avoid criticism from customers who have had bad experiences with Network Marketing.

It was good before – now, with all the new benefits just unveiled – it’s even better.

You can have a no obligation look here.