Why This Blog?
My wife, Sue, and I retired three years ago. I am the type of person who has to stay busy all the time. In addition, Sue and I love to travel, especially overseas. This costs money. We live in the mountains of north central Arizona in the city of Cottonwood. Opportunities to make money here, especially part-time and on my schedule, are limited so this year I decided to look for ways to earn money from home using the Internet.
In this blog I’m going to tell you everything I did, exactly as I did it. I will point you to the same resources I found in my research and include links so you can get these tools too. Many of these resources are free, but some you have to pay for (as I did). Please understand that, wherever possible, I have become an affiliate to market these same products that I bought and I will make a commission if you buy them. They will not cost you any more than I paid (someone made a commission from me). This is the kind of marketing I am involved in and it is what I am trying to teach you. Let’s learn together and let’s be successful together. That’s my goal. I hope to make some money along the way, but I know the frustrations I went through without someone to help me, so I’m also doing this for you (thus, my web site http://www.4usuccessprograms.com/). So let’s start this journey right now.
Oh, and please note, nothing I am going to discuss on this blog will allow you to “get rich quick,” but you can make significant income and can get rich over time, if you are willing to work hard and are dedicated to your own success. However, I must make this disclaimer. This site is for educational purposes only. No guarantees or warranties of any kind are given or implied. The decisions you make are 100% your own and I am not responsible in any way for the results. I will make every effort to provide information that is honest, reputable, ethical, legal and moral, but on the Internet things change fast and what was great today can be suspect tomorrow, so use your own judgement and proceed at your own risk.
Before I started my Internet network marketing adventures, I joined a multilevel marketing (MLM) company. I’ve always avoided MLM programs like the plague, never joining a single one. However, in April when the pet food scare occurred, our neighbor lost her beautiful American Eskimo dog to tainted dog food, so I did some research. I found a wonderful company called HealthyPetNet, a division of Trilogy International. They sell fresh, natural, wholesome, pet food that contains no fillers or chemicals of any kind. All ingredients are from the US and come from human food processing plants. Our cats loved it so much that I became a distributor. I dove wholeheartedly into selling these products (as a shameless plug, if have pets you do owe it to yourself to visit my web site at http://www.wholesomepetsupply.com/).
Now, I’m not a salesman and I didn’t want my friends and family cringing every time they saw me coming, so I decided to use Google AdWords to advertise my products. My MLM up-line (the person who sponsored me into the company) used this technique and I thought I’d try it. This way I’d have prospective customers coming to me rather than me chasing after everyone I saw.
I had never done anything like this before, so I did some research and found a free course called “5 days to success with Google AdWords” (click the title to get your own copy). I was intrigued so I bought the book it recommended and found it worth every penny and then some. I setup my Google AdWords ads and was soon getting orders.
However, this can be a very expensive form of advertising unless you can get a high rate of sales whenever someone clicks through to your web site. You bid on key words and the amount you bid determines where your ad falls when someone does a Google search. Since I rent my sales web site from the company, as do many other folks, you might do a search on “recalled dog food” and see 8 to 10 ads with half pointing to exactly the same web site except for the name of the distributor.
To solve this problem I am in the process of setting up my own web site. This will give me full control and will allow me to optimize my AdWords ads to my web site, which will bring down the cost of the Google AdWords clicks while significantly increasing my sales percentage. And this is cheaper than the site I rent now for $10 a month. I will cover how to setup your own web site in another post.
The other significant dilemma with MLM is that you can only make big money if you have lots of down-lines (these are distributors you bring into the company). You get a percentage of everything they sell. Now, in most MLM companies the distributors are the customers, often at almost a one-to-one ratio. Trilogy, however, has a 13:1 customer-to-distributor ratio, which is almost unheard of in MLM. Still, you need down-lines to make significant income. Trilogy has 9 “star” level designations for their distributors, 9 being the highest. Which level you are depends on how much you sell and how many distributors you bring in. The higher the level, the bigger the commissions. You max out at a 4-star, no matter how much you sell, unless you have several distributors under you who are also 4-star or better. I’ve been a 4-start since June, but I needed distributors to get to the next level.
Again, I did some research and came across a free book called “7 Great Lies of Network Marketing” (you can get it here http://wps.the7greatliesofnetworkmarketing.com/). This was a wonderful read and I liked it so much I bought “The Renegade Network Marketer ebook”, which is referred to in the “7 Great Lies” or you can get it here http://wps.therenegadenetworkmarketer.com/. This is the book that got me into “affiliate marketing” and, in hindsight, was worth many times what I paid for it because it got me moving.
There is so much to cover and this is only my first post, so I am going to sign off for tonight. I’ll be back tomorrow with more. Check here daily for the latest posts.
