Make Money Online Your Way

For many reasons, more individuals than ever, are now turning to a business standard that is suited perfectly for the home business and work online entrepreneur. Many consider network marketing and MLM as the ideal business method. You might not think so, given it’s old reputation, but let’s take a closer look at the aspects that make MLM and network marketing one of the best options for small businesses today.

Multilevel (MLM) or network marketing is a method of selling and distributing services and products by way of a series of distributors instead of through conventional retail stores.

Every distributor sells products or services of their network company and recruits distributors to also to sell the product of the networking company and earn commissions.

Many individuals have made riches in network or MLM marketing business. Consider these facts:

1. MLM or network marketing is accountable for approximately one trillion dollars in sales a year.

2. There are over 3 thousand MLM or network companies all over the world.

3. The total network marketing distributors is approaching to 35 million worldwide. There are over 6 Billion people in the world online that are not yet involved in Network Marketing or MLM.

4. Every week, at least 150 thousand individuals join a network marketing company in across the globe.

5. MLM and Network Marketing has produced more Millionaires than any other business system ever. Because it gives the small business owner a way to leverage their time and money to get a larger group growing their income than they could produce alone.
Here are tips for network marketing and MLM success:

1. Choose your company wisely. Check the network’s company rating with “The Better Business Bureau” and find out how long it had been operating and how much products has it sold within its years while in the industry.

Also, discover the number of network distributors is presently signed in with the firm. You will want to consider the following:

1. Product. Choose a product that you are enthusiastic about. Try the product so to find out if you can really endorse it for others to use.

2. Pay plan. Learn how much commission you can earn from your sales and what is the required minimum sales level you should reach before you can receive commissions.

3. Training and support. This is obtainable through the MLM company and find out how much these programs cost. How will you obtain training? Through another marketer or through a professional trainer? Read their success stories. Do they have more than a few?

2. Practice what your network marketing up-line teaches you. So to succeed, there should be the willingness to learn and listen from mentors.

When you succeed, your up-line also succeeds. Therefore they are eager to teach the system to you. Whatever your up-line did to succeed, they will pass it on to you, so you can duplicate their success.

3. Help from your up-line. Make certain that you have a helpful and supportive up-line who is always willing and ready to assist you should you encounter problems.

4. Lead with down-line. This is all about continuing relationship building. Be ready to at least spend 30 days assisting a new individual come to the business constantly training and supporting them until they are secure enough to go off “on their own”.

5. Duplicate yourself. MLM is all about reaching to many more individuals and selling more and more products through your recruits. Use the power of leverage to your advantage.

This is all about team building, constructing your sales group. Your recruits or down-line will do whatever they see you accomplishing. All that you have learned, pass it on to your down-line. Demonstrate to them good networking habits. Educate them how to also duplicate themselves.

6. Use the internet. More and more are using the internet as their primary marketing tool. Set up your own website including autoresponders so that when you acquire leads, follow up can be done by the autoresponder. Good companies offer a proven system to do this with.

The key to internet success as well as capturing leads is through follow-up. You need to keep in touch constantly with your leads at least every month. Automation has made available a more consistent way of following your leads up.

7. Do not quit working at it until you see regular income coming in. Never give up your efforts unless you are really certain that your earnings from your networking company will continue to keep on coming in.

This means that you are with the right, stable company and you will continue on working hard to earn more and not stop just because you already have a lot of recruits.

Network Marketing takes a lot of determination and commitment not only in your business but marketing it as well.

What I hope you can see is that it will pay off for you better than your job ever could and offer you a lifestyle and time freedom, thanks to residual income, that many could never believe would happen for them.

Stay tuned, as I will also discuss “Challenges to making your business profit - and how to overcome them”

We see in the news that more and more Americans are resorting to working from home. Aside from the benefit of better productivity, you do not have to endure a daily fight with traffic if you prefer to work from home. Also, you can have more time for your family, as a valuable incentive of rearing a home business instead of a 9 to 5 grind. So, if you choose to actually do the work at “home sweet home”, here are some effective tips that you should arm yourself with when starting a home based business:

1. Do Your Homework

Research the kind of work from home or home business you are planning to run. A well-thought out business idea is most likely to succeed than a lamely-planned one. Think if the home biz you are about to put up will be sustainable enough for you to really have a living out of it. Consult your friends, a business administrator or just about anyone who has expertise on the field you would like to work on. Visit libraries or buy books on the kind of business you want to manage. Maximize your online resources. Surf thoroughly and learn more about the ins and outs of the business you would want to venture on.

2. Run a Home Business that Makes You Wild

Wildly passionate, that is! If you would like to succeed in anything, passion should be in your heart. It would definitely be harder to succeed in something you’re not crazy about. Surely, there are many who would want to try out a business just for kicks or for experimental purposes but not many of these experimental businesses are carried out that well for one to earn a decent living out of it. How about working on a hobby that you have always been enjoying since childhood? Many hobbies have been turned into businesses, e.g., scrapbooking, writing, organizing, etc. As the old adage says, “do what you love and money will follow.” Or how about examining your current job and see what task encompassed by your job doesn’t feel like work for you when you’re doing it. Got one in your head? Eureka!

3. Set Up a Home Office

Having a home business doesn’t mean that you are supposed to do work anywhere in the home. You should set up a certain nook for you to do all your home business duties. Find a place where your kids won’t have the freedom to come in and out of whenever they please to. Somewhere work-conducive and yet not as stiff as your then-office from your 9 to 5′er. Setting up an home office will be incomplete if it doesn’t contain ergonomic furniture and office gadgets. Look for that office chair that won’t make you laze around the whole day. Proper lighting should be considered, too since it’s important that you get things done in your office and not being able to see well, will deter you from doing much.

4. Avoid Sticky Financial Situations

The thing with being a newbie in managing a work from home stint is you have wear all the hats. This means you are the business manager, the production team, the marketer, the janitor, etc. And this includes even the hard role of being your own accountant. You have to learn how to manage your finances as a work from homer. Good for you there are a lot financial management software that is available online and are sometimes even offered for free, or a free trial basis. These can aid you in making wise financial decisions and tracking your cashflow, which is what will make you successful as a home business owner. Watching your bottom line!

5. Market Your Biz Like a Pro

How will clients go pouring in if you don’t make your business known? Aside from the generic method of marketing your business through businesscards, banners and posters, creating a website for your business is one of the most effective means of getting the word out about your home business. Create one yourself or hire an expert in web designing produce a professional website for you. Do you know how else you can make others know your business exists? Blog about it. Blogs or web logs are online journals that many online readers find enjoying to read. Talk about your struggles, solutions and success and make blog readers yearn for more by updating your blog often with useful information.

Before you know it, you’ll be the envy of many, as you make money online and quit your commute!

A was having dinner with a friend of mine a couple of weeks ago. He asked me for my opinion on a business this guy had pitched him about starting an online business. Now, my friend is retirement age, has done quite well for himself, so he really doesn’t need the money. He sells used cars for a living and golfs more than he does any work anymore. He doesn’t have much experience online beyond emailing and browsing. As I asked him a few questions about the offer, he tells me this guy has a business that will set up a website for him, with about 800 merchants who offer products that people can come to his website and buy from. He will be able to make money when people go through his site and purchase something. I said, “That’s great! How are you going to get people to go to your website and buy from you? There are millions of websites out there now, why are they going to buy from yours? How are they even going to know it exists?” He scratched his head and said he didn’t think about that, and as I talked about it with him further, he asked if I would talk to the guy, check it out and let him know. It would cost him about $49 a month to have the site.

Well, after a bit of phone tag - I connecting to the guy today. I will not share his name or his organization here. After listening to him broadly explain the overview (which he left a lot of details out on) I started to aks him questions. The problem with people like me, for people like him, is that I know what I am talking about, I know what to ask and am very direct about it. Here’s what I learned:

His is basically a multi-level affiliate business. Instead of buying products from the store, you buy products from your own store (your website) and you get a slight discount as you keep the affiliate commissions. Your sponsor (I did not get into the details of their commission plan) gets a cut also. So at first blush it looks like an online buying club - a pricey one at that ($49 per months!!!! - you better be saving some money! ) This is where it gets interesting - The way you grow your business to be profitable, is to refer your friends and family to the site and get them to buy through your site. I asked him how many “customers” he had, and he told me 15-20 (btw a lot of the numbers he would quote me were ranges, which is kind of fishy, because anybody running a decent business - especially a small one, should know EXACTLY how many customers they have - especially if they were regulars - more on that in a bit) and I asked him how much he was making off those customers and he said he did not know. I asked him for a ballpark figure and he said about $200 - $300 per month. So I will give him the high side of that number and lets look at the profitability or return on his investment of time and money (ROI). I also asked him how long they have been in business - he said about 6-8 weeks. He got these customers for doing what he did with my friend - selling them on the service. So I am going to give him the ideal and say he spent about 1 hour (between rejects and actual sales) getting each of his customers. So, lets break that down. Again- I am going to use low side expenses and high side numbers to examine the ideal here:

15 customers * 1 hour each to acquire = 15 hours.

1 month website costs = $49

Gross Profit = $300

Gross Margin (Profit after deducting expenses) = $251

Hourly wage you just earned (approx.) = $16.73

Now, some might argue with me and say “yeah, but now he gets that every month and he can get his customers to get more customers and grow that into a residual income which is what you taught me was the best way to do it!”

Yes, that is very true, and in many ways, this is close to the truth. Here is the ultimate problem though. This guy has to count on phone sales and personal referrals to build his business. Let me tell you, once I explain that to my friend, he is not going to like the idea that he would be bugging his friends and family to join this as a way to make it succeed and to grow. And that they would have to do the same thing - even with this great phone guy to help make the sales…. Anyone remember a little company called Amway? Same idea, slightly different model - to me will equal the same result = a few guys on top make most of the money, a few more guys in the middle make hobby income, and most of the people on the bottom, make little to no money and just support the system. It does not sound like a good deal to me.

Affiliate sales are a great way to make money if you are good at sales and marketing. You refer or sell someone elses product, someone else completes the sale, collects the money, and issues your commissions - easy peasy right? If it were that easy, everone COULD make it work. The problem is, most people don’t like to sell and are not good at it. Even the ones who do, don’t like to sell to their family and friends, and they certainly don’t want to count on the sales from their family and friends to make or break their business - as that adds an extra element of pressure no one likes. That seams like an awful lot of work to MAYBE make $16.73 an hour or so.

Now lets take the principle and improve it so that it WOULD work. First of all, the marketing system for the business has to be automated and online. It has to be able to explain and sell the business 24/7 FOR YOU. Secondly, the leads system (how you find new customers) HAS to be integrated so that any new member can just plug in and USE THE SYSTEM and can truly duplicate. Finally - anytime you can produce a business that Returns MORE than you put into it - even on a small scale - you can turn that into a monster income, even if you don’t grow that business into a big one. Let me explain it to you this way - I will give you a couple of examples. Lets say, you develop a niche site. For this example, lets say you develop a website that is devoted to Beanie Babies. You write lots of great articles and have picture and information on the site to help people find out if a Beanie Baby they have is worth a lot of money or not. You put some ads on your site and advertise it a little and it starts to make money - not a lot, but after you set up the site once, do the research, write the articles, etc, you make about $200 net profit. Lets say that you do 1 site like that a month. Your first month you make the $200. 12 months later you are making $2400 per month (12 * 200) and now you stop making sites. You did not cold call people, you provided a good service of providing helpful, informative content, and you are leveraging the power of the internet to put automation to work FOR you.

For the second example, lets look at it like an MLM / Network Marketing model. You start a business that makes $200 profit for you a month. You help 2 people sponsor 2 people (2 per month) do the same thing. That is, you sponsor 2 people once, each person they sponsor sponsors 2 and so on.

So the first month, you sponsor 2 people (we are going to figure all commissions at 10% to make the math easy - although most pay plans pay higher than that on your first level). So now there is you and 2 others in your business, you are making $200 + $40 in commissions.

The second month (and here is the leverage that MLM / Network Marketing can offer that NO OTHER BUSINESS can touch) You sponsor NO ONE PERSONALLY - but your first 2 downline members each sponsor 2 people! Now you have 6 people in your downline. Lets add up your profits = Your commissions from your sales $200 + $120 from your downline = $320 total.

The third month, the new people who joined last month all sponsor 2 people. Your total downline is 14 people. Your total profits from your inital business is still $200 and you are now making $280 from your downline for a total of $480.

The fourth month, the growth continues, slowly but steadily and you now have a downline of 30 people. Your profits are up to $800/monthly from your online MLM / Network Marketing business!

We proceed to the fifth month, where your group has grown to 62 people - Your profits are up to $1240 just from your downline which totals $1440 from your business.

If we continue this to the end of the year, you would have theoretically have a downline of 8180 people and be making $8,000 to $10,000 a month (the percentages on your payouts decrease as your groups grow - it is natural mathematical flow due to the distance of the people who joined later that made up the majority of your group.)

Doesn’t that sounds like a better strategy that building niche sites and typing till your fingers and wrists ache? Just kidding, building niche sites is a great additional income stream, but I think you get my point about the leverage of growing a group like that can bring you. As long as we are talking about it, lets look at the reality of some of the factors that start to play into when you are trying to build a MLM / Network Marketing business that size.

Uniformity: People just don’t come in and all act or grow at the same rates. This always causes imbalance in groups. Generally, I think of it as a 30/70 rule. Only about 30% of the people who will actually do the work, grow about 70% of the group. When you put 2 small groups side by side and grow them, always one group will outgrow the other. This is natural, and is what you find with most groups, most of the time. The ones that can actually grow, anyways.

Timing: People don’t all act at the same speed. So you don’t get this steady of exponential growth. But you still get exponential growth and great numbers!

(Back in the real world) When I started my Automatic Builder / Nutronix business I saw that rapid kind of scale up after my first 4 months - it started to grow exponentially. For example, in my first few months I had sponsored about 11 people who had stayed, but no one was duplicating yet. In the 4 month, I sponsored a few more people. One of those people went on to grow a big group in a couple of months - he had about 30 active people and about 70 who were just watching in his group at the end of those 2 months (does that sound like where you work? )

Within 4 months, my downline grew to have over 1000 people in it (my total business was about 8 months old - for those of you keeping track). It took another five months for that group of 1000 to double (unlike my previous theoretical example, where every 2 people doubled every month) at that point it was the 1 year anniversay to being in business and it had been 9 months since I had sponsored my first active recruiter. Can you see the power of that kind of model working for you?
If I extrapolate out to where my group will be at the 2 year mark, I would bet there will be about 3500 people in it then. Well before I hit that mark, I will be making $9,000 to $10,000 a month from that! And that is NOT 3500 ACTIVE members! about 30% of them are the ones who are driving the commissions and the growth! 70% of them are sitting and quitting! Imagine that, a business where it’s failure rate is higher than it’s success rate, yet it is wildly successful! Residual Income - Ya gotta love it!

Now this business is actually in it’s baby stages, it has not hit momentum yet. Once it does, you will see that group of about 3500 people grow to about 35,000 within a few years. Where would you like to be in that group? Towards the top or the bottom?

If you want to learn more specifics about that story, or check out the business for yourself, you will find it at http://www.nutronixhelp.com

Matthew Yonan

“There were over 1.6 million bankruptcy filings last year, up 7.4 percent from the previous year. And according to a new book, more people will end up in bankruptcy this year than will suffer a heart attack, than will be diagnosed with cancer or graduate from college, and it’s not who you would think. Elizabeth Warren is a Harvard law professor and bankruptcy expert and discusses these findings in her new book “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke.” She discusses the book on “Today.” ” This is an excerpt from this news story on MSNBC

That means you have a better chance of going bankrupt than:

- getting cancer

- having a heart attack

- graduating from college.

And that is if you are both working and in the middle class! That means most Americans finances are built like a house of cards.
It is trends like this that should really wake you up. We are approaching the largest number of people that will reach retirement age in America in the next 10-15 years, and a large number of them are going broke. It is a well known fact that 98% of people will be dead or broke by the time they reach retirement age. If these people don’t hurry up and do something they will soon run into that reality. Some people are so engrossed in just trying to survive financially right now, it is hard for them to think of the future. Sadly most people truly are one paycheck away from disaster. If they or their partner were to get injured or sick and their paychecks stopped coming in, they would be devastated. It is the number one cause of bankruptcy. Unexpected illness, injury or the death of a loved one.We have a whole culture of people in this country who traded financial freedom for what they thought was security. They thought getting s steady job would bring them financial security. They are now learning that that image of security by having a job was a big lie. It has been written about again and again, the only true way to achieve financial success is to own your own business, or own real estate. Unfortunately, while it is that simple, it is not that easy. There are many risks inherent with starting a new business, let alone finding the time to have to work on it. There are plenty of people selling books and seminars on how to buy real estate with no money down, or how you can make money finding real estate investment property online. Sometimes I think those are the people making the most money in those industries - the ones training others to do it. Their success stories are few and far between. Some even blame them for the real estate bubbles people have been reporting on in the last year. People can only refinance out their home so much. It is one of the reasons we see the mortgage industry run out of steam.
It is that kind of reality that drove me to find a business that I could develop into a residual income. One that I worked hard and invested in for a year, then whether I could work it or not - my income would keep coming in. I don’t even want to do the math to figure out how much I would have to save and then put into investment opportunities to try to be able to generate the same amount of income. Lets just say I would have to have over a half a million dollars in investments to generate the same level of income that I have from a business that cost me a few thousand dollars to start. For most people, who are barely getting by on their present paycheck - so save up 1/2 million dollars is impossible. They have trouble saving little, if at all.
People know this. That is why we see thousands more come online every month and look for online investment opportunities, and ways to make money. The problem is, many of the ways to make money online they are offered are not very different than what they already have. Taking surveys, traffic exchanges, and many of the online businesses you find are still just offering to trade your time for money. Same trap - different setting. Building your assets - and the assets I am talking about here are not assets like your house and your car that cost you money and you don’t profit on every month, but assets that you invest in, that end up paying you back more than you put into them. That is truly the only way to leverage your money and time to get you ahead.

Otherwise you are just trading time for money and you only have so much time to trade!
That is one of the things that motivated me to join with a network of people and form the Entreprenuers Network and that ended up producing the Investment Opportunity Report

I wanted to produce a resource people could use online that shared with them proven ways they could use to get themself out of the trap many of them were in. It is also the reason I still was checking out MLM / Network Marketing businesses. MLM / Network Marketing has produced more millionaires than any other business system. Period. That is why they teach it in the top business schools. They know, for the average business owner / investor, there is no other business system that can offer so much leverage. That is the ideal anyways. So many MLM / Network Marketing companies have shown time and time again, the problems and challenges to building a business that way. That is until I found Automatic Builder / Nutronix. Finally a MLM / Network Marketing business that had developed ways to overcome all the challenges for the average and small time investor. Really, any system that will ACTUALLY work with both paid and free advertising is a proven one. Too bad it is a rarity in MLM / Network marketing businesses. Yes, it still takes work and investment, but it is exactly the vehicle that people can use to drive themselves out of the trap their in.

Starting and growing my Automatic Builder / Nutronix business into a successful online business was exciting in itself. Being able to share that success by teaching and helping others achieve the same thing and help themselves out of a sinking financial boat is the ultimate reward. If you follow me down that path, I know you will see what I mean.
Matthew Yonan

Today was the grand opening for http://www.exchangeyourdinar.com

The press release announcing it has only been out a few hours this morning and it is really fun to see the traffic on the site spike up as a result. We have also been receiving phone calls and emails from many people who are very excited to have this kind of service available. This is a site that I have been working a few weeks on, and many late nights. It is very gratifying to see it start off with such a positive response!

It is also very exciting to be one of the first people to offer the Dinar investor some security with their currency investment. That was truly the danger that many felt before, was “what if I need to exchange it before it opens for international exchange?”. Now that is no longer a problem.

With the latest news, rumors and speculation about comments that Iraq’s new minister of Finance has been making, there is also a new fear that they could change the currency to a new version, and then many Dinar investors are afraid that they would be left holding old currency. With this new service - we now have arrangements in place to help investors convert their Iraqi dinar to a new version.

To top it all off, we will also be offering a discount to customers who purchased their Dinar from Why Buy Dinar. This is one way we can show them our appreciation for being a customer, and to encourage anyone who is thinking about purchasing more Dinar to get it through us. As I was explaining to a gentleman on the phone this morning, it just extends the service that our customers have come to expect. They bought their dinar from a dealer who did not have complaints about them, and now they will be able to exchange their Dinar with a trusted and established name in the business.

On the site, there is a page that people can go to that contains the latest IQD exchange rate in a ticker at the top of the page (live feed) and has a sections that condense the daily news and information about the Dinar value and exchange rate. This free service give investors in the Dinar a place to stop once and get all the news and current rate, when they used to have to go to 3-4 different sites just to check for changes. Now they can come to one page and get it all.

I am very proud to be offering this site to the worldwide Dinar investment community!

Matthew Yonan

When starting an online business, work from home business or any business for that matter, there are some decsions you have to make at the beginning that will decide a lot about your business. It basically starts with 2 choices.

#1 Sell your own product or service

#2 Sell someone else’s product or service

From there, the choices branch out greatly.

If you choose #1 and you want to sell a product you make - you should ask yourself these questions among others about your business:

How long does my product take to manufacture? How many would I need to get started selling them? If I had to order in bulk, where will I store them? Would I be able to start selling them by just showing the prototype and taking enough orders to get going? How much would that initial prototype or production batch cost? How can I raise the money to do that? How much will it cost to ship each one locally? Can I market it nationally? Can it be marketed internationally? Is the shipping cost still feasible to market overseas? If I look in the marketplace, what kind of pricing is there now? How much markup - or profit margin does that leave me?
If you choose #1 and you want to sell a service you provide - you should ask yourself these questions among others about your business:

What is the maximum number of people I could provide my service to a week myself? What is the minimum number of people I could provide my service to a week and profit? Is there a lot of competition in this service? How will I stand out? How long have I been providing this service? Do I have references? Have I decided my pricing structure and profit margins?
As I hope you can see so far - you will see why I tend to prefer building a business that provides #2 Sell someone else’s product or service as it cuts down a lot of extra work and money expenses - that usually do not lead to a lot of extra profit. Don’t get me wrong, I think people make money in manufacturing and providing services - I just don’t think a small business is the best situation to be a manufacturer or service center. To do it well and efficiently, usually takes a larger number of people.

If you choose #2 and decide to sell someone elses product or service it really simplifies the process as you only need to focus on sales. There are basically 4 ways to sell these goods or services for someone else:

#1 As a regional representative (set commissions - must stock inventory - or buy franchise for service)
#2 As an affiliate or referrer (set commissions - many times free to join)
#3 As a distributor/retailer (set commissions = buy at wholesale, sell at retail price, may need to order in bulk, larger minimum order to qualify to buy at wholesale, offering a service -scalability issues, if you want to grow your business beyond you - how long does it take to train new emloyees, employee turnover, etc.)

#4 As a MLM/Network Marketing distributor (set commissions & potential residual commissions - qualifications too varied in industry to summarize)

Maybe you have never looked at it this way, but now that you are, can you see why I find option #4 the most attractive? I have tried almost ALL the choices outlined above = I have sold my own product (for example - my info-book), I have sold my own service (ie: tile installation), I have sold products and services as an affilliate (ie: e-books, referred people to my link to buy something and received commissions, a type of direct marketing), I have bought products at wholesale and resold them at retail for a profit (too many to list - this is also considered a kind of direct marketing)

The residual aspect of MLM / Network Marketing, is exactly one of the things that kept me coming back to try it again over the years. Boy, am I glad I did! In any other business, if I stopped working or selling - my business stopped and I stopped getting paid. With a successful MLM / Network Marketing business, I have stopped working as hard for periods, even taken a few weeks off and hardly worked, and I kept getting a check, my business even gave me a raise during that period! I know this has been the dream and attraction for many people - but the reality for most people is that if you tried to start a work from home business, or online business - most people failed.

Next I will cover some of the problems that prevent people from succeeding in a work from home online MLM / Network Marketing business and what you can do to avoid them. I will see you then!

Matthew Yonan

Happy Independence Day! I will be celebrating the freedom and independence of our country today. Thank God for the wonderful opportunities and choices we enjoy today because of the price people have paved before us. My parents are both immigrants from other countries. I was the first generation born here from both sides of my families. Ever since I can remember, it has been ingrained into my head all the freedom, and opportunities we enjoy here that many people in many places don’t. We can easily own land or own our own business. Whether you own your own business online or take advantage of a real estate investment opportunity (like owning your own home for starters) does not matter. The point is, here we can invest in our future and own assets of real value no matter whose family we were born into.

Even before I left the shelter of my parents home, I worked at odd jobs, starting when I was young. I always had kind of an entreprenuerial spirit - I will tell you plenty of stories about that later - one at a time. I guess what I am trying to say is that I was brought up well, not spoiled or on easy street. Once I left home, that only got harder. I worked plenty of crummy jobs and rode a bike for many years as an adult as transportation, because I could not afford the insurance and other costs of car ownership. At the time, I thought it was pretty unfair, as I knew plenty of other people in my age group whose parents had bought them a car or helped them out, but it was not to be for me. That’s ok, it taught me a lot of valuable lessons and I got by just fine. I still have fond memories of some of those years as they were when I attended college and met a lot of life influencing people.

Back then, the internet was just an idea, but I had read a book that further cemented my parents ideas and opened my mind to many other things I had never thought of. “Financial Self Defense” by Charles J. Givens. It pointed my head squarely at owning my own business. Working from home was a dream that went with it, but it was hard for me to imagine what kind of business could support that idea. Remind me later, if I forget, to tell you about my Mom’s home grown business that ended up with products for sale at Macy’s (which was a big deal at the time). This kind of thinking laid the foundation for the many businesses and investments I would pursue later that led me here. Speaking of books, I think I will post one day all the books that I found highly influencial to my development. I hope they can help you. Some of them, were so good, I read them more than once - in fact I still have most of them today!

So out of college I was back in the work force. I left just short of a degree, as I did more research into different jobs and options in different carrer paths, I was really dissapointed with what kind of pay was available for people with a college degree. Even a Master’s Degree! That was a wakeup for me, as I had really thought going to college was going to end up helping to increase my wage. For me, it was a great experience and I learned a lot, but that was it. I saw that people in the trades make almost twice as much money as people who graduate from college on average. When construction came calling again, I was ready as I had been used to meager paychecks for too long.

In the business venture I was telling you about yesterday, where my friend and I lost over $30,000 in our little info-book flop? He was older than me and much better off financially. He fronted the money for my half. (We were really close buddies). I needed to pay him back my half, since I was counting on paying that back with profits. I paid him back the $15,000 in 1 year. How did I do it? I gave him 1/2 of every paycheck for a year. That really sucked, but believe me, I have NEVER forgot the lessons I learned about paid advertising since then! In any investment opportunity (and believe me - any work from home or online business is an INVESTMENT opportunity) the reward is in direct relation to the risk. That is why when you give up risk for the reward of a steady paycheck - it is usually for less money than if you went out and did it on your own. That does not mean you should go out and risk everything. It just means, from what I have learned, you have to decide when the reward makes it worth the risk! If you can start with a smaller risk and see how it goes, if you get paid back or profit, you know what to do. If it doesn’t work out then you can come up with a different plan and try again. There is nothing worse than doing the same thing over and over expecting different results from your online business. If you are not getting the results you want with your business or your advertising, change what you are doing! Using your head is the fastest way to get making money instead of investing it. I like this side of the fence much better - the grass is the color of money!

Matthew Yonan

Last Friday my wife and I went out for dinner about 45 minutes away from where we live. It was a great restaurant we had heard was pretty good. We left early to try to beat the dinner rush. We were driving against the end of rush hour traffic (rush hour seems to start earlier and end later every year doesn’t it). I remember having to deal with that and I used to hate it! Just seeing all those people stuck in their cars - day after day reminded me of how stressed and frustrated I used to feel.

Getting stuck in traffic like that just used to remind me how stuck I felt in my life and how badly I wished I could make it better. I used to go home some nights and sit on the computer, surfing and looking around online for some way to make enough money or profit enough from an investment opportunity so I could work from home. I have a good friend who is in excellent shape that I used to spend a lot of time with, he taught me almost everything I know about working out. People would always ask him diet and workout advice and he ended up selling them a lot of vitamins. Being able to tell people about the results you are having from the products you are selling is a great free advertising technique. He taught me how he bought the vitamins and supplements at wholesale and resold them for a markup.

One way we tried to capitalize on that was to develop a how to booklet that taught people how to save 30 to 50% on their nutritional supplements for themselves. We set up a pre-recorded information message on a 800 number and placed ads in many major magazines like Prevention and Readers Digest. This was my first big tuition payment and lesson in advertising . We spent about $30,000 in ads. When we bought the ads in the magazines, we had to wait 3 months until they came out. We were excited and thought it would work, so we placed all the ads we could afford to do.

We got lots of calls on the 800 number (which we had to pay $0.25 each for) and even got some orders. All in all - I think we only sold about $500 in booklets. It was a total flop. The problem was the ads. They got some interest - and got many people curious enought to call, but they were not very effective at selling the product.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have taken out some small local ads until I found a winning formula, THEN we could have taken it to a bigger scale. If it doesn’t work on a small scale - IT WILL NOT WORK ON A LARGER SCALE. Please read that again, and I hope you learn from it as it cost me and my friend over $30,000 in tuition.

That is the basic mantra of any successful marketing campaign. Test, test, test until you find what works - and then throw everything you can into it. If you take out an ad and test it in a smaller market and it gets no response - redo your ad until it works. Once it does, it is like an ATM machine - as you can take money out of it until it is empty.
Well, it’s almost time for me to go to bed. Tomorrow is the 4th of July - Independence Day. Millions of people across the US will get a taste of what I do every morning and not have to wake up because their alarm clock went off. Almost every day I wake up when my body clock tells me to. Wouldn’t that be nice? I wish it for you! I love waking up, stretching and walking downstairs to go to work. Especially because I know I am not dreaming.

Matthew Yonan