Make Money Online Your Way

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

I think, the biggest mistake people make in looking to learn or succeed in anything is that they think if they fail or make mistakes, they can’t be good at it. That is just not true. Most of the things I am the best at, or have become good at is by making mistakes or failing at them! I think this is true in most areas of life. No one I know learned how to walk without falling down. But we all end up learning how to walk. I even learned how to run! This principle has been especially true for me online.

I look at those failures or mistakes as opportunites to learn and improve. Some of the lessons I learned online about free advertising, paid advertising, investment opportunities, Network Marketing, MLM, and starting and building a successful online business cost me thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours. I will share a number of my failures with you that I have found very educational, so that you can avoid losing money and time like I did learning those same lessons.

The first one I will tell you about is my experiences with Referralware. Referralware is a great idea! The problem with it is that it did not work out for me, and I WORKED AT IT! I was with Referralware for about a year and a half. Basically, Referralware combines an integrated marketing system with multiple income streams. Huh? Did I lose you yet? Hang in there, As I will explain and share with you what I learned and how I used that to make money online and work from home.

Problem #1 for Referralware = people have trouble understanding what the heck it is. Some people think it is software (because of the “ware” in it’s name).

Problem #2 with Referralware = To get to the top levels, and qualify for the maximum commissions, it has a high monthly cost. I was spending more than $300 just to maintain my position and get the guaranteed signups packages. That does not even include what it cost to join and maintain membership in the business opportunities that were to be my income streams. They were just expense streams to me.
Problem #3 in Referralware = I did recruit and start to grow a downline there, but ran into the same problems as I had in many other systems. My new members were not able to duplicate in the system and would end up quitting.
Problem #4 with Referralware = Overwhelming variety of online business opportunities to choose from and even though they supposedly had been “pre-screened” for a higher probability for success, most of them were NOT working and you would end up joining a online business opportunity to promote that people were not succeeding at.

What the heck are multiple income streams? Think of it this way: if you work at a job, that is one income stream. If you owned a apartment that you rented out to others, that would be yor second income stream.

Lesson #1 I learned from Referralware = The appeal is to develop multiple income streams online as a way to grow a larger income. It is also a more reliable way to develop an income you can depend on. This is a smart idea as instead of promoting a single thing with your advertising dollar, you can advertise multiple things with the same advertising budget. Also, you would not have all your eggs in one basket. If you ran into problems with one business or opportunity, you could rely on the other income streams to provide for you while you worked on replacing that one. I think of it this way. Lets say I develop a small successful website that makes me $20 per day with ads or sales. That may not seem like a lot. What if I did that 9 more times. Now I am making $200 per day from my websites - all are easy to maintain and if one runs out of business, or has problems - instead of losing my daily income, I still make $180 per day and only need to replace that portion of my income. Is your job that reliable?

Lesson #2 I learned from Referralware = Use the power of the internet and an automated system to get more done in less time. I think the benefits of this are obvious, but I had never thought about this before then. If you can set up an automated system to do 95% of the work for you, it also means any work you have to do will go farther! This way, I also only end up spending my time with task that require my attention and effort, rather than presenting and explaining the same things over and over. If you have used an online business to purchase anything, you know what I mean. You can choose, pay for and sometimes even receive what you were looking for and the whole process was completely automated. Using this automated system, your online business can get that much more done without you. You can set up other things like the marketing system to even bring in people automatically and do the sales, collect the money, and put the money in your account, all while you are doing something else.

Lesson #3 I learned from Referralware = Whatever your offer or system is, it needs to be easy to explain. This means that it would be easy to understand and more people would be interested in it.

Lesson #4 I learned from Referralware = Because of some of the problems I outlined above, 2 guys who were having success started an add-on program to Referralware called Coaching to Profits. First of all, this added to the cost of joining and the monthly expense. What they did right, was to explain to people what the heck Referralware was, streamlined the income streams to a few, and best of all - had a step-by-step plan for how to succeed in your Referralware business. You can easily see that these ideas heavily infuenced my http://www.nutronixhelp.com/ site.

Lesson #5 I learned from Referralware = The main aspect that initially appealed to me was the idea that I could develop a residual income. I could work at something smart and hard once, and get paid for it for years after that. One of the main obstacles to that is if you are involved in something that you need to perpetually re-qualify for, or keep recruiting for. Those kind of things keep it from being residual. That is one of the things I love about the Nutronix payplan. I will never have to recruit another person or re-qualify above my $100 autoship to reach the top levels in the payplan and enjoy my monthly income from that.

I was first exposed to Network Marketing/MLM when the Amway business was presented to me years ago when I was in college. The business presentation and some of the ideas really made sense to me. The idea that I was not going to get ahead trading time for money (as I only had so much time) and that one of the few ways get beyond that was to own a lot of land, own my own business or inherit a lot of money.
Since I was not planning on getting any kind of inheritance, owning my own business made the most sense to me, and so I proceeded to work hard at building my Amway business for 2 years. I was successful at recruiting some people, but they could never duplicate that success and my business went nowhere so I ended up dropping out.
I still held on to that dream of finding a way to get ahead. I did go onto start my own business with my uncle. I worked with him in getting a small tile installation business off the ground and grew it to over 12 employees. It was a lot of work and investment. Even as hard as we were working, after all our expenses and overhead, I ended up making only slightly more than I did if I was doing the work myself. This got me to reconsider what kind of business I wanted to own.
I knew that what I was doing would not get me into the lifestyle of time freedom and money that I wanted, and that I would have a tough time getting enough money to pay down my debts and even to retire. Reading the news and seeing stories of how many pension funds were going under, and I knew how I did not want to HAVE to be working into my later years. It is different if you have a hobby or a business you do because you want to, versus, working at something because you have to. I wanted to work at something that I liked to do that would pay me for years.
This got me looking online for businesses and opportunities to make money from home as I was really sick of driving around all day, and really getting nowhere. I would get home tired, after a long day, and did not have the time, money, or energy to do the things I really wanted to do with my life. I researched and tried many online businesses, and I kept returning to network marketing/ MLM as the business to have, as that approach has created more millionaires than any other business method, along with being able to offer residual income with a successful business. It also used the advantages of leverage, which meant the bigger my business got, I would get paid more and more, even though I was working the same amount. Also the idea that I could work hard at a business for a couple of years, and then enjoy the results of my efforts for many more years really appealed to me.
As I worked at some of the businesses I found, I had success with some, but mostly failure. The weak link for any of these businesses was their marketing and presentation system, and not having a proven way for duplicating their business. They had plenty of “ideas” but none of them worked for my downline. I had been involved with a couple businesses that I found I could grow – in one I helped build a downline of over 10,000 people. It quickly fell apart and most people had quit in 3 months as no one could duplicate the recruiting I was. In the other, I had basically the same problem, I was able to recruit people and new members were not able to repeat that and duplicate, so another downline faded away. That business is where I met my sponsor Shane Woods.
Shane was in another downline than me, and we were both actively looking to find something that worked for the new person. He called me one night and invited me to join with him in this business. (We called ourselves the Success Team). One of the most interesting aspects that he told me about AutomaticBuilder/Nutronix was that they had an automated presentation system with many proven methods of advertising. Listening to the excitement in his voice got me excited, so I gave him my credit card over the phone and had him get my business going that night. Just the idea that they had paid advertising and free advertising that actually worked was exciting! I listened in on some conference calls and after listening to multiple success stories and the kind of leadership and team atmosphere that was in place, I had hope again that I found a business that could work.
I started out slow and skeptical though, as I had been disappointed so many times before. Especially after my last failure in the business before, my wife also felt very cautious and skeptical. The other thing that was attractive to me about this business was that I could work at it very part time. I was in the process of starting a retail business online (http://www.why-buy-dinar.com)and did not have much free time to spend working my AutomaticBuilder/Nutronix business. The slow but steady progress this business made was one of the things that kept me coming back to this business time and time again. Success did not happen overnight for me.
I had been in the business for a few months and basically had just used the GTT’s to bring in new members and about 11 of them upgraded. (GTT’s are Guaranteed Tour Takers). GTT’s are a premier lead that is exclusive to our business. This was very encouraging, but no one was duplicating yet. I was watching to see how much the system would do on it’s own, as I needed to know that it did not depend on my personal skills to succeed.
I listened to a conference call and a member who was having success was talking about the personal welcome email he sent to members and the kind of responses he was getting. Even though the system sends out follow-up and welcome emails for you, nothing beats the personal touch. I decided to give it one more go, bought another set of GTT’s and sent welcome emails to any members who joined, and sent emails to anyone who watched the presentation more than twice to encourage them to let me know if they had any questions, I would be happy to help get them answers.
One of the members who joined from that set and responded to my welcome email was Thom Gruber. He has gone onto to build a downline that makes up the majority of my business. When I first contacted Thom, he was excited and getting going, but he was frustrated as he thought he put his username wrong in a URL that he was sending out in an email campaign he had just bought. He was concerned that if he got any leads from that, they were going to end up at someone else’s site – instead of his. He also told me he had ordered a set of GTT’s. I said that was great, and to help make up for any people he could have lost from the mistake in his ad, that I would buy him a set of GTT’s to make up for it.
Let’s just say that when those 2 sets of GTT’s came in for Thom, he saw the real power and potential of this business and got really enthusiastic about what he could achieve with this business and went about achieving it. I won’t tell you Thom’s story here, I will let him tell you that. I just want to point out that Thom came from another Network Marketing company where he was not finding the success or duplication he was looking for to succeed. As you will see, one of your best tools in this business is helping your new members see that for themselves. Once they see the power and potential of this system, and they know you are behind them, they will be the driving force behind your success.
I feel very blessed and honored to be a part of this business and to work with the leaders I do. Being a part of the Advanced Training calls and hearing the success stories and results people have had from the strategies and training we have covered there has been really gratifying. It is really a rare thing to find an online business that you can work from home and find online success that you can start for as little as $2.95 If you would have told me that one of the best investment opportunities I would find that would help me make money online would be so inexpensive to start my work from home business - I would have told you that you were crazy. I am just glad I was crazy enough to hold onto that dream, and did not stop trying to reach it.

After 2 years of struggling to make a living working online - I have reached my goal and then some! I decided that with this site, I would start blogging about my failures and successes and the path I am walking and finally enjoying to share with others who would like to do the same. I just got my blog set up today and it is late, so I will write more tomorrow. I will be sharing my struggles, my rewards, thoughts on making money online, investment opportunities, free advertising, paid advertising and how to build a successful work from home online business. Stay tuned!

In the meantime - you can check out a few sites I am involved with if you want:

http://www.why-buy-dinar.com

http://www.exchangeyourdinar.com

http://www.investmentopportunityreport.com

http://www.nutronixhelp.com

http://www.time-for-plan-b.com

http://www.be-a-success-coach.com

http://www.yoursuccessguaranteed.com

Matthew Yonan