Halfway Around The World On A Wing And A Prayer

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I recovered from my bias about Multi-Level Marketing as a valid business model once I realized I could advertise online and guide people to a compelling presentation. People would buy, and they may as well be buying from me.

I’ll never forget when it hit me. My wife had crawled in the door. She just had the sortof day that makes you want to throw a stapler at your boss and quit your job. In my infinite wisdom I told her I would solve her problem by consulting Google. They never let me down!

I searched “Work From Home”!

After a few weeks of research I ended up rolling the dice. It cost me about $800 on the credit card at the time.

What I really liked about the online MLM business I chose was you could work at home and you wouldn’t have to tell your friends until the money was already piling up.

Once I finally mustered the nerve to tell my wife, she said, “You better earn your money back and quit”. God love her. Why would I quit if I can earn my money back?

I did earn my money back and more. I even enjoyed 5 figure months. You should have heard the guy at the bank telling me I needed to stop bringing in $6,000.00 checks and start only accepting wire transfers. That was a totally cool day.

There was a down side. Advertising for Multi-Level Marketing that could move an $8,000.00 + product was not cheap. Eventually I was putting 1.5k in advertising into the new MLM business of every member I brought on board. I thought that this would jump start them.

The advertising I was doing rocketed me into the top 20 reps listed at the company with in my first 3 months in the Multi-Level Marketing industry. I figured that should really help people blast off to success since it worked so well for me.

Well, they sucked at it. I felt responsible. It turned out that I would have to provide my team with more than just responsive marketing if I was going to ensure their success in Multi-Level Marketing.

However, I did recognize the value around me - the people I was in business with. I saw how I could place an almost corporate structure around my Multi-Level Marketing team.
The, Occupy the City, MLM Solution.

There are many tasks involved in running a Multi-Level Marketing business. There are things not everyone enjoys about the MLM industry. Different people excel at different tasks. Some of my team was stronger in areas I was less inclined to enjoy and vice versa.

When you assign work according to individual strengths your overall productivity increases. It had been right in front of me the whole time.

At Occupy the City we spend our time with professionals that have a huge drive for success. This is exactly the caliber of MLM business owner that will make you successful. More of them come to us every day with a desire to be a part of something so timely, and forward thinking.

Professionally managed marketing + automated training+ personal support + strength based task assignment + a community effort = one heck of a team based, automated marketing system, Occupy the City.

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Pricing your Product to Move - Affiliate Marketing Tips

In any marketplace finding the price to ask for your product or service that appeals to customers but doesn’t cut you out of profits is a tough balancing act to pull off. Pricing at what you think you deserve for your work may suit your self image but it might mean your product or service will not sell. A big factor is the competition because if someone else comes into the market with a similar product for a little less, they can steal your market share. But on the other hand selling too low means losing margin which means at some point you lose money so why be in the marketplace at all?

This dilemma is just as much of a challenge when selling your product online in a digital marketplace like Clickbank as it is outside of cyberspace. Clickbank doesn’t set your prices and you will live or die in their market based on the quality of your product, how well known what you have to offer is and the relationship between price and value. All of these things are age old market principles that are unchanged just because our marketplace and our product has all gone digital.

One school of thought calls for you to come in with as low a price as you can so you can capture larger sales numbers. Within the context of Clickbank, this does have some solid business thinking behind it. The Clickbank tracking system reflects the movement of your product quantitatively and that is reported to existing or new affiliates. So simply put, the more product your sell, the better it looks to new affiliates. This means more affiliates pick up your product out of the Clickbank marketplace and your sales continue to go up which is a delightful momentum to see happen. That kind of market behavior can offset setting your price low fairly easily.

The other school of thought calls for you to set your price higher to reflect a higher quality product and realize a greater profit per unit on each sale. This may result in fewer affiliates picking up your product on Clickbank but the sales they do generate give you a higher return per unit. It’s possible the outcome could be a wash so deciding which approach to you can be intuitive and may be an area worth some experimentation to see which business model works best for you.

Much of the beauty of becoming an internet marketer in the first place is that you have so much more price leverage than a traditional merchant outside of cyberspace. Because your product is entirely digital, you operate at basically zero overhead. Once you produce the software or the e-book, production is nothing more than generating another digital copy which costs nothing. You may have some software costs for specific formatting software but once your infrastructure is in place, your only cost is the time it takes you to make more product. There is no manufacturing, no cost of goods sold, no distribution costs and with the Clickbank system, virtually no advertising cost either.

This means you can afford to price your product competitively because you will always make a profit of some sort. Now the shelf life on digital products is not very long so you want to milk as much profitability out of each product during the months when it is “hot” and then pump more product into the Clickbank marketplace.

You do have to beware of adjusting your price too much on a single product. If customers see your price moving around, they lose faith in you as a merchant. The best way to “experiment” with pricing is to set a price on a product, track its sales and then sell a very similar product at a different product and continue to track and compare the results. While other factors influence sales, you can eventually develop a model which will serve as a solid pricing strategy.

Need more online selling tips? Grab them here!

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Just as a singer/songwriter like Michael Jackson or Sir Paul McCartney, writes a song once then gets paid a neverending stream of royalty income - or like the writer of the Harry Potter series - writes an irresistible novel then gets paid over and over again as thousands or millions of copies fly off the downtown book shop shelves!

Those royalty incomes are all variations of residual income. Or passive, automatic, monthly or annually recurring income. It’s a rather exciting prospect isn’t it? Many authors, playwrights and songwriters enjoy this recurring residual, royalty income! You can too, as a home based business entrepreneur, working with a telephone and the Internet from your home office. This is what I’ve done since 1997.

Do you fully understand, then, the business model, ideas and concept behind residual income? It is really quite a smart and yet simple business model: “You do something once then you get paid many times over again, for that clever initial action!” It could be the action of referring someone into an online business, like a nutritional MLM, for example.

Certainly, there are many types of home based work online and internet businesses that use the residual income model. For example, nutritional MLM or multi level marketing businesses that typically sell supplemental nutritional products, women’s cosmetics and household goods, like home cleaners, etc., all use the Residual Income Model. It first appeared in about 1950 and has made millions of dollars for business owners and top sales performers. It is also known as referral marketing.

They are a type of referral marketing where you refer someone once to a global home based business compensation matrix or structure then you get paid monthly recurring income at a certain percentage while they remain a paying customer of the company. The simple, compressed matrix works best. Not a complicated binary structure. It looks good in theory but does require a lot of supportive work behind the scenes to make sure your referred downline of customers does not collapse or disappear!

The critical importance of nurturing your workers:
They will all need your constant attention and coaching support, believe me.. Most people seem to work best with frequent leader’s help and reinforcement. You can even devise a system of rewards and incentives, like the large multi-level marketing companies always do. They offer holidays away to Hawaii, for instance, and frequent conferences with hotel accomodation.

Other very smart Internet marketers with online Australian small business ideas create their own passive income systems. I recently joined one such online business called “Passive Profit ROBOT”, created by Jeff Alderson of Florida, USA. I am extremely impressed with this system. It has genius-like simplicity because all I have to do is pass on a free marketing report, by referring people to my unique referrer web URL. That’s all I need to do! It is a very simple system where you refer people using The Internet, then you get paid regularly as they purchase marketing software and business information products through the Paypal and Clickbank merchant systems. Joining these merchant payment systems as an affiliate is a breeze too!

Geoff Dodd
Business Investigator
Perth, Australia