Good day all, this is Josh Fuson, and today we're going to be steam-rolling a very common lie that is so common within the home-business industry (especially in Network Marketing and MLM) that is near-synonymous with the industry. If you happened to catch the first installment of this 5 part series, I gave a little background about myself, and my involvement with Network Marketing. You need to know that I'm not anti-MLM, or anti-home business. I think that the home business is the very definition of Entrepreneurial Capitalism, and I absolutely love the idea of a person embarking upon a venture, starting from scratch, with a few hundred or a few thousand dollars, and turning that into a fortune. I'm Pro-Home Business.
However, I'm Anti-B.S. It absolutely disgusts me the amount of bad information that exists in my industry, and I am convinced that people involved with home businesses fail not because they are stupid, not because they are lazy, but because home-business training and education is of pathetically low-quality. I believe, 100% without doubt that if home-business personnel received the training and education they needed and deserved, that 90% failure rate would flip to a 90% success rate. With that in mind, let's go ahead and slam-dunk a common un-truth that is all-to-common in this industry.
HOME BUSINESS LIE # 4: "TO REALLY GROW YOUR BUSINESS, HAND OUT BUSINESS CARDS, FLYERS, AND TALK TO EVERYONE YOU MEET (ESPECIALLY IN THE SERVICE INDUSTRY) ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS"
We've all been there. We're sitting at a coffee shop, or we're at a restaurant, or we're at the mall, and we see them.
The Networkers.
They're handing out their card to everyone that walks by. Or they're jumping in on other people's conversations, explaining how they can show you the way to financial independence. Maybe they'll even quote a well-noted author like Robert Kiyosaki as evidence that they have a vehicle with a one-way ticket to billionaireville. They're just so excited about his opportunity that they're about to explode, and they're tying to get you to join them on their trek towards financial utopia.
How do I know this scenario so well? Because I used to be THAT GUY.
Oh, I'm not proud of it. I recall with un-fond memory spending many a Saturday morning making a complete joke of myself, using these very same techniques to try and grow my business. Can you guess what happened?
Yup. It didn't work.
Not only did I stay broke, but I felt like a total vulture, circling the sea of potential business-builders. It wasn't that I was a devious or evil person, it was just how I was trained. Hotel meetings. Wasting paper on business cards. I'm sure that if I would have had access to a B-52 bomber, I would have loaded it full of flyers and business cards and dropped my "opportunity bomb" on every major city in the United States. And after, I would have gone straight home to wait for my phone to start ringing, with people on the other end just begging to join my business.
I was that naive.
So what changed? I figured some things out. I figured out how to find my target market. And then I learned how to compete.
Ask yourself this question: would Bill Gates, or Donald Trump, or Larry Ellison try to grow their businesses by bugging people at a coffee shop, and consider that advertising? Does Microsoft employ people to hang out at consumer establishments and attempt to recruit new software users there?
No, they don't.
Here is what they do: they develop the right message, and send it to the right audience. They have commercials, billboards, online multi-media presentations, radio advertisements. They buy up space on stadium walls, they endorse NASCAR racers, they plaster their name on blimps. They get the message out to the masses, not the occasional purveyor of a Starbucks mocha.
Yeah, I know that you can't afford to advertise during the super bowl. So what do you do? How do you compete? You compete in environments that level the playing field. There are three of these environments, and mastery in each of these is absolutely mandatory if you hope to grow a fortune from home.
ENVIRONMENT #1- The Telephone. Folks, mastery of the spoken word over the telephone is absolutely essential. Why? Well, first off, the phone is cheap, which seems to be a major stipulation for the average home-business person. VoIP has made the phone laughably affordable, and accessible to all. Then there is the leveling ability of the phone. If I was competing against Enterprise rent-a-car, or if I was competing against Burger King, the fact stands that I have just as much of a chance of success with my commercial versus their commercials in a telephone environment. While they might have the advantages of huge chains that are nationwide, and I only have a few homemade burgers and my own car for rent, I have just as much of a chance to win business as they do when talking to a prospect over the phone. It levels the playing field, because the only obvious thing that stands out in a prospects mind over the phone line is the skill-set of the person they're talking to. It is this environment that you test and develop the right message, and locate your target market.
ENVIRONMENT #2- The Internet. Too many people think they can just buy a website out in e-world, and all of the sudden their computer is just going to start spitting out money from the monitor. You have to know how to drive traffic to your website, and on your website you must have a compelling message that you have crafted that speaks to the hearts of your target market. The reason you test and develop your message and locate your target market in the phone environment first is because it is a much less expensive process than doing it on the internet. It takes a lot of the guesswork out of the game once you hammer down your message and your audience. You can then channel your efforts to learning how advertising on the internet works, versus trying to develop that skill while simultaneously spending a lot of capital trying to establish your message and audience on the internet.
ENVIRONMENT #3- The Written Word. Copy is by far the most powerful of the three tools, and is the most advanced. It can have the largest financial rewards, and is also the most expensive skill to hone. That's why it's last. Once you generate profit over the phone, then expand those profits on the internet, you can start crafting copy that produces residual income like you've never imagined. Think of this as an example: Did you ever get to read a Mark Twain or Edgar Allen Poe piece while in school? Most of us have. Those guys have been dead for decades, generations, and still their work is producing huge amounts of income. They have powerful works, and the financial rewards from their efforts are still a reality years after they've expired. That's residual income.
I can absolutely understand if you are thinking that all of this sounds difficult, and here's the bottom line: building a million-dollar enterprise is not easy. If it was easy, then everyone would be doing it. A home business is never a cake-walk, but it is fundamentally simple. Once you have these three skills down cold, you're done. You've made it. But refusing to attain the skill-set necessary is the equivalent of asking the marketplace to reward you unfairly for your non-effort. And while the market place is fickle and harsh, it is also fair, and the 'something-for-nothing' dreams entertained by so many are usually met with reality.
Acknowledge the rules of the marketplace: Get skilled, and get paid.