So I want to talk about longevity in network marketing. I was thinking this morning about all the musical artists that are still going strong, playing music, releasing albums in their 70s and 80s. Dolly Parton, Cher, the Rolling Stones, Ozzy Osborne, to name a few. They’re still producing albums.
And it’s not that they have to do it because they’re obviously wealthy. I think Dolly Parton is worth half a billion or a billion dollars. She has other business ventures, but she’s just going strong. Ozzy just released an album last year, and Rolling Stones just released a blues album, I think two years ago.
So they just keep doing it. It’s in their blood. It’s in their DNA. You know, I can just hear Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sitting around going, you know, let’s do a blues album. That’d be fun. And Keith is like, yeah, yeah, let’s do it.
And that’s how you have to think about network marketing. It’s got to be something that you do every day. It’s just part of you. Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to be a master at something, that’s like 10 years, three hours a day, something like that, something crazy like that. So I mean, we’re talking about massive action.
So I want to talk about some network marketing timelines to success. And there’s many different styles and you know, your level of success is dependent on you, your tenacity, and your network. It’s all about networks, right? It’s called network marketing, because you got to network with a lot of people to move products.
So on the timeline, the fastest you can get success that I’ve heard of is about a year. This woman is young, and she’s got lots of friends on Facebook and she’s extroverted – and she’s a people person. Okay. So these are good qualities to have in network marketing. You know, to be extroverted, to have lots of friends, and be outgoing. She skyrocketed to over $100,000 a month her first year, because she had a big network already of close friends and she’s outgoing and people listen to her.
She’s like, hey, let’s build this. So I call that the perfect storm. She was the perfect person in the perfect company at the perfect time, and she exploded.
Generally people say that the timeline to success in network marketing is three to five years, and that’s just what they say because they want you to kind of have a picture of the average it could be two to five years – depends on how fast you want to grow it, and how big of a network you can grow.
People that can grow a business in two to three years, they have a large following. Usually, they have a blog that gets lots of traffic or they have a YouTube with lots of subscribers.
There’s also leaders that come over from other companies and bring their teams with them. So it’s a snowball effect. You bring over all your contacts from your previous network marketing company. That happens all the time. So contacts are crucial.
But the people that succeed in two to three years, they have a big following. They have a big YouTube. They might have a website that gets thousands of visitors every day, and they just write some articles about it or do some videos about it and they can get a lot of people in.
There is a person that skyrocketed in our company. Actually, I see this a lot. They come in, they skyrocket, and then three months later, you don’t see them anymore. Or they’re not at the top of the leaderboard. Those people, what they do is they usually sign up and they’ll do a video on their YouTube or they’re already a big, you know, social media influencer, and they’re excited about their new company.
So they do a video about it, and Facebook posts about it, put it on their blog, whatever. So their original audience already sees that this person is brand new in this company, and so they get a lot of recruits that way.
They basically tap into their audience, their pre-existing audience, and then it takes off, and the person brings in hundreds of people in the next few months, and then that pre existing audience has already been exposed to the company. Then that person kind of fades back down the leaderboard.
So there’s a lot of shooting stars on the leaderboard, and these are people that have large pre-existing audiences. So the bottom line is getting a lot of traffic to your websites. If you don’t have a pre existing audience, you have to do two things: pay advertising to get the ball rolling or you can create content, which is free, almost free. You might have to pay for a blog host. But YouTube videos are free.
So you create content, and you do paid advertising, and you can slowly build up your social media platforms, but building social media platforms from scratch is really hard these days. You can only follow like 50 to 100 people a day on Twitter, and if you follow aggressively on Facebook, they can throw you in Facebook Jail. That’s why I don’t really like Facebook. I tried growing it really fast back in 2014. I followed a lot of people who didn’t know me. They flagged me and I got thrown In Facebook Jail.
Twitter, on the other hand, I got to follow a lot of people. I got my Twitter account up to I think 200,000 followers, but I had to follow a lot every day. Then if they didn’t follow me back within a week, I had this unfollow software and I would unfollow all the people that didn’t follow me within a week. It’s called churning. And I just churned through the numbers until my following started climbing. And that’s really impossible to do today with the algorithms. You can only follow like 50 but back in 2015-16, I could follow 500 a day.
So, social media isn’t even really effective. You got to nurture it. You have to form relationships. It takes a while to form relationships. So the quickest way to get traffic to your website is paid traffic and start creating content like videos, blog articles. And that’s about it.
So back to the timelines. I’ve heard some amazing stories. People with tenacity, people that just kept going. Right? It’s that DNA thing. It’s in their blood – they were unwilling to quit – and that was me. I was writing blog articles every day, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. I wrote like 200 articles. I was only making a couple hundred dollars a month.
I had to go back and get a job four times, because I would get a little spike in my income and I would be like, oh cool, I can come home full time. You know, and then my income would go back down because people quit in network marketing. And I go, oh, man, I gotta go back and get a job.
So don’t quit your job too early, because your income can greatly fluctuate depending on who you got on your team. But you know, there’s a lot of people that join network marketing and they don’t expect it to be hard like a real business, like a real profession.
It’d be like someone going to college to become a doctor, and they’re just a freshman, and they’re like, let me at it. Let me just start doing surgeries now because I’m bored. I don’t want to do eight years of college. Let me do surgery now. I got three months of college. Let me at it!
And that’s what some people do when they join network marketing. They don’t have realistic expectations. And yeah, we all want to make money fast, but that’s not how it works in reality, that’s not how it worked out at your job.
It took me years. I didn’t even make any money, I worked in the restaurant industry and raises were a joke. I think I got a quarter raise one time after a year and a half of working there. A quarter raise – a quarter an hour – that’s ridiculous. And a lot of jobs are like that. You know, you might get a $2 an hour increase once a year or once every two years, it’s still not good money.
So, network marketing is exciting because you can make bank. I mean, you get a large team built and you can make legally over $100,000 a month. There’s no way you can do that on your own at a job. You know, you can make more than a doctor, you can make more than a lawyer. You can make life changing income.
So back to the timelines. Some of the most inspiring stories were people that stayed in and they hustled and they worked and they lost teams, but they kept going and they rebuilt their teams.
There is a pizza immigrant driver who couldn’t even speak English when he came to America. He was from Armenia – and he lost a lot of people on his team and he kept going – and he kept going. He was like a tortoise. He was just determined. He used to go to network marketing events and he hid his car around the block because it was a beater, and he was so embarrassed, but he had to go to these events. His life depended on network marketing. His back was against the wall.
You gotta be a little crazy to succeed in network marketing. You know, but those rags to riches stories are very inspiring. And you’re sitting on a million dollar business, you really are. I mean, you can look at the leaderboard over at business for home org. You can look at the top earners and see that a lot of the top leaders make over $500,000 a month.
So it truly is Life Changing income. So he kept going and he kept going. And finally he made it after eight years his team hit a Pinnacle and he started making enough money.
I don’t know how much he made but he bought a house for his parents. He flew them in for the event where he got his award, bought them a house, bought himself a house, his whole life changed. But it took eight years of struggle.
Now I’m approaching four years in my company and I work full time from home. I love it. But I can always push the envelope and make it grow more. So it depends on how fast you want to grow and where you want to plateau. I mean, I plateaued, you might have many plateaus.
My plateau right now is enough to keep me home full time. I can pay my bills, I can buy food. But I’m not like flying on Lear jets and traveling the world. But, I could hit the pavement. I could build a network bigger, stronger. So you almost have control over what you want.
You know, like I said before, the income you want is dependent on you. How far do you want to take it? So there’s a couple other guys, Dale Calvert, he’s an MLM trainer. He hit a million a year, his 10th year. So he was really slow to start. Couldn’t get it. You know, he just didn’t do the right things and got held back for many years, but he kept going. He had tenacity and his tenth year he broke a million. That’s phenomenal.
So you can’t ever stop. You gotta just get it in your blood. You gotta get it in your DNA. Another guy is Jordan Adler. He just didn’t get it. And he thought it was the company’s fault, so he kept jumping companies. And by his 12th company, he realized that it wasn’t the company’s fault, that he had no success. That’s when he had a paradigm shift with his thinking and just decided to go for it. He’s like, I’m tired of blaming, I’m not going to be a victim anymore. It’s not the company, it’s me. I have to change what I’m doing.
And, in his 12th company, he recruited a woman, his 16th person, and she brought in her friend, and that friend is the one who recruited thousands of people. Then Jordan’s network blew up to 20,000 people, and he started making $100,000- $150,000 a month. But it took him 11 companies to figure out that it was him who had to change not the company.
So remember that: It’s all dependent on you. It’s not the company’s fault. It’s not your sponsor’s fault. It’s not anyone’s fault, but yours if you’re blaming, you got to point the finger back at you.
Because I’m getting exactly what I’m worth right now for the amount of work I put into my network marketing, I’m getting paid exactly what I’m worth what I’ve put into it. And I’m fine with that. I’m fine working one hour a day for residual income that pays all my bills. If I want to do more, I would and you can do the same thing.
For less than $200 a month, you’re sitting on a million dollar business, but you have to believe it’s a real business and a real profession. You’re not going to get a ton of success in one month.
There’s people that start MLM because they think it’s a lottery ticket. They don’t really have any numbers to go on. So they make up numbers in their head. They’re like Oh, I should be making $2000 a month by next month, right? One month to get to 2000 a month. Yeah, maybe if you got 3000 Facebook friends that do everything you say, you could make money like that.
But if you’re brand new and you only have a couple hundred Facebook friends, and they don’t really do anything you say; and you don’t have any following on social media and you don’t have a blog and you don’t have a YouTube – you’re not gonna make anything – just like the freshmen who wants to do surgery. The teacher’s gonna be like, you gotta wait, you know, like eight more years before you do surgery.
I’m not trying to be bitter and bring you down. I’m just saying that the money is there. It’s possible. At least the possibilities there. It’s not possible at your job. In Network Marketing, there’s millionaires right there and they’re like, come on, Erik, you can do it.
It’s all in here (your mind). It’s your belief. It’s your mindset. That’s why all the leaders are like mindset, mindset, mindset mindset. You got to change your mindset. And it’s not what you can earn. It’s what you and your team do. It’s called leveraged income, you’re leveraging the efforts of others like John D Rockefeller said, I’d rather earn 1% from 100 people, then from 100% from my own efforts. And that basically means you need a team to help you make that kind of money.
In the beginning, I was a lone wolf and lone wolves don’t make any money in network marketing. So you got to get people in your business and teach them how to generate leads. I get people on my team that they don’t know how many leads they need. And if you’re dealing with the cold market, people that don’t know you, you have to generate lots of leads consistently.
And in the beginning, it can get expensive. That’s why I say create content. You can run ads, but start to use a youtube or blog, something where you can get your name and yourself up on Google and start getting some organic traffic. Because organic traffic to your blog and your YouTube is free, and everyone likes free traffic, but content takes a while to grow. So that’s what I think.
You can start with your warm market, friends and family, which I never did, then break into the cold market aka strangers by doing paid advertising and by creating content and that’s about it guys. It’s all about the numbers. It’s about keeping people in and excited and getting their expectations realistic. You know, I’ve had people that join me and they’re like, I want to make 25,000 a month with this in six months, and they have no clue. They don’t know what network marketing entails and they quit.
The biggest talkers quit the soonest. Okay, remember that the biggest talkers quit the soonest. So don’t get your hopes up if you get a big talker. It’s usually the quiet people, like myself, that will surprise the sponsors. I was just desperate enough to change my life. My back was against the wall. And you gotta be a little insane to succeed.
You got to have a little OCD. You gotta be obsessed with success like Grant Cardone says, you have to really want it, or do you want just a little side hobby, you know, that’s gonna make you a couple hundred bucks if you’re lucky, every month – if you’re lucky, treating it like a hobby.
Your back has to be against the wall. The people that make it have their back against the wall or they’re going through a major life change. Either they just got recently divorced, or they got laid off. And they have the work ethic, the tenacity, a little OCD. And they know it’s gonna take a couple years. Those are the people that make it or they’re dirt poor and they’re sick of it. They’re finally done with being poor. And they’re like, let’s go for this. Let’s do it!
But you have to have the sustaining power, sustaining energy because it’s a two to three to five year plan. You gotta bring in hundreds of people. And only three to five of those people are going to become your leaders. You know, you have to bend your expectations, you have to expand your expectations.
When I first started network marketing, I thought 40 leads was a huge number, and turns out that there’s people generating, you know, 100 leads a day. I’m like, What 100 leads a day?! So, you’re not gonna grow a business, just getting a couple leads every day if you’re in the cold market. With a warm market, you can just talk to people you know, and get them in. That’s easy. But if you want to keep growing, because you’ll run out of Facebook friends, you will run out of your warm market. If you want to keep growing like the leaders, you have to create content like this.
Because this video/article will be up for the next 10 years generating leads – if I leave a link under this video, that’s what you got to do. Talk about what you want to talk about. You don’t have to talk about your products. Talk about your life. You do that enough and people will start to follow you. Form a tribe of people. I mean, you only need a few hundred people on your team to make pretty decent money.
What if you had 5000 subscribers on YouTube and 300 of them signed up in your business? It can be very powerful. You only need three to five leaders. If you’re in a binary, like my business, you only need a big leader on the left and a big leader on the right. That’s ideal. And you don’t even need a leader on the power leg because I’m helping you build your power leg. I’m putting people down your power leg.
You just need one or two people on the power leg and you’re set and then you just build your small leg. Your pay leg as they call it, build out your small leg and you only have one leg that you got to worry about because the power leg is taken care of. That’s awesome.
I have people on my team that only have to build one leg. And this might be a new language for you, but it’s basically how your organization is built. There’s a left leg and a right Leg. And you usually have to build both and build them out balanced. But in our business, you just have to put a couple on the power leg and then just build out one leg, and that maxes out the comp plan that we have.
With our comp plan, we can make a million dollars a month. There are people making a million dollars a month in our company in our specific company. So it’s a very powerful compensation plan, and I’m sitting on a million dollar business. Let that sink in for a little bit. You’re sitting on a million dollar business – a million a month.
Right now I could grow it. I could bring in thousands of people and grow it. And I am because I’m a long hauler. I’m a long distance walker and I’m going to walk to the finish line with glory and grace and I’m going to have everything paid for and my wife and I are going to travel.
We’re going to eat at all the nice restaurants and talk about it. Maybe do a video about it. Doing one meal a day – attract the omad audience to our brand. Get some omad people in our business – one meal a day. Talk about sushi and filet mignon or whatever – talk about fasting and feel totally alive on a three day Dry Fast you feel like you’re gonna die one minute and then you feel bliss the next.
So design a business you want. If you want 20,000 a month, you have to bring in 1000. You gotta bring in 100 and a couple of those people should be a leader. And they help you bring in 1000 People. Yeah, I think about 1000 people on your team would get you about 5000 a month. Maybe 2000 people would be 10,000 a month. 4000 people would be 20,000 a month.
So, you’re not bringing all these people in. You might be like 2000 people?! It’s like no, you bring in 100 and then they help you bring in those thousands.
You know, some leaders, they only bring in 25 people, but they work with those people very closely, and out of that three people become leaders. You don’t need a lot of people to help you bring in thousands of people. Like Jordan Adler, the 16th person he brought in, brought in another woman who then recruited 2000 people and that turned into 20,000.
A couple years later, Jordan’s still making over 100,000 a month, and that was years ago, when he wrote beach money. It’s a great book, you should check it out. He wrote beach money years ago, and he’s still making over 150,000 a month.
Just like I’m still making residual income from work I did four years ago. I put in the work, I created content, and my team is still paying me. My business is still paying me for articles I wrote in 2014-2016. There’s still people on my team from 2018 recruiting every single day – and that’s the beauty of network marketing – it’ll pay you over and over and over forever for work you did one time.
So hang in there guys, bend your perception, expand it. Double or quadruple your work output. Double or quadruple how many leads you think you need because I always tell my team to work up to 50 leads a day. And if they’re brand new, they’re like what? 50 I was only generating five leads a day. I’m like no 10X it. Read 10 x by Grant Cardone great book. Everyone should read that who wants to do business, the 10x rule by Grant Cardone, and we’ll leave it at that.
