Hey guys, so I really want to talk to you about if network marketing is really worth it. So that’s the question of the day for this article and I’m going to get into some details, I’m going to be very real and honest because that’s what we do here. We keep it real, none of the MLM hype, you know, join me, I’m a top leader, I have a Lamborghini outside my house.
I’m going to share with you my hardships, but I’m going to tell you, the reality of network marketing and what it really takes to grow a business. I’m here for you guys, and I’m not exactly someone that just rose up through the ranks overnight with success everywhere and millions of dollars. You know, I actually have a very hard story just like a lot of us who are not perfect. You know, I was an alcoholic for 16 years and and an introvert, with no friends and I found network marketing and I was already doing internet marketing when I found network marketing and I liked the idea of network marketing because you could get more commissions because you get a little bit of commissions from a lot of different people which adds up to you know people are making over $100,000 a month in network marketing.
I was like how am I going to do network marketing because most of the people are very extroverted. I’m gonna just go for it. So when I started, I just started sharing my links that the company gave me, those are the signup forms where you can take a free tour and look inside the business and you get a temporary dashboard, you get a temporary spot. And if you want to lock in your spot, then you typically have to buy a product and become a member.
So I did this back in 2014, and I started sharing my link. The thing that was missing for me was, for one I didn’t want to talk to a sponsor. I didn’t want to be told what to do. I didn’t want some loud car salesman type person to call me and tell me that I have to do three way calls and get on webinars and go to hotel meetings and do house parties. I wanted to do it all on the internet, and I wanted to automate it.
And so the first place where I got to do that was Twitter. And I know I say this a lot, but I’ll tell you again, I automated my Twitter. So when someone new followed me, they would get a direct message. And that direct message was automated. I was using a software called crowdfire app. And the message was something like we’re looking for motivated entrepreneurs who want to earn extra income from home, click here, and then I’d put my landing page link and people would sign the form and it would generate a lead.
And it got to the point where I was generating 10 leads a day and you know, my business was growing kind of slow, and I asked my sponsor, finally I talked to them and I was like, what do I do to grow my business faster? And he said, generate more leads. That’s the bottom line Guys, if your business is growing slow, it’s because you’re not sharing your website to enough people. So how do you do that?
Well back in 2014 I decided to follow a lot of people every single day so that they would receive that automated message more. In fact, I started opening up several different Twitter accounts and I followed like 2000 people a day. So hundreds of people are getting that direct message, increasing my leads, and then the company emails my leads. So the more leads I had, the more signups I would get.
So that’s still the premise today for growing your business. But let’s talk about if it’s actually worth it. It depends on your situation. I was cooking for a living making only $11 an hour. I consider myself a smart guy, but most of my life, my role models were rock stars or alcoholic writers. So when I was 12 I wanted to be a rock and roll drummer. I drummed, you know, I drummed for like 12 years, and I fell into the Rock and Roll lifestyle. I became a drunk. It was just alcohol and girls and really loud rock and roll. And then I wanted to be a writer, and lots of writers that I looked up to drank very heavily. And so I just fell into alcohol. And eventually it took away those passions.
The only passion left was alcohol. The writing was gone. The drumming was gone. Long story short, I didn’t really care about going up a ladder, a corporate ladder and since I was shy or introverted, I just stayed in the back of the house. That’s what they call it in the restaurant. I stayed in the back of the house and just rose up to be a line cook, and the highest I made it was like a sous chef, where I supervised a kitchen. But I was basically just like at a desk, staring at the computer screen. I wasn’t cooking anymore. very boring.
So anyways, I needed a way out because I was almost 40 and my back was killing me. I was making $11 or $12 an hour. And when I discovered network marketing and saw that the leaders were making over $100,000 a month, I was like, I need to do this. Since I already liked writing. I created a blog, and I started writing articles.
So I’m not saying that you have to start a blog. Blogging is totally different now. And it’s very competitive and you need thousands of articles to become a big presence on the internet, maybe not thousands, but you need hundreds of articles. So if you don’t like writing, don’t even start a blog because you’re gonna need hundreds of articles.
It fell in my lap because I loved writing when I started my blog. And it took about two years and 300 articles for one article to reach the top of Google. And I started getting people on my team from other countries, just from one article, but it took about 300 articles for that one article to really, you know, shine. And I got a couple leaders from the Philippines. I got a leader from Nigeria, and I got a couple small teams going and started to taste the success of network marketing but the first two years I was watching like two hours of videos a night on YouTube from MLM trainers, like Todd Falcone and Ray Higdon.
And I had many hard nights because I really wanted it bad. Plus, I had a little bit of greed in there too. So I was desperate and I was just like, this has to work and why are people quitting on me? So that’s the first thing is you gotta be hungry, very hungry for this opportunity. And you have to have a long term vision. I was hanging on for a long time. I didn’t know if it was gonna work. I was barely breaking even.
In fact, some weeks I was actually negative. I owed the company because I had a couple people refund and that made my Commission’s negative. I had to watch some rags to riches, network marketing stories to keep me motivated. I started watching Tony Robbins just to keep myself pumped up. Because it was just me and my fiance. She didn’t really know what I was going through.
But I put all my eggs in one basket and I was praying that it would work. I was looking at my dashboard every hour to see if I got new leads or any signups and I was praying. Finally, I got duplication, and that is the most beautiful thing you can have in network marketing. And that’s where you make the big money. What duplication means is that you recruited someone who starts recruiting their own people, they basically become independent of you and they start growing their own team.
So that’s the second tip I want to talk about is that you want to recruit people that want to build a business. I very rarely promote products. Most products in MLM are good, you know, I’m not gonna go into product debates with other distributors and say our products are better than yours. I usually lead with the business opportunity. That means that I lead with the income opportunity. If you want to make extra income, take a free tour through my website, that sort of thing. A lot of people fail because they’re just trying to promote their products, and it becomes a competition. And really, today people don’t care about your product. They’re like, Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that before. There’s 1000 other brands out there. What makes your product better than the others and I just don’t want to play the product debate game.
So most people that have signed up with me, they found me on Google because like I said, I was blogging. I started a YouTube channel. And so things were showing up on Google that I created. And I started generating leads and sales that way, but it took a couple years.
Now, the other fastest way to grow your business is social media and you can prospect, learn how to prospect on Facebook, whatever and the leaders are going to tell you to prospect your friends and family because they’re the easiest to get in your business. I never did that. Like I said, I was an ex- alcoholic. I didn’t have any friends left. They all left with the alcohol and I didn’t want to bug my parents about it because I always had big dreams and fancy ideas and they were like, okay, Erik, you know, but they never really bought what I was doing.
So I was basically alone. I started in the cold market right away and that means strangers, people that don’t know you. I didn’t have a warm market. I didn’t really like Facebook. I kept getting thrown In Facebook Jail. And so it was like, I’m gonna just create content. And now, a couple years in, that content started generating the leads. I have this analogy of crab pots. Each article or each video is a crab pot, you throw that into the water or into the sea on the internet, and eventually, you’re going to get leads that go into that crab pot and you can pull it up, and you’ll have leads.
So the more content you create, the more crab pots you have thrown out there, which means you can generate more leads, it’s all basically a leads game. Because you’re gonna run out of friends and family to talk to. If you are doing great on Facebook and you got all your friends in and all your family members in, it’s gonna seem like it’s easy. It’s gonna seem like you’re making a lot of money very fast and you’re gonna be excited but that honeymoon won’t last, because most of your friends and family don’t do network marketing. They got in because of the products, you know, you lost a few pounds and they’re like, wow, I want to join. But they have no idea how to do network marketing.
So eventually your friends and family quit in six months to a year, and you’re back to square one. So if you’re serious about this business, you have to think long term 5 to 10 years. It could be sooner, could be later. But you have to think it’s gonna be a 5 to 10 year plan, and you want to create content. If you’re serious about this business, this profession, then you want to create content because five years from now you could still have a video that’s getting views every single day and generating new leads or a blog post or whatever. It could be a long Facebook post. It could be a post on LinkedIn, it could be a post on medium.com But content rules, but it’s very hard to get going.
So I want to tell you one more analogy, and then I’ll let you go. This is how serious it is. So let’s say you want to get your doctorate in college, you want to become a doctor. It takes about eight years to get your doctorate. So four years for your bachelor’s degree, six years to get your master’s and eight years to get your doctorate or PhD might be even 10 years, but let’s say it’s eight years. So I’ve been doing this since 2014. So that’s six years. So I’m basically finishing up my master’s. Now I can tell you now the results vary. Okay. This is just what I’ve made in the last six years in network marketing. I’ve made probably $200,000 as an introvert recluse who doesn’t do three way calls. I’ve done one three way call my whole life. I haven’t done one hotel meeting or one house party. I haven’t done one zoom call. I haven’t done one webinar.
It’s basically been all through my blog and my YouTube and some paid advertising. I’ve generated over 60,000 leads and most people join me without even talking to me. Now, if you’re serious about this, so if I just finished my master’s degree, you know, if I was in college, and I just finished my master’s, I would owe the college about $150,000, maybe more, but I’ve made $200,000 in this profession, simply by writing a lot of content and doing videos. So it’s been very well worth it.
But let’s pretend you’re just starting college. If you’re a freshman, your first year sucks. You get dumped on by the seniors, people make you a little slave, they stomp on you, they want you to cheat for them, and then you join the wrong crowd and they’re doing drugs and you’re just like, Man, I’m gonna flunk out if I don’t find the right crew, or the right crowd to hang out with.
That’s the same thing in network marketing. The first year or the first two years are just crap, unless you’re an extrovert and everyone loves you, and they sign up with you. And, you know, you can get quick success that way. But for me, and for most people, they don’t want to talk to their friends and family. And they have to go through some really hard times. Even the leaders today say that it’s hard. I know top leaders that used to sleep on friend’s floors because their business did not grow fast enough. They unpredicted it and they thought they would have more success after two years and they didn’t. They lost everything and had to sleep on the floor at friends houses.
So you might be couch-surfing for the first two years, it could be really brutal. But, by year four, you’re going to really know what’s going on in network marketing, you’re gonna have some solid footing, and you could actually be very successful by year four, it could take longer if you’re an introvert, if you’re quiet like me.
So it all depends on how hungry you are. Even if you just stay in by buying you know, $70 worth of product every month and just watch it and learn. You can earn as you learn, so you don’t have to know everything to make money in network marketing. I didn’t know anything except I had to get people looking at my websites, that’s the bottom line – how you can consistently get people viewing your websites. Okay? And I go back to that every single time. You just boil it down to the most basic practice in network marketing. That is to get more views on your websites. And you can target people.
You can use paid advertising, you can create content, you can do social media prospecting. I believe in attraction marketing, I attract prospects to me. They pretty much know what they’re getting involved with when they sign up with me. I rarely talk to people on the phone, because they’re like, yeah, I know what this is. I’ve done network marketing before. If I need anything, I’ll reach out to you. Now that’s probably the sense that I’ve given people and maybe people have watched me before and they’re
like, Okay, I know Erik, I know his style. So I’m going to join him. I like his style. But you know, I’m not, I’m not gonna bug him a lot because he’s all about automation.
So you kind of attract the people you want in your business. I want internet marketers, people that get it. Maybe they’re entrepreneurs already, and they have a business or they’ve had a business before – they know what hard work is, and they are consistent. They have tenacity. You know, most of the guys on my team right now, they’ve been in for two, three years. And they keep plugging away every single day. They’re creating videos, they’re creating blog posts, they’re doing ads, and they’re just on fire. They’re just doing it without me. Sometimes they don’t even respond back if I email them and say great job. I don’t even hear from them. They’re just, they’re just on their own. They’re just going for it.
So, if you’re an extrovert and you love people and you want to talk to them hours on the phone at night, you’ll probably attract people like that. So it all depends on how you put yourself out there. Okay? Eventually you will get a team that you love. Whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, whatever, you can attract who you want in this business. And you can even deny people into your business. Now, you can’t be a rude person and say, No, you can’t join me. But, you know, there’s ways where you can kind of divert them and they’ll join somebody else or they’ll just give up on you. Okay, you don’t have to be a chopping block for mean people. You know, I’m not going to put up with someone that’s rude to me.
If they don’t email me in a professional way, if they don’t say, Hello, Erik, this is Tim Burton from Cincinnati. I really like what I see from your opportunity. I’d like to sign up with you. I just had one question, what product do I need in order to sign up? I love people like that.
But if they go, Hey, call me. I’m not gonna play. I’m not gonna do that, you know? How long would that person last in my business talking that way? You know, I don’t do it. They don’t get a response from me. Maybe the first month in network marketing I would have I would have been like, Oh, it’s $69 a month and please join me you know, because I was so desperate. But if you treat yourself as a professional, then you’ll attract professionals. If you are spamming Facebook groups left and right that you can get rich in two weeks, then you’re going to get a lot of get-rich-quick people that won’t last. They’re like, I thought this was free and I thought I’d be a millionaire by now, you know, what’s the deal?
So it’s all how you hold yourself. treat this like a profession, and it will pay like a profession like Eric Worre says. Study the profession. It’s different from any other profession out there. It’s just a different animal. I’ve had doctors and lawyers sign up with me and they didn’t get it. You know, they didn’t understand how it worked and they quit.
You have to be selfless. And you want to help others get to the finish line before yourself. In the corporate world, people don’t get it. They’re like, no, it’s all about me. I’m going to climb the ladder and stomp all over you. But in network marketing, you want to help your team finish the finish line before you. That’s where the income comes from is when you motivate and inspire your team. And that’s why my business grew slow in the beginning, because I was just thinking about me, I needed money and I didn’t get any money. The reverse will happen. It’s a paradox in network marketing.
So I hope this helps, you gotta be hungry, you have to really want it, you almost have to be a little crazy to make it work, especially these days. It’s so competitive. You really have to put in the numbers. If you don’t have any time, and you don’t have any money, don’t do it. Because it’s going to take one or the other or both. I spent like $10,000 maybe more last year just on advertising for my business. And like I said, I’ve been in this for six years.
And, if you’re thinking why spend money on your business, you got to treat it like a corporation like a million dollar business. Corporations are constantly reinvesting their profits into their business. So don’t think you can just take out money whenever you want from this business like it’s some kind of piggy bank, you have to put money back in it and scale up. You have to treat this like an internet marketing business. You got to scale up and you got to put money back into it. And you have to become very visible, you have to be seen everywhere.
Okay, so If you don’t have any friends, and you don’t have any money and you don’t have any time it’s not gonna work – the bottom line. So I didn’t have any money when I started. So I created content because content is basically free. Yeah, I spent like $60 a month on my blog, you know, but other than that the content was free I had to write it though. And I wrote 500 to 700 articles the first few years just to generate enough leads to start getting sign ups.
Now you can do it differently. You can do it faster, you can use Facebook, whatever but I like attraction marketing. I like content marketing. So if you want true success and you really want this it’s gonna be a few years and you got to put in something every single day if you want to get money back out, you got to put in time or money.
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