I want to get real with you about how it takes money to make money, especially if you’re an internet marketer, blogger, network marketer, and affiliate marketer.
All of these business models take money, or they take time and a lot of people don’t have the time to build their businesses, especially from the beginning, from scratch.
So, last year, I just calculated my taxes, I spent or reinvested over 15,000 back into my business. Thank goodness because I didn’t set aside any money for taxes. But as a small business owner, you can get a lot of write offs for your home business.
Anything from your phone to the office space, you can write off in your taxes. If you’re curious about that I would seek professional guidance. I’m not an accountant by any means but I know that if you use anything for your business, to make it grow that it could be a tax write off.
Same thing with mentoring. If you look at a lot of the top leaders in network marketing, they invest into mentors. Okay. I remember one year, Ray Higdon said that he invested $130,000 into a mentor. So, if you want to make big bucks. You’re gonna have to start thinking that you’re going to have to change your mindset into knowing that you’re going to have to spend money to make money.
So I get a lot of people that, you know, everyone gets people that complain about the starting price. You know when they join our business, the network marketing business. It’s funny that it’s hard for them to come up with $69 to start our business to become a full fledged business owner who gets their own pre built websites to promote, they get their own pre built sales funnel that helps you recruit people in your sales funnel.
They balk about $69 but they can spend 100 on on their cable television, they can spend 80 on their phone, they can spend $6 to $10 a day on Starbucks, like my wife and I do. My breve alone is almost $6 and then we get the egg bites and those are $3. So between my wife and I, we spend 20 Starbucks, you know, in the morning. So 20 bucks right there.
I know plenty of people do that. The problem is, it’s not that they can’t afford it. It’s that they don’t believe in Network Marketing yet. They don’t believe in network marketing as a business model, they don’t believe that it’s going to make them tons of money down the road.
All they’re thinking about are the old stories of, you know, the pyramid schemes and the Ponzi schemes and they don’t believe it’s a business, they think it’s a lottery ticket. They think it’s some kind of scheme that they’re going to join and they’re going to just ride it out and see if it pays off.
You can’t join and then wait for us to pay you. I mean, you have to move the product that’s the thing with network marketing is that you become a promoter, you become an independent contractor to promote the product of the company you join. So, if you get it and understand network marketing it could be a very powerful business model to get you out of your job. It allows you more time freedom. It can do a lot of different things.
In fact I will never go back to a job because network marketing is very efficient, and once it starts paying you it pays you consistently over and over and over, whether you work 10 hours a month or 100 hours a month.
Once you start building a team and they reorder their product you get a residual income check. And yeah, it’s gonna be small the first two to three years, but unless you’re an extrovert and you have 1000 friends on social media and they buy everything you promote then you can make great money in six months, but for an introvert like me, took four years for me to go full time.
But it’s taken bigger leaders five to eight years (or more), and now they’re making a million dollars a year, because they understand it takes time. It’s a real business, but like real businesses network marketing takes money, and it takes time.
How would you build your business with just time, you would learn how to prospect on social media. Social media is free. Anyone can post a post on Facebook, with their link in it, or have people private message you for your link once you post something that’s enticing and piques people’s interest.
I used social media when I started, I also started a blog, the blog wasn’t completely free. I had to pay for my Bluehost hosting, which now is $69 a month. I also have a couple premium plugins that make my blog faster. That’s about 50 bucks a month.
You know, it’s really hard to start your business for free, but you can, and leaders always advise that you start with your warm market when building a business – that means talking to friends and family, because it’s free to get your friends and family in, they trust you. It’s an easy market to break into.
But once you get into the cold market, you know you can, you only have so many friends and family you can talk to, then you have to start prospecting into the cold market. And that’s where a lot of people spend money on marketing and advertising.
Most businesses will invest all of their profits back into their business to keep it growing, and I’ve tripled my income every year since I started in 2014. That’s because I treat it like a serious business. And I reinvest 80% of my profits back into the business, because I want to keep it growing.
I don’t have a warm market, I don’t have any more friends or family that I need to talk to about this. So I basically have a blog, I have a YouTube. I do some paid advertising. And the more I spend on advertising the more leads I get and the more leads I get the more upgrades I get. Then I teach my new upgrades my number one lead generation technique because I want them to start recruiting their own people as soon as possible.
You want people to start recruiting, as soon as possible. You want them to get a paycheck, as soon as possible. That will greatly decrease their chance of quitting, and it’s all about reducing the attrition rate. You know, they say that the attrition rate in network marketing is very high, like 97% attrition means the percentage of people that quit. It’s like, 97% in the first year something crazy like that.
I know it’s better now, because the products are better. MLM has evolved a lot since social media hit the scene. But it takes money to make money. And I want to tell you real quick how I started. Because I really wanted to get out of my job, I hated it. I was 40 years old and I was still working in the restaurant business with 20 year olds running all around me. And I was $35,000 in debt.
But I discovered network marketing, and I needed, like $59 to start with maybe $25 as a starter fee, so I needed $80 to start. I was $35,000 in debt. I had only $90 on a credit card left to my name. I was dirt poor, literally, like I didn’t know what we were going to eat the next few days.
But I saw the vision in network marketing, and I used the last $80 on a credit card to start, then I ran so fast. I hit the ground running. And I got my wife first, and then I got one stranger in off of Twitter and I was like, yeah, Yeah.
But then the next month I only recruited one. The following month after that I think I didn’t recruit anyone. And then after that I recruited maybe two a month; then it was one a month. Then it was six a month. Then it was 10 a month, then it was 15 a month. Then it was 20 a month.
Because I was learning about the profession, I was learning how to recruit, I was doing more with my blog, doing more with social media. The good news is you get paid as you learn. So you might have a really bad first year, or a first bad month, but know that finally, it will pay you, 10 times more than what you put into it.
Like all those blog articles I did. I mean I was writing 1000 words a day, some of the stuff I had no passion for, no heart into it – I didn’t know what I was talking about. They were generic network marketing articles, and I wrote like 200, before I even got any traffic to my blog, I wrote 200 articles, I was only making like $100 to $200 a month in my business, and I was like it’s gonna be worth – it’s gonna be worth it.
Now I can say five years later, I’m getting paid like a doctor. I’m not even blogging anymore. So, it’s like paying me back 100 times what I put in the first two years.
So if you’re in the trenches and you’re working your butt off, and you’re making like 100 to $200 a month, know that if you keep at it and keep recruiting in three to five years, you will be making so much money, more money that you’re going to pinch yourself and you’re going to be like is this legal, I mean, where does this all this money come coming from, and you’ll cry with happy tears, it’ll change your life, and it’s unbelievable.
So MLM is definitely addictive. But the first two years absolutely suck. All you can do is keep recruiting and read ebooks about it, about the profession – lots of motivational videos and just hang in there, it will get better, but don’t jump companies every time it gets hard, or if you didn’t recruit anyone for a month or two months or three months, you’re gonna have dry spells, just like any other business, but remain faithful to one business for as many years as you can handle, even during the slow times, it will get better.
The grass is not greener on the other side, you have to start all over. If you join a new company people are gonna lose faith in you. If you’re jumping to a new company every six months, they’re gonna stop following you. Okay, So stay committed to one company and people will really respect you, that you stay committed to one company.
So those are my lessons today. It’s going to take money to make money. You can start with the last penny you have. And I don’t care if you complain. But know that eventually, you should reinvest whatever you can. Don’t just blow the profits, because that’s foolishness. That’s what rappers do when they get a record deal. They just spend it all. And then the next year, there’s a better rapper that comes out and they lost all their money so invest your money, start investing in stocks.
Reinvest a lot into advertising. I’m utilizing my blog. I got some article writers now to scale it up, once you get money scale it up, inject it into your business and get that baby flying until you’re recruiting, you know, hundreds of people a year, you know at least 30 people a month. Just get it blowing up and then you’ll start getting bonuses from the company and reinvest the bonuses.
Then at the end of the year when you do your taxes, you’re going to be pleasantly surprised that you can lower your taxes by whatever 40% 60%, because you reinvested it. You didn’t just blow it. Okay, it’s all worth it in the end, so hang in there guys, I love you, like and subscribe and we’ll talk to you soon.
Thanks for reading!
