My Journey to the World of MLM

Hello, my name is Marc Barrett and thanks for taking the time to visit my Blog.
I have had the good fortune to be involved in the network marketing industry for over 22 years and during that time I must have spoken to thousands of people about their goals and dreams, and you know what, we are really all looking for the same thing. Freedom…….
Now I truly believe that network marketing is the very best vehicle to achieve that financial and time freedom…. if done correctly. If your goal is to achieve that then you need to become a student of what it takes to succeed and what works.
Lets start with my failures, when I first entered the Network Marketing field even though I had been a successful business person before, I had no clue of how to make it work and I failed miserably for several months. I probably quit 5 times in the first 6 months. but you know, I just couldn’t let it go, I was hooked on the idea of being able to generate a huge residual income stream.
Then finally I got some good coaching and tips from very successful distributors who had built six figure monthly income streams. From that point I  went on to build a very large organization almost entirely from cold marketing approaches, not by talking to friends and family.
I became a 7 figure yearly income earner and over the years earned millions in this industry. My success was because I learned the lesson of working the numbers and using a marketing system could generate a high volume of lead traffic that could easily be duplicated by my organization.
Now if you currently in MLM and have not achieved the success you dream about you are probably even now searching for an answer,  trying to find a way to make your business work. Looking for the secret.
I hate to disappoint you, there is no secret, but there is a mispreception.
The mispreception is that you didn’t pay attention when you got into the business. Think now, you decided to get into the network marketing business not the network selling business.
Most people jump into this industry and quickly adopt the same strategy’s their sponsor or upline is using to build a team. I mean it makes sense, your upline recruited you so what they are doing must work.
The die is now cast, you go out and do the same thing. Network marketing is a business of total duplication, however duplication does have a dark side. We can and do duplicate business building approaches that really do not work very well.
Now I am not here to tell you to abondon the teachings of your upline, or to stop doing what you are currently doing to build the business.
The truth is all approaches work if you work them.
The problem is that some work better than others and most people do not have enough time, money, or resources  to throw at the problem to generate a high enough volume of leads to really get to the gold.
The success of Low volume approaches like working your warm market are based on the assumption that you have a 1% percenter lurking there, someone who will come in and explode your organization, and there very well could be, but the chances are there’s not. And the time it takes to use low volume approaches to build a business, it pretty much guarantees it will probably take you years if ever go reach your goals.
Time to change gears.
Using high volume approaches allows you to generate such a high volume of numbers that you can’t miss.
The high volume success formula really has 4 basic elements.
#1 A way to generate a high volume of traffic, a supply of leads that keeps flowing to you on a consistent daily basis.
#2 A sifting tool that allows you to automatically separate the prospects from the suspects,
#3 A presentation format and
#4 A follow up strategy.
Years ago my traffic formula was based on running ads in the classified section of major newspapers which gave me 80 to 100 leads a week, funneling the leads into a 2 min recorded voice mail summary to screen them, and then bringing the remaining prospects in groups of 6 to 10 into my home 3 times a day and showing them a video.
The follow up strategy was that I didn’t, the serious were attracted to me because they saw I had a system that worked and they needed what I had more than I needed them.
Did it work? Well it allowed me to sponsor over 250 serious distributors in 2 years and generate an income stream of over $1.5 million a year by my 2^nd year.
Today the Traffic formula is different, the traffic is online and the volume of that traffic is huge and its not hard to get to if you have the tools and the system. The good part is you are not going to have to put 30 people a day into your living room, and that once set up you system can pretty much run on autopilot 24 hours a day and its international.
If you are really committed to achieving financial freedom using the network marketing model in today’s market, start looking to  Internet marketing for your success.
To learn how to develop and use a marketing approaches that can quickly tap both local and international markets and help you join that top earner status in your current company, register for free marketing tips below:

Marc Barrett’s Marketing Updates

F0r a free training on how I use internet marketing to generate 50+ leads a day for my business click on the following link now

www.FirebrandNetworker.com

Marc Barrett

Online Business Development & Marketing Coach

Miami, Florida

305-945-9744

marc@businessproglobal.com

eXfuze Review - What? Not another Superjuice!

eXfuze Review

I remember it well, it was just another day in paradise as I sat in my home office in beautiful Miami, Florida and pondered what exactly had gone wrong with the MLM business that I had joined less than 6 months ago. We all begin our journey into the world of MLM in different ways but the one common thread is that at some point a friend, business associate, or many times a total stranger showed us the light financial freedom shining through the mist of our otherwise humdrum daily life. They had brought us the deal. I know that for many people all it takes is one look at a photocopied check or a 3 way call with the upline to have us sharing the vision. Many times its just such an exciting product that we have one of those “WOW” moments, a shiver goes up our spine and we can clearly feel the steering wheel of the new Ferrari in our hands. That was the essence of the company I had joined less than 6 months ago and yet I had just put the brakes on, parked the Ferrari and walked away. I more than anyone else, a 23 year veteran of the MLM industry, a million dollar yearly income earner, should have known better. I have a pretty structured set of review guidelines that I always use when evaluating a new company, but rather than applying them to this company, the “WOW” of the product was so strong not only could I feel the Ferrari I could even smell the leather! The other factor was that it had been brought to me by another seasoned veteran of MLM whom I had known for years, whom I had worked with in a previous company, and I respected his judgment. We had both done a critical analysis of the business after 6 months and both agreed that the flaws we should have seen if we had looked were there. The business judgment of the owners was flawed and even through the product was still ‘WOW”, it was so much so that many prospects just refused to believe it. The real killer was that the average usage was only about $8 dollars per distributor per month and you can’t build a successful downline on that type of volume, or if you do you can’t live on the income. Now here was my buddy Eddie Freeman on the phone again, less than a week or so after that, telling me he had found something incredible. Now a newbe in the industry probably would have been so crushed from the loss of faith when the deal did not pan out, they would have crawled into a hole, vowing never to be in network marketing again! The problem with professionals who have been around the industry for a few years and have achieved success is that we know the system works, even if sometime the companies do not. That’s what sets the top earning professional who seems to go from success to success apart from the frustrated beginner……………. belief! The professional also hit bad deals now and again, but they know when to stop and move on. Now of course once you have been in the industry for a while you do develop a feel for what looks good and what doesn’t but it still amazes me how many professional networkers still jump from deal to deal without ever using some type of business review process to help pick the right deals. I guess its just my background in business that causes me to look at pretty obvious factors that others seem to gloss over. This venture was called eXfuze and of course was brand new and just getting ready to pre-launch. He spun the tale well, the master distributor of eXfuze was Steve Campbell who was a 20 year industry success story. I knew Steve personally from the old days in NuSkin over 20 years ago, he was a very solid reputable guy. The VP of eXfuze turned out to be non other than Paul Morris, a legend in the MLM industry with over 40 years of experience stretching all the way back to Amway. Keith Halls another industry legend, who had actually been the CFO of NuSkin and helped take them public and was probably worth $50 million or so had even joined eXfuze as a distributor. A distributor?? Why would someone worth that much money want to join a company like eXfuze as a distributor? I was intrigued. eXfuze had $5 million in funding for the start up, had even enlisted a whole team of professional football players as investors, yada yada yada! Then the red flag! It was a dam superjuice!      Argggh……………..! Superjuices in MLM were about as common as BMW’s in south Florida! Now I know more than a passing amount about nutrition (I eat handfuls of vitamins every day that scares people when I pull them out at dinner), and I knew about the early success stories in the industry such as MonaVie, Tathian Noni and Xango. I had even studied the Superjuice market extensively while looking at a company called Cyberwize a few years ago when they launched a superjuice product called Tunguesta Blast (named after a meteor strike in Siberia that pretty much wiped out that whole section of the country). I had pretty much come to the conclusion after looking at the Cyberwize product that although good, the average person was still too ignorant on the concept of superjuices (“It costs how much? For juice?) and it would be an educational sale to recruit distributors and a little slow for my taste. But it seems that I had no other good prospects that day so I dragged out my business hat and my guidelines and started to study eXfuze. Now the four factors I believe you need to look at carefully when checking out a new opportunity are

1. Product – It all comes back to the product. Has to be a hot product in a hot market segment.
2. Company – Substantial funding and owners have to have substantial business background.
3. Key Distributors – Need to have substantial reputable key distributors and master distributor in place with proven performance in building and maintaining large organizations.
4. Ground Floor – Needs to have under 50,000 distributors in the US market.

Result What I found with eXfuze impressed me, all four factors lined up pretty well, in fact very well. The eXfuze Product In the product area, I found that the functional beverage market was exploding (Gatoraid, Red Bull, Vitamin Water, etc).  Superjuices was probably the fastest growing area of the nutritional market, there was a very high level of consumer awareness of specific superjuices that was not there even 36 months ago (good grief they sell Noni at Costco!), and the only companies in the MLM industry over the last 10 years to do the flag pole run up to a Billion dollars where in fact, all single product superjuice companies like MonaVie The eXfuze product held up pretty well in comparison to the competition.  eXfuze changed the basic business plan of going out to find one new superjuice everyone else had missed and had gone with a combo of the top 7 well known juices and combined them into one drink using cold process extraction, kind of like a multi-vitamin of superjuices.

eXfuze The Company

  eXfuze was founded by two brothers Rick and Don Cotton, and they have an impressive story about their fathers health and how they came to develop their product but more importantly Rick has extensive background in the network marketing industry and his brother Don a solid business background in the traditional business world that includes Microsoft and holding a CIO position for a publically traded company in the financial markets. Here was someone who might actually know how to run a business. Initial funding to start  eXfuze was reported to be $5 million, more than enough to cover a rapidly growing company during its initial shake out and explosive growth period. eXfuze Key Distributors eXfuze Master Distributor Steve & Melin Campbell were a good choice, they were proven performers in several successful MLM companies including NuSkin, Pharmanex, Rexalll, and ilink. I talked to Steve about many of the other MLM professionals who had joined eXfuze and I was impressed with a list of over 30+ six and seven figure yearly earners in the MLM industry had chosen to join such an early stage deal. Ground Floor This of course is where the rubber meets the road. There are many good MLM companies out there with great products and I truly believe that if you learn how to market properly you can be successful with any of them. However to truly generate wealth in this industry, lets face it, you need to be with a company that goes small to large with a vengeance, and you just don’t get that with a company that is already at a Billion in sales. From what I could tell eXfuze at the time had about 25,000 or so reps in the US and about 10,000 or so in Japan, and at the time eXfuze was at about $3 million a month in US volume which makes it pretty ground floor.

eXfuze – The Final Analysis

Some other interesting factors were found in the eXfuze compensation plan. Now I am not really big on trying to grade comp plans in MLM’s. Lets face it, there are many different versions of comp plans in the market today and people make money with them all. So I never base a company recommendation based on comp plan. The only thing you have to be careful of is a variation of a comp plan that has not been tested in the market. With eXfuze, they used a Hybrid Binary which combines the win-win nature of the binary placement strategy with matching bonus plan based on a unilevel called the Director Check Match. Rather than try to explain it let just say we know it’s powerful because it is essentially the same comp plan that Mona Vie uses (with a slightly lower payout) and we also know that the top earner in Mona Vie made about $6 million in his 2nd year with them and it was undoubtedly the Directors Check Match that did it. Now of course there are so many variations of business model compensation plans in the world of MLM: Standard, Unilevel, Top Tier, Hybrid Top Tier (Empower Network), binary, etc, that you could write a book on them, however in the world of the standard MLM, the hybrid-binary is pretty darn powerful. So I guess a comparison is in order here. The last major launch of a Superjuice company Mona Vie, hit $1 Billion in sales in their 5th year, so even thought there are many many superjuice companies the market almost appears to be getting even more aggressive over the years for this product segment. eXfuze distributors constantly use Mona Vie as a comparison so their eyes are definitely fixed on that same goal. It will be interesting to see what actually happens with eXfuze, they are awash in a sea of superjuice companies which keep popping up like there is no tomorrow, but this one gives you a good gut feel. Now there are many great opportunities in the MLM world today, and regardless of the company you choose to join, it’s critically important that you learn how to market properly. Too many people in network marketing base the success of their business on hot product, pure luck and company momentum to make it happen for them and then once they have blasted through their warm market, they are dead in the water. If you truly want to be successful with a company like eXfuze, then you need to learn how to successfully market you business and don’t leave your success to chance. Today of course the traffic and leads are on the internet. 

Want to learn how I  generated over 3000 leads, sponsored over 50 new reps and generated over $30,000 in affiliate commissions in just my first 5 months after learning how to generate MLM leads online?  For a inside look at some of these powerful lead generation strategies check out

My Lead System Pro Video

 

eXfuze

Holiday Best Wishes and a Special Gift

It’s Christmas Day in my part of the world and I wanted to take a moment today and send a special wish that the holidays will be everything you want them to be. I also wanted to give you a gift, its a special gift that can’t be delivered by UPS or Fedex, it’s a gift that we can only give to ourselves. It’s the gift of  “Belief”   Now I am not talking about religious or spiritual belief although those are very important in our lives also.   I am talking about belief in ourselves.

When I entered the network marketing business years ago, I was pretty excited.

I saw a check for $15,000 that some guy called Mark Yarnell had made in his 4th month in the business. I thought, if he can do that I am going to be rich in 6 months!   That however is not what occurred. It took me much, much longer, I hit the wall over and over again, and I even quit the Network Marketing business several times in the process, but I kept coming back and in the end the success was huge. How realistic is it to believe you can make $30,000 to $50,000 per month or more? Seems like fantasy doesn’t it. Is it even possible? I guess to answer that question, I will tell you that in my previous experience in network marketing I was with a company that had over 500 or so leaders, and in 1997 their average income was about $650,000 per year. As I think about their backgrounds, their stories, their education, their socioeconomic status, there were people from every walk of life. I bet you could find one that is a duplicate of you.

Was their Network Marketing success just dumb luck?

  I’ve never felt that success in business is a function of luck, it’s true that in network marketing that timing, being in the right market at the right time, can make a difference in how quickly we achieve our goals, but in reality we make our own luck by clearlyunderstanding our objective in business, then charting a course of action, and having a business plan and marketing system that will get us there. Then as long as we can stay on course, take it in daily bite size pieces, make adjustments as we go, and avoid being distracted from our ultimate goal. Success will be ours as surely as those who traveled the course before us. You know the great part about Network Marketing is that once you start down the right path, you can create an empire in just a few months. I invite you to join me Make this week matter for you, resolve to make it happen, and more than anything else   “Believe you can”!   Best Wishes for the Holidays  

Still searching for Network Marketing Success?

  So if you are ready to take your business and income to the next level you need to learn how to use the internet to leverage your business. Today there are hundreds of millions of people online and many are probably looking for a Network Marketing business just like yours, imagine for a moment just being able to reach out an tap just the smallest fraction of that huge traffic and bring it to your business. Exciting thought isn’t it? The good news is that you can learn how to use the internet as a tool and generate tons of leads to power your business by using powerful Online Marketing Systems that will teach you how to use the internet as a powerful resource for your Network Marketing business. Now generating leads of course is only a small part of the success process, to be able to achieve your financial goals within the time frame you set for yourself depends totally upon designing a 7 Figure Business Plan and using the correct business model that can actually get you there. There are far too many people who fail in the home based business industry because they try to use a business model that is just not going to get them to that magical $10,000 per month in 6 months or less. Here is a special webinar I did recently that explains the differences in business models and why they will make the critical difference between your success and failure  

Click To Play Video

 

When I first started using online marketing systems I generated over 3000 leads, sponsored over 50 new reps and generated over $30,000 in affiliate commissions in just a few months. For a inside look at some of these powerful marketing strategies check out my free Video Training Bootcamp For more on “My Story” review my blog entry “My Journey to the world of MLM” Network Marketing

TVI Express - Fast Lane or a dead end?

TVI Express Review

Once you have been in the MLM industry for a few years you almost get immune to the constant parade of new “Hot” deals that seem to flow through the marketplace. For someone just entering the MLM world it can be very distracting. You know how it is, first you agonize over making the dread decision to actually do “MLM” and hope no one you know actually finds out, but then once you are in and trying to learn this new system the other deals start to flood in. Its almost like someone put a little ad in the newspaper telling everyone that you are now an MLM’er and now all your friends you were too embarrassed to even put on your warm market list are hitting you up with the greatest deal of the week. Your upline tells you to just “focus” and “put the blinders on” and “don’t get distracted” and after a while it passes when we realize its like everything else in life, the grass always seems greener over there. For those who don’t focus they join the other “MLM Junkies” destined to jump from deal to deal knowing full well that success lurks in the next one. Top earning professionals in this industry don’t usually get distracted, once they are committed to a deal you usually can’t get their attention unless a real game changer enters the marketplace. Now that the stage is set lets talk about one of those potential “Game Changers”, TVI Express. Since I am heavily into online marketing and lead generation using keyword advertising, I can always see where the traffic is. The rumblings of the emerging deal. That’s how I came across TVI. There was a huge increase in lead flow for people wanting to learn online marketing coming from this company keyword starting in about October of this year. I reviewed the company website did not see anything exceptional and that was that. Then I got a call from Greg, a new distributor for TVI who had been with them for about 2 1/2 months and he wanted my help in online marketing. We discussed the company at some length and then I asked him how it was going for him so far. That’s when he dropped the bomb! He said he had made a rather staggering amount in just the last 2 months. Now I have been in the industry for over 22 years and have seen it all but I have to admit the amount he mentioned in such a short time period shocked me. Here are the results of my in depth review of this new company. TVI Express is basically a travel club that launched their business model in January of 2009 in Asia. Now lets face it, travel is a sexy product, people love the idea of being on vacation and you combine that with making money and you’ve got something. Now travel deals like TVI have been around the MLM world for a long time, and they always seem to do well for a while but then kind of loose steam after a while. The most recent success story YTB (Your Travel Biz) smoked for a while but recently seems to have hit the wall on growth. Here is the result of my 4 step critical analysis on TVI express.

TVI Express Products

  Most travel deals use the “Be a travel agent” business model but this is more of a club. The TVI Express base product is a Travel Voucher that is good for a free 7 day/6 night stay for 2 people at any of hundreds of 3 to 5 star resorts around the world. The voucher also includes companion airfare. The base price on this from the company is $250 US and this is in fact what you receive when you sign up to be a TVI Express distributor for $250 It may actually cost you $275 or $300 depending on if you buy a voucher from your upline to sign up or use the international money transfer service to pay the company. The voucher route is better. Once you are a distributor you can also purchase more of these “Vouchers” in your TVI Express back office and sell them to customers. Once you are a distributor you also have access to travel discounts through their channel partners on everything from Rental Cars to Ship Cruises though your back office. No Autoship One of the attractive things to many people is that once you have paid your TVI Express distributor fee there are no required monthly purchases to stay active. This is a great selling feature but may be an “Achilles heel” for them in the future.

TVI Express – The Company

The TVI Express original home office was in the UK and according to their website they are backed by a prestigious UK financial group. Their current home office appears to be in Cyprus although they do still have offices and customer support phone numbers in the UK. Apart from that there’s not much more info on the company. They are currently operating in 150 countries world wide. Ground Floor Since TVI Express launched in Asia in January of 2009 and in the US in late summer, you can’t get much more ground floor than that but boy have they grown! It seems they amassed almost 200,000 distributors in Asia before they even hit the US and they are now growing like gangbusters in the US. TVI Express Compensation I usually never look too much to a company’s comp plan since MLM comp plans are all profitable, but the TVI Express comp plan because of the aggressive nature of the payment structure bears a closer look. The basic difference is that TVI uses a Matrix comp plan rather than a standard MLM residual. Now generally there are two basic business models in the world of MLM, Standard MLM and Top Tier MLM, however Matrix compensation plans represent a variation that borrow a little bit from both models. In MLM most companies will pay you a small amount or residual on downline activity multiple levels deep in your organization. This means that you get a small amount off of the people in your group. These small amounts don’t amount to much in the early days but as your organization grows all those small bits end up being a substantial paycheck once your organization gets large. With this Matrix the difference is that you don’t get paid when you sponsor someone or even when volume occurs in your organization. The money that would go to pay all those small commissions is held and then paid out when you hit a threshold point. There are 2 of these points in TVI Express, one is at $500 and one is at $10,000 Here is how it works. There are 2 matrices in TVI, picture them as a lower one called the Traveler Board and an upper one called the Express Board. The structure of the matrix is similar to what you see in a standard MLM unilevel example. One position at the top, two below that, four below that and eight below that. The difference with a matrix is that when you start you enter the lower level which has 8 positions for new reps and once that level is full the level splits and shifts up to the 4 level. When the eight level fills again it shifts up again pushing all positions above it higher. The person in the top position graduates from the lower board triggers the threshold $500 commission and graduates to the upper matrix called the Express board. The process is then repeated each of the levels shifting up until a distributor graduates from the top position receiving a $10,000 commission and $5000 in travel benefits. The distributor position then re enters the lower level of the top matrix and can revolve through it again and again each time earning $15,000 in total compensation. Movement through the TVI matrix can be speeded up by being either Partially Qualified (having sponsored 1 person) or Fully Qualified (having sponsored 2 people). These take precedence over anyone who is unqualified (has sponsored no one) The big bucks are made by having more than one position, which the company allows. That way in the time to transit the matrix rather than making a $10,000 payment the distributor would make multiples of that as one position followed the others out. There are also residual payments made to those who have graduated from the top matrix and they can range anywhere from 5% to 10% depending on how many of your reps you have helped graduate from the Express board. TVI Express Commentary Very interesting MLM to say the least. The main appeal is obviously the income potential and it seems that an average rep can get to the bigger dollars much quicker than in a traditional MLM. The TVI Express entry into the market has caused an un-level playing field and as a result has drawn fire from many in the MLM industry claiming it is not a legit deal. I can only smile as I remember an attorney general from some state on TV claiming that one of my previous MLM companies was a pyramid scam and then ten years later the company was publicly traded on the New York Stock exchange. Its funny how quickly perceptions can change. In all fairness to this review, I have to say it does look to good to be true but that does not mean its not. TVI Express has an actual product that has value and they pay their commissions. It will be most interesting to watch where TVI Express goes in the future. One warning here is that many times Matrix comp plans are sold by telling the prospect that they only have to sponsor 1 or 2 people and and then the spillover from upline will take care of all the rest. Don’t bet the ranch on this approach! Its true that all you need to do to be fully qualified is to sponsor 2 people but I never recommend leaving your success to chance or the good intentions of others. If you want to be successful in any MLM you need to learn how to effectively market the opportunity so you can plan on bringing several new reps in each month. Its the same with TVI.  TVI Success Secrets To learn how to develop and use a marketing approaches that can quickly tap both local and international markets and help you join that top earner status in TVI or your current company, register for free marketing tips & Free 7 Day Video Training Course below!  

For a inside look at some of the powerful online marketing strategies that allowed me to sponsor over 10 reps a month and earn over $30,000 in affiliate commissions in the process in just a few months, check out my free

Video Training Bootcamp

TVI Express

NuSkin Review - Is This Deal Past it's Prime?

It was almost 20 years ago but I remember the day well, I had just been invited into the inner circle of the NuSkin elite, the distributor advisory board. It seemed like a dream since 2 ½ years before that I had been struggling to try to learn the elusive business of network marketing and had probably quit at least 6 times in the first 6 months and then I hit my stride and became a NuSkin Blue Diamond and then a Hawaiian Blue Diamond (now known as “Team Elite”) in about 30 months. It had been a dizzying ride as the company exploded into their momentum growth curve moving from about $50 million to almost half a billion and then a billion in the blink of an eye. It was the stuff dreams are made of, checks going up over 35% a month, your downline exploding, life was good. Now I had been invited into the inner sanctum of the NuSkin advisory board with 11 other company leaders. We sat there with the company founders Blake Rhoney and Steve Lund,  and they gave us some office memento gifts and then brought in balloons filled with helium, handed us the strings, and gave us a pin to pop them. I think Jerry Campisi went first and “Boom” out dropped a little rolled up certificate telling you the amount of your NuSkin check that month. As we all popped the balloons and looked at the amounts in shock, (my check below was pretty darn exciting) they told us we had just broken all company records and had enrolled over 40,000 distributors in NuSkin that month alone.

Now that should have been a “yahoo” moment, I mean lets face it, things were good, very good. But in that instant I had a sinking feeling, kind of like being on the 5th day of a 7 day ship cruise and things are really getting good and then you realize that in 2 days you have to go home. That brings us to the question at issue here, can a network marketing company or any company for that matter go straight up forever? Is there and ending point, and if there is what does that even mean in the world of network marketing? If we are to believe the leaders in the company, that are making huge amounts of money off of their large organizations are telling you, then you would believe that “the sky’s the limit”. Now for them, that may be true, because once you have a large stable organization you are pretty well locked in, but what about the newbie? The distributor that is just joining a billion dollar company today, what does it mean for them? My MLM reverie was brought about because the other day someone called to prospect me into NuSkin. Now they obviously did not know that I had already been in NuSkin, and that I had retired from active involvement years ago and had given my interest in the distributorship to my kids, but it brought up a good question because in today’s depressing business markets all network marketing companies, even the old giants are seeing renewed growth.

NuSkin vs The MLM Success Curve

  There has been a lot of buzz in the industry in the last few months about NuSkin! They are after all taking another run at the golden gauntlet, or should we call it the golden ceiling of MLM companies. Its somewhere around a billion dollars a year in North America. If a company hits the mark in the MLM world and knocks the cover off the ball, they go through one of those S shaped growth curves I frequently use in presentations.  I show how companies pick up speed as they grow in popularity until they hit about $50 million a year in the North American market, at which point they break through a threshold point and explode. Then the go-go days of momentum growth where the company growth goes vertical and so do the paychecks of distributors who are well positioned. These are the glory days in which just the sight of a FedEx truck driving down the street can make your heart start pounding like a jackhammer, and unleash a feeling of total euphoria. (MLM companies like Nuskin love to showcase success by sending top reps their checks by FedEx when then get over $5000 a month or so) . Then it happens! Bam! You hit the inevitable Golden ceiling of network marketing when the company hits about a billion dollars in volume. The company growth, at least in the North American market starts to slow and then plateau. I wrote about this in a recent blog post on another MLM Success story MonaVie. Standard Network Marketing companies like NuSkin, as opposed to Top Tier MLM companies, rely heavily on duplication and the development of huge organizations to generate the type of big dollars the top earners make, but once that explosive growth slows so does the income. When they hit a growth plateau most companies fall back about 15% to 25% in overall volume and then kind of sit there at billion or so. Not a bad neighborhood really, and if you were one of the lucky distributors who were well positioned, this is your MLM pink slip, your retirement notice. You worked hard, go cash those checks and travel or something, or maybe take up a hobby. In the MLM world of yesterday, you had 4 options at that point.

• Retire and cash your checks: Stay in the game just enough to make your appearances at conventions and rally’s, and talk about the good old days with other fortunate people in your group.

• Cash your check and move on: If you were not making enough when it stopped, or if your passion is just the excitement of building, then go off and find a newer version of your old company. You must of course leave your downline alone or the company will cut off your check.

• Go International: Buy a copy of Rosetta Stone and start studying those foreign languages. The action will now be mostly be international as the company expands into market after market, and you have the opportunity to feel the joy again as you position for momentum growth in each of those markets. Now the problem is you are pretty much going to have to move there, so pick somewhere nice like Thailand or Australia.

• Keep Building: Then there are the die hards! They just don’t know when to stop. They keep building and pushing harder waiting for the 2nd momentum spurt, you know the one that takes the company to $5 billion. The problem here is that there are extremely few examples of this ever happening.

In the market today, lets face it, things are a little different, and of course part of the fallacy of all business or financial forecasting is using the past to predict the future. It works sometimes, and sometimes not. Lets examine today’s market. First, lets face it the economy is not good, and record numbers of people are literally being forced into re inventing themselves, and into self employment. Also network marketing is much more accepted today than it was even several years ago. Second, there are companies who have broken the golden ceiling such as Amway, who is somewhere around $8 billion in worldwide revenue. However I do believe most of that is international.

NuSkin May Have An Edge

In all fairness to NuSkin, if anyone can do it they probably can. Having worked for several MLM’s,  I would have to say that NuSkin stands out head and shoulders above them, they are a class A+ operation. They constantly have been able to reinvent themselves over the years but most of the true growth has been international. However in the past NuSkin tried to push continued growth in North America by creating separate divisions, that distributors pretty much pitched as separate companies. There are been a long line of these: IDN, QIQ Connections, Big Planet, Pharmanex, Pharmanex Medical, and Photomax. Each of these NuSkin divisions did do well initially but then seemed to hit the wall in continued growth. However, it may be that the product types they used for the divisions were part of the problem here. Standard nutritional supplements are not emotional products, lets face it no one every took a vitamin pill, no matter how high quality and woke up the next morning and said “ Wow do I feel good”. Technology products such as Big Planet has are even worse, there is no emotional attachment at all with these products and if there is, the love affair is short. In building with those product types your organization can become a revolving door after a few years as distributors cycle from business builders, to product users, to gone.

However this time may be different, this time NuSkin is cycling back to their original product line Skin Care and Anti Aging.

In my book skin care being a visual, emotional, consumable product is probably one of the best of not the best product type you have have in a Network Marketing company, as long as the company does not have a culture that excludes men. If you do, then you eliminate half of your target market for distributors, not a good move. NuSkin was always unique in that respect. I would estimate half of the distributors, even in the old days were men, most other skin care companies have not been able to achieve that type of culture. Well it will be interesting to watch, NuSkin has their guns loaded this time. They have a lot of excitement going with the “Galvanic Spa” and they are rolling out yet another exclusive product, “Ageloc” that they are rallying the troops around. They have even motivated many of the retired NuSkin leaders who were already making crazy amounts of money to get back in the game. One note of caution here, NuSkin’s comp plan pays big bucks, but can be harder than most. If you truly want to be successful, develop an effective marketing system and plan on bringing in at least 6 to 8 reps per month. The best way to do this in todays market is to use internet marketing approaches and systems like My Lead System Pro  to tap into the huge traffic flow that is online every day searching for opportunity. Want to learn how to develop and use a marketing approaches that can tap both local and international markets and help you join that top earner status in NuSkin or your current company. Learn how I  used online marketing and generated over 3000 leads, sponsored over 50 new reps and generated over $30,000 in affiliate commissions in just my first 5 months using this killer system?  For a inside look at some of these powerful marketing strategies check out the video....    

There are many great opportunities in the MLM world today, and regardless of the company you choose to join, it’s critically important that you learn how to market properly. Too many people in network marketing base the success of their business on pure luck and company momentum to make it happen for them. If you truly want to be successful in this industry then take the time to learn how to successfully market you business and don’t leave your success to chance.  

For free training on successful internet marketing strategies visit

www.NuskinSuccessSecrets.com

 

Visiting Mom

My mom is Helen, an inspirational lady in my life and she is 94 and loosing it slowly but surely. The love is still there but the daily mileposts and reminders and memories are now foggy. She still dances to the Beatles music when I take her for ice-cream but then it's gone. I visited her this last weekend as I do every week and I noticed something that reached in and seized my soul like an icy hand. There were these little boxes outside the door of each of their rooms, boxes that they could put things into, mementos and pictures to symbolize them and their lives. "This is what my life was all about, this is me. " Wow, what as sobering thought. If we had to, right now  today, put our lives in a little glass box outside our door, what would it say about us? Would you be proud of your own life? Would you have done all you wanted, or would you still be waiting with the big dreams unfulfilled? Look before the thought overwhelms you, I will tell you I had a really hard time with that thought. I have had some great success, some huge incomes, I have kids that love me, but wow  my life in a box, that was disturbing. Those boxes were filled with old pictures of wonderful people in their prime, in the passion of life, living in the moment and looking forward to a future of joy. I looked at my own life and knew there was so much still left undone, so much still unwritten in my story. Sometimes life presents us with these moments of clarity, of clear view, and challenges us to either hide, or embrace the idea of change and move forward. I choose forward, you know  its never too late. May that box at your door be overflowing with a life well lived and with no stone unturned (your bucket list fulfilled). Like the ancient Romans used to say..... Carpe Diem (seize the day)

Is Network Marketing Dead?

Has The Network Marketing Industry Changed? An Analysis

Well the internet is a very big place but I guess it had to happen sooner or later.
I finally stumbled across the infamous “Coffeehouse Letter”.

It was purportedly written by industry giant Mike Dillard in 2007.
Wow! Interesting read. While I scrolled through it hitting the highlights all I could do was roll my eyes and shake my head in amusement but then bam!
Some very insightful truths about the Network Marketing industry started to roll off the page and then they had me, I devoured every word and at the end I was pissed off.
So why was I mad?
It’s that thing we all hate, being slapped in the face with a truth we don’t want to accept.
We know its truth because once you are exposed to it, you kind of realize that you have known it all along. It brings that level of doubt that you have been trying to keep out of your consciousness to the surface where you finally have to look at it, and deal with it.
Just so I don’t leave you too mystified, let me summarize.
The coffeehouse Letter is a treatise or a rant depending on how you want to look at it about the validity of the Network Marketing model as a success vehicle in today’s marketplace.
It basically says:

“Network Marketing is dead, and the internet killed it”

Now the letter is not a condemnation of network marketing by some outsider but a carefully crafted argument by an insider that points out something we all already know and proposes an alternative business model called GPT or Get Paid Today.
Now it’s pretty obvious to anyone that has been around MLM for a few years, that network Marketing today is a very different animal than it was 15, or even 10 years ago.
The letter points out that the Network Marketing business model is a victim of its own success and of the internet age.
Look  if you are in the industry, you probably already know what the flaws are.
Building an all volunteer sales force and then growing that team into an organization of 10,000 or more is hard. The recruiting is hard, the drop out ratio disappointing, the duplication difficult.  Hey look,  let’s be realistic here, any business is hard. However the rewards if you hit a home run are well known.
If you can get that organization up and off the ground and you have a hot company with a hot product, the sky’s the limit and the rewards are legendary as I pointed out in my company review of Mona Vie, where top earner Brig Hart reportedly earns about $980,000 per month.

Yes that’s not a misprint, I said per month!
Now as you probably already know I am a big believer in MLM and the network marketing industry. It changed my life financially in a huge way and no other business even comes close to the reward you can achieve in a network marketing business. It is a world of challenge, personal development, achievement, friendship, mentorship, and incredible reward. It is a true win-win business model where you can only achieve if you help others to excel.
Then what is it about today’s market that makes it different. Well in a word the internet.

Now in a way the internet has made recruiting so much easier than it ever was before. Good grief, years ago  to  recruit someone long distance,  I would have to mail a video tape to a prospect and wait 3 days until they got it. Today, I shoot them an e mail and they have the presentation in a heartbeat! As the title of Bill Gates recent book said: “Business at the Speed of Thought”
But did the internet age also open a Pandora’s box of hurt for the Network marketing industry?

Well in a word, yes.
Today, network marketing companies can be started in the blink of an eye, competition for your downline can be as close as the next e-mail blast and leaders routinely jump from deal to deal today like a game of musical chairs.

But is Network Marketing really Dead?

And if so, what are the alternatives?
Does the GPT model really work as a viable alternative and is it really the answer to all the problems of  Network Marketing in the 21st century, or is it simply a business model with a different set of problems?
I have to say that after studying the concept of GPT also known as “Top Tier MLM”,  it is an attractive, powerful alternative, and I can see why it speaks to a lot of people, but I also believe MLM is far from dead, you just have to play the game differently today than you did in the past. You need to embrace the changes in the market, adjust your marketing approach but most of all learn how to build quickly.
Now I guess in the final analysis, you pay your money and you make your choice. Which model you are attracted to depends on your overall financial goals and how long you are willing to work to achieve them.
GPT offers a way to achieve very substantial money much quicker, a few months as opposed to a few years but realistically probably tops out at 7 figures a year. MLM takes longer but you are leveraging through a much larger group so the top end can be much bigger.

Articles & Sites Related to this Post

For the full text of the Coffeehouse Letter go to  http://www.coffeehouse-letter.info (opt in to get the letter)

Blog Post “Top Tier MLM or Traditional Which is Better?”

Family IQ Review – Is It A Bird, Is it A Plane? No, It’s Top Tier MLM!

Network Marketing

Attraction Marketing - Is This For Real?

Attraction Marketing – A Review

Several months ago out of pure frustration and on a whim, I took the red pill and then went down the rabbit hole following it seemingly into an almost parallel universe, a parallel universe of network marketing.
Perhaps I should back up and explain here. There was this movie called The Matrix, I am sure you have seen it, and there was a scene in the movie where one of the characters Morpheus offered another of the characters, Neo, two choices or rather two pills.
In one hand he held a Blue Pill and told Neo that he could take that one and go on with his life and nothing will have changed, in the other hand he held a Red Pill. He told him if he choose that one, that the illusion of the world would be ripped away and nothing would ever be the same.
Then he told him, “I promise you only one thing and that is to show you the truth.”


That’s kind of like what happened to me almost a year ago. I had made the commitment to build a new network marketing company and I was struggling with find a good high volume lead generation strategy and encountering lots of frustration as I kept retooling and trying to adapt older approaches trying to find the magic in the marketplace.
You see I have always been a believer in high volume lead generation approaches as the best way to build your network marketing business. If you read “My Story”  in www.AskMarcBarrett.com/about then you know that the huge organizations I built and profited from were generated form cold leads, not friends and family.
That insight of course did not come right away. When I first entered the network marketing business, even though I had been a successful business person before, I had no clue of how to make it work and I failed miserably for several months and probably quit 5 times in the first 6 months.
You know how it is, I got so sick of chasing my warm market around only to hear, I haven’t decided yet Marc, I still looking at several options Marc, follow up with me next week Marc. It drove me nuts.
I could see that to be successful in network marketing you needed to be able to develop a large group, but using the approaches I was using, I could see it was not going to work. I knew there had to be a better way.
Then the light went on and on day probably after my 50^th person said no!


I could see the problem was that I was selling the opportunity to a bunch of luke warm prospects who weren’t really interested, and what I needed to do was to start marketing to a much larger audience who were actually looking for what I have to offer. I quickly developed an advertising approach and scaled it up until I was getting 60 to 100 MLM leads a week.
Now when you achieve that kind of volume, you are suddenly swimming in prospects and it becomes impossible to follow the normal sales routine of:  “Prospect, Present, and Follow Up”.
So the normal chasing of prospects that we all are taught to do in sales abruptly stopped.
I did group presentations for the prospects, and then sent them out the door and told them they would have to get back to me within 48 hours if they wanted to be on my team.
Now believe it or not, I never followed up on anyone.


Did the strategy work? well within 2 years I was one of the top producers in my Network Marketing company, had sponsored over 250 dead serious people into the business and was making pretty close to a million dollars a year.
Now why did it work?

Attraction Marketing

Well the prospects were attracted to me because they saw I had a system that worked,  but they also saw that they needed what I had more than I needed them.
In short, they were attracted to me.
Now the problem that I faced a year ago, was that the network marketing universe changes year by year, and what worked yesterday may not work today. So although some of the marketing systems I developed worked pretty well, there was still something missing.
I sensed that there was something just beyond my grasp, kind of like waking up from a dream knowing that you have solved a huge problem only to have it disappear. In those first waking moments you knew that you had the solution, you could feel it with every fiber of your body, but within a few moments it was gone and you could no longer put your finger on it.
Well that’s exactly where I was when Joe stopped by my house with a copy of Magnetic Sponsoring, the Attraction Marketing manifesto by industry legend Mike Dillard.
Joe was a successful business guy in my MLM downline in Miami, and as he sat down in a chair he dropped the 80 page printed out Magnetic Sponsoring e book in front of me and told me I needed to read it because he was going to do what the book said.
Well, that is of course the ultimate challenge, a rebellious MLM downline veering off on some tangent you know nothing about. So I knew I had to read it so I could assure him it was just more crap off of the internet and to stick with the basics.
I of course had seen references to this book on Attraction Marketing on the internet for a few years but the name “Magnetic Sponsoring” seemed kind of stupid so I never checked it out.
Let’s see, we read this book on Attraction Marketing and all of a sudden people start chasing us down the street begging us to sponsor them…… right!


Well I took the book and started reading it, never realizing that I had taken “Neo’s” fated red pill, and my journey down the rabbit hole began.
I think I read the entire Attraction Marketing e-book  in one sitting, as paragraph after paragraph rolled off the page all I could do was smile and shake my head because it was so right on target it was scary.
Then the Ah Ha moments started coming and didn’t stop until the end of the book and then I had to put it down and think about it for a day or so.

The Principals of Attraction Marketing

Now it’s not a training course but rather a philosophy and a marketing strategy that the author Mike Dillard professed would change the way you do the MLM business forever.
It outlined the principals of Attraction Marketing, which is a sales approach so subtle yet powerful most people never even realize they are affected by it.
It outlined a high volume MLM lead generation approach that used the internet to generate leads for you network marketing business that I could see far surpassed what I had been able to do in the past with newspaper advertising.
It employed Attraction Marketing principals to eliminate the chasing of prospects that burns us all out.
It also outlined the principal of using what is called “Funded Proposal” marketing which allows you to that generate huge traffic off of the internet, while being able to make money off of that traffic even if they never join your network marketing opportunity.
Believe it or not this strategy changes the process of generating MLM leads from an out of pocket experience where you normally pay for advertising and hope for a return,  into a cash flow business were you can generate thousands of dollars of income while you generate thousands of MLM leads.
Now there are “Point & Click” out of the box internet marketing systems that are based on this same key principal of Attraction Marketing like “My Lead System Pro” that can not only give you the training on how to generate leads on the internet but also already have the “Funded Proposal” affiliate income streams built right into the system so you don’t have to be some tech wizard to use this type of marketing.

Well I went down that rabbit hole pretty far and it did change the way I do business dramatically. If you haven’t looked at this remarkable E book, on Attraction Marketing check it out at the link below.


Magnetic Sponsoring Free 7 Day Video Bootcamp


Now I warn you, Mike Dillard’s book on Attraction Marketing will challenge you, and it will change many of the ways you currently look at doing the network marketing business.
Now of course it’s easier not to change, to stay the same, but something in us is just so curious.
And if you were wondering, Neo of course took the red pill.

Articles & Tools Mentioned In This Post

Magnetic Sponsoring Attraction Marketing E Book

My Lead System Pro Online Marketing System

My Lead System Pro Review – A Magic Bullet For MLM Success? Well Maybe…

www.AskMarcBarrett.com/about

Attraction Marketing

Re-Inventing Yourself

Humm….

Had a birthday the other day, well lets be more precise, August 31^st and yes that’s right I am a Virgo but of course if you have listened to any of my trainings you probably could already guess that … task oriented, highly organized, thinker, problem solver, yada, yada, yada.

Not sure I believe any of that stuff anyway, I believe we are who we choose to be.

Having a birthday always forces me into a period of reflection as I think back on what I tried to accomplish in the past year and what I actually did. For many people I guess the big event that triggers the reflection is Jan 1^st .

That of course is when the proverbial time door slams shut on the old year and we realize in a panic that we are supposed to set goals and plans for the new one.

My year closes out usually right around my birthday since I set a business plan in motion over 20 years ago that pretty much forced me into a period of planning every September.

It actually coincides with my journey into the world of MLM about 22 years ago. If you have read My Story on my blog then you probably know that I had been a real estate entrepreneur for years and then crashed and burned in the early 80’s.

However I have been very fortunate in life for I have found that whenever one door closes another one opens for me.

Now sometimes it takes a while to recognize it as a door, because in the beginning it generally looks more like a hole in the floor with a 3000 foot drop into a chasm.

However that financial disaster lead me to the world of MLM, and I had the opportunity to re-invent myself in a totally different way.

Once I get on a track I am pretty much an obsessive worker and not that I neglected my family, but I always wished there could be a way to spend more time with them and be more involved in their lives as my kids were growing up.

Well I guess you have to be careful what you ask for, or at least maybe be more specific.

Sometimes our gifts come in ways we never would have conceived (at the time I really would have preferred not have my business destroyed just to implement a better master plan, but the universe never asked my opinion).

Well I’m  rambling, but anyway when I had to re invent myself and setup a business plan for this new world of MLM I decided that I would create my perfect reality and then live in it.

So I decided rather than trying to make myself less obsessive about work, it was much easier to simply set a schedule that would force me into compliance with my goals. So I decided to take every summer off and spend it with my family and kids and then work obsessively the rest of the time.

Not a bad plan really, and that’s what I did for over 20 years. The network marketing business gives you the ability to generate huge leverage, and because of that you are free to structure it any way you want.

We had great times during those summers, taking months off and traveling in a motor home to Alaska or to other parts unknown, or sometimes traveling to the South Pacific and Australia, Japan, and others.

My reflection over the last several days caused me to think about and be grateful for how far I’ve come and how much I have learned:

The trials and frustrations of building a successful Network Marketing business and the incredible rewards that came later.

The challenging journey into the world of online marketing, and the frustration of being flooded with huge amounts of information and then the rewards of finally watching that business model gel into 25 and then over 50 leads a day like a finely tuned machine.

Was it hard, of course it was.

Was it frustrating, you betcha!

Did I ever want to quit? Every day!

Was it worth it…. Oh Baby was it!

However even as I bask in those feelings of accomplishment there is a gnawing uncertainty as I realize this coming year will probably be filled with even more challenges as I take this new craft of internet marketing to the next level, maybe even re-inventing myself again, Marc Version 4a?

Wow, when does it stop?

The challenge is that nothing is ever static and the more we try to keep it so, the more frustrated we get. Learn instead to embrace change and just love the ride.  It’s just like the famous quote by Mark Victor Hansen

“Sooner or later, we must realize that there is no station, no one place to arrive at once and for all. The true joy of life is the trip.”

Now probably the biggest barrier to re-inventing yourself that we all face is letting go of the business self image we have created for ourselves, but that has to die before we can move on.

I know how hard this can be because I struggled with it, I mean I was the “Real Estate Entrepreneur” the “Deal Maker”, who could package and spin a project better than anyone. Who would I be if I let go of that, and what about all the years of skills that went into creating it.

I mean I was invested in that self image big time.

I mean it’s hard to do some people just can’t let it go, they just keep slamming their head against the same wall over and over.

You know we all face challenges in life that at times force us to re-invent ourselves and we have a choice to either go into the closet and hide, or to stretch and in the process become more than we are.

Stretch with me… There’s nothing interesting in the closet

Need help Re-Inventing Yourself? Click Here

MonaVie Review Update - Up the Superjuice Creek Without a Paddle?

Oh MonaVie, MonaVie, MonaVie, by the gods of Network Marketing what has happened to you? For those of us lucky enough to have attached their wagon to a mega hyper-growth MLM money machine like MonaVie this is supposed to be the time where you sail off into the sunset and send postcards back to old prospects who never joined you telling them you are sorry they missed the boat. I actually knew one guy who would drip on his old prospects by sending them envelopes with small quantities of beach sand and a note telling them it was too bad they couldn’t be with him on the beaches of the world. Well as the wreckage and empty lifeboats started to float back to shore it is became pretty obvious that that ship sank. So what happened to the MLM success story of the decade? In a recent company review I did on MonaVie I cited them as an almost textbook case of the type of Viral Hyper-growth that is legendary in the network marketing industry. I mean let’s face it, MonaVie was a rocket ship that blasted from zero to over a billion dollars in sales in about 5 years. That explosive growth curve AKA “Momentum Growth Curve” ,is what is always spoken about in hushed revered tones by the MLM leaders after the big opportunity meetings as they ponder the future of their company. Yes it’s that rapid growth that creates fortunes in our industry for the lucky ones who got in early, and it keeps the rest of us pounding the phones ignoring the painful rejection form our friends and family because we know our turn is next. But is it? It seems that even if you have a reserved seat on that rocket it can explode and crash back to earth on you just like any other business. That brings us to the painful discussion about the Myth of “Walk Away Residual Income”. I know that this is heresy to speak of this, and it’s even stranger that it comes from a 7 figure earner who loves the MLM industry and who has in fact ridden those rockets. Look if you are going to bet the proverbial ranch on your success in this industry, I feel  that you deserves to know the facts not the myths. Network marketing is a business just like any other business and as such is not immune to the laws of business gravity. You can’t go straight up forever, once you have tapped all your easy market and reached a certain point of saturation (I hate that word) generally at about $1 Billion in sales in the US market or approximately 1 million distributors, most companies will plateau and then fall back by 15% to 25% and then stabilize. However in some cases that fallback can be much worse. Now that does not mean it’s over, there is still growth especially on the international front but the go-go days of 35% monthly check increases are pretty much gone. Then there is that ugly word “Attrition”. That’s where your traitorous downline abandons ship and promptly jumps to other deals, taking your income with them. This is what is referred to as the “Leaking Bucket” effect that I wrote about in my review of the infamous Coffeehouse Letter, called “Is network Marketing Dead?” and why the Top Tier MLM business model has become so popular in the MLM industry. Even if a company is years away from stability there is always attrition, it happens as people lose faith in the business or just burn out, and it happens at regular intervals: 30 days, 60 days, 6 months, 1 year, 10 years, etc, etc. Because of this effect your residual income is not stable no matter how successful you are. The truth is that if you walk away after building a successful network marketing business at some point your income will start to fall. To maintain the level of income you want you will need to keep building year after year. But wait you say! I was told this was get rich quick and then retire! Sorry, it’s actually a business and you have to pay attention to it and continue to run it. But back to the main issue….

What did happen with MonaVie?

  Well of course they hit the magic ceiling at about $1 Billion dollars and then began to stabilize and after a fallback that should have been it. However there were a couple of factors that made their business model unique that came back to haunt them and make the fallback very severe.

First, the MonaVie growth or duplication model was heavily product based and recruiting distributors through tasting parties was the mainstay.

Because of this and the way they positioned customers into becoming distributors they ended up with a huge base of distributors who were really not in the business. I believe that when the economy hit the skids recently and consumers lost jobs and had to cut back, the MonaVie superjuice got dumped. The other factor was the aggressive product give away strategy that pretty much every business builder promoted, of buying huge volumes of the juice every month and telling everyone to give away one bottle a day. Some MonaVie leaders it’s rumored pushed their teams to sign up for autoships of $1000 per month to feed this sampling model. This promotional effect swelled their volumes and once again, I believe that when things started to stabilize and fall back there was no reason for the business builders to maintain that huge monthly ordering volume since recruiting volumes slowed so much and they cut back also. The result was the ultimate double whammy! Alas, the market giveth and the market taketh away. From all evidence, it appears that within about 18 months of hitting their peak MonaVie had a huge unraveling of volume.

MonaVie’s Future Prospects?

Now I don’t want to give you the wrong impression here, MonaVie is still alive and kicking and by all accounts doing very well in a number of international markets, and there are a boatload of top MonaVie distributors that followed the money tree overseas and are now learning Korean, and other interesting languages. So what did we learn class? Well there are several conclusions you can draw from this:

1. Network marketing is a business (a very high paying one) and just like any other business and you have to run it and pay attention to it.
2. You should probably take a close look at the product, the market, and the duplication model rather than just base your decision on photo copies of your upline’s checks. Different types of products have different growth cycles and some work a lot better than others in the MLM universe.
3. No matter what you do, when you are raking in the bucks, don’t spend it all. Keep your lifestyle the same and build your bank account for that rainy day. (OK so buy a sexy car or huge flat screen TV but keep it under control OK?) Too many top earners in MLM spend like drunken sailors and if the money flow stops, they’re broke.
4. There are different business models in network marketing and each has a particular building style and set of benefits. (i.e. Standard MLM, Top Tier MLM, etc.).  Understand your options before you make your choice.

Ready to take your MLM business to the next level? Learn how to use powerful online marketing strategies to generate 25 to 50 leads a day to power your business. When I first started using online marketing systems I generated over 3000 leads, sponsored over 50 new reps and generated over $30,000 in affiliate commissions in just a few months. For a inside look at some of these powerful marketing strategies check out my free Video Training Bootcamp “

 

MonaVie

Top Tier MLM vs Traditional - Which Is Better?

Top Tier MLM, well how do I even begin to describe it? Humm….. well, it’s kind of like being transported into a parallel universe of Network Marketing, and in this universe the only thing that’s different is that you actually make money in your Network Marketing company in your first 90 days. Now if you have watched any science fiction (I love that stuff) you know the allegory here. A parallel universe is a reality identical to our own except…… Except for a just a few tiny things that are totally different. I mean if you somehow were magically transported into one you would immediately recognize everything, your wife or husband would look and be the same, the dog the same, the house the same, the backyard, everything the same except maybe one little detail, like when you check your bank statement and somehow there’s  $10 million dollars in there. Now this is where you start running around the house yelling and screaming and waving the bank statement in the air muttering something about going to Tahiti, and suddenly you notice no one else understands what you’re so excited about. There seems to be nothing strange about it to anyone else, it’s just always been that way. Now I know what you are thinking, the other universe is looking pretty good right now and our first thought is probably….. Oh yes, TAKE ME THERE QUICKLY! However as science fiction teaches us, there is always a price to pay. When you change one factor in our reality then you give up something in return. Well back to the main point of the article, the Top Tier MLM business model.

What exactly is Top Tier MLM and how come you don’t know about it?

Well it’s been around for quite a while but it’s not as recognized as traditional or as I will refer to it, Standard MLM. Now Standard MLM’s are the ones that everyone is familiar with, like Amway, NuSkin, FHTM, MonaVie, eXfuze, etc. What makes a company a Standard MLM, is that the entry fee when you sign up as a distributor is generally only a few hundred dollars. Now because the entry fee is so small, even if you are a super recruiter and can bring 10 or 20 reps into the business each month, you are never going to be able to earn a full time income based on your personal efforts. That’s not how the Standard MLM business model is designed. To make money in that business model you need to build a team of several hundred reps to earn even a few thousand in residual commissions, and a group of 10,000 or more to get to the type of money that most people associate with good income in our industry. That means you are going to have to build a big team, and so establishing that magical duplication in your downline is critical to your success. Because of this, your success now depends on factors that are outside your direct control and even if you are really good and bring in hundreds of people to your opportunity, sometimes that magic duplication just doesn’t occur. We have all seen it happen, everything seems to be lined up perfectly and then bam! The market changes, the company doesn’t handle something right, there are endless possibilities that can go wrong.  A textbook example of this would be what happened recently to the mega-viral MLM success story of the decade, MonaVie (See my blog update on MonaVie). Now that of course, that’s just part of the territory, some businesses fly and some die. It’s no different in MLM.

Now enter the world of Top Tier MLM

In the Top Tier MLM business model, everything is the same except that the entry fee to sign up as a distributor is higher. Generally, it’s in the range of $2000 to $10,000 or more. Now when you sign up a rep in this model, you generally get a 50% commission for sponsoring them, so you can generate commissions of $1000 to as much as $16,000 a transaction in some Top Tier MLM companies such as WealthMasters International,  Family IQ, or Empower Network Now supporters of the Top Tier MLM model point out that this totally changes the dynamics of the MLM business into a much more powerful lucrative opportunity. Using a Top Tier MLM model, a person can enter the Network Marketing business, go out and prospect, and even assuming it takes them 2 or 3 months to really get their feet wet, they could be earning $10,000 a month within 90 days or so, even if no duplication occurs. I told you this was a parallel universe! This puts a distributor in the position of being able to earn a full time income right from the beginning. What an interesting concept! This Top Tier MLM model is primarily dependent on your own personal efforts, so it’s more of a direct sales business model with a residual tacked on to the back end of the compensation plan. Because the compensation plan is heavily weighted on the front end, the Top Tier MLM business model is also referred to as “GPT” or “Get Paid Today” (see my review of The CoffeeHouse Letter in the post “Is Network Marketing Dead”). Now of course it seems that the biggest barrier for top tier MLM companies to recruiting, would be convincing the average MLM person who has problems trying to talk a prospect into a $500 start up kit, that it’s just as easy to sell a $10,000 one. But is it really any more difficult?   Take Franchising for instance, even in today’ turbulent economic market it’s booming! So there are a lot of people with money looking for opportunity and probably the cheapest franchise you can find is $5,000 to $30,000 and then you are married to the bricks and mortar. Now of course with a high ticket sign up kit the potential prospect pool is probably smaller but then again in a Top Tier MLM, you really don’t need to sponsor many people to get to 5 figures a month, maybe 3 or 4? Now historically you built a Top Tier MLM business the same way you built a traditional MLM: make a list, do meetings, advertise, etc. However the biggest boost to the Top Tier MLM business model has been the marriage of Network Marketing prospecting with online lead generation systems like  My Lead System Pro, I mean if you have a large enough pool of prospects to pull from you can sell pretty much anything. Online marketing system allow you to tap into a global market of over 1.7 Billion internet users. In today market the big earners in the Top Tier MLM companies are almost all using online marketing approaches and automated sales systems to tap their markets. So which really is the best business model? Well I actually like them both. As I pointed out in my Blog Post “Is Network Marketing Dead”, the Top Tier MLM or GPT model offers a way to achieve the big money much faster, a few months as opposed to a few years, but probably tops out at about $100,000 a month. MLM takes longer but since your ultimate team will be bigger, the top incomes are much higher. To confuse things even more, there are many reps who actually do both. They reason that since not everybody is attracted to the same company or product, why not have both in your store? Now of course in the world of Traditional MLM or old school Network Marketing this is heresy, but in today’s market I am not so sure. For those in traditional MLM that love their company or product but realize that it could take a few years to build up the duplication, marketing both a Traditional and a Top Tier MLM is a workable hybrid business model that can provide front end funding so that you can afford to do the slower build on the other. In the final analysis, I love the MLM universe and there is something to be said for just about all the business model variations. However the confusing part of the MLM world is that with only minute variations in the business models (Unilevel, Matrix, Binary, etc), there are so many choices in companies, that most people make it just based on whether they like the product (not a good way to do it). With a Top Tier MLM, the business model is so radically different, that is doesn’t seen to suffer from the same type of competition in the mind of the prospect. They either see it or they don’t, and one big advantage is that they can generally see a more achievable path to the money, 2 or 3 months as opposed to 2 or 3 years. So dive in, make your choice and GPT (Get Paid Today) or GPT (Get Paid Tomorrow) or GPTT (Get Paid Today & Tomorrow).

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