I am almost exhausted after viewing thousands and thousands
of opportunities on the Internet. Ones offering you instant
wealth, millions of instant downline members: the promise
of little work or effort and to rub insult into the wound,
they show you pictures (very often the same ones) of
mansions in Hollywood (why anyone would want to live there,
I don't know), Lambourghinis (my favourite car as a child,
so an added barb). Often the owner, or principle is sitting
on some deckchair in Mexico waving at you, making you feel
really foolish that you haven't taken him up on his offer
yet.
Let's cut the nonsense and get down to brass tacks! Anyone
with any common sense, including yourself, knows that the
following is simply not true:
- you can have thousands in your downline instantly;
- you can work at this for just a few minutes every other
day;
- others will do most of the work for you (MLM);
- you will have thousands, or millions in the bank within
six months;
- theirs is a product that everyone will automatically buy
from you;
- you absolutely HAVE to get in now before it's too late.
I am not going to go into each one of these, suffice it to
say that your instincts are shouting at you that this is,
or at least smacks of a scam. It is probably someone making
these claims from his/her bedroom offering their flashy,
badly written affiliate website that is peppered with
spelling mistakes and bad grammar.
This is what any credible Business School will tell you:
- any business is hard work, every single day, or at least
every other day;
- you always need at least some capital: good advertising
always works, and costs money;
- the product should, preferably, be in demand
internationally;
- you must be passionate about the product;
- the company must have been around for some time,
preferably years, in order to be credible;
- you will need training and back-up support;
- you absolutely must have a business plan that is proven
(even if it is MLM);
- it will take time: 80 percent who start will fail because
they were not consistent and did not stick around.
Some people take most of their lives to realise these
facts. I will be honest with you: at 52 it has taken me a
number of years to get to this point. At some stage, I
entertained at least some of the bad beliefs mentioned in
the first bulleted section.
You might get the idea that I am knocking MLM in some way:
not at all. But it must be a proven system that in no way
even remotely suggests that others will do the work for
you. This is rubbish.
Forget about the pay plan: in fact if you understand it
within the first few days, I would say your focus is
incorrect. Most of them are so difficult that it would take
at least 3 or 5 viewings to understand it: that's what I
mean when I say your focus is wrong. You should have been
looking at the business plan, the product itself: can you
talk about this with undivided passion? You should have
spent most of your time looking at the support or the
back-office and promotional tools available to you. Do you
already have a website? How many people are visiting it per
day? Can you link this business to your site? Do you have
access to and knowledge about YouTube, Myspace, etc? If
not, you'll find promotion difficult unless you're prepared
to go the traditional route of physical presentations in
rooms to a crowd of people. This does also work, of course.
Am I scaring you? I hope so. I hope to scare you away from
this article and from affiliate programs in general. There
are two reasons. One, I will be saving you much heartache,
time, money and anger from your loved ones while you spend
all the time away from them promoting something in the
false hope of becoming rich quickly. Two, I simply don't
want you to spend any time even thinking about an
opportunity I have come across if you don't fit the profile
I mentioned above.
Go back and read again what any successful, sensible
business owner considers before they jump into anything.
If you truly believe that you fit this profile, and that
you believe these points above to be true, then I urge you
to consider any affiliate program that fits the profile of
a viable, economically sound business.
Good luck.
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Michael Klerck is a writer and winner of the Mondi Paper
Magazine Writer's Award for work in Men's Health. He is
also an avid promoter of the best luxury resorts membership
in the world today. Visit his site:
http://luxuryresortsVIP.biz and see the excellent movie.