I have created this blog to share my experience and thoughts on making an income from home. The tagline for the blog is a quote from Benjamin Frankin. While the quote doesn’t really say that much about the content of this blog, it does cover the general message I want to convey. If you are interested in finding out about how you too can be successful working from home, then you may want to stick around. If not, that is also quite okay – we can’t all be interested in the same things.
I was first introduced to the concept of network marketing in the very early 1990’s, when I was looking for a way to support myself while studying at university. Over a period of 15 years, I joined a few of the large network marketing (and direct sales) companies, used their products, made lists of friends, lost friends, lost money and lost momentum. In spite of all the wonderful things I was told, success in the network marketing field did not eventuate. My university studies were hence never subsidized by any network marketing opportunity – instead I took a job as a tutor at the university, and worked part-time as a disc-jockey.
While each opportunity that surfaced looked better than the previous ones I had tried, I could never become as successful as I wanted to. I now know why, and I will cover these reasons in time on this blog. The point I am making here, is that I kept trying new opportunities – not because I wasn’t learning from my mistakes, but rather because part of me knew that it should be possible to become successful in network marketing. Other people had done it, so why couldn’t I?
I am not the type of person who is able to get excited about a really expensive (but ostensibly very good) “home maintenance system”. What is there to be excited about? It cleans floors, and it costs a lot of money… do you want it or not?
I started thinking that my inability to become over-excited about the products I was selling was the main reason I wasn’t successful. And, by extension, I was beginning to think that network marketing was really not something I could ever be good at, if I wanted to remain level-headed and honest.
A large number of network marketing companies are founded on an ephemeral euphoria. This euphoria attracts new people to the organization, and then when they are less successful than they were hoping to be, they display the same artificial euphoria hoping they will attract some new people to the opportunity. Network marketing companies are never created with an intention to deceive potential distributors, or to make wild claims about the benefits of their products. These are just a couple of the side-effects that occur because the distributors are desperate to recruit more people so they can at the very least “break even”.
The truth is that the products don’t matter, and the euphoria is optional. The only thing that matters is people. Network marketing is not about selling products – it is about providing people with what they already knew they wanted. If you don’t know what people want, you will never be able to provide it to them.
I hope that you find something of value on this blog. Feel free to contact me at any time if you have any comments or questions.
Peter Abolins (August 2009)
