Sharing my adventure

I have been making websites, both intra-net and inter-net for many years. I have also been making applications and tools to go along with those websites. For many years I worked as an employee of a few Fortune 100 companies. Over the years I came to realize that my work was making these companies hundreds of millions of dollars, while I was paid well for it....it simply was not enough of the pie in my opinion. At this point I began to work for myself, however I was still doing the exact same jobs, just that now I was being paid much more than I was before. Now there is nothing wrong with making more than $10,000 a month. Believe me you can live quite well off of that much income. The problem for me was that I had run smack dab into the ceiling of my earnings. I was doing all the work that I had time in a day to do. It just was not possible to make more money than I was currently making, unless I was to start raising my prices.....and the market only allows you to charge so much.

This is the point where I started to investigate Multi-Level Marketing using the internet. I studied several different opportunities and found them all to be relatively the same as far as concept, principle, and compensation. So I joined one and followed all of the training and advice I was given. I participated on all the phone calls, I made my lists, I wrote out my goals. I purchased leads and cold called them all. This was how it was done in the 90’s. I met with moderate success and within a few months I was earning more than I was spending. I was adding 10 to 15 new distributers a month into my down-line. The problem was that out of those 10-15 a month, only one or two were sticking around more than a couple of months, and some of those did not stay more than 5 or 6 months. So the only way to keep making money was to keep buying leads and keep calling them. It was a lot of work for the small amount of money I was making. In fact I was earning far less per hour at MLM than I was building websites. Something had to change, so I started researching on the internet for a new MLM with a new business model. Unfortunately all I found was the same business model applied to internet based MLMs, but it seemed like a good idea to market to more people via the internet. So I made the switch and I made money using the same techniques that I used before. I purchased leads, I cold called them and the only thing new was they had a website they could go to and check out the business. Low and behold I had the exact same success rates with this MLM. Not surprising because I was using the same tactics. Even when I changed to start using e-mail leads and an auto-responder I was getting the same results, just a little more money back than what I was spending.

It was at this time that I had a small confrontation with my up-line. I discovered that the leads I had been buying for over a year were actually coming from my up-line, who seemed to be keeping the better leads for him. This was when I decided that I should be able to capture my own leads using the internet. I purchased several domain names, set up web pages to use as capture pages and purchased traffic to my sites via advertising. To my amazement this did not work out very well at all. I discovered that I knew absolutely nothing about marketing. All I had accomplished was that now I was spending the same amount of money for leads as I had before, except my leads were not converting into my MLM opportunity. In fact I was getting many nasty emails from my leads about spam and threats to sue. So I swallowed my pride, ate some crow and called my up-line about buying leads from him once again. This is where my foray into online MLM’s ended, because when I finally got my up-line to answer my calls he informed me that he was “moving his entire organization to a new pre-launch MLM, and I was not invited to come with him.” The majority of my up-line and down-line soon disappeared into the internet sunset and I closed down my online business a few thousand dollars poorer than I had started.

Since that time I have kept up with my research into online business opportunities and the new methods of marketing them. I discovered that I was on the right track with my attempt to build my own lead capture system that I could market my business opportunities to, I was just woefully inadequate at marketing and generating traffic to my system. I have began playing around with several of the new systems being offered these days, and in the future I plan to give a full report into which ones actually live up to their hype and which ones fall short. So if you would like to learn from my mistakes and my marketing adventures for free, just start following this blog.

Also I am asking that anyone who has free information about what works and what does not to please add it to this blog site. Share with us all that you know and have learned in your online business adventures.

My original challenge still goes out to all Marketing Gurus to put your money where your mouth is and prove that your system works. Contact me at nick@nickaadams.com

Nick A Adams
http://www.nickaadams.com

Network Marketing.....Just a scam?

I am a computer programmer by training and generally a computer geek by nature. Over the years I have read quite a bit about Network Marketing, MLM, Reverse Funnel Systems, etc. I have read about many people who have made a lot of money in these areas, but I have read about many more people who never made a dime, but instead lost money in these systems. So what I would like to do with this blog is to allow people who have actually made money, not potentially made money, but actually made money in these areas to share how they did it. I mean come on, if you really are making a lot of money doing this then you should have nothing to fear about telling us what does and does not work.

I am currently in discussions with several people who claim to be making serious income using their techniques. Right now I am doing my best to verify their claims and will be reporting my findings. So if any of you so called experts want to put your money where your mouth is, then feel free to email me: nick@nickaadams.com I will give an honest report on your success, and allow you to have free advertising on many of the web pages that I own.

I am also contemplating setting up some sort of contest to let our "Marketing Gurus" train one person each (whom I will choose for them) in their system and seeing who can successfully prove-by-doing what they claim.

SO lets hear from the gurus out there, and from other bloggers just what you think.

Nick A Adams
http://www.nickaadams.com