What do you do this for?
The constant failure, the jeers from friends who say “it will never work,” the credit card debt. What inspires you to keep going?
My story, call me lazy but I never liked working. My first job at 17 was at Toys R Us, I loved working with people, making connections, but $6.41 an hour just made everything worse. I got fired, re-hired, and then quit. My next job, the call center (you can here the spooky music start at this point.
By the time I was at the call center, I already got caught up in my first mlm, Mannatech. Two people from my church were doing very well, including my Pastor, whose son lost his asthma thanks to mannatech. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. Enroll 600 people and you’re making $10,000 a month, who doesn’t want this wonder vitamin. Guess what? Teenagers don’t want it. My first experience in direct sales was to my high school classmates. 30 cd’s and a few testimonials later, nothing.
Well guess what I did at the call center, sell health insurance, so what does this brainiac do. Market my mlm to my co-workers, turns out my boss would not like it much. It’s a good thing I didn’t start marketing to the people I called. Well it turns out working for commission only when you hate the hone isn’t the best idea, so I soon left the call center and my first shot at network marketing.
I bummed it for a while, God bless my parents, but I couldn’t live like them. They went to work early, came home late, worked weekends, and always looked tired. I knew it wasn’t for me, 40 years in a repetitive would kill me before it retired me. I tried data entry, $100 in ppc and 1 $14.95 clickbank commission check (which I never got). Turns out a lot of people search about mp3’s but don’t want to pay for them.
Surveys, paid to click, and paid to joins came next. Gotta love testing for those $75 surveys then finding out you don’t qualify and end up spending half an hour on a $2 survey. Paid to click and join offers were great, until you forget to cancel that offer in fine print and get stuck with a $49.95 monthly charge.
I then tried another vitamin company, “The Greatest Vitamin In The World.” I must be extra gullible in the morning because that infomercial had me. I quickly shelled out almost all the money in my account to purchase the website, starter pack, and some sign-ups. Come on enroll 20 people, make $1000, its the greatest vitamin in the world, how hard could that be. For those who can’t see me, namely all of you, I just slapped myself in retrospect. The company seems to have disappeared now, along with the commission they still owe me. What did I do wrong? I sent traffic there like mad, all those traffic exchanges and buying traffic but no results.
Next I tried out GDI. I could finally build my own website, even with the WYSIWYG editor, my website looked like crap. My traffic source, more traffic exchanges, I just never learn. On top of that this time I was on the other side of the ptc offers, I used it to advertise. I learned one of the harshest most costly lessons ever, nothing comes cheap.
I used whats called guaranteed sign-ups, pretty much paid to join where people give fake e-mails and youre happy for 7 days until they don’t upgrade in GDI and you waste over $100. I got 1 paid sign-up, who actually stayed longer than I did, it just wasn’t going anywhere for me. So what next, more surveys and paid to joins, made a $50 check and paid off some debt. Finally my stupidest point hit.
Ever heard of More Than Traffic, this was before my SEO days, I thought these guys were kings. Based in the UK (immediate red flag), they promised $100,000 in any program in 4 months or you don’t pay anything. If they get it, you pay 15%. What $15,000 when you’re making $100,000 so I invested my over $400 for them to build mirror sites to collect sign-ups. Even after reading all the complaints, hearing the accusations of people who knew better, my greed got the best of me. Even when they were “hacked” and taken offline to reboot their system, I still stupidly held to the belief I that they would follow through on their promise.
You can find out what I did after in part 2.