When you choose and run an internet marketing business you will soon realize that you cannot be the jack-of-all-trades. This would not be productive and by wanting to dilute your energy on all marketing techniques you would end up mastering none.

So you will need to focus on what you are good at. That’s why it is important to know what your strengths are. Here are 3 basic steps you should take when starting an internet home business.

1. Assess your talents.

Think of your talents as the things you’re really good at. They are like personality traits. For example, you may be a very creative person, or someone who is really good at attending to details or a person with a gift for communicating. Your talents are the base for any successful business venture, including an internet marketing business.

2. Examine your skills.

These are the things that you can do. The difference between talents and skills is that talents are passive and skills are active. Skills are being developed over time as you learn. For instance, a creative person may have excellent skills for drawing or writing.

3. Put your talents and skills together.

When you combine your talents and your skills they become strengths you will want to focus on. If you are a good writer, then you should work on this talent to develop copywriting skills and article writing or blogging.

Focusing is a major factor of success in any business venture. Knowing what your talents are, spending time to educate yourself and learn will help you develop skills. Then, be sure to focus on your strengths and you will surely build a successful online marketing business.

In my former company a big emphasis was put on setting goals. Every executive and manager had to set goals on different levels such as department, team and individual level, and this was done following the S.M.A.R.T. method (more on this later).

When I started in the network marketing business I was very surprised to see that many people had no idea about goal setting and how to do it the right way. Most people who contact me and people who join my team do not really take the time to set their goals for their business. I have some people tell me things like “but Anne, my goal is to make money”.

When you are working from home and especially when you are starting an internet business, whether on your own or as a distributor of a MLM or any network marketing company, it is critical to set goals properly. Why? Because first, if you don’t set precise goals you’re never going to achieve anything. And then, if you set your goals the wrong way this will prevent you from designing a good plan to achieve those goals and without a good plan it is very difficult to be successful. This is true for any business by the way.

Here is the method I was using with success in the corporate world and that I would recommend for any network marketing business: set S.M.A.R.T. goals.

S. = Specific

Making money can definitely NOT be a goal, because it is not specific. A specific goal would be to buy a house in a particular area, to pay for your kid’s education, to travel to Europe, to provide for retirement, these are just examples.

M. = Measurable

It must be possible to measure a goal, ie it should always be quantifiable. You might want to make $1,000, generate 25 leads, sign up 50 people in your business, and so on.

A. = Attainable

Your goals have to be realistic so that you can achieve them. Being a newbie in the network marketing industry and setting a goal to make $10,000 your first month is definitely NOT realistic hence not attainable. Another example: generating 100 leads per day might not be achievable if you know that the top producer in your business generates 50.

R. = Relevant

The goals you set must be directly linked to your business and must make sense. It may be more difficult to find simple examples here, but let’s say that you are setting goals for a MLM business with a particular company, and you set a goal of developing your own product; well this might be a great idea but is not relevant to your business.

T. = Time-bound

You will always achieve a goal within a time frame so never forget this element. Make $1,000 per week, generate 5 leads per day the first month, sign up 3 people per week, reach a six-figure income within a year, buy a house 2 years from now, and so on.

Once your goals are “S.M.A.R.T. proof”, you can safely move to the next step, which is building a solid business plan.

Not so long ago I was still working a full time corporate job. Working from home is a life-changing experience and I love it. I could probably come up with 20 reasons to work from home, and I have summarized my 5 main reasons in this post.

1) Spend time with your kids.  This is the number one reason people give for working from home. I was with my 2 year old only one hour a day and now I take him to morning day care, have lunch with him, play with him, this is just priceless.

2) Create wealth for yourself.  Working for someone else can be very frustrating when you have the feeling that you are creating wealth for your boss and not for yourself. The point is your boss is not here to make you rich, but to ensure that you get your pay-check. Working for yourself is much more rewarding because you can create unlimited wealth for you and your family.

3) No Commute. The average working person wastes almost 10% of their week getting to and from work, and most of the time in stressful traffic jams. I was spending 1.5 hours on the road every day and now I just have to commute to my son’s day care (5 minutes walking) and back to my home office.

4) Choose your own hours.  Working a 9-5 job can be very frustrating when you have nothing more to do at 3pm or quite stressful when it’s 5 and you still have tons of work. You lose time or you have to work 200% to do it all before 5pm. It’s the dictatorship of the clock. Working from home, I can now have my own schedule, adapt it to my family needs, and I don’t have to ask permission to take half a day off when I need or want to.

5) No longer waste time or emotional resources coping with a boss or frustrated colleagues. I can now focus all my energy on working on my business in a productive way, and I think I must be 2 or 3 times more efficient and less tired at the end of the day.

When they want to start a home based business in the network marketing and direct sales industry, most people focus on the products and the compensation plan. Actually most MLM companies are built around the compensation plan. They forget that a business is about SYSTEMS and PEOPLE.

You can have the best product in the world, along with the best compensation plan, if you don’t have a system to market your product and a mentor who can teach you how to market efficiently, you will never make a dime. And that’s actually why 95% of network marketers make no more than $10 a week.

What I’m going to share with you here are a few key points you should look for when you are choosing your network marketing business. These are very important factors of success in this industry.

• First of all, you must find a business where you can have a mentor, a coach who is going to be there for you, someone you feel you can trust. This has to be someone who is willing to listen to your needs and actually cares about your success, someone who will answer your questions and help you be successful. This person must also have a financial interest in your success. Make sure he/she gets paid every time you do!
  

• Make sure the team you are working with has a powerful marketing system in place that anyone can duplicate. A strong system that anyone can plug into and get results with. If you have to figure out your own lead generation or if the company relies on recruiting family or friends, purchased leads or newspaper advertising, just run away. If you don’t have a reliable way of getting quality prospects in front of what you are offering you cannot be successful on a long term basis.
  

• Find a company where you don’t have to do any personal selling or explaining. Make sure there is a team of people in place to do this for you. You should have an entire team of people to support you.
  

• Make sure that the products being sold are legitimate stand alone products. These must be products that would sell independently from the business opportunity. Most network marketing and direct sales companies are built around the compensation plan and not a stand alone product. If what you are marketing is not a stand alone product, you will have a hard time building residual income and a stable business as most people will not be able to duplicate what you are doing and people will leave your team faster than they joined.
  

• Make sure that the company has a long term vision and is going to be financially stable as long as you are going to be marketing for it. Also make sure the company is not hiding offshore somewhere to keep out of reach of the attorney general. This is a key sign of a company’s true colors.

If you can find a legitimate company, with stand alone products, a strong marketing system, good sales support, and a personal mentor, you will dramatically increase your chances of success in the network marketing industry.

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A real scam is a fraudulent scheme designed for making a quick profit, and a fraud is a breach of confidence perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair advantage. There are quite a lot of those scams on the internet that’s why you need to be careful.

But there are actually a lot of people who jump into a legitimate business opportunity, who fail and then say they have been scammed. Why? Well I think that’s exactly when the emotional factor I was talking about in my last blog post is playing. People start to believe they will make fortunes on the internet just because other ones do and just because it’s the internet. And when reality is not delivering on their beliefs, they wake up and say they have been scammed.

That’s why I think it is very important to be realistic when starting / choosing an online home based business. Forget all the hype and think about these 3 main points:

1. Some people are mixing up an internet home business with a get-rich-quick scheme, thinking they will get rich by next month. There are online home businesses that are legitimate businesses where you can make a good six-figure income your first year in business, quit your job and then achieve financial freedom. But like every business, you must be ready to invest TIME into it.

2. Some people think they will make money with little or no effort, and that the product will sell by itself. Well this will never happen with a legitimate business because again, it is a business and no get-rich-quick scheme. You need to learn how to market online, you need to take action on a daily basis, be consistent, and put a lot of ENERGY into your business.

3. Some people think they can reasonably expect to build and grow their business without investing or spending a dime. Tons of people on the internet are looking for “free home business opportunities”; well, in business, the get-something-for-nothing mentality will get you nowhere. A business is NOT free. The good news is that most legitimate business allow you to start your business with a very low budget. But of course, to hit big results you’ll need to invest MONEY into your business.

I think that keeping those 3 points in mind when choosing a business will help you remain realistic, know what to expect, and avoid “being scammed”.

Last but not least, to be successful in your online business, you also need a strong training and a good support. You need a SYSTEM (Save Your Self Time Energy & Money) that will help you leverage time.

Whether you are brand new to network marketing and want to start your own home business, or you are already involved in a company and you are looking for another home business opportunity, you will do some research. And of course you want to avoid scams.

A real scam is a fraudulent scheme designed for making a quick profit, and a fraud is a breach of confidence perpetrated for profit or to gain some unfair advantage. You also have the pyramid schemes that are illegal because there is no product or service offered, but only the exchange of money to be part of an organization. For sure there is a lot of garbage on the internet, and this is really critical to do some serious research before joining any business opportunity. And it is important to keep in mind that there are scams that do look like perfectly legitimate business opportunities, and on the contrary there are opportunities that seem to be scams but are actually legitimate opportunities, and that is exactly why you need to be careful.

What happens when you search the internet is that you find a whole bunch of ads, videos, articles reviewing opportunities, and people who say they have been scammed and are telling their story. You did your research seriously, you found a company that looks perfectly legitimate, and one day you stumble upon one of those ads or websites where a guy is telling you that such company is a scam and that you should stay away, and you end up totally confused.

There are 2 important points here:
- first, you need to recognize that anyone can write anything online, and that just because something is on the internet does not mean it’s true. There are even websites posing as consumer-helpful resources that are anti-home business to such an extent as to render any information on the site useless. There are much better ways to find more objective information from reliable sources, starting with the company’s own website.

- then, it is a very common tactic on the internet to promote a business opportunity by discrediting other ones, especially if these are good ones. You will often stumble upon an ad where someone is telling you that such company is a scam and that you should look at HIS business opportunity instead because HE is the one who has found the real deal. This is especially true of successful network marketing company, because as they are perfectly legitimate and successful, they tend to attract network marketers, and people in competing companies will do their best to discredit the company in order to attract people to them.

You should NEVER trust someone who is discrediting a business opportunity just to pitch his own. Why? Because it is someone who lacks ethics, and ethics is important if you want to be successful in business in the long run. Then, would you buy a product because the advertiser is telling you that his competitor’s product is not good, or would you buy it because he can show you what is in it for you?

The point is that these techniques actually happen to work pretty well because those people are playing on our emotions, as nobody likes to be scammed and have his dreams crushed, and it does work because people are driven by their emotions more than anything else.

The best thing to do when you want to avoid scams is to do your own research and not rely on misleading comments or judgments made by people you actually don’t know. They might as well make you miss the opportunity of a lifetime.

More about scams and legitimate business opportunities:
” I Got Scammed” .
Legitimate Home Business Opportunities: What You Should Know .

When you want to start your own home business, you are looking for a legitimate home business opportunity, and you must be able to make the difference between different internet business models. The choices for a work from home business in today’s home business industry are almost unlimited. There are two different categories of home businesses: you can decide to start your own business offering your own product or service to consumers, or you can become an independent distributor or affiliate for an existing product or service. In this article I will focus on the second category, as this is the most chosen by people who start in the home business industry.

The home business industry can allow ordinary people to match or even exceed the earnings of executives and CEO’s of corporate America. Choosing the right business or company can propel you to a five or six figure yearly income, regardless of your educational background or your previous experiences. It gives motivated people the opportunity to start and build a business on a small budget, and to then go on to earn a significant income.

It can also be the playground for many deceptive businesses, so it is important to know how to tell the difference.

First I want to address the issue of “pyramid schemes” and how to spot one, because they are not legitimate businesses, they are scams and you should avoid them. An illegal pyramid scheme is a situation where there is no product or service offered, only the exchange of money. It’s a situation where you are encouraged to join an organization for a certain amount of money, and the promise is that your “investment” will grow to several times that amount. You don’t buy a product, you don’t sell a product, you simply find other people who agree to pay the same amount to join the organization. Sometimes these programs are called “gifting” programs…just “people helping people.” It’s still an illegal pyramid scheme and not a legitimate business. So the first thing you want to look at is if there is a product or service offered. If not, stay away.

Then, there are the multi-level marketing (MLM) companies, who offer a legitimate home business opportunity, and who use network marketing as a distribution model. Network marketing is often the distribution method of choice for companies with unique and high-quality products. This is a person-to-person method of distribution that allows for more product information to be given to the consumer than what could be accomplished by selling the product through retail stores.

Before starting a home business in the MLM industry in 2009, however, you should keep this in mind: first, the attrition level facing MLM’ers is very high. 97% of people in this industry are still failing to make money. And  people get started in your team but drop out within the first 90 days, all the more so as the initial investment is often so low that people don’t loose much money by quitting. Then, the old-school methods of prospecting (buying leads, doing surveys, handing out flyers, cold calling, chasing friends & family) are far from attractive and most of the time will not bring you any results. You can be very successful in MLM, but if you really want to succeed in an MLM business, you’ll need to have access to a very good training and a marketing system that will enable you to generate leads, brand yourself and attract people to you.

Eventually, there is what is called GPT (stands for Get Paid Today). This model gives serious entrepreneurs the opportunity to quickly achieve 5 to 6 figure incomes. Most of your commissions are paid upfront by the company, and you also have the opportunity to earn a substantial residual income from your team. The initial investment varies from a few hundred dollars to several thousands, and entrepreneurs who join at the higher levels of investment are less likely to quit because of their investment. Now, if they do quit it isn’t such a big deal for you because you have been paid your commissions upfront. This commission structure tends to attract more committed entrepreneurs than the MLM model. You also have access to a turnkey marketing system that eliminates or highly reduces cold calling, selling, pitching, as well as a complete training and support system you can depend upon to actually train you on how to market and leverage the internet.

So, when you want to start your home business, make sure you do your due diligence. There are some awesome companies out there that meet and exceed all the principles above, but there are also plenty that don’t. If you do your research then you can find the company that suits you and have the success and the lifestyle you are looking for.