Okay, so you want to earn an income online, but you don’t have something to sell and you want to find a good product, service or program.
At
12-SECOND-COMMUTE.NET, we do not endorse any one company—actually we don’t endorse any company and not because there are not some good ones out there. We focus our attention on what we do best and we make ourselves available to our clients to answer your questions.
With that said, below are some tips to help you find something you can sell and use
12SC to help you achieve your goals.
Step One: Start with yourself
What do you like? Not candy wise or food wise, but what are you interested in? Are you interested in vitamins, health, saving the planet, coffee, animals, kids, computers, etc.? The reason this is where you start is because you must believe in what you sell as that is 90% of the battle. If you are trying to sell vitamins, but you don’t take them personally, how are you going to sincerely persuade others to buy your vitamins? The answer is you cannot and it will show in your sales results.
So, start with yourself and make a short list of things you like and things you believe in. Come up with 3 – 5 topics and then move on to step two.
Step Two: The pros and cons
Take those topics and write the pros and cons of each. Let’s take vitamins as an example, you might have a pro and con list such as:
Pros:
Help keep you healthy
Extend your lifespan
Everyone needs them
Once someone starts taking them, they will most likely continue
Cons:
Expensive
High Turnover
Saturated market
Write as many pros and cons for each of your initial topic and there is no right or wrong with these as you are just developing a starting point for your business.
Step Three: Review the pros and cons
Once you have your list, review the pros and cons for each topic side by side and see if you can come up with objections to overcome the cons and then see if you can come up with cons to get rid of the pros. Again, there is not a right or wrong as this exercise is designed to make you think a little outside the box and help you get focused on topic.
Step Four: Choose the winner
Choose the winner from your topic list of pros and cons and then start researching that topic. Don’t get rid of the other topics just yet as you might need them later, but by now you should have a clear winner from your initial topic list so you can start your research.
Now use the search engines to find a company that has a business opportunity related to your chosen topic of interest. Again, you will want to come up with 3 – 5 businesses that you can review to see which one you want to work with and don’t worry if you can only find one or two companies to review, that can be a good thing and it tells you that the market is not saturated yet for your chosen topic.
Step Five: Company review
This could very well be the most important part of your process because you want to make sure the company you choose to work with is solid and has a good reputation. There are many ways to do this and starting with the search engines is your best bet. Also, don’t rely on just one search engine for your task. Check Google, Yahoo, and MSN and use the same search criteria for all search engines you use.
For example if you want to find review of the company, put the company name followed by the word reviews and you can also put the company name followed by the word scam. Now, keep in mind you will almost always find more bad than good reviews because most of us don’t say anything unless we had a bad experience with something, so if you find more negative reports than positive does not mean the company is bad.
If your company is an MLM company, there is a site that gives some good information about many of the MLM companies out there. The URL is below so you can review your chosen companies at your convenience:
http://www.mlmrankings.com/mlm_companies.asp
Also, check the Alexa rankings of the company in question. Go to
http://www.alexa.com/ and put the URL of the company in the search field and see how the company rates in site exposure. Any site in the top 100,000 is doing really great.
In addition, you will want to do a Whois search
http://whois.org/ and this will also tell you how long the company has been using their domain and who owns the domain. This is important information so you know whether the company is owned legitimately or using an Alias.
Step Six: Make the call
Okay, once you have done your due diligence and you have settled on one or two companies to work with, now is the time to make a call to them. On a personal note, if they don’t have a phone number, don’t bother with them because they are a scam. Any company wanting to sell online without a phone number is not worth working with.
Call them and ask questions about their company, compensation plan, number of members, how long they have been in business, what is their growth rate. Ask as many questions as you can—even if you think the questions are stupid or you already have the answers. The reason you do this is because you’ll want to see how supportive of you they are going to be as well as to see how honest they are going to be.
Here is an example of what to watch out for: If they tell you they have 20,000 distributors but on their site, they say a different number, run away. This is the kind of company you want to stay away from because if they cannot be honest to you and on their home page, you cannot trust them with anything else.
It takes more research to find out things like the above, but you can do it. After you talk with corporate, ask for some distributor names and call several of them and ask them questions. See if what they tell you coincides with what the company said and what each distributor says.
Yes, all this takes a little time, but it is better to spend a little time up front and get the right company long term then to just jump into a business and find out after you have forked over a few hundred dollars that the company is not what they appeared to be.
Final Thoughts:
There are many companies out there promising quick riches and instant income and let me tell you right now if you come across those in your research, run don’t walk away from them because they are deceiving you and not worth of having you as a customer.
It is going to take time for you to build your business, regardless of what that business is. Google and Microsoft lost hundreds of millions of dollars before they made a dime. Every offline business in the world lost money before they made money so when a company tells you that you can retire in a year or two or tells you that you can make money instantly, don’t believe them.
I have seen companies telling people they can make over $70,000 per month and that will happen when pigs fly and gas drops to 20 cents a gallon.
Don’t be fooled by empty promises and instant riches. I can’t tell you how many people have asked me to get involved with their opportunity and then they show me their sales page with charts and graphs stating how much I will make with them. Each time, I tell them to show me their canceled checks or proof they are making money and not one of these people has ever been able to prove this to me.
Do some people make a lot of money on the Internet? Of course they do, just like some people offline make a lot of money, but it takes time and it takes patience and it takes an investment. Anyone out there making a good living online is spending a lot of money to run their business—something they will all strategically forget to mention to you.
You have to advertise and you have to constantly advertise or you go out of business. People come and go in online businesses all the time because they think they are going to get rich quick and when they don’t make their million in a month, they head off to the latest and greatest get rich quick scheme and start again.
If working online was so easy, everyone would be retired by now and the Internet would implode, but that is not the case is it?
Take your time, do your research, use your tools, services and resources in
12SC to help build your business, track your ads, brand yourself, help your downline and you can make it online. Our job is to help you and teach you what you need to do. We have been where you are and we have not forgotten how lonely it is when starting out, so let us help you get what you desire the right way.
All The best
Eric Burgoyne
