How Do You Tell Which Home Based Business Will Create A Legitimate Secondary Income Stream (Or Even A Large Primary One), And Which Ones Will Eat Up Your Time, Money And Self-Esteem?
The first vital piece of knowledge you must grab a hold of is that you must evaluate two aspects of any Home Based Business:
1)The company – this primarily consists of the compensation plan and the products or service they are asking you to sell. This is often the part people are talking about when they refer to the ‘opportunity’ or the ‘program’.
2)The Marketing System – this is the process they expect you to follow when selling the product or service.
Within each of these areas, there are specific criteria you need to make sure are there, or you will be setting yourself up for spinning your wheels, and ultimately, failure.
Let’s Take A Look At The ‘Must Haves’ For The
Company First…
Criteria #1: Gives You the Chance to Benefit from Explosive Growth.
Many people have been lured in by the phrase “ground floor opportunity”, or ”pre-launch phase” as if that’s the best thing you could ever find.
In their minds they think they have their hands on the next Google or Microsoft.
I would disagree.
Unfortunately, the sad truth is that most companies fail, so if an opportunity really is “ground floor,” then there’s no track record yet and the chances for failure are much greater than the chances for explosion.
What that means is you might be getting in on the ground floor of an opportunity that’s…
Going Nowhere!
Criteria #2: No ‘Selling’ Required.
Most opportunities require that you sell their “latest and greatest” product. It may help you lose weight or live to the ripe old age of 107, but anything that requires a lengthy explanation just to get a few people interested is setting you up for trouble.
Why?
Because to be successful in most home businesses you are going to need to be able to duplicate, and even if you can sell the super-complicated product, most of the people on your team can’t.
Which ultimately means it won’t get you the lifestyle you want.
Not to mention, if you’re constantly doing sales presentations, when are you going to have time to do what you really want to do? And what happens when you stop doing sales presentations?
Bingo!
You stop and your income stops. (Sounds a lot like a job.)
This also relates directly to the next criteria…
Criteria #3: Doesn’t Require People to Change Their Buying Habits.
The vast majority of home business opportunities require you to sell a product you’ve never purchased before – and more importantly – a product you probably wouldn’t purchase if it didn’t come with the opportunity to make some money.
This is a problem because buying habits are extremely difficult to change.
Chances are, you buy a particular brand of soap every time you go to the store. What if I told you about a new soap that:
- Costs twice as much…
- Was only available online…
- And came only in packages of 50 bars.
- Oh, and you have to pay shipping, too.
It would be pretty hard to get you to buy that soap even if I swore up and down how much cleaner you would get and how much longer it would last.
Truthfully, the only reason most of these people buy it is because they’re hoping they can get other people to buy it, so they can earn a commission. (Translation: People aren’t really buying soap… they’re buying the opportunity.)
Bottom line: if your home business opportunity requires people to change their buying habits, you’ll find it much more difficult to find and keep new business partners AND it ends up being a nightmare trying to sell enough product to make any money.
Here’s a much better approach: Find an opportunity that taps into money that people are already spending… on the products they’re already buying… and in the stores they’re already shopping at.
Those Three Things Are Vital. If An Opportunity Has The First Two, That’s Still Good. But If You Can Find All Three, You’ve Got A Real Winner!
Why? It might sound crazy, but human beings are creatures of habit and we get as used to the stores we shop at as much as the products we use.
On a certain level it makes sense…some stores and brands have legitimately earned a level of trust from their buyers. Why not tap into that hard work they’ve done?
This is also closely related to the next critical criteria…
Criteria #4: Doesn’t Require You to Sell an Overpriced Product.
Are most of the products sold in home businesses outstanding? Yes. Worthy of a premium price? Yep. But try explaining that to your brother-in-law or your friends at work.
Chances are your pitch will go over like a lead balloon.
Many home businesses sell expensive products because it’s the only way they can afford to make money and pay their reps. Unfortunately, what the company needs… and what your customers want… are two totally different things.
You may try to convince your prospects that your product’s prices are about the same as what you’d find in a store, but most folks know better. And they’re not going to buy it.
On the other hand, if you can find an opportunity that sells the products people already buy at around the prices they are used to seeing, you’re going to be positioned much better.
Ok, next up…
Criteria #5: Compensation Plan Gives You An Opportunity To Earn Money Immediately
This one is key.
As you get more successful at attracting business partners, a firm dose of reality will set in…most people get started with great intentions, but never do a darn thing.
That’s the beauty and the curse of the home business industry – you can’t make people do a thing. They are their own boss.
However, you definitely feel more of the curse when you spend a lot of time and effort getting people started and so few of them do anything!
That reality isn’t going to change as long as people are people, but there is a way around it, and there are two keys to doing so (you definitely need both):
- Find a company in which most people who join your team also buy the product so you are making money almost every time someone gets started on your team regardless of whether they end up doing anything. (I’m not talking $10 either. It should be at least $50 so it is worth the effort of getting people started)
- Leverage a system that allows you to go through enough numbers that you get more people started without having to do increasing amounts of work (called “scaling”).
A good system will allow you to get more and higher quality people started which means it will take a lot less time to find the right business partners who will put effort in and be successful.
