Cellphone Plan Home Business

Network Marketing is one of the few industries (some people will argue it’s not really an industry, but that’s the only word I can come up with now) that offers both Residual and Passive incomes. Both of these kinds of incomes are superior to the “time for money” type of incomes you might get with a job. What are they and how do they differ?

Residual income is income you get long after you already done the work for it. A real world example of this would be recording artist. They get paid long after they’ve done the actual work to make the recording – sometimes for decades after.

Passive Income is income you earn by doing little or nothing at all. A real world example of this would be a sports star who lends his name to a product for promotion purposes. He hasn’t really done any work – but he’ll get paid usually on one some ongoing basis for the use of his name.

You might be saying: But I’m not a recording artist or a sports star! That’s ok because network marketing usually offer both of these advantageous income types. If your network marketing product is sold with an Autoship option, that means you get paid long into the future for one sale. This is residual income because you do the work once and you keep getting paid long into the future. Passive income can be found in your network marketing team building. Presumably your team is doing work; bring in customers and building their own team. You will get paid on their efforts! Both of those criteria can be met with Lightyear Wireless.

Passive and residual income are both far superior to ‘paid by the hour’ income. When you are paid by the hour, you are simply trading time for money. And time is something that there never seems to be enough of. Often when you are working a low paying job, money is also in short supply. Trading time for money and not making enough money – that doesn’t sound good does it?

So we are very fortunate to have network marketing where both types of income are present. With some work and dedication you can build both passive and residual income streams in network marketing.

Having been involved in several Network Marketing programs in past, I can at least say that by now I know what I’m looking for in an NM company. And more importantly, I feel that I know what to avoid.

One of things I avoid is single product Network Marketing companies. NM companies that really only offer one product. Without arguing the merits of whether the single product does what it’s supposed to do or not, let’s look at the ’single product’ approach. What happens if some fundamental shift occurs that causes this product to be no longer desirable or marketable? Suppose for example it’s a supplement of some kind. The most likely thing to happen with a product like this would be some sort of side effect and a lawsuit, followed by a lot of negative publicity. Or it could be a negative report from the FDA or something.

A few years ago, EcoQuest International was riding on a high horse. They weren’t a single product NM, but they definitely had a flagship product which brought in the lion’s share of their business – their ozone based air purification systems. These systems worked by spraying ozone into your room and ‘crushing’ mold, odors, and contaminants. And EcoQuest was not the only one selling these things: Sharper Image had one too. But in 2004, the EPA came out with a report warning people that using these systems in the home was unsafe due to the levels of ozone in closed environments. Needless to say, that hurt the business and it took them some time to recover.

Bottom line: single product NMs or NMs with a high percentage of sales coming from a single product can be a dicey proposition. It’s the old “too many eggs in one basket” thing all over again. Now as Network Marketers does that mean you shouldn’t join one? Well I wouldn’t for the reasons mentioned above.

When someone talks about the “warm market” they often speak of it terms of your close friends and family members. Usually this not a very good group to market to for a variety of reasons. What about acquaintances? This is a much larger group for most people. This is everyone you know the first name of. This group consists of neighbors, parents of your kid’s classmates, people you worship with, people in your club or organization, co-workers, and so on.

Your relationships with these people vary greatly. It could go from someone who you consider a friend to someone who you only see once or twice a year and even those you don’t particularly like being around. This group is a significant group depending on how many people you know.

The plus side of this group is that you have easy access to them. The down side of them is that they may not be the least bit interested in your product or opportunity. As a result you could waste considerable time with people who aren’t interested. And as a result of that, you could mar your reputation with those people. Unfortunately, network marketing does not have the best reputation for some people.

The best way to approach this group is to let it come up in casual conversation relating to “what do you do for a living?” or “where do you work?”. That question can open up your opportunity to let them know you work for yourself. If that concept interests them, you might be able to take the conversation a bit further. If they don’t seem impressed, then let it die.

I would not say throw out this group entirely. As a network marketer, you should think and breathe your business and this means be willing to talk to people around you that might be interested in what you’re doing.

Lightyear Wireless offers two options for starting the business – The Manager Option ($49.99) and the Senior Manager Option ($299.99). Of course anyone can join as a customer but here I am talking about the business building part of Lightyear. What is the difference between these two options? What substantiates the $250 difference between these two options? Obviously that’s a big difference and most people make me explain this on the phone (obviously they want to know what their extra $250 is going to get them). So I thought, well since I explain it on the phone so many times I may as well blog it or at least the basic overview part of it.

What may already be obvious is that which option you choose will determine how what level you join the company at. Lightyear Wireless has 6 levels from lowest to highest: Manager, Senior Manager, Regional Manager, Vice President, Senior Vice President, and Presidential Director. $49.99 will get you on board as Manager and $299.99 will get you on board as Senior Manager. If you joined at Manager it would take a bit of work to get to Senior Manager. You would have to have 2 personally sponsored reps and 6 reps total. You would also have to have 2 PCPs.

PCP means ‘Personal Customer Point’. PCPs are points earned when someone buys qualified Lightyear products or services from you directly (not from your downline). Without going into a lot of details about the compensation plan, I will say that Senior Manager puts you in a position to begin earning residual income from Wireless plans (Manager does not). There are a few other things that you get with the $250 Senior package, but the instant Senior Manager position is the most significant. This is a way to jump start your Lightyear Wireless business and get it off the ground running.

Click Here to Learn more about Lightyear Wireless

I spent some time this morning cleaning up my twitter account. Mostly focusing on the list of people I was following. I noticed that a good portion of them have not “tweeted” in a long time. By long time, I used 3 months as a guide. I figure if they cannot tweet in 3 months I don’t want to bother following them.

Next up, I cleared out the ones that weren’t relevant to my interests. Like real estate agents for example; not sure why I followed them to begin with. Last out were the noisy ones with nothing but promo tweets. You know.. “download my such and such ebook” or “register for my such and such webinar”. Nobody wants to read promo tweets all the time.

This exercise taught me a few lessons about Twitter. First thing is that I need to make a renewed commitment to it. I have been guilty of not tweeting for long periods of time myself and need to refocused on connecting via Twitter. Secondly, Twitter must offer something of value to me. That is the people I follow must tweet things of interest to me. Otherwise, the service has no value. Thirdly I should provide value – even if it’s just a bit of humor to make someone smile.

There are a lot of people with Twitter accounts, but I would guess very few people are using Twitter effectively. Celebreties have it figured out; but people follow them like groupies. What about home based business people like me? Ok so I am off to tweet a few things. Follow me at the side bar.

Click Here to Learn more about Lightyear Wireless

I was speaking with someone the other day about joining my Lightyear Wireless business. As the conversation often does, it turned to questions about my success as in “how much do you make from this?”. I always refuse to answer that question directly for two reasons. 1) income claims are frowned upon and 2) my income varies from month to month. The way I answer that question is to say “I make a full time living from my home business” – which is a true statement.

He was one of those people who believes the 97/3 theory. That theory says that 97% of people to attempt a network marketing business fail at it, while only 3% actually succeed. I don’t really believe that statistic, but this person said “Oh you must be one of the lucky few who make money from this business”.

I assured him that luck had little or perhaps nothing to do with my success and bid him farewell. This turned out to be someone who didn’t really sound like he was ready for a home based business so I moved on. But I got to thinking about the luck thing later.

Imagine that? Some people think that you have to be “lucky” to be successful in network marketing! Oh, I guess there is potential luck involved. It would be ‘lucky’ if I happened to get a lead and signed up a person who turned out to be one of those ’super earners’. You know, one of those people who ends up building a team of 50,000 with me as the upline. That hasn’t happened yet but yet I still make a good income from network marketing. Perhaps it will happen and yes that would be lucky for me.

But an individual’s success in network marketing does not depend on ‘luck’ in the same sense as it does in pure ‘luck driven’ things like the lottery. In the lottery, your odds are in the 100 millions of winning and it depends almost entirely on luck – not just luck but ‘extreme luck’.

Network marketing on the other hand depends on persistence, attitude, perseverance, and many other attribute factors. And yes, a stroke of luck will certainly help but you don’t have to depend on it.

I keep running across people who seem to be in waiting mode. They’re waiting for something to happen. Waiting for this and that. What they’re waiting for varies, but a lot of people seem to waiting for things to ‘get better’. They don’t want to start a home based business because these are challenging times. What purpose does waiting have?

If you are waiting for better times ahead, you may be waiting a while. A lot of experts feel that we are beyond the normal predictable cycles of recession and recovery due to varying factors (like more government control in public companies). The last recession following the Dot.com bust has a phony recovery when you think about it. That ‘recovery’ was based on the housing/mortgage market – need I say more? That was mainly smoke and mirrors.

If you are waiting for high paying jobs to come back; again, you may be waiting a while. High paying jobs were few and far between in the last so-called recovery cycle. Most jobs that were added were low paying service jobs. So you shouldn’t expect any different in the future. There is already indication that pay scales are shrinking. They are not only shrinking in relative terms (compared to what it actually costs to have a decent lifestyle) but in absolute terms (actual dollars).

So why I am going on and on here about economics? Because it leads back to the idea of a home based business. There are no guarantees with a network marketing business, but there is something very close to a guarantee. If you are diligent about finding the right network marketing opportunity and you put in the effort necessary to succeed, it will be difficult for you to fail. And once you find success with a network marketing business, you can ride them through the various economic cycles. So what are you waiting for?

—————————-

If you are feeling overwhelmed by the choices in home based businesses, download my free book below to help you sort out and sift through those choices. It’s not about how to start a cell phone business; it just keeps it general. Although I am admittedly biased toward Lightyear Wireless, the book does not mention it (expect in the bio at the end).

If you’re old enough, you might remember the Apple Lisa computer that was around briefly in the early 1980’s. Of course, you would have had to have been paying close attention to the computer industry because Lisa came and went pretty quickly. Lisa came on about the time the IBM PC was getting started and Lisa put a friendlier face on the computer (a graphical user interface). Lisa was the first commercial GUI computer. Trouble was, Lisa was too expensive at just under $10,000 and few bought into it. By all accounts, the Lisa was one of Apple’s biggest failures.

But do you know what computer came out right after Apple realized Lisa was failing? If you guessed the Apple Macintosh, you guessed correctly. We all know that that computer was not only one of Apple’s shining successes, but the introduction of the “Mac” represented a pivotal stage in modern computer environments.

What on earth does this have to do with Network Marketing and a home based business? Well some take-aways. Apple had a huge failure followed by a huge success. Is that a take-away or what? If you are experiencing failure in your home based business, that big success might just be waiting around the corner.

The other thing to note is that Apple learned from the failure of the Lisa to make the Macintosh what it was. Likewise, before you wash that failure from your memory, take one last look at it and try to decide what you could have done differently if anything.

As network marketers, we have to get used to a lot of people saying no to us. To some, that equates to failure. In some cases you can learn from the no and in other cases there is nothing that would have made them say yes, and you just move on.

So don’t look at failure as something to be entirely discarded. See what you can learn from it and who knows? Maybe a big success is waiting just behind one of those failures.

Click Here to Learn more about Lightyear Wireless

There are loads of good reasons to start a home based business. Among them are being your own boss, elimination of a cross town commute, better control over time, and more quality family time. If you ask any three people who have a home based business, you’re likely to get 3 different answers.

I’ll share my own reason for starting my home business. I suppose the above reasons are all valid for me, the one that trumps all the other is being free from the ups and downs of economic fluctuations.

I got tired of always having to worry about the economy. Tell me this: are you worried about economic conditions right now? How would you like to be free from that type of worry? Those are the questions I asked myself and that freedom is the primary driving force.

When you are caught up in the hire and fire cycles of businesses, you are going to forever be at the mercy of someone else’s hiring whims. Your success may be somewhat dependent on your skill, but in general, you are at the mercy of luck and circumstance. Over the years I grew increasingly uncomfortable with that cycle. I got tired of having to worry about whether the economy was going to go into a recession.

Don’t get me wrong: I still am alarmed at the recessionary cycles. The difference is that now I have more control over my income and standard of living during good times and bad times. In fact, Lightyear Wireless business is going strong now. This is largely due to the fact that during economic hard times, more people become interested in starting their own home based business. Businesses like Lightyear Wireless benefit greatly from that.

So maybe you’re tired of these economic cycles too?

If you are feeling overwhelmed by the choices in home based businesses, download my free book below to help you sort out and sift through those choices. It’s not about how to start a cell phone business; it just keeps it general. Although I am admittedly biased toward Lightyear Wireless, the book does not mention it (expect in the bio at the end).