Alec Bryan`s Business Blog

It all started for me back in 2001 – I started my first internet business. Then I started my next site, a few months later and the rest is history.

You see my wife and I wanted to find a way to generate some extra income that would allow her to stay home with our first child who was born prematurely and had a pretty rocky start on life.

Since that time, I have moved on to build a very successful internet empire that spits off enough money for her to stay home with our now 2 child family, and fund some nice vacations and a car payment.

However, in 2006 I realized that I was not building something can build true residual income. In other words, a business that would continue to grow and provide increased income from the labors of others.

I started to get interested in Network Marketing/attraction marketing as a good avenue to provide the residual income that I was looking for long range.

I had a friend that was involved and was making good money with a network marketing/mlm company. One day she gave me a call, and I ended up signing up with her a few weeks later. Little did I know at the time that I had absolutely NO idea how to succeed in MLM!

I have gone on to build a successful team, but in the process I have changed directions 180 degrees 3 times – is that even possible?

When I first got started in network marketing, the first step of training was to make a “names list” of 100 people that I know and then start prospecting them.

So I geared up, learned all I could and started making phone calls. I will admit it right now – I only called 5 people on the list, and then I gave up. And the big secret of the industry is that I was the exception – I actually called more than one person on my list.

You see 95% of people that join a network marketing opportunity, never even pick up the phone to make that first call. This is why things like calling parties, etc were created by leaders.

Then came the hotel meetings – bring a prospect and he will get a presentation. This is okay, because I did not have to do anything other than invite – but seriously, this is like 1980’s style cheesy!

The biggest problem with working your warm and hot market is that eventually it will run out. For me it ran out because I did not want to do it anymore. For others they will simply end up in the NFL (No Friends Left) club – as my friend Todd Falcone likes to say.

So what most people do is end up doing what I did. They start buying expensive MLM leads. These are leads that have signed up online wanting to receive information on starting their own home based business.

Typically these sell for $3.00 to $20.00 per lead. The lead company that generates them will typically resell them at least several times, if not dozens of times.

What this means is that you will NOT be the only person calling this prospect! This is a real problem.

So I bought hundreds of leads – costing thousands of dollars over the next several months. I would spend hours calling leads several evenings a week.

Frankly this sucked! I called so many losers, couch potatoes, no money, whiners – it completely wore me out.

I asked my upline what was wrong, they said just keep calling, there are “real professionals” in these leads – it’s a “numbers game”. They said you need to tweak your approach, change your posture, etc., etc., etc……..

After signing up just one person as an associate, after spending hours on the phone I gave up. I spent well over $700 buying leads, and made a whopping $100 – talk about a negative ROI.

I took a 3 month break from building my network marketing business. But I did not give up on the industry. You see I knew there had to be a better way to build this business.

There had to be a way that I could build this business and start making money, and then one day it clicked…… I realized that it was all about leveraging the power of the Internet to my advantage. I researched Drop Card Marketing and found this to be very effective as well.  

The moral of the story is that if I figured my way around this, YOU CAN TOO!  Don’t get discouraged!