I started marketing on the internet on July 8, 2008, four weeks after I moved to Suffolk Virginia. I purchased a “travel store” which came with a website and a back office. The website fee was $59.95 per month. If you signed up three people then your website would be FREE. The hype surrounding this business was in the compensation plan and the exotic travel locations at a reduced rate for you and your family. Yes, they had a training/marketing module, but one had to get family and friends to sign up for this opportunity. Hence, I asked family and friends via phone calls, letters, e-mail, fax, etc. Not one signed up.
The training/marketing module from my upline consisted of a thirty- day boot camp, which was nothing more than a few emails put together with various tips, and tricks that were dated. No blogs, no discussion forums, no PPC, no article marketing, no press releases, to name a few marketing strategies, were ever mentioned with this travel company. The training/marketing package and business cards were another $150. The “travel store” itself cost $199.00 because it was discounted at the time of purchase. It would have cost $399 without the president’s discount. If one considers all fees and monthly payments from July to December then the grand total is $708.70 out of pocket expense!
So living in a city in which I new no one, I had to find a way to market this product. My upline was friendly, but of no assistance whatsoever. Their marketing strategy was to cold call leads that you purchased. They even called some leads that I had from my days of working ten hours per day, but that’s another story. I endured for several months. I did earn some money – $80.80! But to get this commission I had to write the company telling them that I was going to start a letter campaign against them for non-payment, a breach of their contract. I received the check and deposited it quickly.
The tax deductions were all good for this first attempt at earning money via an online MLM. The next part of this odyssey was concerned with finding a legitimate primary business on the internet. I needed to find out how to market on the internet. My research and due diligences lead me to find this important fact of life: internet training with a focus on marketing and the ability to use marketing tools is the foundation of any successful MLM.
I needed a training website that would be cost effective yet useful in learning internet marketing. After one year of going for this and for that, I finally discovered the Traffic Plan. The training is intense, purposeful, and easy to understand because it is taught in a non-techie way. One is able to listen to videos again and again. The Traffic Plan is free to join, however, the value is apparent once you get started. For example, article marketing is discussed in detail on day 15 of the 30-day training schedule. Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media are explained in terms of the way in which they interconnect to drive free traffic to your blog or to your chosen primary business. Another example is using Twitter traffic directed towards FB, Ezines, Blogs, etc. In other words, free traffic is generated from social media! Currently, I am marketing with skills that I have learned at the Traffic Plan and TTP continues to add new training almost daily. So to avoid the search for the “Holy Grail” of internet marketing, and to answer the question, “What’s marketing got to do with it?” visit the site below. The experience will be AWESOME.