Last time we talked about how a “job” is a dead end. JOB = Just Over Broke. The problem is that your income is ultimately limited to the number of hours in the day.
What else is there?
There are three broad categories of ways to make money. The first is to trade time for money, or have a job.
This also applies to some people who start their own business. For example, when someone starts a restaurant they feel that they need to cut costs by doing all the work themselves, which makes for some excruciatingly long days. They have to begin work very early to prepare food, work all day serving customers, then after the restaurant closes at night they still have to total all of the receipts, order supplies, and any of the other office-type paper tasks of running a business.
As a massage therapist, I know that this is where a lot of therapists fail to make ends meet. They want more money so they keep adding more sessions during the day until they end up injuring themselves from overwork. At the end of the day, for both the restaurant owner and the massage therapist, there is very little money left after expenses. That’s way too much work for so little money, not at all my idea of the American Dream.
The second way is to trade money for money, or to invest. I think most people do this to some degree, usually through a 401k plan from their job or with an IRA. I also think that most people have no idea what they are doing when they put money into their account.
You need to do a lot of research to successfully invest money in stocks, or you need to have someone you trust doing the research for you. I don’t know about you, but I don’t take the time to be an educated investor. I look on my pay stubs to see that money went into my 401k then hope that my quarterly statement will show an increase in value.
While some people do make a lot of money doing this, Warren Buffet for one, most people don’t do as well. Some people lose everything they have (think Enron).
The problem with trading money for money is that you have to have money to start with and you have to have enough money to be able to weather the market fluctuations. And it is very risky. Most of us are probably too young to remember the Great Depression but we probably do remember the .com bust, Enron, and the very recent collapse of Bear Stearns which involved a lot of speculative investing in sub-prime mortgages.
That brings us to the third method, which is to leverage other people’s time for money. This is usually called MSI, or Multiple Streams of Income. You may have also heard the terms “residual income” or “mail box money”. This is how most, if not all, of the wealthy people created their wealth.
Since you only have a limited amount of time available, you use other people’s time to make money. An example that you are probably very familiar with is the person, or group of people, who own the company that you work for, assuming that you currently have a “regular” job. They have hundreds or even thousands of people, including you, doing things that make them money.
The restaurant owner who was doing everything himself can turn his business into an MSI by hiring some employees to run the restaurant, which will free him up to focus on activities to build his business, such as marketing, and eventually opening up more locations and/or franchising out to other people.
Our massage therapist friend, or my wife and I, can rent out some space to do massage and contract with another massage therapist to do the work. The owner only works on select clients herself and uses the rest of her time to work on marketing and attracting more clients. Then she hires more therapists to handle the growing client base and eventually opens more locations.
That’s how MSIs work in a traditional business world, but it still takes a lot of up-front work to get the business started. There are easier ways to get started that don’t require all of that initial effort. I will cover a handful of them here very briefly and cover them in more depth in separate posts in the near future.
Affiliate marketing is the easiest that I know of. With affiliate marketing you sell someone else’s product for a small commission. You can create an Associate account with Amazon.com then add book links to your website or in your email signature. When someone clicks on your link they are taken to Amazon.com where they can buy that book and you get a very small share of the proceeds.
In network marketing you can create full-time income with part-time effort. Take an established business (some of which have been around for 30 years or more) with established products (usually higher quality than you can get anywhere else) and start selling them.
Sounds like affiliate marketing, right? Well, with network marketing you generally get better commissions and keep the profit from the difference between retail and wholesale prices (effectively buying at wholesale and selling at retail but without the headache of actually handling the product).
Network marketing companies generally offer bonus incentives too, like cars, houses, or vacations. For example, the company I’m with will pay out a lifestyle bonus at the higher levels that you can use for whatever you want. That is all in addition to the money that I earn.
The real ability to make money in network marketing comes from having other people on your team. That’s what makes it an MSI. In the company I’m with, I get paid on a team that can be infinitely wide and up to six levels deep. That means I get paid on the activities of the people I sponsor, the people they sponsor, and the people they sponsor, up to 6 levels. Put another way, if I sponsor 6 people and they each sponsor 6 people, and everyone on down each sponsors 6 people, I will get paid on the activities of 55,986 people. Now that’s what I call mail box money.
Next, you can write a book or e-book and sell it online. With the internet and Adobe’s PDF format, you can self-publish and self-market your own books. You are no longer dependent on big publishing houses and major bookstores. As an author and publisher, the internet gives you complete control of how your information is presented to your reader. And you keep all of the money. You won’t get that from a traditional publisher. So, if you have something to say, say it online.
Last, you can start an on-line business. Everything I’ve mentioned so far can be done as an online business, but there are other things you can do too. Just use your imagination. I’ll give you an example to get you started. How about an eBay store. I know of people who go out and buy things, usually from outlet stores, garage sales, or auctions where they can get them cheaply, and list them for sale on eBay. People will buy just about anything on eBay.
Go here to learn more about network marketing or check out my business opportunity. For some recommended books, see my resources page.