My Network Marketing Confessions
Copyright © Greg Mangin
http://www.DailyEarner.com
Hello, my name is Greg Mangin and I’ve been involved with work-at-home, internet based, network marketing since September 2002. I’m going to tell you exactly what led me to network marketing, what successes I’ve had and my mistakes. Hopefully this will help you to make correct decisions about your choice to enter the work-at-home family.
I graduated
I had become very unhappy at my position even though I owned nearly ¼ of the corporation I was working for. The reasons for this do not need to be discussed here any further than to say that I was making plans to separate from my business partners and start my own consulting engineering firm. I formed a corporation to do just that in August 2002 and was divorced from my partners by October 2002. During this time I had been doing a lot of internet searching for “work from home” and “home based businesses” in case I couldn’t make it as a consulting engineer on my own. I found SFI, then Six Figure Income, now it’s Strong Future International or just “SFI”. I signed up for email information and finally, after several sales emails, I joined SFI in September 2002.
Now, SFI is a fine company. I have highest praises for their business and the opportunity. I began reading and studying all of their materials. Somewhere, in all that literature, I found that it was best to have your own website with which you can promote your affiliate programs. This is of course true, and makes absolute perfect sense. But… Affiliate sales require someone to visit your site in the first place. You can’t sell anything if no one sees it.
Back in 2002, everyone was just coming across the idea of search engine optimization (SEO) which is a way of setting up your website to favor the search engine spiders. That is, give them what it is they are looking for. It’s impossible to have a website with much of a chance of getting any search engine recognition if all you have is a cookie cutter affiliate site that 7 million other affiliates have. Most of the search engines won’t even list it or bother to “spider” it. So…. I found a place to plunk a website. I think it was “tripod” which had a klunky website development program. I began studying HTML and how to make a website. My first website was a dismal, poor, awful sorry looking thing and got no traffic to speak of. I kept reading and searching the internet. Somehow I came across Stone Evans in late December of 2002.
If you’ve not heard of Stone, he has a very successful affiliate program called “plug-in-profit-site” (PIPS) that promises free website setup and six streams of income. Stone is also a top SFI recruiter regularly making the “leader board”. When I found his offer to set up a website for free I said “Bingo, just what I need” and signed up with him. My PIPS ID is 159. Currently, I believe the ID numbers are in the 22,000’s. Regardless, Stone was an answer to my prayers. I told him so, my testimonial was on his sales page for all of 2003 and I’m not sure for how long after. You can see my current PIPS page at http://dailyearner.com This is my “new” PIPS page which I haven’t done anything to (yet).
The original PIPS program was all “free to join” programs except for the web hosting (Host 4 Profit, which I highly recommend). The autoresponder he chose was (still is) Getresponse which has a free version. If I recall, you really needed to upgrade to Getresponse Pro to get much use out of it though. In those days you could purchase leads from “load your wallet” or any of a zillion leads companies and dump them into an autoresponder and go gangbusters. That all changed with the UCE laws and so now everything is double opt-in. This change happened just after I was getting some moderate success and it really caused me to be disheartened. It meant I had to get leads to sign up (twice, remember double opt-in) or I had to purchase leads that Getresponse generated for pay. I began looking for lead generation systems, traffic generation systems, places to buy traffic, etc.
I began trying other programs, that is, ones that were not part of the PIPS program. I decided to add them to my PIPS website (all that studying html came in handy after all). I added more and more programs, and eventually my PIPS site only vaguely resembled the original. The current big cheese at
I bought James Martell’s book and program “Affiliate Success” and placed him at the center of my once PIPS site. James is very much into the SEO thing and one of the first “content is king” crowers. He also promoted many, many mini-sites and heavy linking to get your site listed high in the search engines. This was my first attempt at article writing and linking. I still had the original site which was global2home.com but now I had another “James Martell” site called A1-Homebusiness.com. Notice the website url,
A1-homebusiness.com, a tip from James that the search engines ignore leading characters (like A1-) which is very helpful. I generated traffic mostly by using traffic exchanges where you click and click to view other peoples websites in exchange they show your website to other people. I had a crazybrowser which was one of the first tabbed browsers I’d ever seen at the time. I had a dial up connection so the best I could do was surf five traffic exchanges at once. A lot of the time, I’d just buy traffic on the exchanges. I found auto-surf traffic exchanges and used those heavily too. I joined ProfitRally and was getting some good exposure then when the owner and founder disappeared owing me about $90 (where’d alex go anyway?). I was getting a lot of traffic but not many signups. I made a little money but not much. The only traffic exchange I use now is Trafficswarm which I highly recommend http://www.trafficswarm.com/go.cgi?85970 .
Remember, I still had a fledgling consulting engineering business that I was trying to build also http://manginengineering.com . In 2006, I had enough engineering business to move out of my basement home office into a building in town and hire some help. We had a very large project and several small projects and things were really picking up. I made more money that year than I ever had in my previous engineering engagement. We were very busy, working many many long days and some long nights and weekends. I had absolutely no time to promote my internet businesses and let them fall by the wayside. In mid 2006, I cancelled nearly every affiliate position I had including SFI, Empowerism, and any paid or pro positions. I kept my hosting at Host 4 Profit, and of course I’m still a PIPS affiliate.
That, in all, was about a 3-1/2 year run with a pretty big net loss. I allowed myself to become distracted and let myself take off on tangents that only divided my efforts. I failed because I let too many programs with too many promises into my circle. Don’t let this happen to you. I read about article publishing, and ezine marketing, and opt-in email marketing but I thought I had a better way. Like a lot of Internet marketers, I’ve spent many years and dollars on an education.
Stone Evans tells everything that is needed to make money with his website in his 30 days to success training that you get when you sign up with his PIPS program. I’m following the “30 days course” faithfully this time. If only it had been there for me to follow the first time… http://pluginprofitsite.com/main-159
More to come…
Greg Mangin
About the Author:
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Greg has been involved in internet marketing since 2002.
To find the best home based business ideas and
opportunities so you can work at home visit:
http://www.DailyEarner.com
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posted by DailyEarner at
9:08 PM
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