Another Easy Tip for Gaining Self-Confidence

Would you like another tip for gaining more self-confidence?

When you go to a meeting, a conference, or church.......where do you sit?

Do you sit in the back, so that you can avoid being noticed?  Or in the middle, so that you can blend in with the rest of the people?  Or....do you sit right up front, in the middle, right in front of the speaker?

Sitting right up front will give you the appearance of being a confident person.  However, I believe that sitting up front habitually will actually help you to develop more confidence.

There is one other advantage to sitting in the front.  In my experience from sitting in church, I find that it is much easier to be distracted when I'm sitting in the back.  I can even zone out and be thinking of other things.  I don't get as much from the meeting if I'm not paying attention to the speaker.

Sitting in the front row, right in front of the speaker, helps me to be more engaged in what the speaker is saying.  It is much easier to stay focused, and I actually learn more than I would if I had be sitting in the back.

I would recommend that you give it a try!  At the very least, other people will subconsciously consider you to be a confident person just because of where you sit in the meeting.

--Roger Cox  

Are You Making Your Dreams Come True? Or Someone Else's?

You probably spend a lot of time making someone else's dreams come true.  Do you ever spend some time making your own dreams come true?

If you are employed by someone and spend a large part of your day working, you are actually spending much of your time helping someone else's dreams come true.  Whoever owns the company is getting their dreams fulfilled by hiring employees to do the work for him.  That would include you as one of the workers.

That is not necessarily bad.

But what about you?  What about your dreams?  Are you also working to make YOUR dreams come true?

Maybe.  Maybe not.

What do you do when you come home from work?  Do you watch a little television or watch a ballgame?  Watching a baseball game on television is very relaxing for me, and I watch a game on a regular basis.

But.......when you are watching ball players or actors, you are still making SOMEONE ELSE'S dreams come true.  They get paid because you are watching the show or the game.

If you are employed, the hours between the time you get home from work and the time you go to bed are your best hours to work toward YOUR dreams.  Spend some of that time working for YOU.

Think about what you want for yourself and think about what you need to do to accomplish your desires.  Break your desires down into small steps that you can do in the time that you have available. And then do it.....consistently!  Use the Slight Edge concept that I talked about in a previous post.

It is a great time to work on personal development.  Read some good books or watch some good self-improvement videos.  If your goals involve working with people, begin working with people during those hours by networking with those who can help you make YOUR dreams come true.

Television is a great way to relax.  But spend some of that time in the evenings working for you.  You deserve it!

--Roger Cox

Residual Income Without Work?

Want to know how you can be sure that you will fail at network marketing?  There are actually a number of ways; but for the purpose of this post, I will concentrate on one.

When you first began network marketing, were you told about residual income?  Residual income is income that continues to come in even after the work that created the income is finished.  Residual income can be compared to the royalties that an author or a songwriter might get.  The song is written once, but the songwriter continues to get paid whenever someone uses his song.

Residual income sounds like a great thing.  And it is!  Don't get me wrong!  But it is dangerous to think that you can get a customer or a recruit and then just sit back and watch the money come pouring in.  Sometimes we get that idea and some times we are even taught it from our upline.  It's an exciting to think that with just a little bit of work, we can get greatly rewarded for an indefinite amount of time.

It doesn't really work that way.

Once you have a customer, treat him like gold.  Cultivate the relationship.  Make sure that you meet his needs.  Then once you are satisfied that you are doing all that you can to nurture that customer, go get another one.  The same principle applies to business recruits.

Don't subscribe to the thought that once someone has signed up with you, your work is done.  Yes, that person might be the one that brings you in considerable income, but circumstances change.  People change.  For whatever reason, that customer may stop buying.  Or that business partner may drop out, or just become inactive.

Continue to build.  Continue marketing both your product and your opportunity.  Keep learning how to do it better.

Even if you have ample residual income coming in, don't stop working.  Because contrary to what you may have been taught, residual income is usually not permanent.

Network marketing is NOT an easy, get-rich-quick plan.  It is not even an easy get-rich-slow plan.  It is a business.  It works in direct correlation to how much and smart you work.  If you don't work, you will not have much residual income.  And if you don't work, what residual income you do have will not last.

Treat your network marketing business AS a business.  You won't be disappointed if you do.

-- Roger Cox

Develop at Least 100 Retail and/or Wholesale Customers

You should make developing 100 customers one of your highest priorities.  While it is nice and exciting to add another distributor in your downline, your personal customers, and the customers of your downline, will be the bread and butter of  your business for several reasons.

It is often easier to find someone who will buy your product than it is to find someone who will commit to creating a business.  Launching a business is a far greater commitment than buying some product.  The thinking in the back of a potential customer's mind is that if he is not satisfied, he can just stop buying the product.

There are some things that you can do to ensure that the customer DOES continue to buy from you, but that is a topic for another day!

If you treat your customers properly, the dropout rate can be much lower than the dropout rate for your partners.  A stable customer base will give your business stability and will give you a solid level from which you can build your business.

A network marketing business should be built on customers.  Customers are what gives the business credibility.  It also makes the governing bodies happy.  One of the field marks of a "pyramid" scheme is the absence of real customers.

And you know what?  Some of those customers that are very happy with your service just might someday become your partners in your downline!

So work to develop 100 loyal retail customers that continue to purchase your product month after month, or wholesale customers who are not currently distributors, and see if that does not make you excited about your business!

- Roger Cox

Do You Want a Slight Edge in Your Network Marketing Business?

Lately I've been thinking about a concept that I learned from the CD "The Slight Edge" by Jeff Olson.  It is a simple concept, but, oh, so powerful!

The Slight Edge is composed of consistency of doing the small things over a long period of time.

Suppose you have an assignment to read a 1,000 page book.  There is no deadline, but you MUST read every page to complete the assignment.  Now, you might look at that book and decide that the task is impossible.  There is no way that you would ever be able to read all 1,000 pages so you don't even begin.

Or you might be really motivated to read the book, and the first day you read 300 pages.  The next day you don't have quite as much time to devote to the task so you read 100 pages.  The next day you don't read at all.  The day after that, 25 pages.  The pattern that follows is one of reading a few pages once in a while with large gaps between days where you read at all.  Eventually, you give up on the assignment.

However, suppose you only read one page the first day.  That is NOT a big step.  But the next day, you read another page. And the day after that, another page.  The pattern is one page a day, consistently, for a long period of time.  You would finish the task in 1000 days.  Approximately 3 years.  It took you a long time to do it, but.......You did it!

For another example, think of your exercise program.  You decide one day that you are going to get in shape because you don't want to die young.

You could go to the gym daily for a few days and spend many hours working out.  Are you in better shape now?  Not if you only do it for a few days.  There isn't much improvement if you give up.

But what if you can only exercise 30 minutes a day?  But you can do it EVERY day?  Or at least quite consistently.  Are you in better shape one day as compared to the previous day?  Not that you can measure.  But what about after a year of exercising 30 minutes a day consistently?  Would you be in better shape compared to where you were a year ago?  Most likely.

What if you miss a day or two of exercise during that year?  Are you going to be healthy one day and then the next day not healthy because you missed a day?  Only if that missed day becomes a pattern over a period of time.  A simple task, like a few minutes of exercise, done consistently over a period of time produces results.

A seemingly impossible task becomes a completed accomplishment if broken down into small, simple steps done consistently over a period of time.

Any application to your network marketing business?  Some people have an amazingly high rate of activity when they start their network marketing business. Then some of them burn out.  When the results don't come in soon enough for them, their activity drops off.  With no activity, there are no results.  Then they quit.

I would rather see a new person apply the Slight Edge concept and contact as little as two people a day, either by phone or email or however they can make the contact.  Two contacts per day equals over 700 people contacted over the space of a year.  That excites me more than a big burst of activity at the beginning and then nothing.

What about you?  Do you agree, or do you think I am off-base?

- Roger Cox