When you start out in marketing online, you face a number of challanges. If you are new to this world, you'll see network marketing or MLMs everywhere. You'll hear people tallkng about how to get free traffic (trading time for traffic). You'll hear the phrase "the money's in the list" constantly. There isn't anything inherently wrong with any of these things. In the case of building your own email list of people you can build a realtionshipt with is perhaps the most important asset you have as a marketer. But one thing I haven't seen talked about much is how to make sure you can accomplish your goals wihtout going broke first.

One of the most successful marketers today does talk about a tangent to this idea. He discusses how, when he is helping a new marketer start getting results, beginning marketers tend to have a higher overhead than is of value to them.  What, though does this mean? Basically, as a new marketer, you are tempted daily by products that will "make you rich." These can be any number of fees and subscriptions one has signed up for. Again, there may be nothing inherently wrong with these products or services, but, the overhead they bring is usually does not provide enough return on investment (ROI) to new marketers unless they have a specific plan as to how they will extract the ROI for the systems. So, he will work with the person to whittle down the subsctiptions they have going for each month, helping them decide where to focus their investment, and more importantly, cancel anything that is likely just and expense versus an investment.

I was thinking the other day about this and I realized that I have never had someone mention what I think should be the number 1 goal for anyone trying to make it in this business. In my experience, newbies (myself included) start working this business, join an opportunity (or every shiny new one that comes along...), and promote that opportunity's splash pages. But what I am sharing is that this is not the proper order of operations that will lead to success.

I believe tha the very first goal for a new marketer is to focus one's time on makeing their marketing and traffic systems self sustaining before ever picking an opportunity to join.

This method offers several advantages over what most newbies do. First, it give them time to learn about how to get the most important thing in this business: TRAFFIC. Once your traffic system pays for itself, then you can use the knowledge you aquire along the way to make informed decisions about what opportunity you might join or what products you will sell.

When you are spending your money, or your time, building your traffic system, you will undoubetdly learn what is legitimate, what is trustworthy, what stage of the business cycle an opportunity is in. This knowledge will save you so much time and money, you will thank me.

So, how do we do this? There are a few folks out there that are building systems that drive traffic either first, or to an opportunity or product that is low cost and of value. This approach makes much more sense than simply throwing traffic  from mailers or traffic exchanges at the first MLM offer you came across and signed up for only to find out that it is so big that you may never be able to fill your team.

After spending WAY too much TIME and MONEY, I have found 2 systems, both from the same man that actually provide the right tools to make this work. The basic premise is that you focus on building your traffic plan, read and learn about opportunities, which are good, which do people say are bad, which will only be around for a few months (taking your money when they disappear), and all the rest of the things that hurry failure in this business. Know, very clearly, that I am not saying that you should not be spending ANY money in the beginning, but you have to be smart. You need to know how you will get ROI on the money you spend. It is WAY easy to get enough subscriptions to really hurt your finances if you are not careful.

So my recommendation is that you start with building your traffic system. If you want to start earning money in paralell, only join inexpensive opportunites that have been around for years (I know of some that have been around 25 years or more!). Then, once your traffic system is paying for itself, and ONLY when your traffic system is paying for itself do you begin to buy traffic and begin your move from trading TIME for TRAFFIC to trading MONEY for TRAFFIC. Once you get here, if you build smartly, you will never miss the money. The money was generated for a specific purpose. At this point you will focus on building whatever product or opportunity you have decided to persue. You see, while you have been building your traffic system, you will be exposed to opportunities and strategies, you will know other folks, you will have an idea of what is trustworthy and what is not.

Once you don't have to worry so much about getting traffic (or your systems is so good you only need to address changes in the marketplace from time to time), your mind is released to focus on choosing and promoting the right product or opportunity to send all that self sustaining traffic to.

It took me a long time to realize this fact. It cost me time and money. I am sharing this with you in the hopes that I can help you save soe of both. I am happy to share the 2 traffic generating strategies I mentioned above, but I do not want this to be a marketing atricle. This is meant to be an educational article. So if you want to learn about them, please reach out to me by clicking HERE