How To Pick The Right Business For You – Episode 2

Have you ever wondered what business you should start? How do you pick the right business when you have no idea where to start? In Today’s The Boss Life Podcast we look at three different types of online businesses, and give you the pro’s and con’s to each!

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Three Key Boss Points From Today’s Podcast

• If you have no idea where to start and do not have a lot of money to invest, the fastest way to start an online business is network marketing.
• If you have a following on social media and have some experience with technology, affiliate marketing is a great place to start.
• If you have some money to invest, have experience with technology, then ecommerce could be what you are looking for.

How To Pick The Right Business For You – Episode 2 Transcription

In today’s episode we’re going to talk about how to pick the right business for you.

Welcome to the boss life podcast. Building an online business is hard.

We make it easy.

We’ll walk you through how we went from corporate executives-

To online business builders all from home.

From areas with leaders-

To our top secrets we’ve never shared.

to your questions answered.

Are you ready to build your boss life?

Let’s get started.

How does someone go about picking the right business to start?

You know it’s amazing that you would have to find a business that fits your personality.

We feel you, we feel you. This is a big struggle a lot of people have is they wanna make money online, they wanna be successful, but you know above everything else they have no idea what to sell, where to start.

Yeah where to start? Where to start is the biggest struggle that you know most people when they approach us they’re like “I have all these ideas” or you know maybe they’re an influencer and they’re like “Where do I start?”

We’re going to talk about that today. We’re going to talk about the three main areas where we’ve built successful online businesses.

Yeah we’re going to talk about those. There’s three different ones that we would recommend that have worked really well for us.

One of them is affiliate marketing. We’ll talk about that one in a second. Affiliate marketing we’ve done really well with that. Number two is eCommerce. We’ve done eCommerce, we’ve done everything. We’ve ordered stuff from China and we’ve had stuff held up at the borders, we’ve gone through all that stuff. We’ve done really really well with it.

The last one we’re going to talk about is network marketing as well. Which we absolutely love and we’ll talk about that one too, we’ve done really well with it.

Yeah, and we wanna make sure you all understand that we are not saying one of these is better over the other. We’re going to talk about what’s good that we’ve found and what’s maybe a con for us personally. Each individual business has to do with your personality, what you love doing, what you hate doing. We’re going to share our experiences with it.

Why don’t we start with eCommerce.

Commerce is basically when you’re selling something online. It could be a product, it could be a whole number of things. The way that we were most successful was we sold things on Amazon. Which is Amazon we did some FBA, some fulfillment by Amazon. We also had some stuff that we were selling on Shopify. Shopify did very well as well. The pros and cons to each aren’t really that important. More so is the tough part becomes what product do you want to sell and figuring out what that is. In other episodes we’ll go into details in every single one of these, but we wanted to give you an overview of what these were like.

If you’re someone that I would say that maybe wants to sell a specific brand of makeup or a phone case or USB charger cables or dresses things like, then starting an eCommerce can be something that you might really enjoy. The whole process of doing the research and figuring out which product it is. You know we had a lot of fun emailing various manufacturers on Alibaba. Alibaba is a website you can go to Alibaba.com. You can find so many different suppliers all over the world. The ones that we work with specifically were in China. They will all bid on the work that you wanna do.

Let’s say for example you wanted to have a very specific kind of a phone case. You would find the manufacturers, you would tell them “Hey, here’s what I wanna build”. A lot of times they will send you samples.

Yeah, we got a lot of samples.

We got a lot of samples. We enjoyed that.

You know and the trick with this one in particular is to make a profit. That’s why when you’re partnering with a lot of places maybe that are overseas you need to develop relationships. That’s one of the biggest tips. If you are wanting to do an eCommerce type of business, you have to be a good relationship builder.

I’m going to burst your bubble a little bit. You’ll see a lot of ads on Facebook that say you know XYZ, we sold a million dollars in products through our Amazon store and here’s our learn from home product that you can buy and you can learn it and you can do the same thing. What they don’t talk about, and we wanna be really honest and transparent, there’s a lot of cost involved in this model.

Tons of cost. Yeah.

For us to get started, forget about the six months research to get a product. The other part was just the cost involved in getting something at a price that I would still earn income on having this product on Amazon.

Right. I mean we also made sure that we had to consult with lawyers so there was legal fees and you know designing a brand and all that kind of fun stuff that is fun, but you have to understand you have to be so passionate about your product that it’s all worth it. With any business, you’re going to be up late at night, early in the morning, especially if you’re dealing with people overseas. You have to connect with them when they’re awake.

Yeah. It can be a little bit tough. At the end of the day, let’s say for example, I would say to get started in this business, realistically people will tell you you only need a thousand dollars to get started. I will tell you that if that’s all you have, you’re going to be just hopefully breaking even. We ended up, a good number for us I would say to start would be about five to ten thousand dollars. You’re going to wanna … once you have those samples and you have a shipment come over to you, there’s going to be a lot of things involved. Amazon’s going to ship it back to you saying the packaging wasn’t right. I remember getting those. We sent them so many containers of stuff and they’re like “We’re going to have to charge you more money because all the packaging is falling apart from what we got from China. We’re going to up your rate that you’re going to pay us XYZ.”

There’s all these things that people don’t think about.

The customer experience too. You live and die by your customer rating, so if your product for whatever reason doesn’t fulfill their expectation and you get a negative review, oh man. It so cuts into you know where your product lands on the page when they search for it and all that kind of stuff. This has to be your full time gig. I mean, people do well at it and you know if this is your avenue we’re not trying to dissuade you from doing it. You have to treat it … it’s not a side time.

For us it was great. It still is great, we still have the store up we’re not here to sell you the product. We love it, it’s a great model. We want you to know something important that if you’re going to go into eCommerce I would say make sure you have at a minimum five thousand dollars ready to start spending. Then if you can you’re going to have to keep upping that. That’s a lot of how this works is the more you sell, you have to keep all that money and just reinvest it back into the business. Eventually you’re buying thirty thousand, forty thousand dollars in product, fifty thousand dollars in product.

At the same time, you’ve gotta be passionate about the product. This is one thing I wanna really mention is a lot of people say “Well it doesn’t matter what you sell you know as long as it’s making a profit”. That never really worked for us. For us, we had to be passionate about it because you’re literally up at night making sure that if one negative review goes up you gotta email them immediately and try and solve the problem.

Again, this all works but you have to have the backing. I would say probably it’s not a good idea to start with eCommerce but it’s totally up to you.

It really depends on your background, you’re financial situation, all that kind of stuff. If you’ve never been in business before, it’s going to be really tough for you to make this killer successful business. We want you guys to understand too we’ve started a lot of businesses that didn’t work too. I mean if you wanna start and fail that’s a great learning experience, it just can be very expensive.

Yeah, are you willing to lose five grand. Let’s say you were selling wallets or something and you send five grand and you don’t get the wallets you wanted you’re out the five grand.

Right. No ones going to take them back for you. You just have to find somewhere to get rid of them.

Or you could put them in a garage or something.

Right. Let’s talk about the next kind of business. Let’s talk about affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing. Why don’t you kick this one off and you tell us a little bit about affiliate marketing and can you tell us a little bit about why you love it.

Affiliate marketing is an awesome business for those of you who maybe have some influence already on social media. Maybe you have a large following. Maybe you love certain products and you’re talking about them anyways. These companies, there are a lot out there that have affiliate programs. What that means is they pay you money to talk about their programs so that they get customer information. That’s kind of how it works. They trade money to pay you for customer information like an email address or something else like that.

I love this model because it really doesn’t take a lot of effort on your part. You have to already have some kind of significant following with trust built up with your network because if you’re just … you know maybe you’re just starting out and maybe you only have you know a couple of hundred followers on Instagram and you post an affiliate link. Chances are nobody is really going to buy it unless you have 200 people who really love you.

That’s exactly right. I mean and there’s different ways to do affiliate. The easy way to start is yeah throw up a link. I mean many of you could start affiliate marketing quote unquote right now. You could go find a product that you typically use and you could find an affiliate link for it and start recommending it and you might make a couple bucks here and there. Again, I say a couple of bucks because you’re not going to make a killing if you approach it that way. There’s other approaches as well that do it, again we’ll talk about more in other episodes. One of the things that can be really cool about affiliate marketing is if you do get really good at it and you do create a really powerful tribe that’s following you and know like and trust you and all those things. Then you start really providing value.

Let’s say for example there’s a company you know they’re doing an affiliate promotion and let’s say they’re splitting their profits 50/50. There’s companies like that that will do it. Even more sometimes. Let’s say 50/50. Let’s say the cost of the product is 400 dollars. Every time you sell it you pocket 200 dollars. People are doing affiliate incorrectly a lot of times they’ll just promote that product. They’ll say “Hey go buy that product, go buy that thing” and then they don’t do very well.

If you get smart at affiliate marketing, and we’ll talk about this in other episodes and let us know in the comments in iTunes if this is something you want us to dive into more. If you do it the right way you know you talk about yourself. You brand yourself. You talk about all the cool things that you’re going to give people. The value proposition. The twenty things they’re going to get if they sign up with you and they grab this thing from you. Then later on you tell them a little bit about that extra thing over there right. Then that way it’s a win win because now you’re promoting yourself versus promoting the offer and you’re increasing your sales.

Affiliate marketing has a lot of benefit in the sense that you definitely can start with basically zero investment in terms of cash, but you are investing a lot of time because you do have to build up your personal brand before you can really be effective with it.

Yeah, the one thing I will say with affiliate marketing is that it is not necessarily residual income. It is one of the things that unless you’re promoting it and you become a great promoter on social media or an email list or anything else like that that you do this recurringly and your audience still loves it and buys it or maybe they’re ready to buy it, that’s the way to have recurring income with affiliate marketing. Otherwise, it’s a one pop and you’re done.

Yeah like for example this moment we just got a nice little deposit for about five grand US which is awesome in affiliate commissions.

Woo hoo.

Pretty good. We’ll wave goodbye to that. We’re going to reinvest it.

We’re going to put it back in our business. Let’s talk about that too in another episode.

Here’s the thing though. You know affiliate works really really well but you do have to have a pretty big influence following around that. Again, I really don’t like the fact that it’s a one time deposit. There’s no benefit. If people continue to purchase from this company that we’ve recommended and that we’ve sent our following to, like we literally sent out people go over there and purchase this product, you know we’re not going to get paid anything further. That’s the part that I really don’t like about affiliate marketing.

We wanna make sure you understand that it’s not about slapping a link up on social media and just crossing your fingers and hoping to make money. You are putting your name associated with this product. If it’s not a great product or a great a company that you stand behind, don’t do it.

One specific company in general I’m thinking of right now the one that actually just got paid, we research for almost … I would say I used their product for about four years first of all. Then when we were thinking about promoting them same thing. We started researching like crazy, we called their customer service lines, we did everything before we did that because we didn’t want to lose trust.

There’s a lot of things that you gotta … everything takes work doesn’t it?

Well it takes work and it takes time. If we had tried to promote this four years ago when we started using it, because we’re like “Wow this is great and it’s amazing”. You know how many people would have signed up? Maybe one.

Yeah. If that.

Right. Let’s dive into my favorite type of online business which is network marketing.

Network marketing. First of all, some people get a slimy feeling right away when they hear network marketing.

I get warm tingles.

I love it. I can’t tell you why, but I do get … because when we first decided to go into this, at first I was the one that was like “I’m so skeptical of this. I don’t wanna go bug my friends and family next door. I don’t wanna bug anybody.”

I remember when you were bought in and you tried to sell me on it. I was even more skeptical. I was like “They want you to buy what? And you have to sell stuff?”

We came up with something amazing that works really well. We’re not going to talk about it in this episode, but we were really successful with that company and we still are. We’re not going talk about companies. The reason we like network marketing is because it’s residual income okay. It’s passive. I hate to say passive but it is a word people use because passive would mean that you’re not doing anything and I don’t believe that. I think you continue to do a lot of stuff when you’re in network marketing but you still get paid.

For example, the affiliates that we promote sometimes, we promote those affiliates we still get people asking us questions about the affiliate thing that we recommended but we’re not getting paid. We’re supporting this other affiliate but in reality we’re not getting paid a penny. Whereas in network marketing as you continue to grow and you continue to help people you’ll see your earnings grow and you’ll still continue to get paid if you pick a good company over and over.

I think that that’s a huge thing to start with. If you are you know wondering or maybe you’re not sold on the whole network marketing aspect of online business building, this vehicle in particular allows you to get started with a couple hundred dollars usually.

I will say, we go to conferences a lot and we’ve met a lot of successful people. Almost always, it’s kind of funny, you sort of ask them “Well how did you get started? What did you do?” Almost every single one got their break in network marketing.

I think network marketing teaches you so many different aspects about business that you’re not necessarily going to learn in school. You know one thing we wanna make sure that you’re doing as well is you do you’re research on the company. We’re not saying that every single network marketing company out there is fantastic and above board and all that stuff. You have to do your due diligence and find out you know are they a good company? How long have they been in business? What do they do in terms of giving back to the community?

There are great companies and then there are you know not so great companies. You have to do you due diligence to find out that.

The other thing I love about network marketing is you’re going to get free training. Again, if you pick a good company and you get started with the right people you’re going to get incredible training that would cost you tens of thousands of dollars to get on your own. I just think we invest personally in ourselves a lot of money every single year. I would say well over a hundred thousand dollars in personal coaching and products that we buy programs, just to better ourselves.

So we can be better for you know the people that we affect.

Yeah, out of that what we do is we build training programs and courses. Really what I’m saying is a lot of people that do that. That’s what great about network marketing is that let’s say you wanted to start an eCommerce business. Well you’re looking at additional cost. Who’s going to teach you how to do that? You’re going to have to buy a product, a program. I think when we first got started with Amazon sales and fulfillment by Amazon, I think we spent about 2500 dollars just on programs for someone to teach us kind of what to do. Then we take the action on it and it was more cost involved. In network marketing if you pick the right company and you pick the right person, you get started with the investment of buying the products and you’re ready to go. Typically if you pick the right company it’s rather low and then they’re supporting you for your entire journey.

I think that gets overlooked a lot. Having someone that’s going to be helping you-

In your corner.

-invested in your success.

Right. I think that you know if you don’t know how network marketing works, it’s not about signing up and woo hoo made a million dollars. It’s definitely not that. You can sign up and make no money. It’s like with any of these other businesses that we talked about. You have to put in the time. You have to put in the work. I just wanna put a little thing in here for my introverts who are listening to this. I am a hard core introvert. I still can’t even order pizza on the phone okay. If you pick the right company there are ways that you can build an incredible online empire and you can still be an introvert. I think a lot of the myths that surround building this business it that “Oh you have to be an expert. Oh you have to be great at public speaking. Oh you have to be so comfortable doing XYZ.”

That’s just not me, but the cool thing about this business is that you’re able to build it around your personality.

Yeah, personally , for our business what I love the most this is also what I’ll say about network marketing, is that for the business that we decided to pick and different people can pick whatever they want to do. For us it was something that we wanted to make sure that we were helping people. That we were providing an awesome service. I remember years ago meeting with various people and entrepreneurs and even my dad just giving us advice I remember the big thing in life should really be that you’re helping other people.

Even with this podcast, we’re just putting it out there just to help people. We really don’t have anything major planned with this yet. I know that something will come of it. Our whole thing is that if you serve people and you help people and you help them get from point A to point B that good things are going to come from there. All the products that we promote, not just network marketing but affiliate everything is something that we feel a passion for. In network marketing it’s important for you to find that thing that you’re super passionate about that you feel like it’s a disservice if you don’t help someone with this specific product. By doing that you know what I love the most is the thousands of people that we’ve been able to help and the emails and the messages. It’s just mind blowing how you can transform people’s lives if you provide a service or product of value that they can go like “Wow, thank you Erin for showing this. This has transformed my life.”

You’re so welcome.

It is, that feeling is so cool.

It’s revolutionary. I think that a lot of what maybe you’ve seen on social media is you see people getting together, you see the community, and you see that their lives. I don’t know about you, but when someone has come into my life and they seem ridiculously happy, there’s usually been a massive change that has to do with something internal. Something has clicked for them. I feel like a lot of people have that happen to them when they join a business like this.

That’s so true. We got affiliate, we got network marketing, we have eCommerce. What advice can we give people? We’ve shared a lot of stuff. What advice can we give someone that’s sitting there … I’m going to play out three scenarios.

Let’s say there’s someone coming into this, they’ve never really build funnels, landing pages, they don’t have an email list. They haven’t done much personal development. They know they need to make more money but they really have no idea where to start. They have an iPhone that’s about it. Facebook, Instagram, where do I start?

I think with someone who’s you know very entry level, network marketing is a great way to get started because it’s going to teach you as you learn. Learning can be a little painful when you fail at doing certain things. You will fail, that’s just part of it. If you choose to look at the failures as learning pieces, then you’re going to grow. Then you’re influence will grow and your business will grow. I think if you were just starting out and you don’t have you know a crazy amount of capital and you’ve never been in business before but you really love something. You’re in love with a certain I don’t know deodorant or something like that.

I love deodorant.

Just the ones that are good for you though. If you love something and there’s a company that is a great company that you can connect with and you love their message then network marketing would be the best way to go with that.

Also I’ll add to that too, if you’re someone that can’t lose any more money, if you don’t wanna make a big investment.

Yeah, or maybe you’re struggling to pay the bills.

Yeah that’s a big one. Let’s take someone else. Let’s take someone that’s coming into this now. They have a bit of a social media following, let’s say they’ve got like 5,000 followers on Instagram. They’re looking at different things to do, ways to make money. They’ve got some income set aside to maybe spend a little bit. Maybe on some basic Facebook advertising, Instagram advertising, where should we start this person? They know the computer pretty good, where would I start?

I mean there’s two different ways that I would say this person can make some pretty good income. Number one I would say is affiliate marketing. If they already have a following built up, loyal fans who maybe you know you post a picture of your dog and you get I don’t know 150 likes, those people really like what you’re posting.

I will say posting photos of pets you will get engagement. That is a good trick.

Okay, well maybe you’re posting a photo of your lunch or something right, food does well too.

[inaudible] relating.

Yeah, we’ll do a whole episode on that too. You know if they already have a following they have influence. I would say affiliate marketing is a great way to go but I wouldn’t you know dismiss network marketing as well. As long as the company you choose really matches the vibe that you have already on social media. If you are picking something that totally incongruent with what you’ve already posted, you’re going to have no traction.

Perfect. Last person I’ll say is someone that you know now I’ve made some money in affiliate marketing, I’ve dabbled in how to set up landing pages, I’m maybe doing some network marketing on the side as well as a little side hustle. I’m pretty good, I’ve got an you know 10,000 dollars saved up in the bank I’m ready to invest it in something. Again, we’re not giving any financial advice whatsoever.

No none. We are not financial planners or nothing.

I don’t pretend to be and I don’t know anything about it. That’s why I have a financial planner. She’s always telling me to stop investing in the business.

Anyways, for someone like that obviously you know you have something set up. This is something that you have extra income, you wanna diversify. I would say that you know eCommerce for a product that you know you can you know make a profit on would be something that you should look into.

We like to end all our podcasts with a challenge. The challenges are great because it’s gonna force you to level up and move even the slightest bit forward. I’m going to put Erin in the hot seat.

Ohh the hot seat.

Go for it.

Alright. Let’s look at today’s episode. We talked about three different types of businesses you can build. Maybe some of you are already building businesses, but maybe there are those of you who are just on the fence. You know you wanna do something but you’re not really sure what. Some of you have business experience, maybe you have income to invest. Maybe eCommerce would be the type of business you wanna look into. Maybe you know you have influence on social media and you want to start looking into affiliate marketing or maybe you kind of need a little bit more help, you don’t have a lot of income to start up.

Maybe network marketing is more of your jam, but I want you to put a stake in the ground and pick one. Just pick one today because just by you doing that and doing the research on maybe products that you wanna sell or maybe companies that you wanna partner with. That’s going to make you so much further ahead than people who are still sitting there trying to decide what they wanna do.

Remember, ditch the employee mindset.

Start living the boss life.

We’ll see you in the next episode.

Bye bye guys.

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