I’ve got a mug here on my desk with this printed on it:

“What if it does work?”

A couple of years ago I happened on Kim’s site WhoWho911.com and decided to take in one of the conference calls she had posted there. At the time I was ready to return to my original position of extreme skepticism with regards to all network marketing companies - this was after someone I respected highly had gotten me to to take a look into a “business opportunity” despite my “better judgement”.

I’ll just fast-track the uncomfortable memories and say that initial experience didn’t work out for me. However, I had been fascinated by some of what I had learned from a lot of the training material along the way. This got me thinking,

“Ya know, if there’s a company that’s out there that focuses on customer acquisition, servicing the customers well, fair prices and realistic commissions for the distributors, this business model just might work.”

Well I figured if I could find a company or two like that and mold my own business - mixing in a product or two of my own - it sure would be worth the effort. So I went on the hunt to see if there was anyone out there who was addressing what I saw to be flaws in the practice of network marketing. That led me to Kim.

The Truth
I was really impressed with Kim’s logical approach. I remember thinking to myself “This is it. This makes sense. Why don’t all the other network marketing people talk like this? This is viable.”

Well, frankly, I was so impressed I bought several books in quick succession. The Truth Book - again Kim’s doing things a little different - it’s a comic (as in cartoon) book. Great read as the other ones I picked up - “Plan B”, “Rules For The New New MLMer” and “If My Product’s So Great How Come I Can’t Sell It?”.

Back To The Mug
When my first purchase from Kim arrived, to my surprise, this mug was sitting there in the package.

Staring at me. “What if it does work?”

Over time, as much as Kim’s conference calls and reading materials have been invaluable in clarifying my thoughts and strengthening my convictions about how best you can leverage a network marketing company to create your own business (hint, brand you and your business not the network marketing company) I think that mug has been even more valuable to me.

Why? Every time I use that mug - which is pretty much everyday, maybe multiple times in the day, I think about that phrase “What if it does work?” Then it gets repeated to my mind subconsciously in various ways as I work:

• Maybe this just might work
• How can I make this work?
• Who do I need to talk to so this will work?
• What resources would I need to make this work?
• How can I adapt this idea/concept to make it work for me?

etc

This thought process has opened up windows of opportunity when I thought I was hitting a brick wall. I not only still am in business for myself, I keep generating ways to keep it alive and growing when so many others are bailing.

That’s why I point anyone who asks for a recommendation (and even those who don’t ha!) to Kim. She’s impacted my business significantly, could she impact yours?

Note to self (and to you too) - don’t forget to check out Google Page Creator when they finally allow more registrations. This new service has already been swamped and they’ve had to put a stop to new registrations while they beef up the resources.

Imagine, free hosting of your web pages on Google? Admittedly they’ll have to be static pages - no scripting support from what I have read, but most of the WWW is static anyway.

What’s cool too is that your website will be visible as a subdomain of googlepages.com. i.e. http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com

They say that you won’t pick up brownie points (read PR / ranking) with the search engine for hosting with Google Pages, but at the least I’m pretty sure the pages are guaranteed to be indexed quickly. Google says “The pages you create can be crawled by Google within a few hours of publication.”

My figuring is… hence the pages at the end of outgoing links should be picked up quickly too. Just my speculation but we can test it pretty easily - once we can get an account that is.

Oh, just in case you haven’t got your GMail / Google account yet, try this link or ask me nicely for an invite.

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You’d think I’d know better.

After researching a tool I needed for a long time, I finally settled on the one I thought I wanted. It would cost me about $145 but I really needed it so I finally plunked it down (virtually speaking of course) and excitedly installed and started playing…

… only to find out - Aargh! A specific feature I’d forgotten I wanted - it wasn’t there!

Went back to the merchants website only to search in vain for a refund policy - no mention of one. Oh poor me.

Well, if you sell digital products online you may or may not have much sympathy for me. After all I’m sure you have a sneaky suspicion that someone who asks for a refund may still be happily using your product.

However, risk reversal is still a huge factor that tips the scale in causing people to buy from you. (Obviously I didn’t need that factor in this case. Until it was too late that is.)

From my reading it seems that requests for refunds on good digital products are very low despite the temptation it may offer the sleazy, so digital product developers - offer the refunds, take the risk away from the transaction in the customer’s mind and maybe, just maybe you’ll make even more sales.

Buying digital products? Check for the refund policy and see whether you can live with it. As for me, I’m making the best of my new software, and I think I’ve figured out a way to make it work for me yet.