As a husband and a father, I don't want my little family to want for anything - I don't want them to eat every meal off of the dollar menu and live on garage sale budgets, forever. And i know that I can't be the only one because it seems to me that ther are more young mothers, today, than ever before. Girls who are 19 and 20 have babies, girls my own age (a very young 27) have kinds that are 8 years old! And most of them seem pretty happy.
But it is more expensive to raise children, today, than ever before. Health care expenses, gas prices, day care costs and a failing job economy hurts these women worse than anyone. And now they are speculating that it won't let up in 2008. Probably not in 2009 or 2010, either.
The reality is that it simply isn't feasible for Dad to be the sole bread-winner, anymore. And women are stepping forward to find a place as second-income earners like never before.
How do these women do it?
My family growing up was known for the weird soap that we had in the house, the weird factor of how little we went to the doctor because we had almost all of our medicines in the herb closet (no joke - the "herb closet"). Not many people remember Sunrider, these days, though they are still around. We believed in nutritional supplementation for everything from stress relief to blisters on your fingers, to skin care and curing the common cold.
Little did I know until later that while my Mom was making us swallow these weird capsules, she was supplementing Dad's six-figure income by doing something rather simple - having girlfriends over to the house. My Mom always had someone at the house chatting about their health problems and I thought that this was just what Moms did. I thought "why does she keep talking to people about Sunrider?" It wasn't until I was in my pre-teens that I realized something shocking...
Most Moms don't do Network Marketing?
I was stunned. Today, however, it is more commonplace than you might guess. I'd like to talk about how young Moms, today, can use new technology to make an extra income with Networking businesses.
MySpace
You've got one, I've got one, Barack Obama's got one, even God has one - everyone who's anyone is on Myspace. Or at least on facebook or some equivalent. There is a growing interest in getting friends and family to talk in online forums about their day-to-day goings on. My wife blogs about cute things that our little Scarlett is learning to say and how stressed out Daddy is and what beautiful little pictures we've taken, this week. And our parents' generation scratch their heads and say "Why?"
And something amazing happens - Molly's sisters and high school girlfriends and ex-boyfriends and in-laws and Elementary school friends, and cousins and parents and friends of those people are all wandering onto her site and leaving messages as simple as "Aww, cute!" and "We miss you! Let's have lunch on friday?" and "Come on over and bring the baby!".
If my Mom could get over her fear of the internet, this would be her dream come true! I noticed that my sister-in-law talks about her Sensei business on her blog. A friend of Molly's talks about her Pure Romance business and jewelry business. Molly's other sister does Mary Kay and my own sister is in my sister-in-law's Sensei downline. The internet has become the way for these girls to plan "boutiques" and "home parties" and "business trainings" and being that I work in the Network Marketing field, myself, this is very exciting news for us.
These days "My Avon business" news goes alongside "Our new car!" and "Baby's turning 1 next week!" It's not taboo, anymore. Blogs, Myspace messages, discussion groups, Bulletins and mass e-mails are the best way to build Networks that I have ever seen and I aim to spear-head the building of tools to help these young Moms get ahead. Let's talk about how you can use your Myspace, Blogger and facebook accounts to get started in business.
#1 - Find a business that sells what you need.
At the company that I work for, I meet girls all the time who are in their twenties and recently lost 30 pounds or 60 or 80 pounds or even more with our company's products who are replacing (I said "replacing") their husbands' income with blogs that say "Check out me in my new swimsuit!" and "No more Baby-belly for me!"
And guess what? Other Moms read them. They read them and they respond to them because they need them. Now, if the war continues to draw on (I'm not speculating, just saying) then women will still want to lose weight - men, too - people will still need a secondary source of income and actually need it more when times are hard and work is "iffy" and careers are put on hold to provide for the family. It is, literally, the recession-proof business - forget that "buy gold" and "invest in Real Estate" crap, I'm talking about paying the mortgage tomorrow by blogging, today.
#2 Get friends
Start an account and start searching for friends by name and once you find two or three you are likely to stumble onto more friends to reconnect with through their "My friends" section. I have only 74 Myspace friends but I think that's pretty damn impressive and you will find that you can spend hours up all night digging through friends' friends and saying "Oh my God! I remember them!" This is the best Networking system ever developed - it's more important than cell-phones.
#3 Post "Bulletins" to get Blog Subscribers
Once you have friends, you start seeing all of their "bulletins".
Bulletins are great - I find myself going through them like a local newspaper, rushing past all of my friends' news about "I miss my cat, Mittens" and "I'm moving back to AZ!" and getting into the bulletins about "I got my first gig in Hollywood" and "The band is playing at The Sets, tonight!"
It's truly fascinating to see what people are up to and post something to generate interest in what you are all about. Start putting a post up every two or three days on a topic that is remotely related to your business.
For example: if your company is an energy and health drink company...
Subject: So tired...
Body: Up all night, again with the baby teething. Oh well, she's got such a cute little smile! And besides, Mommy's on "X" juice and life is so much better... Talk to you soon!
Subject: So much stuff to do!
Body: You ever notice how much you have to get done in a day? Yesterday was just crazy with Baby's doctor's appointment (where they made me wait an extra hour!) and paying the rent, checking the mail, grocery shopping. I ish Mommy had naptime!
After a few days, you will want to start Blogging. We'll get to that in a minute. In order for people to read your blog, they need to subscribe to it - like a magazine about your life. After you post a blog, copy the URL (you know - http://jenspace.mysp....) of your blog page and start posting bulletins like this:
Subject: Awesome sale on maternity clothes!
Body: I just got a whole bunch of stuff for less than $50 at this new outlet that I found on Power and the 202. check it out at and subscribe to my blog! http://jennyandalex.myspace.com/blog/
As more people subscribe to your blog, you are setting yourself up for better and better networking.
#3 Blog to Generate Interest
The trick is to not make your blog into a business-only blog (pretty silly considering your reading just such a blog, but bear with me). Your friends probably don't go to your Blog to see how your business is doing, so start blogging about personal stuff. It's become cool to be in High School, forever.
A great thing about Blogs is that they can be as short as an e-mail or as long as the Great American novel. But you
The other great thing about Blogs is that you can see how many people are subscribed to yours. if it isn't many, then you need to write some blogs that are more interesting to your online friends. Here are some ideas...
- Have you recently saved money on anything? (besides car insurance - aw heck, even car insurance)
- Write a review about your new cell-phone, love it, hate, it, whatever.
- Write about an Old Wives tale that turned out to be true.
- Write a review about a movie - these are great because you can write one every week or even every couple of days - some people even write reviews of movies they rent off of Netflix.
- Reveal a secret about yourself - old crushes and new guilty pleasures like porking out on junk food are great blog material, especially with titles like "My guilty secret" and "I was in love with "so-and-so" in High School - there, I said it!"
- Are you making any big plans with your spouse/significant other? Vacations? Birthday bash? second honeymoons?
- Who is the most interesting "reconnect" you have made in a while?
- Take a digital camera everywhere you go and snap photos of things that you'll blog about later.
- Anything that you would want to know about someone else, someone else wants to know about you.
Tip: I never post an important blog without posting a bulletin to advertise it.
Once you have some subscribers, start blogging about your business. Mix it up with your personal blogs or people are likely to think you've gone off the deep end.
Tip: Learn how to create links. Myspace, Blogger and other sites generally have a tool for this built into your blog. If you can link to your blog directly from a bulletin, it makes it much easier for people to casually browse to your blog and subscribe.
Well, that concludes the introduction to our new blog, please tell as many people as you can and feel free to stop by and leave me a message or ask questions or advice, etc.
See you, soon!
Joe
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