Today counting on one income source is very risky. One of the fact that I learn from current recession is that nothing is really secure even our jobs. People look for a job because of its security. But it is not as secure as what we used to think like. As you can see, if anything happens in our economy, our jobs will be affected as downsizing happens in many companies. Although we can recession-proof our jobs but for long term solution, we must know how to have more income sources. It is too risky for us to depends on 1 income source.

Just like investing and retirement planning, we must diversify our income source so that our income will not 100% collapse just in case anything happens.

The Benefits to Have Multiple Income Sources

Having more income is really a big advantage for us. With more money,

1. We can pay down our debt faster. We can use the money to pay down the credit card debt, mortgage, personal loan etc. This will let us to be debt free faster and easier.
2. We can have more money to invest. With more money, you can have more choices for your investment plan. You can invest in those high yield investment or even invest more money to build up for your wealth. With this extra money, you can take more risks to have more returns too.
3. Save more money faster. You can put all the money into your saving account to save money. You can save for your children college fund or even your retirement fund. You can also build up your emergency fund too.

In good time, extra income sources simply let us have more money to invest and build our wealth, in bad time, we have multiple income sources to support our life. This is why I always say that multiple income sources are essential for everyone of us.

What Are The Important Requirements To Have Multiple Income Sources

Currently, we are making money because we are providing some kind of value to others. People are paying money to exchange for our values. It can be services, products, knowledge or time.

So if you want to have multiple income sources, you can:

• Provide Multiple Values. Maybe you are knowledgeable in different area. Then you can provide different values to different kind of people. For example, you can repair computers as your job, get a freelance programming jobs at night time and provide computer tutorials to children at weekend. This can let you have multiple income sources.
• Provide The Same Value in multiple ways. This is slightly different from above. You know nothing but only your expertise. So you can concentrate on your expertise and provide your value in multiple ways. For example, you are good in cooking. So you can work as a chef in local restaurant, then you can write and sell some cooking recipes, you can also build a site that about cooking and earn money from the internet. All the ways are build around the same expertise but in different ways to provide the value.

Personally I prefer the way #2 to make more money. By focusing on 1 expertise, you can really improve and become an expert on a particular field. So you can provide even more value to people and make more money because you are an expert. Besides that it is also easier to control 1 knowledge rather than different knowledge. Just like what people said, 1 knife that can cut is better than 100 knife that is blunt.

People with different level of income can achieve financial freedom as long as they know how to manage their money properly. But a matter of fact is that people with higher income can be financial free and achieve their financial goals faster. In fact, high income is a must for those who want to achieve financial freedom and retire earlier, like me.

I want to achieve financial freedom by the age of 30. So I must boost my cash flow speed to achieve this goal. First of all my income must be high and I must know how to manage the income to build more passive income assets. There are many options I can choose to generate high income but I never include MLMs in my plan even though they always promote the theory of financial freedom in their programs.

Multi-level Marketing

MLM is multi-level marketing and here is the definition from wikipedia:

Multi-level marketing (MLM), also known as Network Marketing, is a marketing strategy that compensates promoters of direct selling companies not only for product sales they personally generate, but also for the sales of others they introduced to the company. The products and company are usually marketed directly to consumers and potential business partners by means of relationship referrals and word of mouth marketing.

The Reasons Why MLM is Not For Me

As you can see, the plan of MLM actually quite match the requirement of financial freedom. We can leverage on MLM to generate more passive income by introducing more “downline” or members. This is why many MLM companies use the terms of financial freedom to promote their programs to people because they are being promoted as a system to generate passive income.

However, no matter how good a MLM system or products are, I never have any interest in MLM. I even never think that I want to achieve my financial freedom through them. Anyway, more and more people are not feeling good with the words MLM.

Here are the reasons why I think in this way:

• MLM System is too money oriented. I found that many MLM companies are too concentrating on making money. They are too promoting the concept of “money making” to people until they forget what is the real meaning of running a business. This let me feel that MLM is not selling any products but money making opportunity to people. MLM system is only a marketing system and the most important part is their products and contributions to the society. This is the main mission for a true business. However, what I found is they are just promoting their MLM system and carry out the message how much money we can make from their system. They should pay more attention on their products and services and not how much money their memebers can make.
• MLM products are too highly promoted. Well, everyone who joined MLM company is trying to make money and be a good sales person. Guess what, they are too highly promote their MLM system and products to people. They always claim their products are so different and rank no 1 in the market. I even met with some friends of mine promoting their MLM products exaggeratedly. After doing my research, I found that their products are having problems and some of them are being banned in different countries due to the side effects to consumers.
• The markup margin is too high. How people can make money from MLM company? Commission from different level! As the name indicated, mlm company has to pay commission to multiple level of people. Some of them even pay up to 5 level of people. So Can you imagine how much margin they have to markup on their products so that they can pay out so much of commissions so many levels of people? This make me doubt about their products… and I don’t wish people around me use this kind of “expensive” products because I want to make my commission.
• The Relationship for prospecting. How a new MLM marketer get started to promote their products and systems? Yes, through their relationship. They will introduce their companies to their relatives and families. they will hard selling to their friends and anyone who within their networks. Yes, we can leverage our network and relationship but I won’t leverage on them to make money especially by selling so called “business opportunity” and expensive products and services to them. I have been approached by several friends who are MLM marketers. For me, I really tired and lazy to answer their phone calls or meet with them because they always leverage on our relation to make money. I hate this process so I will never join any MLM companies for this purpose.
• Not Everyone can really Make “Big” Money. Yes, there are many people who is making money from MLM and in fact, some of them are even making big money from the MLM system. But not everyone can do this. Based on my observation, people who can make money, especially big money, are those consider as the pioneer of the MLM system. They are the first group of people who joined the system. I think I have no luck to get into a system at the early stage and MLM is not suitable for me.

Conclusion

MLM always emphasize that it is a business and everybody who joined the MLM system are business owners. I have different view on this. For me, the MLM companies are running the business and not the members. Everyone who joined their system are sales persons who are trying to recruit even more sales person.

Above are some of my points about MLM and I meant no offense by the remarks.

I’m a repeat visitor for a popular Internet marketing forum, The Warrior Forum. I like this forum so much because I can always find some know how, information, success stories or learning materials from that forum. It just like a big live library for me on Internet marketing and online business.

Last month, I came across a 10 pages old thread about how a normal guy’s Adsense income was shooting up from $0 to $35 per day in 7 weeks. I love this thread very much because the owner, John are so helpful and really share a lot of information with people. He doesn’t charge any money for this and all the advices are free. For every question people asked, John answered it directly with full information and details. I really learned a lot from this thread.

I’m not a big fan for Adsense but I’m so motivated by John’s story and would like to give Adsense a try. Just by following what John has done. This is not because of his Adsense income but I’m more motivated by his persistence and hard working. It definitely great to see the end results that we achieve after working hard.

According to his info, it can be easy and also be hard to make money from Adsense using his method. You will understand what I’m talking after you understand his method to make money from Adsense.

How John’s Method Works

Without further ado, below are the information that I collected and rearranged from John’s thread over the forum. It contains the true way to make money from Adsense.

Global economy is in hot water now and everybody is worry about their money and future. However, there are still a group of people thinking about whether they should start a business during this bad economy time. Some of them have been planning for so long to start a business but unfortunately the recession happens when they are ready to start one.

So the question is should you start a business during recession?

There are no right or wrong for the answer. According to my research, big companies such as Microsoft and Apple were founded during slow economy. Today, they are the big companies that are making billions of dollar. This has proven that economy and market doesn’t really have that much of impact on a business. But somehow people keep saying that it is good not to start a business during recession. So it really depend how you make your decision.

What Are the Factors that Determine the success for a Business?

Personally, I’m running a business too so I know the requirement to make a business succeed. Yes, economy and market might have some impact on business but they are not the major. For me, there are 5 factors that really determine how success your business is:

Business is just like a tree. You have to nurture it so that it will grow. Without nurturing, you never receive the juicy fruits from the tree or even have a shade tree. However, the bad news is business is not as simple as growing a tree. It is a competition for you to grow your business. You have to grow it fast. If not, your competitors will surpass you and your business will be in hot water.

Now you know why many businesses are suffering. In most cases are due to the slow growing of their business.

Below are the top 5 reasons why small business cannot grow: