This is the second in a 4-5 part series that examines how I (finally) decide to start a business that I will be marketing online. You can read the first post here. And, please leave your comments at the end of this post if anything I write resonates with you.
If I look back on my career path, I see a definite pattern. Every 8-10 years, I switched jobs. For many reasons, all perfectly valid at the time I made them. Suffice it to say that I've never been afraid of sticking my neck out and trying something else.
What might be fair to say is that one of my deliberate career choices was the one that took me back into the classroom as a high school English teacher. And from there, off to graduate school to earn my Master's degree.
The wall that I kept smacking into during those years was the wall of "there are no permanent fulltime teaching positions available unless one of our staff drops dead or gets pregnant and takes a six month maternity leave." Fortunately, there were a few of those six month leaves of absence so that I got a taste of having my own classroom. My own students. And I loved every minute of it.
I would have taught for free.
That's passion.
Remember that because "passion" - passion for something - is going to be one of the emotional drivers that I keep coming back to.
Fastforward to 1997 and I had come to the realization that I was not going to be hired fulltime. Seems that there was another hiring freeze on in the one district that I had racked up a 16 year track record with as a per diem sub. It would take me another three years to sever my ties with this school district, but that year marked a critical turning point for me.
That year, I made the second deliberate career choice in my life. I signed up as a distributor with a company in the direct sale/network marketing field. During the seven years I was with that first company, I built a consumer network of 200-plus individuals that would generate over $10,000.00 in monthly sales volume at its most productive period. I attended eight company conventions and embarked on a program of self-development that is largely responsible for who I am today. For that, I will be eternally grateful.
The company was Arbonne International. Back in 1997, there were approximately 30,000 distributors. And, the internet was in its infancy.
While some people were trying to figure out how to harness the vague perameters of the online world to develop what would ultimately be "internet marketing business models," I was wrapping my brain around how to develop residual income using a network marketing business model.
For several reasons (none of which are important here), I resigned as a distributor with Arbonne in 2004-05 and went on to explore a few other network marketing companies. I also began to reach out to small business owners and solo practioners in my community. This is when I began to build my professional brand as a "consummate networker."
All this time, I'd been poking around the internet, trying to figure out the business models that would let someone make a sustainable income online. Nobody was stepping up and volunteering that kind of information. But they were out there and some of them were becoming very successful.
I kept poking around and over time, found myself following a couple of people whose online messages resonated with me. This was long before Twitter, so "following" someone online had a slightly different meaning back then.
I continued my online research. And, as luck would have it, signed up with another network marketing company. This company was a bit different than the companies I'd worked with in the past. Most of the experienced field leaders were building their organizations using systems that internet marketers have been using for years. Systems?
Systems. How about: autoresponders. Squeeze pages. Opt in boxes. Personal web pages. I learned about pay-per-click ad campaigns, got my first peek at the behind-the-scenes preparations for Webinar broadcasts and was a regular participant on some of them.
It was fascinating to understand how these systems knit together to create an automated process with a series of predicatable actions that would lead to a series of predictable results.
Systems. Imagine what I could do on my own with these systems working for me.




