MLM Home Based Business : A Case Study

You may be asking yourself, “Why is Jay looking at an MLM opportunity when John Chow makes over $10K a month blogging?”

There are a lot of people out there attracted to multi-level marketing. The idea of leveraging the earning potential of those you recruit is a powerful attraction. These people are often those who can least afford to lose money online…they may be working at jobs they hate, and have little energy left to devote to an online business. Yet the idea of making $1 or so filling out surveys online doesn’t appeal to them.

If you’re one of these people, I want you to stop, and wait. True to the mission of this blog, I’m going to pay the money and take the risk, and let you see whether you really can succeed at an MLM opportunity with only part-time effort. This will take some time, because I want to make sure that I allow enough time to make a fair evaluation.

So today I’ll review the program I’ve chosen, and let you know how I’m going to proceed. Then in a few weeks, I’ll be back with the results. If you want to view the ongoing details, you can go to Apsense.com and join my NPN group.

The MLM opportunity I’ve chosen is called The New Plan Network (NPN).

The best sort of MLM opportunity is one where members do not pay just to support those above them. That’s why I like Agloco, since members don’t pay anything at all. NPN does require a monthly payment, but provides some Internet marketing services in return. The services provided are:

1. Autoresponders: setup a series of email letters to be sent to prospects over a period of time.
2. Generic opportunity capture pages that feed into your autoresponder
3. The NPN Messenger: an instant messenger sort of application specific to your upline and downline at NPN.
4. Ad Trackers: see which of your online marketing efforts are getting the most traffic.
5. URL Rotator: display one of several possible web pages when going to a rotator address.
6. A Clickbank front end: a store of Clickbank products you can direct people to, with your Clickbank id associated with all the products.
7. Banner Rotator: every member can provide three banner advertisements that are then displayed on the NPN web pages.
8. Multi-Downline Builder: you can provide details of up to five other MLM programs you support, and anyone you recruit into NPN will see the links to those programs.
9. NPN Toolbar: a toolbar with quick links to NPN news and the members area of the site.
10. Leads: you can purchase the contact information for people who have indicated an interest in online opportunities

Now, none of this alone is remarkable, and many are available for free. But packaged together, you could justify $10 a month for the services.

Their primary selling point is that they use a 5×5 forced matrix for people you refer to the program. This means that if you refer Jim and Sally, Jim will be under you and Sally will be under Jim. This supposedly keeps Jim interested in the program, since he got a referral unexpectedly.

Earnings are a modest $0.50 per member in your downline. With a 5×5 matrix, you can have up to 3,905 people in your downline, for a total of $1,952.50 per month. You also are paid $5 per month for each person you personally referred. To further complicate things, if you or your personal referrals have recruited at least 1 new paid member in the month, you will also earn a bonus equal to what your personal referrals earn that month.

All this makes it a bit tough to estimate a possible income. Theoretically, if we don’t manage to recruit anyone at all, but our sponsor does, we’ll still end up with people underneath of us and earning money.

Seems like a great deal, right?

That’s part of the goal of this case study, to see how it works out in practice. I’ll be marketing NPN the way a typical beginning online marketer would do so, using methods that are quick and easy, sometimes trading money for effort. This includes:

1. Using NPN’s own lead packages ($30 per month)
2. Posting in appropriate forums
3. Sending emails to safelists
4. Some bulk pop under traffic

We’ll see in a few weeks how effective these methods are. Again, to keep closer track of the results, see my NPN group on Apsense.com.

While we’re waiting to see how this goes, I’ll review a couple of far safer opportunities. See you tomorrow!

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