How to Reach a Full Time Income in Network Marketing Faster

If you’re looking for the fastest way to reach a full-time income in your network marketing business, you need a plan and a strategy in place, especially if you have family and a career.

It helps to know exactly what to do and how to get there. Hearing the advice to “work hard” isn’t going to help you get to the point where you’re earning a full-time income in network marketing. After all, you can be working hard doing the wrong things!

You may also hear the advice to “treat it like a business.” That’s a vague statement that’s not helpful either, particularly if you’ve never had a business.

Personally, my entire life changed when the mentors that came into my life shared exactly what to do step by step. Their guidance led me to being a stay-at-home dad and husband for over two decades while also being able to help thousands of people all over the world to do exactly what I did. And now I want to share that knowledge and experience with you.

So, let’s discuss what you need to do to start earning more money.

A Few Warnings First

I know that you’re ready to go to that next level in your business, so I’m going to give it to you straight. There are too many people that set up false expectations, which gives the profession a bad name. So, I have two warnings first.

Warning #1

I am going to tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. As I heard someone once say, I’d rather you respect me and be wealthy than like me and be broke.

I’m not here just to give you information. There are already too many people who do that, and you’re not here just to get information anyway. You’re looking for a transformation, and that’s exactly what I want to help you get.

Warning #2

Everyone is different, but in my 28 years as a distributor, I’ve seen a lot of people make the mistake of quitting their job too soon. Going full-time in a business doesn’t necessarily mean generating a full-time income. It can mean:

• quitting a job too soon
• getting fired
• looking for a job and unable to find one

When you quit your job too soon, it puts too much pressure on you. Your prospects can smell commission on your breath because your posture shows desperation. You’ll seem like you’re trying to get that next sale to pay your bills.

The late great Jim Rohn—Tony Robbins’ mentor and a mentor to many, including network marketing legends—said not to lose the power of the part-time story. When you say that you’re working in your business full time and you generated $300 last month, people will not be impressed.

But, if you share that you generated an additional $300 from your smartphone last month while working a full time job/career and being a husband and a dad of five kids, that’s more powerful. 80% of the people that join network marketing join to make three to five hundred dollars a month in income.

So, when you’re building your business around your life, it takes the pressure off and gives you the power of the part-time story. You’re showing people how to work on a fortune part time while working a job full time. They’ll see that you’re going to show them how to build a business with what they’re doing right now and where they currently are in their lives.

Beware of Knowledge

Knowledge is not power. It’s potential power. Knowledge plus action equals power. I’m going to give you a road map to show you exactly what to do to reach a full-time income the fastest way possible. Do the things that I’m sharing so that you go beyond consuming information to get that transformation.

Brian Tracy said, “A genius without a road map will get lost in any country, but an average person with a road map will find their way to any destination.” It’s like the saying, if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.

So, the roadmap is an important component to understanding the fastest way to succeed in network marketing.

Let’s get started!

1. Reset Your Mindset

Stop thinking small. Think bigger and reset your mindset. Network marketing is not a hobby. It is a business, so treat it like one.

The challenge of building your network marketing business is that it’s so easy to get started and it’s so easy to get out of it. When the investment is so low, the accountability is also low. What’s easy to do is easy not to do. Then you start justifying all the reasons that it’s not going to work.

We’ve invested several hundred thousand dollars in multiple franchises, and it’s a huge undertaking. But, here’s what’s fascinating. We were generating more commissions in one month in my network marketing business than both of those franchises combined in an entire year. The franchise investment was $700,000 whereas the network marketing business investment was less than the price of my smartphone. The difference was I didn’t treat my network marketing business like a hobby. I treated the hours that I was working like a business.

Stop thinking about it as “I’m gonna try it and see if it works.” If you’re trying, you’re lying. There is no trying. You’re going to do it whether you have five hours or ten hours a week. You’ve got to commit mentally to network marketing as a business. Listen to Tony Robbins whose companies do billions around the world. He will tell you that 80% percent of your success is your mindset whereas only 20% is skill set.

I knew the skills at the beginning of my career, yet I couldn’t break through that next level because my mindset was not where it should be. It’s not the how to’s, it’s how you do the how to’s.

2. Evaluate Your Environment and Associations

The quickest way to kill a big dream is to tell it to a small-minded person.

When you’re looking to go out there and grow a business understand that most
people are not going to see what you see. So, it makes sense that if you want something different than the masses, then you have to be willing to do something different than the masses. Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do.

When you think everybody’s going to be excited about your goal to create a full-time income in your network marketing business, you will find that people will try to tear your building down to make theirs bigger. Carefully consider who you share your goals and dreams with and who you give your attention to.

Your associations work harder on you than you work on them. Be wary of self sabotage. You have that internal thermostat that says you only get what you feel like you deserve. So, make a list of who you’re going to limit your time with and who you’re going to seek out. Ask yourself what your associations are doing to you and what they are doing for you. Like an elevator, the people and environment around you either lift you up or bring you down.

One negative comment is 14 to 17 times more powerful than a positive one. That’s why there are points in your career and life where you have to say no more stinkin’ thinkin’. One person can put a little negative weed seed of doubt in your head, and it changes your entire day. So, to reach that full-time income in your business, make sure that you’re very intentional about who and what you surround yourself with.

3. Start with the End in Mind

A mentor of mine told me regularly that the clearer the picture of your future, the more goal directed your actions are. Also, he would say that we magnetize the condition that we seek. In other words, when you create that clarity in your mind, you tend to move in that direction. What you focus on, you attract.

You’ve got to know yourself before you grow yourself. So, let’s do a little assessment. First, answer these questions:

• how much money do you need to be able to go full time in your business or
• what is the income goal that you need to achieve what you want

If you make it about the money, you’ll quit. Instead, put an emotional attachment to the money. Give that money a place to go before you ever receive it. Maybe you want to pay off debt, put your kids in a private school, buy your mom a car, go on a dream vacation, or give to a charity or church.

Next, if money and resources weren’t an issue, what would a perfect day in your life look like? What about the perfect week? People spend more time planning their vacation than their life.

Lastly, what rank in your company would generate the type of income to get you where you want to be? What does it take to get to that rank? This is where you map it out. You need to know exactly what it takes to achieve the goals in your company that will get you to where you want to be.

Answering these questions will help you set a goal and identify a destination. You must create a motive for your actions, which will create clarity. And, writing down your goals and dreams increases the odds of them happening.

How to Stay Motivated and Maintain Clarity

When all of a sudden you’re able to create and design your own life, you can’t wait to get up and get the day started in the day because you’re living in your passion. Turn that dream machine on! Modify your goals and dreams as your vision gets bigger.

But, let’s go one step further. People will do more to avoid pain than they will to gain pleasure. So, what are the things you’re going to suffer and what is the pain you’re going to go through if you do not achieve what you want to achieve in your business?

Write down the things in your life right now that you’re sick of. What you don’t hate, you will tolerate.

Here are a few examples to get you started:

• Missing my kids field trips
• Not being able to feed my family healthy foods
• Going to a job I don’t like
• Someone else dictating my worth
• Watching your spouse take the kids to school in an unsafe car
• Missing memories I can’t get back

When you start identifying these things, it will motivate the heck out of you. This is the push and the pull. The pleasure and pain combo is a powerful motivator. It creates a massive sense of urgency. You’ll be more intentional and get more stuff done in the minutes that you have to work on your business, whether it’s an hour, two hours a day, or 20 hours a week.

4. Be Intentional

One day a mentor told me to treat my network marketing business like a minimum wage job. With a minimum wage job, you’re paid very little money and you have a schedule with set hours each week. Thus, you know what your work hours are each day and week.

Since this is a business, you need to be proactive not reactive. Don’t leave anything to chance, which means be intentional when you’re planning your week. Plan it around the cracks and crevices of your day.

One of my coaching clients was a married mom of two little kids and had never done network marketing before in her life. She had a very small database of contacts and didn’t know a lot of people. She would show up to work early in the parking lot and work from her phone after she took her kids to daycare. During the work day, she would have a break or lunch and once she got the kids in bed at night, she reached out to more people.

In her first two weeks, she reached out to 150 people each week and then 10 or 15 a day. She was putting in two hours a day, six days a week. In four months, she hit one of the top ranks in the company and was recognized for a top rank top producer in the company. She only worked throughout the cracks and crevices of her day to make that happen.

Faster Success Through Intention

Let’s say you reach out to two people a day, five days a week. That’s 40 people a month, almost 500 people a year. If you’re consistent and persistent and keep a good attitude, then you’re constantly filling that pipeline. Eventually, if you just continue to do what you did, you will have people reaching out to you.

To increase how fast you are able to reach a full-time income in network marketing, you just speed up the amount of exposures and follow-ups. You compress time frames.

However, most people are excited at first then they get discouraged and stop. What happens next is that they have to start all over and that ruins the momentum.

So, plan out the hours you’ll work in the business to get ahead of your week and not behind your week. Focus on the profit producing activities, such as prospecting, following up, and marketing. Build a pipeline by doing the simple things on a daily basis which will compound and build momentum. And try to avoid doing those things that hamper your success.

Being intentional about all of these things builds a strong base and a strong business. The momentum starts to kick in as that snowball is starting to roll down the hill. It’s a little teeny snowball, but the more it rolls, the more momentum it gains and the bigger the snowball gets. Eventually, if you get in front of it, you become a part of that snowball and that’s the way your business works.

5. Leverage Systems

Another way to reach a full time income in network marketing faster is to create systems. It can be team or company systems, but you want your business to be system dependent and not people dependent.

Here’s an example. Someone I recruited called me immediately after the onboarding process. She asked me to explain the compensation plan to her. I directed her to a video and document (aka third party tools) that do a much better job at explaining it and told her to call me back after consuming those.

She wasn’t too happy with me. However, after she started building the business, she knew that I did her a huge favor since I taught her to fish. If you give someone a fish, you feed them for the day. If you teach them to fish, you feed them for a lifetime.

If you want to get to several thousand people on your team, you have to do in the beginning with a few people what you would do when you have a team of several thousand people. For instance, with a team of several thousand people, you couldn’t answer every single person’s question. That would completely stall and crush your business. And that would make it more difficult to reach your income goals.

To have that exponential growth where it grows with or without you, start making sure that you’re a master promoter of the systems. You have only so much energy, and there’s only so much of you to go around. If you get sick, have an emergency, or ever want to go on vacation with your family, you don’t want your business being dependent on you or everything will come to a halt. Make sure that you leverage systems.

Real Life Examples of Systems at Work

Systems can save you time and make business growth faster. It helps if they are organization or company wide systems. Here are a few examples.

Years ago, several leaders and I spent several days creating a one-page document for on-boarding, which was a getting started document that was accessible by computer, phone app, or print-out. Once we all agreed, we were fanatical about using the onboarding system we’d set up. When members wanted to welcome somebody to the team, we would direct them to that onboarding system.

For other tasks, I’d say, “Let me show you in the back office where you can find that information. If you don’t see exactly what you’re looking for, then let me make sure you have the customer service information.” I taught people to use the onboarding and back office systems to streamline business management.

Here’s another example. If people wanted my personal time, they had to plug into our weekly training or the company resources. Otherwise, I would give them group time only. To do something with me directly, they had to look at the resources first and contact me afterwards. This showed me that they were willing to plug into the system, and that’s a leader that I can count on.

Some of them didn’t take it too well, but they understood later. When it comes to building a business, a lot of times your team won’t see what you’re doing to understand why it’s so important. But to grow, it’s very important to continue to promote and leverage systems and follow a process.

6. Replicate Yourself

Have you ever had a team member tell you that they’re going to make more money than you? When people told me that, I’d be happy because you know that you have a strong business when your leaders have more success than you. As Zig Ziglar said, if you help enough other people get what they want, you’re automatically going to get what you want.

Early in my career, I had no idea what it meant when people talked about developing leaders. I would tell team members what to do, which is not good for developing leaders. When I started implementing the simple “tell, show, try, do” process, I was able to start replicating myself. You tell your team what to do, show them what to do, they try it, then they start doing it—with or without you.

Leadership is visual. People learn by what’s caught more than what’s taught. So, this is a very effective technique. My team saw me do it with them, and then they started doing the same thing with their organization.

Your paycheck is a direct and indirect reflection of how many people you’re able to impact. The bigger your paycheck, the bigger the positive impact that your team is making on more people.

To be effective and impact the most people, have the attitude that you’re going to grow leaders and replicate yourself. Create an environment that encourages a growth culture. What gets praised gets repeated. So, work on your leadership habits. Regularly praise and recognize more of what you want to see in your organization to develop leaders, which will help fast track that full time income you’re trying to achieve.

7. Lead by Staying in Personal Production Mode

One of the best pieces of advice that I ever got was from a billionaire. He said that most people make this mistake: they stop doing what they did that got them to where they are.

Here’s an example. A friend and I started in the exact same company on the exact same day. We both started out excited and in personal production mode, and we both went out and started having some success.

Unfortunately, I stopped doing what I did that got me to that point. So, I went from building to management and then eventually survival. I realized that I needed to get back into building mode. I needed to lead by example. My organization is going to do what I do, not what I say.

Fast forward to 36 months later, and I was making a six figure income. However, my friend’s income was 17 times what my income was in a 12-month period!

Every month, he acted like he was starting all over. He spent 50% of his time on prospecting and following up every day. And, each month he acted like he had no team. He said that he never wanted to ask his organization to do something he’s not willing to do himself. His team was watching, and they knew if he could continue to lead from the front, they could too—no matter what they had going on in their life.

It’s not about you and your desire to advance. It’s about helping the team. The best way to help them is to be a great leader. Having a leadership mindset, setting an example, and keeping in personal production mode will be contagious with your leaders and your organization, which will lead to growth and more income.

The Key to Reaching a Full-Time Income Faster as a Network Marketer

To reach that full-time income in network marketing, take action every day. You’ve got to DO THE WORK. Make the commitment.

You can’t complain about the results you’re not getting from the work you’re not doing!

Commitment is doing the thing you said you would do long after the feeling in which you made it has passed. It is easy to get excited when you’re listening or watching a training that motivates you and gives you hope. But later on, you go into the self-doubt phase and wonder if you’re better off working a regular job.

So, make that commitment. Draw a line in the sand then trust the process. Success is not a place that you arrive at. It’s many different things for many different people. To me, success is the process of growing every single day. It’s about progress, not perfection.

Always be consistent and persistent with a positive attitude. Surround yourself with people who are supportive and knowledgeable, like your upline leadership, a mentor, and a coach. They will guide and direct you.

If you’re doing the right things and you’re making mistakes, don’t worry. That failure is your friend. Learn from it. The only way you really fail is to quit. So, fail forward by following the process and doing the right activities. Learn how to be more productive. You’ll get a little bit better each day.

This post is part of my Leadership Podcast where I help network marketers and business owners grow their business and become better leaders. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts or check it out on YouTube.

And don’t miss this free training on how to grow your team faster by avoiding the five big mistakes leaders often make that sabotage their growth.