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A PERSONAL PRODUCT EVALUATION METHODOLOGY
I want to say ‘Thank You’ for your time and interest and I would like to share my business philosophy with you today.
The ‘BEST Home Based Business Ever Offered to Mankind’
It almost seems that each and every business opportunity advertised on the internet  makes a claim along those lines, some are just more ‘BEST’ than others.
Pardon the grammatical faux pas. I used to buy into a lot of those exaggerated claims of fame and fortune, far more than anyone with common sense should, and I like to think that I have common sense, but, desire almost always overrides common sense.
You know what, let’s leave out the fame part, I always wanted to be anonymously wealthy. Yes, I know, it’s asking too much, but a boy must have dreams.
But, doesn’t it just make sense? There are these great products, millions of people on the internet and a super duper delivery system, EMAIL.
All you have to do, is pay your money to get into the business, buy the products, send out loads of email to advertise your new business and great products, and watch the cash come rolling in.
 Success is yours!
Right!
If it happened that way for you, congratulations, I am happy for you.
It didn’t happen that way for me and pulling from my personal experiences and the stories I have been told recanting the experiences of others, it just doesn’t.
It may have happened that way in the past, before everyone’s mailbox was flooded on a daily basis with 50 of the ‘new best business opportunities’ along with 100 of the latest ‘must have’ products.
Now I am convinced that it won’t happen that way again.
If it was ever there, easy and inexpensive internet success is gone.
Soooh, now what?
Jumping from the latest ‘Best’ internet business ever to the newest ‘Best’ internet business ever offered to mankind, doesn’t work,
I tried that too.
I finally realized that I had to actually start looking at my internet ‘ad-ventures’ as a real business, what a concept.
 I had to start thinking about what I was doing and what I was going to do instead of letting someone else tell me ‘all you have to do is…., do what I do’.
I listened to that line too many times.
Well, wouldn’t you, after all, this person is wildly successful doing exactly the same thing they are telling me, right? Right Again…
Most of the people you are listening to are just like you, and are repeating the same phrases they heard when they bought into the business opportunity they are promoting.
 Just to be fair and not sound too bitter or critical, some of us will get lucky and find a savvy business partner who truly knows how to build an internet business.
I’m pretty sure you’ve heard the term ‘Heavy Hitter’, everyone is looking for these people, finding a ‘Heavy Hitter’, insures your success. 
It makes being in business so easy and enjoyable, all your friends will see you as the successful internet entrepreneur, your downline volume is so huge you win a free lease for the car of your dreams, how great is that? You made it happen.
What if you don’t stumble across a ‘Heavy Hitter’?
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it would be great and I hope you do find someone with those credentials, but, you must realize there just aren’t enough heavy hitters for everyone to have one in their business, what do you do then?
The point I am trying to make here is this, don’t expect someone else to be responsible to build your business, its’ your business, it’s up to YOU!
O.K. Let’s say a great uncle you never heard of dies suddenly and you inherit a million dollars.
The only stipulation in the will is that you must use this money to buy or start your own business.
Are you going to just ‘try’ the first thing that looks good and see what happens?
I don’t think so, I hope not. I think you are going to see the opportunity that was presented to you by your benefactor; you are going to get serious and focused.
 You realize that this is your shot, your one chance to really change your life and be truly successful, and the chance to provide a wonderful life for your family, just like you always imagined you would.
So why wouldn’t you take the same serious and focused approach with your own hard earned cash?
I can’t answer that question myself, it really doesn’t have an answer, but I have been there before, guilty as charged your honor.
It’s not a million dollars, but, you are looking at a business venture with the same intent; you want to change your life, you want to give your deserving family a better life and you want to be financially independent and live the dream.
So say we all.
 Now, how did I get out of my ‘throw enough garbage against the wall and see what sticks’ mode of operation?
Well, the biggest reason was that I got tired of seeing the disappointment in my wife’s eyes.
I got tired of finding an excuse for the latest failed business. Favorite EXCUSE:
I mean, really, I only invested a few thousand dollars, and what did I actually think I was going to make from such a small investment? That was my all time favorite. I never really invested enough money to make any serious money.
How about if I made a profit? After all, it was a business wasn’t it, shouldn’t I have expected to at least make some kind of a profit? 
As you can see, I still have some anger issues with myself over my past business indiscretions.
If I ever offer to introduce you to my ex-business partner, Stu Ped, please turn me down. I don’t need any further business advice from Stu and neither do you.
LET’S SEE WHAT STICKS METHOD
 My personal business or product evaluation methodology was more or less born out of desperation.
Failure was no longer an option; my kitchen walls are too slick for my previous business selection method to be effective so, I had to develop another, one that required a little more thought and analysis.
I never wrote about my previous business selection methodology, so I didn’t have to give it a descriptive name, or for that matter embarrass myself. If I had, I suppose I could have dubbed it ‘Sticky Walls’ or the SW Methodology so no one would really know what was going on, I know I didn’t have a clue.
Since I am writing about my current methodology, a descriptive name is in order.
I chose to call it ‘Tripodology’, further reading will reveal why.
It is still a work in progress, but it does serve to
(a) make me take a long hard look, and
(b) make me take a long hard look.
I hope you're still with me and you take the time to read the rest.
TRIPODOLOGY’ A DEFINITION
What is ‘Tripodology’? As the name suggest, there are three components, or ‘legs’, to my personal ‘product evaluation methodology’, that I like to refer to as ‘Tripodology.
In order for me to consider adding a new product income stream, the ‘candidate’ must have three legs to stand on. You can run with two legs and still make money, but real stability and security comes with three legs, which is why photographers use tripods.
The first leg of the potential new opportunity is ‘real value’,
the second leg is the potential for exceptional monetary reward,
and lastly, there must be a delivery system.
One leg is not more important than the other, but without all three legs, you don’t have a tripod, a stable platform on which to build a profitable and long lasting business. I’ll explain how I use this methodology in the following paragraphs.
VALUE - The first leg of my TRIPOD
 I have a short series of questions I ask of myself when I am trying to get a ‘good feeling’ about the value of any product I am considering promoting. Did you notice that I used the words ‘good feeling’, not very scientific, and that’s because like you, I don’t have a huge staff doing market research to advise me, and must rely on my own personal experience, wants and needs.
I don’t consider myself to be the ultimate consumer, but I do my fair share to keep the economy on track, not to mention how much help I get from my wife and kids. When evaluating this leg of the tripod, all of the questions are only about the ‘Real Value’ that the new opportunity will bring to the table. 
- Does it pass the ‘WAA Test’, or to put it another way,
- does it have ‘Wide Audience Appeal’?
- Does it save me time or money?
- Does it add value to my life?
- Would I purchase this product if it was not part of this business Opportunity?
- Is it consumable?
- Would I want to buy it more than once, possible Repeat sales?
- If I owned this product, would I use it, or will I just be collecting yet another drawer full of pills?
- Has the competition eroded the value of the product?
Most of the products I review are those that are consumed by the general populace, like health products or travel and leisure, you get the idea.
Everyone on the planet wants to be healthy, just about everyone loves to travel, Homo sapiens have been wanderers since their feet first hit the ground eons ago, its’ in our DNA. I like to promote products where the obvious general use or value jumps right up in my face, I get excited.
When that happens, it passes my WAA test with flying colors, and I get the first leg of my tripod out of the box. I don’t put the tripod leg in place quite yet, there are still a couple of value checks to consider. OK, maybe it isn’t something I would personally buy, but is it a consumable product with intrinsic value? Would someone have a reason to buy this product again and again?
THE ‘WAA’ TEST
WIDE
AUDIENCE APPEAL
 Baskin Robbins sells ice cream to the same customers over and over.
They sell a wide variety of ice cream, 37 flavors of ice cream, but some are more popular than others.
  
If I were only going to sell two flavors of ice cream, guess what they would be?
You’re right, chocolate and vanilla.
Of course, I don’t want a product that has rabid competition, but, again, I am not going to try and introduce jalapeno ice cream just because it is unique and the commissions are in the stratosphere.
Would I be able to sell enough jalapeno ice cream to cover my marketing cost, even at a 75% profit or commission? I have been wrong more than a couple of times in my life, but I seriously doubt, there would be mass appeal for that product. When evaluating this leg of the tripod, I have to think like the consumer that I am. What am I going to do with this once I own it? Most marketers count on you being an ‘Impulse Buyer’, on occasion I have been known to be an impulse buyer myself.
If the product or opportunity has no sustainable value, the impulse to buy is soon followed by ‘Buyers Remorse’.
 The request for refunds follow, and more of your valuable time is spent on refunds and returns than was originally spent on making the sale. This is not profitable, nor is it an effective use of your time or energy, and it doesn’t help in the reputation department either. By the way, you must honor all reasonable requests for refunds and returns, it is just good business. When I say reasonable, I mean just that, if you have a 30 day return policy and someone request a refund or return in 33 days, honor it, it’s the right thing to do.
Market competition does have some affect on the value of a product or opportunity.
If you see it or hear about it everywhere, it loses some value to you personally, but usually not as much in the marketplace.
 Yes, it could be a little tired, and the added competition makes our job a little harder, but if there was a strong market, there still will be a market.
Tens of thousands join the internet community everyday, from every place on the globe, many of these newcomers haven’t seen or heard about your product or opportunity before today.
I won’t do what everybody else is doing, but I won’t be a voice in the wilderness either.
There are many unscrupulous opportunists on the internet today, I know, I have fallen victim to a few of  them, maybe some of you have had that experience as well. They make outrageous claims and promises, but in the long run, fall far short of the mark. This has a far more negative effect on any internet product or opportunity than any amount of competition will ever have. The key to maintaining your products value is to ‘under promise’ and ‘over deliver’ for your customers.
There is no free lunch; ‘
Real Value’ does not usually come with the low bidder.
REWARD - LEG TWO
I like to work business opportunities that have exceptional income potential. It must have exceptional income potential in order to attract savvy business partners like me and you, who expect to be suitably rewarded for our efforts.
What a concept, getting paid what your worth. The opportunities pay plan must be structured so that five to ten thousand dollars a month is possible with limited personal sales. If it isn’t possible to achieve this level of income with this product or opportunity, it won’t free me or a potential business partner from the day job and a pass is probably in order.
Just like you, I have a limited amount of time to spend each day and I want to make the most of it. I look for opportunities that allow me to leverage my time and my business partners’ time with probability of repeat sales allowing me and my business partners to develop a residual income.
 In case you haven’t heard the term residual income, I will give you my abridged version of that term. Here goes; I make a product sale and receive the appropriate commission from the company I have chosen to represent. Good for me, my hard work paid off and I was rewarded as expected. In many instances the ‘company’ would consider their obligation to me to be over and justifiably so; I was paid for my efforts.
Enter the concept of ‘residual income’.
Let’s suppose the products I sell are consumable, and the customer ends up purchasing the same product month after month. During this time period, I spent no time or effort to sell or service this customer again; I didn’t even know the customer continued to order. It’s something like the old IBM concept, where the salesman owns an account and gets commission on everything that the account buys, even if he was on vacation at the time. That’s an extremely simple definition of residual income, but you can see the possibilities when you multiply that customer by a hundred or even a thousand such customers over time. Some companies have taken that concept to the extreme and instituted policies that assign a customer to a representative for LIFE. Imagine, next week, next month, or even next year, that same customer comes back to the company and buys the same product or any other product and I get paid again, even though I have had no contact with the customer for a year. That’s truly residual income on steroids.
Now, let’s take it to the next level,  suppose all of my business partners are doing what I am doing and I get a small percentage of the monthly residual income that they receive, let’s say I have a couple of hundred business partners, mind boggling, isn’t it? The potential for extraordinary income is phenomenal. The point I am trying to make here is that a single sale will earn my business a commission for that day, adding the concept of residual income earns my business commissions for a lifetime. It will continue for as long as my business, my business partners and their business partners and their business partners’ business partners remain active in the company and customers are buying products. This continues even if I am no longer actively recruiting new business partners or generating new customers. That’s what I would call ‘Exceptional Income Potential’, or EIP squared
Get out the third leg, the tripod is coming together.
The ‘SYSTEM’ - THIS IS LEG NUMBER THREE
No leg of a traditional tripod is supposed to be more important or stronger than any other leg, they are three equal partners, joined together for a purpose, that being ‘stability’. ‘Tripodology’ is slightly  different, I like to use a somewhat modified quote from the book Animal Farm, ‘some legs of the tripod are more equal than others’. The leg that needs to be stronger and is just a slightly more important than the first two legs is the third and final leg of the ‘Tripod’, a ‘Proven Marketing System’. It must deliver your message in a manner that both educates and excites potential customers to purchase, and potential business partners to get involved in a business with you.
The third leg of the ‘Tripod’ must be easily understood, a plan that you can visualize yourself executing and successfully promoting to others, in short, it must be easily duplicated by me and you.
In the past, I have jumped into opportunities that did not have the ‘PMS’ Leg of the Tripod.
At that point of my internet ‘mis-adventures’, the concept of my Personal Product Evaluation Methodology hadn’t yet formed. I didn’t slow down long enough between catastrophic failures to analyze what had happened. My idea of product promotion was to get some third party to send out one million emails promoting my opportunity to their already over mailed and tired ‘super responsive list’, DISaster.
How about I just farm out this traffic issue to someone else, get guaranteed signups and watch my business grow, DISASter. I know, I will buy clicks from Google and Yahoo at 3.00 U.S. a click that will surely do the trick, DISASTER.
Those actions I described are repeated again and again, by just about every new internet marketer arriving on the scene, I did it too. When I think of the money I wasted on these types of fruitless endeavors I want to scream.
Sometimes I just plain listened to the wrong people giving self serving and misdirected guidance.
I once had an upline sponsor that told me to spend the PPC dollars like I was already making a huge profit from my new business.
What was even worse than that was I did it, I did it. No plan, just spend the advertising dollar like I was a marketing maven. Keywords, the more the better, get those clicks.
 Can you say CATASTROPHIC DISASTER.
I was broke and disillusioned in a matter of weeks, like three to be exact. 
The moral of the story, unless you happen to be a Bona Fide Internet Marketing Guru, you can’t go it alone, your new business must have a Proven Marketing System in place, ready to be put to use by you.
If the company doesn’t have a Proven Marketing System, look closely at your would be sponsor and the upline team, are they participating in a marketing co-op, or pooling their advertising dollars to spread the cost and results among the group? You need to be involved in some type of product promotion program. It is ill advised to try and go it alone, it usually has an undesirable outcome, like you, broke and disillusioned.
Have I scared you yet?
If you just answered ‘Yes’, good you got the point, on the other hand, if you answered ‘No’, that’s also good, I’m sure you got the point, your just a little more ambitious than the person who answered ‘Yes’.
So, even if I liked the product and would certainly use it, even though the income potential was exceptional, if the third leg of the ‘Tripod’ is missing, it doesn’t meet all the requirements in ‘Tripodology’, it is definitely Bi-Pedal.
We need to PASS on that one. 
We have already established that I am not a marketing genius, to be truly successful in any opportunity, I need help. I must have a marketing plan, a step by step blueprint to follow. In other words, a ‘Proven Marketing System’ that I get to experience, when I am introduced to the product or opportunity for the first time. 
If there is no proven marketing system coming from my ‘would be’ sponsor, and I was not shown a vehicle that was easily duplicated by myself and my future business partners, I won’t get involved in an otherwise good business opportunity. Great products with fantastic payment plans for the business owners, disappear from the marketplace everyday, the third leg of the Tripod never materialized, no strong leader emerged to put it in place. I have had more than my share of failed business opportunities and do not want to repeat those experiences. We are supposed to learn from our mistakes and I believe me, I am doing the best I can to learn from mine.
Tempted as I sometimes am to join an otherwise exceptional business opportunity, I can not bring myself to take the plunge if the ‘Third Leg’ isn’t there. I would just be repeating the bad behavior of my past and going against my own rules.
If all legs of the ‘Tripod’ are not there, I still have the possibility of building a successful business, but there will certainly be too much pain along the way. 
I get some degree of business insurance when I get a ‘Proven Marketing System’.
RESOLUTION
I don’t know about you, but if I failed to mention it before, I am now, I don’t like selling. The two key components of ‘Real Value’ and ‘Income Potential’ are the door openers. Calling people on the phone day and night, going through a script time after time, is just not for me.
I know it works, it just doesn’t work for me. I will not try and ‘talk’ anyone into anything. You are educated and intelligent, you either see the value in the products and opportunity or you don’t. It is either something you want or not.
If I could talk you into buying something that wasn’t for you, I am the only one who benefits, ‘one time only’. That is just not good business, you feel cheated and I earned a demerit on some blog somewhere on the internet.
Enough demerits and I might as well become a Wal-Mart greeter, no insult intended to Wal-Mart greeters, it’s an honest job, again, just not for me.
In order for me to have you as a ‘repeat customer’, someone in business with me, I have to deliver real value and opportunity. Helping you grow and become successful, helps me grow and become successful. And now, to wrap this up, I will give the abbreviated conclusion.
Once again, apply the first leg of my ‘Tripod’, which is, ‘Value’ , 
coupled with a product that passes the ‘WAA Test’, increases the potential for sales, which generates greater monetary ‘Rewards’ , otherwise known as ‘Big Cash’, or leg number two,
and last but certainly not the least, we have leg number three, an automated ‘Proven Marketing System’ .
An opportunity that puts all three legs of the ‘Tripod’ in place gives you a clear margin for success, which is my idea of Business Insurance .
The formula for success:
Value + Rewards + Proven Marketing System = BusinessInsurance
I hope you found my Personal Product Evaluation Methodology interesting, informative and helpful.
Please put it into action when evaluating any business opportunity in the future.
I’ve paid for E-Books with less substance.
Take control of the future of your business success from day one.
Get Serious!
Get Focused!
DO IT NOW!
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