The Perks of Networking Business in the Philippines

I actually hate it. Some of my friends would invite me over this orientation of their company, telling me that it could "change your life". Such things would sound shady to me but since they are my friend, I find myself having no choice for a favor.

So then I go. And what do I find? A networking business.

For those who don't know, a networking business is a kind of business where the people in the company benefit by having more members. It's like one of those religion thingy: for you to become a cell leader, you must have more "invites". So you annoy some friends and some acquaintances to accompany you into one of your church's services, offering so much "fun" and that again, might "change your life". Ugh!!!

I know that it's not just about inviting more people, it's also about preaching and connecting with others under God's roof. But I'm already taken on "inviting more people" into the church. Seriously, can't we just go to church and not care to bear any responsibility where it would take more than 5 hours of our time every Sunday? Sunday is supposed to be a relaxing family day.Maybe I should make another post regarding this.

So anyway...

With those kind of people trying to goad me into their beliefs and unbelievable businesses I'm considering unfriending them (if only real life is just like facebook).

So back to networking.

Basically, it's like this:

1
You buy your membership into the company with this amount: say, $100.

2
With your membership, you can now sell the company's products that came with the membership.

3
Overall price of the products you can sell is about 1.5x the worth you spent in becoming a member.

4
You earn more by inviting more people into the company.

As how number 4 works? The thing they call the Compensation Plan. So how does compensation works? The compensation plan is the money-back guarantee just by inviting someone into the company alone. The compensation plan is different for every company, depending on the price of the membership and how many percent one gets for every "invite". But the structure is the same for all. Let's have this for an illustration:

Say you have just become a member. So you invested a $100. You invited a friend. For every invite, you get 10% the price of the membership. For every person your friend invited, you get another 10%. So if you invited 2 people, you gain a profit of 20% money-back guarantee.

Let's look at this image for an example:

business networking

You are that person in that circle. You invited friends A & B. Your friend A invited her friends C & D while friend B invited his friends E & F. With persons C, D, E & F, you get 40% of your money back. With person C inviting G & H, and person F inviting I & J, you get another 40%. Now, just by compensation alone, you get a summation of 100%. You just have your investment back!

If persons D & E have just invited 2 persons each (we'll name them K & L, and M & N respectively), that would be another 40%. Imagine what you would get if persons G, H, I, J, K, L, M, & N were to invite 2 people each, and imagine if their invites are going to invite 2 persons each on their own... amazing, right?

Putting the whole picture into a linear progression, for your first 2 set of people, you get 20%, 40% for the next, and 80% for the next tier. Of course, it just works double every single time. That is if, all members of your invitees are hard-working enough to "convince" someone to join them into the company.

Wow, getting money would be that easy.

But then, really?

Think about the plausibility. The plausibility of you being able to "convince" someone to join you in the company. To do that, you must have a reliable product to sell and most importantly, you must have loads of friends. The problem with the orientation (for most companies) is that they don't appear to be selling a product. What they do rather, is selling the idea that you'd get more money by inviting more people into the company!


Hell, they could just be selling a trash and so long as the idea of getting more money by inviting more people sinks in to the mind of the simpleton, anyone would just simply throw a whole stash of money for investment that very day.

If this goes up, it'll be like getting a victim into a company. You'd get your money back by taking a part of somebody else's investment. To iterate: you invest and you convince others to invest, and you get your investment back by taking a portion of other people's investment. Do that, rinse and repeat. That doesn't sound good to me.

The way these sellers' mind works seem like this: let's get all the population in the whole country to invest in our product so we might get richer by the minute! What?!

These people are rather working on getting more people than actually selling the product. Please just make your product legitimate! If only their focus is actually selling their product than selling an almost intangible idea.

I'm fine with those reliable and stable products. But what usually are the products being sold to the market by these networking companies?

1
Beauty products

These beauty products include shampoo, deodorant, soap, lotion, and facial creams. With so many companies throwing in beauty products into the market, wouldn't you rather buy the famous ones? The ones that are already tried and tested by so many people through time? Why risk buying something new that you know nothing about? Even if they claim to be organic...

2
Oral Supplements

People need vitamins and minerals and pretty much anything to protect us from free radicals and stuff. But seriously? Beauty products that only need to be applied on the skin are hard enough to sell. And you want us to sell products to be taken orally? How many are willing to risk taking something that could probably mess with their hormones?

3
Slimming Pills

Between the usual beauty product and the oral supplement, believe me, this is easier to sell. With the media brainwashing us that being thin is beautiful, lots of women are willing enough to risk their lives with anything that would rid them of excess body fats. It's hard to control oneself with diet, exercising is exhausting and takes much time. What's easiest? Taking pills to burn those stubborn fats.

The problem with these networking companies selling this product is that... they sell them at such a huge price. Why buy something at $50 when you can buy a bottle of 30 capsules at $2 from China? Between looking at skinny Caucasians and skinny Asians, people would rather buy the Asians.

4
Loading Sim

The Philippines is the texting capital in the world. Why? Texting is cheap, calling is 6x the price of texting, and we love to save money. Among all the products I'd mention, this is the most stable. Texting in the country will be forever. This particular product offers a sim that can load all major loading stations. This is nice considering that you don't have to keep 3 cell phones just to load to all networks; you only need a nifty one.

5
Video Streaming product

The best thing about this product is that you can have a conference with 10 people at once. There are lots of free online video services (i.e. live streaming) like Skype for a one-on-one video chat. The problem is, you can't do it with more than 2 people while this product can. It can also be used to save video files and embed these videos to any of your websites.

The company claims that this is a promising product because aside from its advantage over Skype, we can't be sure that youtube will remain free in the future. I'm almost swayed over that last bit. But after Veoh, I don't think youtube will be greedy with money.

The downside of selling this product is that membership starts at $300-something. Yes, that expensive. I think that this is the thing that pulled the string for me to write this post.

UPDATE! Google invented a plugin called Hangout which actually does this Video Streaming Product's work! While you can only have conference with 10 people, you can let your audience (which runs by thousands if you are influential enough) view a live stream of the conference via youtube! Google is that great.



There's actually a threshold for the highest income that can be generated by a single person. No one can earn to infinity, which is good.

The thing about this networking business is that it still is not clear to me how one makes money. Consider a pyramid: if one individual at the bottom of the pyramid joins the team, the rest of the people joining him from the bottom to the top earns 10% of the investment each. Where does the money come from?

Have I taken anything here wrong? If you think things aren't clear to me, then please clarify me on that aspect. Obviously, I haven't understood everything yet about this networking business.

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