Every new company you see these days seems to be talking about being some sort of opportunity for you, and one of those companies is Wow Green. The opportunity they offer is a distribution program, where you can make yourself a small commission by selling their line of cleaning products yourself. You can also make even more money – residually – by getting other people you know to sign up for the program.

It’s certainly a wonderful opportunity, but the Wow Green opportunity isn’t for you. It’s for Wow Green. Opportunity, if you look in the dictionary, is about advantage – in this case, market advantage.

The Wow Green opportunity is primarily an opportunity for Wow Green to recruit a whole bunch of people to talk about their products, saying the brand name as many times as they can, to as many people as they can. In fact, that bunch will recruit other people into new bunches, until it becomes a tremendous market force – spreading the Wow Green brand like a fungus, from one place to another, until it’s everywhere.

And that’s a great thing for Wow Green. Opportunity in the form of people promoting you, and you don’t even have to pay them, is a really good opportunity – no matter who you are. Can you guess what this is worth to them? How many doors will it open? It’s truly a fantastic opportunity.

So what opportunity do you get from it? What’s the advantage on your end? A few sales dollars in the short term? How much effort do you end up putting into this Wow Green “opportunity” before you understand that your work is worth a lot more than those little checks you’re depositing?

The Wow Green opportunity looks like an opportunity to do difficult work without being paid, except when you sell their products and get a small check in the mail… and you’re selling more than enough of those products to bolster their revenue a lot better than you’re increasing yours.

What possesses people to take the Wow Green opportunity, anyway? Why do they invest so much effort, getting virtually nothing for their trouble, while Wow Green reaps the benefits of greater brand recognition? If you’re going to build someone’s brand recognition, start with your own.

The most difficult lesson of the business world isn’t that marketing and self-promotion is hard. It’s that time after time, year after year, there’s always another Wow Green opportunity – only the names have been changed. Instead of that opportunity, why not make your own? Promote yourself. Market yourself. Put that time and energy into your own business, and your own success – not into the latest big corporate name that promises you a few cents on the dollar from your otherwise-unpaid efforts.

Posted on 28 September '09, under Business.