Mathematically they look unbeatable, but it is extremely difficult to get people to sign up under you.   Actually most of these sites have a free to join option.   You usually get a fair amount of people to come along with you for free during the pre-launch of any particular MLM.

When the time comes to upgrade to a paying member that’s when most of people are relunctant to pony up a monthly membership fee.

When I say MLM I am talking about the programs with matricies.  There seems to be dozens of them.  2×2, 2×3, 2×6,  2×10, 2×15 etc.  then there are the 2 up programs and on and on.

As I said mathematically they work  just as described, the only difference between them is the payouts.   Some are designed mostly for the designer/developers of the site but some are designed more for the members.

One of them that I joined was a 2 x 8 matrix that was a $32.50 per month membership fee.  The payout was as follows:  you get $15 each for the your first two people who sign up under you as paying members.   Basically when you get those first two people you have broken even.  Then for the next 6 levels (this is 7 levels deep) you get only $1.00 for each paying member but for the 8th level you get $8.00 for each paying member.

For a 8 level matrix, at the 8th level there are 256 people on the 8th level.  This is figuring each person on each level gets 2 people. 2×2, 2×4, 2×8 etc etc.

Anyway if everyone on the first 7 levels pays their fee that is equal to $282 for you, then the 8th level pays $8.00 times 256 people for another $2048.  This comes to a total of $2330 per month.

Of course if each person in the matrix can accomplish the same thing then each person in the matrix can be making $2330 per month.  It just seems this would be extremely attactive to people looking for a simple way to make some money on line.

This particular MLM is paying 97.5% of the membership fees back to the members.   The remaining 2.5% stays with the developer and it pays for the maintenance of the site plus some profit for him.

I imagine a lot of you long time internet marketers are having a good laugh at my naivete about MLM’s, but as I said they are absolutely mathematically sound. 

I suppose the biggest problem with them is that everyone is worried they will be the last to sign up and won’t be able to get anyone to sign up under them.  I suppose at some point there would be a limit to available prospects but with the millions upon millions of people on the internet it seems like there would always be new people.

Anyway I have tried I four different ones but have been unable to build a downline of any size to speak of, so onto my next adventure in this make money on line pursuit.

More to come later about affiliate marketing.  I may be onto something that will make some money, so that is my current activity.  Ever heard of Automatic Traffic Hubs.  If not this is my first one, http://normsgreenenergy.com

Till next time,  Norm

It is a planning and implementing, step by step, by stumble by stumble, get up and regroup and replan.  Straighten out your route, learn new things and forge forward.

There are a lot of things to learn about internet marketing and one of the biggies list building.  Which should come shortly after you have mastered a long list of technical know how stuff.

For the novice marketer that does not have a full compliment of prospects and customers to sell to,  there is the ever so important email marketing list to be built.   Blogging is one of way doing it but my message today is about List Building With Giveaways.

These are events that are put together by a few marketing individuals and partnerships where they lobby for contributers to supply  free stuff to be given away to anyone who is willing to supply a name and email address.  Hence your source for opt ins to your list.

The giveway event is promoted thru JV Parternships that you can join as a contributer.   You supply ebooks, or reports or software that you have either developed yourself or garnered from a variety of sources such as Butterfly Reports .

There is a whole bunch of things  you need to do to put together a giveaway and to join an event but that is for another time.   In the meantime you can pick up a book from JT Martin called JV Givaways Unleased .  Excellent book to learn how to do giveaways.

Of course there is also Alex Jeffreys’ list building course that is available for free at: http://someoneneedsit.com .   This course also covers a lot about giveaways.

I have been getting fairly reasonable results from giveaways since I started doing them a few weeks ago.  When one of my giveaway events is currently open I usually get 10 to 20 opt ins per day during the event cycle.

A friend sent these pictures of the new F-22 Raptor  the other day and I just had to share them with everyone who visits my blog.

You have to click on “Read More” to see the pictures.  For some reason I don’t understand yet I can’t get the pictures to stay on the first page.  They are there when I preview but when I publish they jump to the second page.

Enjoy

Norm

Seems like it should be fairly easy because I have not been closely involved with anyone besides Nataniel and Anatoly and I haven’t heard from them for a little while now.  Anyway here goes.

1.  As with Gene I am also a Christian.
2. I have 2 biological children and 1 that kind of adopted my wife and I because he needed some parents.
3. My wife and I sponser a child in Bangladesh, he is 20 years old now and a great joy to know he is doing ok.
4. I am retired, oh wait I think that is in my profile so number 4 doesn’t count.
5. I love to write and as some may notice I can be a little long winded at times.
6. I have not made any money on line.
7. Wait a minute I take that back I have an Ebay store where I have made some money so that would count as “on line” I guess.
8. I used to travel to China for a company I worked for and I still have a couple of friends there and we email each other once in awhile.
9. I am writing a ebook about giveaways.  Am about half done with it.
10. I just had the best day for confirmed opt ins since joining Alex.   A couple of my giveaways finally went live.
11. I have a cat named Jackson.  Does that count as something you didn’t know?
12. My wife is still working and I have taken on the domestic duties for the most part.  I’m starting to enjoy cooking.  My daughter and I exchange recipes.
13. I am working on my 49th year of marriage.  Oh yeh to the same woman.  I actually saw her for the first time when I was in the 7th grade.
14. I live in Oregon, was born in northern Minnesota but moved to Oregon when I was 12 so I consider myself a native Oregonian.
15. I am pretty handy around the house, we are in our 4th home and I have done remodeling in 3 out of the 4.
16. I do a bit of woodworking, building things for myself and my family.
17. I used to play golf a lot but after a cancer surgery I have a tick in my side that is very painful when I swing a club so I haven’t golfed since the summer of 2004.
18. I have only one working kidney.  Does that count?  Hey I’m digging deep now to come up with things you guys don’t know.
19. I also used to camp and fish fairly regularly, but the past few years with some health things we sort of got away from it.  I need to get back to that one.
20. My wife, son and I owned a coffee shop for about a year and a half.   That was kind of fun but also a lot of work.  If anyone needs a latte, I am pretty good at making them.
21. I joined Affiliate Jump the other day after joining the webinar Alex pointed us at.   Hope to do something with it, it is really easy to set up the CPA websites, I just need more places to advertise them but I am working on that.
22. I am now on Skype but I am in the dark ages and don’t have a web cam or video recorder so I can only IM on the thing.  My skype name is norm.malone.  Come visit sometime.
23. I have a grandson in the Marines, he just went to Okinawa a week or so ago.  He’s not a biological grandson he is the son of the my son that unofficially adopted my wife and I.
24. I am working with an acquaintence in Malta with the Affiliate Jump thing.
25. My son-in-law and I are building a retro rod.  It is a 65 Mercury Comet that belonged to my mother in law and my daughter inherited it.  Only 47,000 miles on the odometer.  So far we have most of the mechincal done and are prepping it for paint.  It should turn out to be somewhat of a muscle car when we are done.

Ok I know it isn’t exactly 25 because I fudged on a couple of them but it’s pretty close.  So now I need to tag 5 others.  Not certain how to do that but will list them below when I do.

1. Gene Ilten
2. Dawn Anderson
3. Rich Cardarelli
4. John Tanner
5. Nathaniel Monk

I believe the second thing was “To Share”.

Well I found something I want to share and it is free and it is a traffic getter.  You can see it over in my advertisements but I will also link it here.

http://www.fwebtraffic.com/?rid=1256040

I’m not even going to hide the affiliate indicator because I don’t make any money off this thing, it just helps me get traffic to one of my ads.

It is interesting to note the 6 (SIX), kind of fits right in with the Six Degrees of Separation theory.

I found two pretty good articles.  The one I am attaching is an article about LinkedIn and how it fits the Six Degree model.  LinkedIn is akin to the Social Media things being talked about in the forums.

Anyway enjoy the article, I hope there will be a pebble of knowledge you can glean from it.

You must be familiar with the term “six degrees of separation”? If not, it basically means that if you are in reach of a group of people, and they are in reach of a different group of people, than you are 6 “reaches” away from the whole world. And, if that’s the case, than you can use LinkedIn’s networking concept to gain reach of anyone in the world who is also participating, just through the law of six degrees of separation. 

If you haven’t experienced it already than you truly must. LinkedIn is a professional network unlike most others. It provides you with an opportunity to connect (like the six degrees of separation) with your connections and their connections, and so forth. Basically, on LinkedIn, you can be introduced to anyone as long as you have a connection that knows that person. The greatest part, they even show you if you are connected to the person up to two degrees or if they are in one your groups! 

So how can LinkedIn and the six degrees of separation help you? 

While here at our company, it has generated sales through our CEO’s profile. It is unbelievable to watch someone sign into LinkedIn and go to their inbox to find out that a connection was introducing them to one of their connections. We like to call it six degrees of separation at its finest, or you could just call it an easy sale. Let’s just say that LinkedIn has made it possible for our company to get recommended to many users we don’t know, through our connections! 

Aside from this, we have also established sales by joining groups and connecting with the users that are looking for certain answers. I remember logging into my account one day and seeing that someone was looking for training in Social Networking for their company. Quickly, I replied with an offer for our course we just finished creating. Yet again, Linked In provided another great opportunity to create a sale through connections! 

Although these are just a few of the benefits that LinkedIn has offered, it has definitely taken the true meaning of six degrees of separation and worked it to its finest. The employees at our company now have the chance to connect with millions and generate sales around the world with this simple website that took a phenomenal concept and turned it into LinkedIn.

I shouldn’t say boring you probably won’t read any further.  It’s fascinating, I sure use that word a lot about this subject.   Maybe I should say intriguing or captivating, hmmmm fascinating describes it’s affect on me better.

The Six Degrees of Separation theory was proposed way back in 1929 by an Hungarian writer, Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called “Chains”.  Of course the Six Degrees term came much later.

In the 1950’s an MIT guy and an IBM guy tried to prove the theory mathematically.   20 years later they still had not proven it.

Then in 1967 a socialogist named Stanley Milgram came up with a way to test the concept.  He called the test “The Small-World Problem”.

He selected, at random, some people in the midwestern United States.  They were to send a package to a stranger.   The only thing they were to know about their target was: his/her name, occupation and general location in the USA.

The instructions to the senders was to send the package to a person they knew and who they thought would be most likely to know the target personally.   That person would do the same and so on down the line until the package was received by the original target person.

The people participating expected it would take hundreds of people in the chain to get the package to the target.

As it turned out it only took an average of 5 to 7 chain links to get it done.  This is when the phrase “Six Degrees of Separation” was coined.

After that there were plays, movies, and games and even websites on the subject.  One of the 10 best websites of 1996 was “The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia”.

There is a whole Hollywood California story about the actor Kevin Bacon on how everyone in Hollywood is only 5 persons separated from Kevin.

The research continues to this day.  In 2001 a Columbia University professor, Duncan Watts, did a huge email test of the theory.   He collected data on 48,000 senders and 19 targets in 157 countries.  Average number of links?  You guessed it, SIX, 6, VI.

As I said, “the research goes on”, and my contribution is applying the theory to internet marketing. 

I’m still stuck on the 4th degree but my list is building and pretty soon someone is going to download one of my free products, BINGO, 5 and then there will be that first SALE, waaaalaaaaaa  SIX, 6, VI.

I love this stuff count em SIX, 6, VI. .

I will get it into a giveaway today, so if I don’t include the weekend I am only a day late, since I had intended to get it done by last Friday.

I must have watched Alex’s videos at least 5 or 6 times in order to get the thing completed.  I certainly learned a lot about html editing, squeeze page generation, FTP, aweber and PayPal Buy Buttons.  I suppose I should include Butterfly Reports and branding in the learned catagory.

Alex’s videos on the subject were a life-savor but I have to admit there were things I had to learn outside of what he covers.  I am now considering writing my own tutorial of some sort on the subject.  Maybe from a “watch-out for the pitfalls” point of view. 

I can sure tell you what not to do and all the things that get affected when you change one little thing.  Things that need html updated, re-linked, aweber edited, FTP re-uploaded, buy button edited etc.

One thing is for sure, testing and re-testing is absolutely essential before you are ready to release it to a giveaway.

I should clarify, even though I spent most of my online time working on the giveaway, there were a lot of other things that used up time that had nothing to do with marketing.

It was one of those weeks when “life” got in the way.  Sons, daughters, wives, cats, yardwork, neighbors, old golfing buddies, webinars. (ha ha)

  Just a great week to be alive and kicking.  By the way that should be “wife” not “wives”.