It is endless let me tell you.  There are so many programs, money making schemes, social networking sites it boggles your mind.

In my affiliate marketing pursuit I validated the Six Degrees of Separation theory a number of times.  It did not always result in my selling something but the progression of links pretty well came out at six from the time I placed my first query for someone or something I wanted to pusue to arriving at my cyber space destination.  It’s uncanny.

Example:  I had sold an item from my Ebay store to an individual in Australia.  It happened to be some very nice Royal Doulton fine china pieces that she needed some replacement pieces for her china set she got at her wedding.   Later I found I had some more of the pieces she was looking for but when I tried to find her information, somehow it was lost.  I could not find it in my Ebay records.

The interesting thing was, I had also sold Royal Doulton stuff (different pattern) to two other people in Australia.  Royal Doulton apparently did well over there in the 90’s. 

Anyway I contacted  one of those other two individuals and asked if there was anyway they might be able to track down the person I had lost contact with.  I supplied that person the name of the second person so I had already provided link number 2.  They then put out the word to people they knew that might possibly have some information.

It took less then a week and if I understand them it took about 4 more links to make the connection.  I was able to re-establish contact with my lost customer and we made another deal.  She was delighted and I was able to land another sale.

Affiliate marketing, although I know it can be lucrative,  has not worked out well for me.

I am now pursuing a whole other avenue for improving my financial condition using the internet as a means of connecting with people.  And whatya know, a progression of six links seems to be how far it is from query to quest.   This new pursuit is strickly by Private Invitation only and that seems to be the key to connecting with an interested individual.

I place an invitation to someone I have been introduced to or already know and it flows from there.  As been my experience it usally takes a progression of around six invitations to connect with someone who wants to join my endeavor.

Could it be there is really only Six Degrees of Separation between almost any of us on earth?

Anyone can build a ning site.  It is similar to a blog but different because you can add a whole slew of stuff.  Like forums, groups. blogs, advertising, members etc.

Just for kicks and the experience I built one of my own the other day: http://someoneneedsit.ning.com/

You can design your own front page with a variety of themes that are available or you can design your own.

Usually there is a theme to a ning, like some sort of marketing group, or a group of people with a common interest.

Of course like everything else on the net, if you are not skilled at promoting your ning as with your blog then no-one ever finds you and the whole thing goes un-noticed, as with the particular blog you are presently on.

Oops, that sounded like sour grapes didn’t it.  I shouldn’t complain since I have pretty well ignored this particular blog for awhile.  I just felt like writing something today and decided it was time I visited the Six Degree theory. 

I don’t have anything new to report in regards to six degrees of separation, I am just out there starting new connection probes and tracking how many links it takes to meet that someone you were targeting.

In this process I have bumped into some interesting on line money making opportunities and have also re-activated and re-freshed an old web site of mine.

I am just using this platform to vent my frustrations with the politics and general response from the public and news media regarding the current economic condition in the US and other parts of the world.

Today I saw an ad that said something like this: “we need to go back to more simpler times, we need to not be so involved with “things/possesions”.

Seems like a really good attitude, doesn’t it?

That attitude my friends is what will only make our condition worse.  Think about it.  The only thing that made our lives what they are today is “things/possesions”.

The only way to create wealth for everybody is to PRODUCE THINGS, actual tangible things!  Then have people BUY those things, and around we go.

We are not, I say NOT, going to bring our country or the world out of economic crisis by government spending more of  OUR MONEY, that cannot work.  Pretty soon they will run out of OUR MONEY!

Govenment cannot create jobs, fool-hardy idea.  The only jobs government ever created are more jobs within the government.  The wages and salaries for those jobs, by the way, are paid for by OUR MONEY!

Remember government workers DO NOT PRODUCE anything.  They are only users of resources.  By the way those are OUR RESOURCES.

We need to have manufacturing businesses making things.  We need to have the public at large buying those things.  By the way we need to buy them whether or not we actually need them.

Here’s how the economy cycles: “you earn money, you spend money, you earn money, you spend money”.

The process of you spending money causes other people to earn money.  When they earn money, they spend money and someone else has the opportunity to earn money.  The more people doing this the more healthy the economy.   Money flowing and the government keeping their greedy hands off of as much of it as we can keep them from will make us great again.

This is not brain science or rocket surgery.

If we listen to the wackos that think we can go back to the dark ages and live off the land we are nuts.  Those times are gone and will never return.

We only became a wealthy nation  by making things and people buying those things.  Then make more and people buy more, around and around we go.  Seems crazy but it worked, didn’t it?

They say this is the information age and information is the hole grail of economics.  Hog wash, the problem with information is; it is not a tangible asset.  The information age only puts a small number of people to work.

We need manufacturing.  We need factories making things.  This is what will put people back to work.   By the way if all we manufacture is “green” products or green energy products there is not enough demand to create a reliable cycle. 

We need a cycle of making things, buying things and then making them again.  The only thing that keeps an economy going is a cycle of turning the money.  Environmental things will NOT create a money turning cycle.

Green things will stagnate the money, it will end up with limited distribution.  Limited distribution of money kills the economy.

You know what else stagnates the flow of money?  You may not like this but it is a simple truth.   “People thinking they are entitled to something they did not earn.”   That’s correct, people need to work and pay their own way.  Don’t expect your neighbor to pay your way for you.  By the way that neighbor becomes the government.

When you think and the illustrious government convinces you that you have the “right” to something you did not work for, the only way for you to get it, is for your government to give it to you.   The only way the government can give you something is for someone else to fork over “their” hard earned cash so you can have it.  

Once you have a significant portion of the population getting things they did not work for and earn, it starts to slow down the natural cycle of money.

You are not earning what your are spending.  In other words you are not “producing” anything that someone else can buy with their earned money.

You have just thrown a monkey wrench into the cycle.  Now the government is spending money that no-0ne has actually earned, no-one produced anything. 

The rest of us can’t work hard enough to generate enough money to give to the government to give to you, we just plain run out of energy and resouces to carry you.

If you curtail the cycle either with government intervention or the intervention of special interests groups you end up as we are today with an economic crisis.

Government cannot fix it.  Actually they could be the catalyst to fix it by just getting out of the way.  Stop spending our money, stop limiting what business is capable of doing.  GET OUT OF THE WAY.  GET OUT OF OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS, GET RID OF AT LEAST 50% OF GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES, THAT MEANS DISMANTLING BURACRACIES, LIMIT THE POWERS OF UNIONS, STOP THINKING YOU CAN TAX AND SPEND YOUR WAY OUT OF THIS.

STOP MAKING A BUSINESS PAY $.50 TO A COLLECTION OF LOCAL, CITY, STATE AND FEDERAL AGENCIES FOR EVERY $1.00 THEY PAY AN EMPLOYEE.

Thing about how many MORE employees a business could afford to hire if their payroll load wasn’t so heavy.  Good grief, if I pay an employee one dollar I then have to pay govenment agencies another fifty cents just so I can pay that person one dollar.  What kind of craziness is that?

Okay, now I am getting a little carried away, aren’t I?

Well it seems so simple to me and the government or at least the powers to be want you to think it is very complicated.  WELL IT’S NOT.

Economics 101 or ecomonics 1.   I make something, you buy it, now I can buy something someone else made and they can hire you to help them make it.  Now you have the money to buy what I made.    Get a few million people into this cycle and you have an economy.

Sacrifice just enough of your money to the local, state and federal government agencies to fund the following things, no more, no less.

Schools, roads, fire and safety, utilities oversite, national security.   The rest of it you are responsible for yourself.  Don’t make me responsible for you. (There are probably some other things that could or should be included in this list, but for now these are what I think are essential)

I will help my neighbors out of the goodness of my heart and my sense of morality but don’t think I owe it to you or your neighbor, as you don’t owe it to me.

Remember our country says you have the “right” to the “pursuit” of happiness not the “right to happiness”.

First degree:  Acquired a tutuorial on how to establish Automated Traffic Hubs.

Second degree:  Made contact with a tutorial rep. for more instruction on setting up and ATH.

Third degree:  Acquired a new domain name for the ATH.

Fourth degree:  Chose an affiliate product that fit some specific criteria.

Fifth degree:  Built the ATH by wrapping the ATH blog around the affiliate’s sales page and blog went live.

Sixth degree: First sale.

Ok so maybe I force fed the 6 degrees a little bit, but the theory tends to fit.  The theory being:  ”You are only approximately 6 contacts or events away from your first action to achieve an intended result”. 

It has been proven over and over again the number of persons or events in the process from start to finish tends to be six.  Following is some of my original research on the subject:

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.

My first blog http://normsgreenforce.com is still up and running and it deals with the idea of DIY Green Home Energy projects.

This new one http://normsgreenenergy.com is an ATH built around a project that can basically create free power for your home.  I have just started to build one of these magnetic generators myself.   I think it will be fun but I must admit it appears a little more complicated than what the promotions indicate but it is a great idea.

The success of the ATH in regards to affiliate sales remains to be seen but there are definately encouraging signs.  I am tracking traffic with Google Analytics and there is a steep trend for the past week.  Currently I have made one sale.

I guess I should track that sale in regards to my Six Degrees Of Separation theory.   I will have to retrace the events from the start of my ATH to the sale, but I am running short of time today so I will do that at a later date.

As I said I am short on time today so I will close this post with just the short comments I’ve already made.

Don’t you wish there really was an introductory course to Affiliate Marketing. 

There sure are a lot of folks out there with the “Secret” to Affiliate Marketing.  I just love that sales method, how could something be a “Secret” if it’s put out there on the internet where there are literally “millions” of viewers.  Of course if was put on my blog, it will probably remain a secret for a long time, ha ha.

Once you start looking at the Affiliate Marketing plans, however, you discover they are all about the same.  Find a good Clickbank product, generate a good sales page, use PPC or SEO to get traffic to your sales/landing page.  Cloak your hop link so people won’t know your are an affiliate marketer. 

Apparently you will get a negative response if your potential customer finds out you are just marketing someone elses product.  Hmmmmm, I wonder why that would be?   If someone is intereted in a product, why would they care whether you are the author/developer or just a distributer?

Most products in the world are actually sold by distributers as opposed to the actual manufacturers of the product.  It is actually an efficient way for the manufacturers to market their products.

A network of distributers can cover a much larger customer base than what a manufacturer can afford to reach.

Of course if you are the customer I suppose there is the belief you can purchase the product directly from the manufacturer for less than what a distributer will charge.  Seems logical doesn’t it?   Truth be told a good deal of the time the manufacturer’s price will be equal to or higher than the distributer’s price.  Economy of scale, I believe this is called.

The manufacturer’s direct sales volume is lower than his wholesale volume and hence he feels he must charge a higher price to compensate for the lower volume or it isn’t worth even offering direct sales.

Well I have gotten off my original Affiliate Marketing subject.  Sometimes I do that just to excersize my brain a little.

Anyway I ran across an Affiliate Marketing method that I think has potential.  Not that it is different in regards to the basics.  Find a product, develop a sales page, get traffic to the page, make sales etc.

The difference is the method for developing a sales page and then getting traffic to that page.  It’s called Automated Traffic Hubs and it a product of a fella named Bill McRea and is called Marketing On The Fringe.

The basics of this idea is to, of course, find a good clickbank or commission junction product.  Then build a wordpress blog and use the affiliate product’s sales page as the home page of your blog.

Of course you need to check out the sales pages of the affiliate products to find ones that look good, that makes a good sales pitch for the product, has good graphics or videos etc etc.

Next thing is to find an automated article writing source and give them the concept of your product and they will write articles with related content and post them on your blog.

There are some other tags, backlinks and pings things to do but all that is fairly easily accomplished.

Once you have the blog live on line it will automatically build a series of content articles that will produce the backlinks, pings and all that other stuff  necessary to get you ranked on google.  Hopefully with good page rank and a good product you will get the traffic required to make sales.

There is a bunch of other social media stuff that Marketing On The Fringe offers but I will talk about that in a later post, this one is getting a little long.

Till tomorrow or after.

Norm

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

As with most other things I had tried I had a lot of enthusiasm at first and jumped into the program fairly aggresively.  And with most other things I have tried I soon found out there is a whole lot of work required to make any of these programs pay off.

Not saying this program was any worse or better then any of the others but as you may have guessed I still have not made any money, or at least any appreciable money.

I don’t really know how the other folks are doing in the program.  The amount of success doesn’t seem to be shared very much.  There are some people that have gotten their own products out there.  I have also noticed I somehow have ended up on the email lists because I often get offers from them in my email.  Sometimes for their own product but most of the time for some one else’s product they are promoting.

Anyway, I don’t know if anyone else is making any money or not.

My primary effort has been trying to build a decent email marketing list, which is what I have blogged about mostly up to this point.

I have created a list of a few hundred, but I understand you really need thousands to make the marketing numbers work in your favor.

Of course at a point I started veering away from my daily goals and task lists and was pulled toward pursuing some of the other opportunities that kept being presented.  

The first of which was actually from my mentor.  Being from my mentor I naturally joined it, but soon found out it was beyond what most of us can afford to pursue, unless you have an unlimited PPC budget to hang in there long enough to get a return.

One of the things my mentor said right up front was: “don’t chase the money, just do your work and the money will come”.

Boy that sounds like sound advice doesn’t it?  Like a lot of you, I suspect, I got a little anxious and did not follow that advice and started chasing the money.

And that is what I intend to blog about for awhile.  The programs, opportunities, scams, come-ons, false promises, hypes, and all the other stuff I have fiddled with in the past few months with little to no results.

Although, some of these things should really work just as they are shown to do.   They are mathematically sound but only if you can convince others to come along for the ride.

Which is what all the internet marketing is all about.  You have to sell an idea or a product to someone on line.

There is a whole thing about, “helping others”.  Help others and it will be returned in spades.  I bought into that for awhile but kept noticing the “help” that is offered is always followed with an “upgrade now if you really want this to work” or “you will only see this offer once, so if you want to really make some money, give me some more”.

I don’t know why this surprised me.  Maybe I am getting cynical but I think the primary objective of everyone in business is to make money for themselves.  Helping others is only the ploy to bring a new prospect into the fold and line them up as a customer.

I hope you all know that I am fully aware, if anyone reads this post I will probably get a lot of comments about how negative I am sounding and probably lots of advice about how you really have to work at this stuff and not expect it will fall into your lap.

Just to head off some of that.  I don’t think any of you have probably worked any harder then I have the past few months.  I hope you worked smarter then me but I doubt if you worked any harder.

Till tomorrow when I will be a bit more positive and will start a chronology of my efforts the past few months.

I also hope to get back to the 6degrees of separation theory at some point to see if there is another approach to that process.

 As an on line marketer the only “good” way to have, might we say, a captive audience to which you can market your goods, is to have their name and email address and their permission to allow you to send emails to them.

The email list has to be large to huge because the same old traffic principles apply whether you are a store front where traffic passes by your store or you are passing your “store” so to speak by your traffic.

Whether it is the 80/20 rule or the 95/5 rule or “they’ve got to see it 7 times” rule it doesn’t matter, traffic is the key.

Seems kind of cold and far from a relationship but it is the cold hard facts.

Of course once you have converted a piece of traffic to a prospect and then to a customer and ultimately to a client, you can then build a relationship.  But first you have to keep them on your list, try to keep them from eventually opting out, as it were.

I have been slowly building lists using giveaway events in a variety of different product niches, so I have, I believe, 8 separate lists.  Each of the 8 lists has at least one follow up message that goes out after a prospect opts in.  Some have multiple follow up messages.

I didn’t pick up on any particular patterns in regards to opt outs with my regular follow up messages.

After my total list count got above 200 I then sent out some broadcast messages about some additional opportunities I thought the prospects might be interested in like a new giveaway or other free stuff.

This is when I noticed a definite pattern with opt outs.  It seems when they receive a message they are reminded that they are on someone’s email list and guess what?  The new message gives them the opportunity to opt out. 

I notice most of my opt outs are either the same day or the day after they have received a  new message.  Further it seems more prevalent when they receive a broadcast message then just the regular follow ups.

Maybe this is obvious to everyone in this business but I just noticed it and thought I would write about the phenom.

I’m not sure if this can be controlled but I am searching articles for ideas on how to make it better.

If anyone has any thoughts or ideas I would appreciate your input.

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.