Internet Marketing Editorial

When I think of internet marketers, I picture a massive gathering of salesmen and women, all shouting to solve all of your problems. Ware to the newb who stumbles into this three ring circus looking for a way to make some extra money. With a constant bombardment from both legit programs and out right scams (with no real way to tell the difference), it is no wonder many noobies get overwhelmed and give up. Don't get me wrong, there is money on the internet (massive piles of it), the problem is knowing how to find it. In most cases the people who really rake in the cash don't want you to know how to earn your share.

Now I know there are like 5 billion ebooks out there (most being given away free or as part of a program signup), and a lot of them actually contain very good information. Though, they are often dated (mentioning programs that no longer exist or leading to websites that pop up with a 404 error), but the skills and ideas are often still valuable and adaptable. The problem with ebooks is that they all seem to offer you just one or two pieces of a billion piece puzzle.

So what are some of the major issues facing network marketers today?

1. Too many sellers/not enough buyers.

2. Too many products/programs.

3. Getting customers/referrals that actually do something.

4. Disappearing up line (people who care about you until you sign up under them, then they are gone)



The good thing about sellers is that they once bought, so they may buy again (if you can solve a problem for them). Newbies tend to sign up for more then they can really handle, lacking the experience and being offered so many "great" deals. So I guess the ideal person to sell your product/program to, would be someone who has tried out a few, but hasn't yet become jaded. A newb has so many plates spinning, it would be a miracle if they produced any activity for you. A jaded veteran often only completes the trial periods, not really willing to commit to anything that doesn't produce cash results quickly. The best thing I know to do, is find something that solves a problem for you, something that you get excited about. Learn everything you can about it, become an expert on that product/program. You will gain more eager referrals/customers, being passionate helps people to trust you and can infect them as well.

Yes, there are too many products/programs. I find that letting yourself be drawn into too many programs causes you to both loss money and patience. The sad fact is that you need 2 or 3 streams of income on the web. That way if a company goes under (which they sometimes do) or you just can't promote it successfully, there is always back up. Try to join more then 4 and your simply not going to have the time/energy/money to really give them a chance to succeed. To this day, I have to remind myself "Don't sign up for that, (it may be a great deal) but you need to stay focused". So my advice is to keep the number of companies you work with low, you will have more succeess and much fewer failures.

Active customers/referrals, the hard to find keys to success. Lets face it no matter how hard you work getting cust./referrals, no matter the hours invested, no matter the cost, there is no way to guarantee that your new referral/s will actually do anything...at all. It is sad, but true. Then some will take off like a rocket, only to sputter out after a week or two, while others still will suddenly spring to life after being dormant for a week or so. I find it best to attempt to make weekly contact with my downlines (offering help and encouragement). People need to be made to feel valued. Also, as a sponsor you need to be active, it is the best way to keep your referrals/cust. active.

Which leads me to the "Disappearing up line". What happens when you are all excited about a product/program you have just found, you signup and all you get is an automated welcome message? Sure you may try to go it alone, but that is extremely hard to do. Most people just simply lose their excitement and drift away to another opportunity. Two major reasons your upline might not be there for you are: 1. They have spread themselves too thin, trying to juggle several programs. 2. They have this idea in their head that their job is to "get" referrals, and that's it, assuming either you will figure it out on your own or they get too focused on one part of the company and forget to be there for you. There isn't much you can do if your referrer doesn't stay in touch with you, some programs will let you switch referrers but not many. The best thing you can do, is be an active sponsor and encourage your downlines to do the same. Lead by example.

Well, that covers just about everything I wanted to talk about today. I hope that you found it interesting and/or useful. Comments are always welcome.
Thanks for your time.

Joe James

A review of a online club that I am exited about...

A Review Of Reality Networkers

This is a club that I found a few short weeks ago. It of course is called Reality Networkers. A club designed around a single simple idea. In order to succeed online you NEED to have real support and real training from your upline. This solves two major problems that most of us Internet Marketers have struggled with in most MLM/Affiliate companies.

1. As a new member you need an active support line, people who care if you succeed or fail.

2. As a sponsor working hours on end only to get inactive/unmotivated referrals.

Both of these problems have been a personal headache for me for some time. So, how does RN solve these problems?

1. New members are given support from an upline that only gets paid when they help their team. RN has setup tasks that help their downline (i.e. finding new safelists, training, ect.), these tasks must be completed in order to progress in the business (get paid).

2. Sponsors that are paid to help thier downline tend to have more active referrals. The fact that RN offers a 14 day free trial (no credit card), and the unique system that is in place, makes getting referrals pretty easy. When offered true support, they are much more active.

RN is a rare breed, I have not found a company like this before. The best thing about it is, that it gives you a 5x6 matrix of ACTIVE members. Imagine if you started in a new program, whatever the matrix, you would have an army of active members that are ready to join with you. This is an amazing club. Two Thumbs Up!

http://www.reality-networkers.com/index.php?refid=2492763


Joe James

An Email to my Mom

My mom has been in need of some extra income for a while now. So when I found these PTC sites (Paid to Click), I sent her the following email. I thought that others might benefit from it, so I have posted it below.

The Email:
Hey mom,
I hope Sam feels better soon. I found these 3 companies recently and I think you and Sam could benefit from them. Don't worry they are free and won't spam your email. They are what are called PTC sites (paid to click). The deal is advertisers pay the sites to provide people to view their websites. They do this by using part of what they are paid to pay you to view the site for 30 sec.. These 3 sites pay the best I have seen, 1 dollar per click/site view. Now the catch, well sort of, the minimum payout is 1,000 dollars and as a free member each site only lets you view around 10 sites a day. But think of it this way, you spend about 30 mins or so viewing the total 30 sites (10 or so from each) and you make a total of 30 dollars. Sure you can't withdraw it until you have 1,000 banked, that just means it will take a while to get paid, but they pay is great. They do have upgraded (pay for) accounts, which are fairly cheap and give you around 30-50 more sites to view, which means getting 1,000 bucks faster. Well that was alot more then I had planned to say. Two last things, if you tell someone about these sites and they seem interested, don't send them directly, get their email, then on each site click the promote button and copy/paste the link into an email and send them those. Like I did below, you get credit for new people. The other thing is to do your views every day as they don't stack up, and I couldn't find anywhere it said "no more then one per household" just "no more then one account per person", so you and Sam should be able to have accounts, you just need to make a new email address for the other account. pant pant pant.... I need a break.

Love,
Joe
http://www.grandptc.com/index.php?ref=joejames77
http://www.richptc.com/index.php?ref=joejames77
http://www.bigmoneyptc.com/index.php?ref=joejames77

Looking for the money…

First let me introduce myself. My name is Joe and I am 32yrs old. I have been searching for a way to make a living with an online business. This is what I wish to talk about here. Where is the money? I know it is out there (probably in a pot being guarded by a leprechaun), I KNOW people are making money online. How are they doing it? Is it a better program? A better product? These are just a few of the questions I scour the web (clicking on hundreds of "promising" links), reading e-books, newsletters, and of course watching both intro and training videos by the dozen. It can be exhausting. Not to mention costly if you tried to join them all. That is why I try to stick to free programs that pay you for customers, that way if its a flop then your only out your time and energy.

The biggest problem for me is that the actual and real information on how to be successful online is scattered thoughout the web. I find a piece of the puzzle here, then find a piece over here…. It gets frustrating at times, chasing ones own tail. Then I guess thats is how some of that money is made (probsbly s great deal of it), selling pieces of information but never giving the customer everything. You buy into a program only to find that you also have to buy all their extra "services" to promote their program. Of course, they aren’t all like that, but a bunch are.

There are many hazards and pitfalls on this search of mine. Bad investments (both time, and money), outright scams, good companies with bad products, bad companies with good products (very sad when a product you really believe in goes under because of bad management), and lets not forget the ever present hackers and viruses. I wade through endless links, sift threw untold amounts of text, and watch videos till my eyes water. Finding those nuggets of great information, and bringing them together. Then maybe I will be able to really start making money online.

I will be exploring affiliate programs/online programs (the cheaper/free the better). Giving my thoughts on everything from their "capture" page to the "back-office". I will provide links for all reviewed sites, so that you can check them out for yourself.

Reviews to come in the near future.



Joe

Warehouse 13 Season 1 : Ep. 8

What's Inside a Slim Jim?

Beef

It's real meat, all right. But it ain't Kobe. The US Department of Agriculture categorizes beef into eight grades of quality. The bottom three—utility, cutter, and canner—are typically used in processed foods and come from older steers with partially ossified vertebrae, tougher tissue, and generally less reason to live. ConAgra wasn't exactly forthcoming on what's inside Slim Jim.

Mechanically separated chicken

Did you imagine a conveyor belt carrying live chickens into a giant machine, set to the classic cartoon theme "Powerhouse"? You're right! Well, maybe not about the music. Poultry scraps are pressed mechanically through a sieve that extrudes the meat as a bright pink paste and leaves the bones behind (most of the time).

Corn and wheat proteins

Slim Jim is made by ConAgra, and if there are two things ConAgra has a lot of, it's corn and wheat.

Lactic acid starter culture

Although ConAgra refers to Slim Jim as a meat stick (yum), it has a lot in common with old-fashioned fermented sausages like salami and pepperoni. They all use bacteria and sugar to produce lactic acid, which lowers the pH of the sausage to around 5.0, firming up the meat and hopefully killing all harmful bacteria.

Dextrose

Serves as food for the lactic acid starter culture. Slim Jim: It's alive!

Salt

Salt binds the water molecules in meat, leaving little H2O available for microbial activity—and thereby preventing spoilage. One Slim Jim gives you more than one-sixth of the sodium your body needs in a day.

Sodium nitrite

Cosmetically, this is added to sausage because it combines with myoglobin in animal muscle to keep it from turning gray. Antibiotically, it inhibits botulism. Toxicologically, 6 grams of the stuff—roughly the equivalent of 1,400 Slim Jims—can kill you. So go easy there, champ.

Hydrolyzed soy

Hydrolysis, in this instance, breaks larger soy protein molecules into their constituent amino acids, such as glutamic acid. Typically, the process also results in glutamic acid salt—also known as monosodium glutamate, a familiar flavor enhancer.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Incoming CEO's Manifesto for New Pirate Bay

Hans Pandeya, whose Swedish software company is expected to assume control of The Pirate Bay perhaps as early as Thursday, writes in a manifesto that file sharers of unauthorized copyrighted works are not morally weak. They need the new Pirate Bay to show them "how to pay," he says.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Family Guy Season 7 : Ep. 13 Stew-Roids

Defiant Pirate Bay Crew Evokes Churchill

After a day of internet cat and mouse with Swedish censors, The Pirate Bay is back online. In a victory speech of sorts, the crew evokes one of Winston Churchill's most famous speeches, delivered during the darkest days of World War II. The Bay will transform from a free BitTorrent tracker/index to a paid media site.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Twitter Followers Users

Twitter Followers Users

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Extreme Makeover: Craigslist Edition

The craigslist team isn't interested in updating the site, so Wired asked leading designers to give it a user-interface lift.

Craigslist Today

Visitors arriving at craigslist are confronted by a confusing homepage cluttered with links most people will never click on. Overall, the user interface is in dire need of an organizing principle that guides you to the details you seek while filtering out extraneous information.

It's hard to know even where to begin: Should you start your career search under Jobs or Gigs? The right side of the screen is devoted to an exhaustive list of cities and countries, although most users care about only the one they live in. Once you dive into a section, navigation requires more backtracking than a hedgerow maze. Locations aren't sorted in sufficient detail, images aren't available until you click through to a listing, and items can't be flagged for side-by-side comparison. And that's just the desktop version. On a mobile browser, craigslist is an interminable roll of links rendered in eye-crossingly minuscule text.

Make It a Web App

Khoi Vinh,
NYTimes.com

The NYTimes.com team retained craigslist's basic look and feel while making the site work more like an app. Since search is the most important feature, design director Khoi Vinh and his colleagues gave this function more real estate and placed it at the top of the page. They moved the all-important Post to Classifieds link to the right side of the page and increased its visibility by bumping up the type size. They made room for white space and eliminated the gray backgrounds, which they thought weighed down the site. "It feels more open, more nimble," Vinh says.

Information architecture Anh Dang,
Design Paul Lau

In the design created by Vinh and his team, the listings themselves don't stand alone but are framed by navigational aids that let you jump immediately to other parts of the site. Buttons up top lead to the major sections (the current one always appears front and center in light gray). On the right side, the My Craigslist sidebar shows the ads you've viewed most recently and the sections you browse most often, transforming Craig's list into your list. The calendar, fixed at the bottom right, is available on every page.

Make It Simple

SimpleScott

"Craigslist is working," says SimpleScott, former design director of BarackObama.com—why fix what isn't broken? Instead, he focused on making the site easier on the eyes. On the front page, he aligned rows and columns in a uniform grid so they're clearer at a glance. Links you've already visited leap out in blue so you can retrace your steps easily. Displaying the site on a mobile browser, however, presents bigger challenges. SimpleScott met them by dividing the pages into a series of screens. A hierarchical menu makes it easy to navigate without accidentally clicking the wrong link. A map page lets you browse listings by location. Ads and photos each get their own screens. Buttons along the bottom make common functions available at all times.

Make It Beautiful

Matt Willey,
Studio8 Design

"Craigslist is frustrating and claustrophobic," Matt Willey says. His layout has a contemporary look, a Web 2.0 feel, and plenty of breathing room. He eliminated long lists in favor of two pulldown menus: one that lets you jump to various sections and another that sorts listings by price or date. His design displays images in the category pages, so you don't have to click through to the individual listings to see them. Thumbnails load rapidly and blow up to full size with a mouseclick. A button called Add to Watchlist marks favorites, while the Share button emails listings to friends or posts them to social networks.

Make It Personal

Luke Hayman and Lisa Strausfeld,
Pentagram

Think the current homepage lacks personality? "We decided to do something about the cult of Craig," Lisa Strausfeld says. She and Luke Hayman highlighted the contradiction between Newmark's interest in grassroots democracy and the reality that the site is, well, his list. The arrangement of words is essentially random; this design won't win awards for ease of use. Numbers from the calendar outline Newmark's head and glasses; longer text strings form facial features. Newmark is always in the background—this version brings him to the forefront.

How Would You Redesign Craigslist? Suggest Your Own Makeover and Vote on Reader Contributions

Submit your redesign.

(No more than one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.)

Vote on designs submitted by other readers.

Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your redesign.

Back to top

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Calling All Amateur Astronomers: Help Solve a Mystery

This fall, the super-bright star epsilon Aurigae is starting to dim, and astronomers are asking citizen scientists to help them find out why. Because the star is visible to the naked eye even in the most light-polluted cities, scientists say all it takes to help is a good pair of eyes.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Five Things Not To Let The Kids Bring In The Car

Generally speaking, I agree with the TSA when it comes to sharp objects and I’ll also stick with their decision to ban firearms, drills, blasting caps, hand grenades, plastic explosives, pepper spray and tear gas. The last thing I need ten hours into a twelve hour drive is a cattle prod duel breaking out between the occupants of rows two and three.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Defying Gravity Season 1 : Ep. 5

Network Threats Evolving, Danger Growing

This article first appeared in Aviation Week & Space Technology.

The 2008 Russia/Georgia conflict has become a defining event in network warfare, with a new report released this week revealing even more details.

For example, altered Microsoft Corp. software was fashioned into cyberweaponry and hackers collaborated on U.S.-based Twitter, Facebook, and other social-networking sites to coordinate the attack on Georgian digital-based targets, according to the report by the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit (USCCU).

The new paper -- only parts of which are available to the public -- was put together by John Bumgarner, research director for security technology and Scott Borg, director and chief economist for the USCCU. Analyses of the attack began simultaneously with the war’s start in the late summer of 2008.

The researchers were able to monitor attack activity over the Internet as it was taking place. They also collected data after the conflict from Web caches, companies hosting Web sites and the forums used by attackers. Information included extensive network traffic and security logs.

While the attack itself is interesting because of its scale and military impact, Bumgarner (a former CIA and FBI employee) cautions readers to look at the larger implications.

"It’s the sort of cyber campaign that we can now expect to accompany most future international conflicts," he says in an interview with Aviation Week. "This is what makes some of the details about the way the Georgia campaign was managed pretty interesting. Russia is likely to run this playbook again with minor adjustments."

A striking revelation for the researchers was "how quickly a common citizen can be transformed into a foot soldier in a cyber conflict," Bumgarner says. The cyber attacks were carried out by civilians with little or no direct involvement by the Russian government or military, the researchers found. Most of those launching the attacks were Russians, but sympathizers from the Ukraine and Latvia also participated.

Bumgarner tracked the attacks to 10 Web sites registered in Russia and Turkey. Nine were registered using identification and credit card information stolen from Americans; one site was registered with information stolen from a person in France. They were used to coordinate "botnet" attacks, which co-opted thousands of computers around the world to disable the Georgian government, banks and media outlets. Computer servers used in the attacks had been previously used by cybercriminal organizations, according to the USCCU.

Read the rest of this story, see whether ISF can keep Iraq from blowing up, ponder Russia's sale of high-tech SAMs to Iran and see why the Dutch need more Bushmasters from our friends at Aviation Week, exclusively on Military.com.

-- Christian

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

7 Crimes That Will Get You a Smaller Fine than File-Sharing

In response to the recent sentences against illegal downloaders for millions of dollars, here are seven crimes that will cost you less than downloading songs off BitTorrent.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

High Noon(ish) Psych Season 4 : Ep. 3

Monk Season 8 : Ep. 3

Bogosphere: The Strangest Things Pulled Out of Peat Bogs

A few thousand years ago, someone living in what is now Ireland made some butter, stuck it into an oak barrel, wandered out into a bog about 25 miles west of Dublin, and buried it.

Somehow, that someone lost track of it, which two lucky archaeologists discovered when they dug up the stashed loot earlier this year in the Gilltown bog, between the Irish towns of Timahoe and Staplestown.

But that wasn’t the first keg of butter that’s been preserved by the strange chemistry of the bog. Or the 10th. More than 270 kegs of bog butter have been retrieved from the wetlands, along with dozens of ancient bodies, swords, and ornaments. Here, we run down some of the strangest things that scientists and citizens have pulled from the peat.

All kinds of bodies have been found with their skin and organs intact. The objects are preserved by the remarkable properties of Sphagnum mosses, which come with preservatives built into their cell walls. After they die, they decay very slowly. and anything that falls into the Sphagnum peat bogs decays more slowly, too.

Murder weapons are a common find. Archaeologists believe the bogs were sites for ritual sacrifices, because many of the bodies appear to have been tortured or “overkilled.” In the picture (above) of a find named Yde girl, you can see the cord that was used to strangle her. Tollund Man suffered a similar fate: A noose was found around his neck.

Murder wasn’t all that happened out on the bogs. Multiple trepanated skulls, that is to say, skulls with holes drilled in them, have been found. Based on the use of the procedure in medieval times, one hypothesis is that the “operation may have been performed to remove a blood clot or a less-tangible thing like a spirit” from an individual. Even now, there’s still a small number of people who think drilling holes in their skulls is therapeutic.

While we don’t know much about the people who wandered these bogs thousands of years ago, analytical chemistry has helped identify substances that make them seem startlingly modern. One corpse’s hair appears to have been coated with primitive hair gel, made from “vegetable oil mixed with resin from pine trees found in Spain and southwest France.” The man lived around 300 B.C.

Beyond the bodies, which were the subject of a traveling international exhibit, The Mysterious Bog People, functional artifacts are often found, too. These swords from what are now Sweden and Denmark were discovered in the late 1890s.

This wheel was discovered in the Netherlands along with another just like it. It’s about 2½ feet in diameter and carved from a single piece of oak. It’s been dated to 2700 B.C., which makes it one of the oldest wheels found in Europe. (But let’s not get bogged down in reinventing the wheel.)

A construction crew working on a highway in 1955 pulled up this dugout canoe from a Dutch bog. It’s almost 9 feet long and was radiocarbon-dated to 8500 B.C.

Images: 1. flickr/ronlayters 2. Drenth Museum, Netherlands 3. Drenth Museum 4. Anthropologisk Laboratorium of Denmark 5. Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 6. Drenth Museum 7. Drenth Museum

See Also:

• Gallery: The Making of a Prehistoric Brew


• No @#&!, Sherlock: Prehistoric Cave Bears Were Ferocious and Other Obvious Science


• Scientists Find Contents of Prehistoric Messenger Bag


• The First Aid: Iceman May Have Dressed His Own Wounds


• Scientists Discover 3000-Pound Gigantoraptor Dinosaur in Mongolia

WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter, Google Reader feed, and green tech history research site; Wired Science on Twitter and Facebook.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

10 Photography Pet Peeves We'd Throw Down a Black Hole

Wired.com's maestros of the photographic arts tell you all about (and show you) the stuff that drives them crazy.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The Colbert Report

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Aug. 21, 1989: Voyager 2 Reaches Triton

Voyager 2 caps the planetary exploration phase of its mission with a rendezvous at Triton, Neptune's oddball, bitterly cold moon.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Ask Strangers for Medical Advice

Some people just can’t get rid of their acne, or chronic pain, or psoriasis, no matter what treatment their doctor recommends. Now, just like looking for a hotel recommendation, they can turn to strangers with the same ailments for advice at an online community called CureTogether.

The website is much like Yelp, but its members review remedies, instead of restaurants and barber shops. It allows anyone who is facing a tough medical decision to draw upon the experience of crowds.

“People with acne report treatments they have tried and rank how well they worked,” said Alexandra Carmichael, co-founder of the website. “Everyone else with acne can then see the community stats.”

The same goes for 350 other conditions including migraines, insomnia, irritable bowel, and acid reflux.

Whole Foods and other retailers peddle countless alternative medicine products, but there is very little data about whether those substances work, and even less incentive for a big drug companies to find out. This may be part of what is driving a trend toward DIY health tracking.

Though it’s not a substitute for professional medical care, members of the CureTogether community can share their experiences with every treatment they’ve tried and help others decide what to buy, how to change their behavior, or what to ask their doctor. Every bit of that user data is also available to researchers, so it could potentially cut the cost of evidence-based medicine research, studies that aim to evaluate the effectiveness of medical treatments.

To keep shameless drugmakers or herbmongers from tainting their information like disgruntled diners and restaurant owners try to do on Yelp at times, CureTogether has several security measures in place, including some active analysis of their log files.

Even if some bad apples make their way into the community, it may still be a better source of information than some peer-reviewed literature, since top scientists have been caught fabricating data about medications and Elsevier has published entire fake journals dedicated to bolstering the reputation of Merck drugs.

Image: Statistics showing a variety of acne treatments and how effective they are./CureTogether

See Also:

• Human Genetics is Now a Viable Hobby — 23andMe Cuts its Price to …


• Enter Navigenics, Where Personal Genomics Gets More Medical


• 23AndMe Will Decode Your DNA for $1000. Welcome to the Age of Genomics


• Wired 14.06: The Rise of Crowdsourcing


• Crowdsourcing the Flu Vaccine


• Google Could Have Caught Swine Flu Early

Follow us on Twitter @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser

So Smart: Electric ForTwo Arrives This Fall

The cute city car goes electric. A few thousand lucky testers can lease one later this year; the rest of us can buy one in 2012.

View Original Article

Blogged with the Flock Browser