Day 25 - The Stigma of Network Marketing

Network Marketing, like Internet Marketing, has gotten a bad rap.

But it's their own fault - in both cases.

The problem is GRQ (Get Rich Quick) and this means Lack of Value.

Both have had their problems with this. And the real people making most of the money are those who do educating in this field. Because that is where the real value is. Lets face it - the majority of the people out there are wanting to be educated. Spammers are another form of education - when you come out of the other side, you've learned some lessons which will stay with you a long time.

Fortunately, there are easier (and less expensive) ways to learn life's lessons.

Network Marketing Basics

The point of this is to get people to sell for you. And the basis of Network marketing is to have a repeatable pattern, which can easily be taught and applied. So a person learns this pattern and gets someone else in who they teach this pattern to, getting a percentage of their sales as part of it. That taught person then gets others in and teaches the pattern to them, getting a percentage, and so on.

This is also why I recommend 2-tier (at least) affiliate sales products. So you get returns on the work you do, while you also get returns on others who are working for you. And if they are any good, you'll start getting returns from the people who are selling for them.

And this is also the point of offering valuable consumables - because they have to be replaced. So you have continuing sales.

Shaklee

This brings up Shaklee as an example. While I'm still learning how to crack into this via Internet sales, you can study their whole system with a low entry fee (around $30 - which gives you a lifetime discount on their products) and  see if it's a good match for you and the people you would bring in as a "downline". (I like and have had good results with their Cinch diet plan.)

Shaklee is so low key and not in-your-face, it's almost hard to see why they are expanding. They don't follow the "rules" you expect with various other network marketing offers and systems. Their underlying reason for success is the extreme quality of their products - and the fact that they only sell on word of mouth, not a lot of advertising. Instead, they hand out commissions to people who sell for them.

The marketing which most "classic" network marketing companies use is hard-sell and built on a ponzi scheme of getting more people in at the bottom to pay for those who were there first. Like Social Security. Eventually, these get top heavy and the people who get in later don't get paid anything. (Unless you have the government backing it, in which case they can force people to pay and also print all the "money" they want to pay for things.)

The key is to realize that this is an educational process. And learn from everything. Meanwhile, you simply keep looking for valuable products which can and will teach you the ropes of marketing, plus give a valuable return to everyone who comes into the system.

Magnetic Sponsoring

One fascinating educational process (my only criticism is that they email too much) is one called Magnetic Sponsoring. Ostensibly, you get leads for your own networking system by offering their program. Again, this is about a $30 entry fee for the basic course of the same name to start learning and working their system. You get a nice little ebook and some free video lessons which can start your education process. (That's the only way to become an affiliate - get some "skin in the game") And they are coming out with more materials regularly. Their main point is to teach people about how to network market - and share commissions on all sales, so you are getting a piece of the "action" from day one. Obviously, when people are satisfied, they tell others, and you are then getting another set of commissions from those sales. (Oh, and don't get their "Building on a Budget" - it's based on marketing through Squidoo, so you know how dated it is. I haven't gotten their higher end products, so couldn't give you a review of them.)

The main part with Magnetic Sponsoring is that they give you sample ads to run as classifieds and are constantly tweaking their sales pages for conversions, etc. Of course, you are getting numerous emails to buy this and that new release - which you can opt out of. These are great for simply studying how they are pitching their offers and the frequency (as well as what is annoying and what you should be avoiding.)

Continuing Income (on "autopilot")

The point with these two programs is that you have a low-entry point and are able to train yourself on the whole system of Network Marketing to create a continuing income.

There is no "autopilot" in actuality. The people who earn a lot of money in Network Marketing invest time in working and coaching their downlines to greater production. That's if you want continuing sales and income. I've got a lot of stuff out there (built as tests) which gives me surprise checks every now and then, but I don't work these and have simply put them up as a simple series of pages with affiliate links. And that is more like putting a plane in the air and hoping it doesn't hit something or run out of fuel.

If you want to get somewhere, you have to have a goal and actively work at getting there. Simple.

But there are some very interesting things you should know about setting up a "continuing income" system. I recently read T. Harv Eker's Speedwealth (a free download here) (webinar replay here)and re-learned some datums I'd earlier read while studying Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad).  The point is that you want to build a system so you can simply get out of the way at some point. Passive income (like our online income earning) is like that. Once you can get it up to the point where you can hire (or recruit) promotion outlets, and someone who will keep your content freshened, then you are able to then put your attention on other ways to earn income - or simply sell it off as a turn-key income source. That is why Kiyosaki was interested in real estate. Buy once and rent it out to other people indefinitely after that. Only so much real estate on this planet, so the supply is limited, while demand continues to grow.

More Network Marketing training routes

Another T. Harv Eker ebook, "Millionaire Minds for Network Marketers", takes what he already has been saying (and improving) in his Millionaire Mind Intensives, just for people who are studying Network Marketing. He also has an hour-long teleseminar (podcast) where you can listen to him describe how to network market from the inside out.

But wait, there's more...

Yes, I've already given you far too much. There's one last way to train on Network Marketing that I wanted to tell you about before I sign off for today.

This is the good old boys at Site Build It!. They have a very direct page which ties in having an Internet content publishing system to a successful network marketing downline. And it has a couple of free whitepapers and a video and other stuff you can check out. They are the past-masters of pre-sell and this page shows they use what they preach.

So if you are into Network Marketing, you can have all these links and free stuff to satisfy your thirst for knowledge on how to succeed.

- - - -

No, I don't have (more) freebies today - because I've already given you nearly a dozen above. And that is plenty to study in this area.

See you tomorrow.

Day 16 - Where SEO and Social Media Meet (?)

(Secret Sauce - part 2)

Practically, SEO and Social Media don't meet. SEO had to change in order to keep up with the evolution of the Internet.

Welcome to the second day of our Secret Sauce sub-series. We will have probably 8-10 in this series of just telling you the somewhat revolutionary, but very definitely effective ways of getting your content to rank well so you can then potentially earn extra income online - enough for your goals anyway...

Practically, if you look at it, this whole site and Online Sunshine Plan book is revolutionary. Even though it's old school.

The more interesting point to me is that the more I study this stuff up, the more I've found that it's been out there for awhile and what I considered something a trade secret, has already been promoted on several sites.

What keeps people from seeing these (myself included) is their own self-built blinders.

- - - -

OK, from our last lesson, we covered that social media can be boiled down into 3 categories. These are from their function, not their communities or content-type. And we are naming these in order to simply make sense of how to earn income online by getting and keeping top rankings in the search engines.

Social Media Types: 

1. Bookmarking
2. Status Updates
3. Networking

This doesn't cover everything, but it covers what we need to know. (If you want to spend days and months covering this material, you can - I have, and it doesn't necessarily increase your income, although you are well-entertained.)

Your first steps are, just to recap:

• Find your own purpose
• Find the community which bests matches it
• Study that community to find out what solutions you can provide to their problems
• Create content to offer the service(s) or product(s) which will best help them (and you).
• Optimize your content so the search engines can make best use of that content and rank it well.

But a funny thing happens at this point. You'll see it if you use Market Samurai to dig into who is actually on top. You'll find that some of these sites have no real reason for being there. They don't have as many backlinks as the people they beat out, and also they aren't necessarily optimized for search engines as well as others.

What we've covered so far is really "old school" and based on very traditional models. And if you SEO your main site properly, you will eventually wind up in one of the top 5 spots and stay there. But that's just on-site SEO, mainly.

What will happen if you don't continue to add fresh, optimized content to your site is that it will drift lower. If more people find your site and backlink to it, then it will come up some. But Google and others bring in fresh content and float it at the top of their rankings to see how people like it. Good performing sites stick around. (Even though Google's second test is to then drop it like a rock to see if people still find it useful - if they do, it slowly rises again.)

But that doesn't explain all the weird things you can find happening on the rankings.

Social media does start to explain these.

Search engines were caught unaware when the flood of social media sites started up. And then these sites matured and started their own internal search functions, which then took traffic away from Google and the others. So now they are playing catch up (and have been for years).

In and among the 200-some factors Google uses to figure out how a site has "authority", they throw in some social factors as well. Not just popularity, but the amount of people who recommend (thumbs up, like, plus-1, leave comments, etc.) any site shows how people trust it. And trust shows valuable information.

(A scam scene I knew had to finally give up and accept the fact that forums exposing their scam were going to rank right along with them, regardless how many people they paid to remove their negative comments or take down their sites. Before, they owned the top 10 or so spots so could point to these as how great they were...)

Bookmarking

Search engine spammers (and others) first tried to understand bookmark collections as ways to get backlinks. Yahoo, in fact, was built originally on huge collections of bookmarks by several college students - who started a company based on having access to those bookmark collections.

Unfortunately, they didn't work that way. (Yes, I was one of those deluded "others".) Studying the effect of bookmarks was mystifying. You could get tons of bookmarks created for your site, but they all wouldn't show up on the search engines as backlinks. And the more popular bookmarking sites (Digg, Delicious, etc.) tended to not show up as well. But bookmarking did make the targeted sites improve in rank.

Bookmarking is an indicator of value and trust. And if you simply bookmark your own sites and have a few friends bookmark them, it still doesn't mean as much as a site where lots of people bookmarked it.

The other problem with bookmarks is that they aren't created by everyone on the Internet. So while they were wildly effective for raising rank a few years ago, they are more or less just an additive today (even if still a very potent additive.)

Status Updates

Twitter isn't the only rodeo out there. If you want a great overview of how prolifically these have spread, check out http://knowem.com - which deals ostensibly in "branding" by helping people to grab social media real estate for their name on the web. If you dig into their back pages, they have sorted out social media into several different categories. Status updates is huge (as are many others). But do a search from the front page and you'll have their list of key ones. You'll see some of every type, but status updates are present - and are also part of several of these, no matter how they are categorized. (Myspace, Facebook, and Google+ are all built on this, regardless of what else you can share.)

It was simply noted by Google that these status updates also showed what content people found interesting and trustworthy. So they are another factor. And while you can search for these, they don't particularly show up in Google for main sites - as they are transitory.

Networking

We are going to approach this from blogging. Every "free" blog out there is part of some community, whether they participate in them much or not. These free blogs make their money from included ads, and so promote the various new content so they can keep viewers interested and entertained.

The search engines know this, and keep tight tabs on them to find new and fresh content they can rank.

A lot of people say Facebook, LinkedIn and some others are networking social media. And it's true that they were formed to facilitate networking functions which people normally have. But both of those IPO's also shoot themselves in the foot regularly. Main point is that they don't provide content, or keep making it hard to add good, fresh stuff. Their main use, really, is in status updates. (Facebook even deletes anything older than 30 days, and doesn't like Google searching what it has.)

Our use in defining Networking sites from a blogging view is to give it some relevance from a content approach. Obviously, a site which doesn't like Google won't have much content ranking well, and so won't get the click-through's found in organic search results.

Sidebar:

Facebook is called a "walled garden" for good reason. And while you can work to involve people in your "brand"  and several people sell various ways to use chat and other means in order to get leads - it's incredibly time-consuming. The most effective strategy I've found is to concentrate on content and always link your content into Facebook, but as an invitation to leave. If you look up my profile there, you'll find that I don't stick around much - but I do post regularly, on a via. Most of my stuff is posted first to Google+ (which we'll cover later.)

This book and site follows the principle that the Internet was built on freely accessible content. And the observed response that search engines reward fresh, original content which is regularly provided.

The pragmatic workouts follow this, and say that your best approach is to simply optimize your content for the search engines to get the best ranking and click-throughs.

So our over-arching approach in all of this is to follow what the search engines observe about their users, and duplicate so we can help them understand our content best - and so get the best ranking possible.

By creating blogs, you will be contributing to the search engines finding your material and being able to rank your stuff well. And then you only have to have some way to convert viewers to leads and leads to clients. (Like that is "all" you have to do. Well, I didn't say this was easy, only that I could explain it simply...) ;)

Summary:

While I've covered a great deal in a short space today, we've still gone on longer than is wise. You are going to be using (or at least studying about) these three types of social media in order to further your search engine optimization and both attain and preserve high rankings and volume click-through's.

- - - -

Freebies and study assignment:

Social Networking Exposed! makes more sense if you don't take it too seriously. This PDF does give you another viewpoint than what I've said. The key point is to give you a good overview of how to set up social media, as well as pitfalls to avoid. Note that the date of this shows how much social media has already changed in just a few years.

WAHM Masters Course - another great book from SBI! for work-at-home-mons will give you a lot more options about how to build your business. But I'm also giving this to you now in order for you to get a thorough overview of how to build a business to earn income online. It's not all that social, but does build on their concept of having an Information Site which pre-sells the viewer into becoming a lead (and later, client).

Day 09 - Affiliate Programs: Good, Bad, and Remunerative

Hello again.

Today's topic is Affiliate programs. Figured it's about time we tackled this by the horns.

I went through the entire book and see that this is an omitted section. It's touched on, but not worked up directly. So - relief is yours - no chapter to study today as preps.

When and Why Affiliates?

The purpose of affliates is to get additional sales people to pitch your products/services. They can cover more ground than your own two hands and feed can. They use their resources to promote your product, in return for some percentage of your price.  So affiliates come with an overhead - but they are getting you sales you wouldn't normally have.

The other side of this coin is that you can build up some income by finding and pushing an affiliate product which is valuable. This is how you can get paid while you learn.

The logic of this is simple:

• You are producing content anyway to forward your own purpose of delivering value to people.
• You might as well get paid for telling people about a good product or service which aligns with your purpose.
• And you can meanwhile learn from any effective affiliate marketing program, as the good ones will regularly be sending you special offers which you can promote.
• So you learn while you get paid for producing content.
• As you get better producing content, then you get paid more.
• Ultimately, you've both had the time to perfect your own product or service and also learned how to enable others to do affiliate sales for you (or signed up with some company that does - like writing ebooks for Smashwords).

Now while you are just starting out, you'll probably want to get into product- or service-lines which give you the maximal leverage for your time and money. Best return on your investment.

To get this best return, you want 2 things:

1. Offer services or products which people must renew, restock, or re-supply.
2. Offer services or products which enable others to sell under you, where you also can get paid for their work.
   

In this, there are a few - "evergreen markets", they are called:

• Food (and food supplements, medicines fall into this)
  
• Clothing
• Housing

- - - -

• Children's items
• Pet items
• Insurance

- - - -

• Entertainment
• Education
• Enlightenment
  

The above lists are roughly in order of how people will pay for and buy stuff. They also are in the order of greatest return.  As you can get people to subscribe on a continuing basis (such as Insurance), then you can earn a "piece of the action" on a continuing basis.

One sale gives potentially a lifetime of income. Get several of these and you have what is called "autopilot" income. You'll also see this in simple things, such as where a person continually re-news his domain name and his ISP hosting. (As in Domain Samurai - which has a good affiliate program.)

If you can become an affiliate on that chain, you'll get a piece of that action as long as that person continues to renew these services. And is why people who sell Insurance (and who own Insurance companies) become very well off indeed.

While fashions and food needs change, children grow up, and pets get older - people will usually stay with their same Insurance companies for years - and will often expand their coverage to include other items they own. (No, I haven't researched Insurance companies to find out which has a good affiliate program - but thanks for asking. Now this starts to make sense, yes?)

By supporting companies which have affiliate programs, you can get people funneled through your site and link to buy these programs. And then you get a continuing income based on those sales.

Oh No -- Not "Network Marketing"....

And this is where "Network Marketing" comes in. Regardless of the bad press it gets, the principle is to have people selling under you which gives you a piece of their action as well as your own sales. You would prefer to get programs which are at least 2-tier affiliate programs - meaning you can sign up people and get commissions from their sales as well, and they in turn can sign up a person under them for their own commissions, and so on. (And yes, Insurance Companies utilize this same principle from top to bottom in their organizations, as well as any sales company or sales section. People get paid by their production, but also take a piece of the pie of those salespeople under them who are producing.)

My book, Online Sunshine Plan (OSP) deals with making an "online" living in general terms. The underlying basic is that the Internet is built on information and usable content. The search engines are evolved from helping people find out what they want by constantly studying what people want and how they want it presented to them.

What ranks on the search engine findings are simply the content which best answers the question being asked. Google published guidelines for these years ago and simply following their outline gets the best results.
You find problems people have, then find an affiliate program which solves those problems. Providing content in a way that the search engines can use - you get a large number of people to visit your site and click on those links to visit those affiliate programs. When they buy, you get credit for the sale and a commission payment (or in Amazon's parlance - advertising fees.)

All that work in OSP deals with the Internet as a content-driven scene. However, it's only one of several ways to get visitors to opt-in to your program or someone else's (which you are writing/blogging/videoing about.)

There are  5 main ways to earn income online:

1. Organic SEO - being at the top of the rankings and so getting search engine traffic to your page
2. Classified Ads - driving to a landing page for conversion to sales.
3. PPC - also driving to a landing page for conversion to sales.
4. Email - biggest app on the Internet, you develop a stable of readers and provide them good content and opportunities.
5. Social Networking - Facebook is a prime example right now. Engaging in chats can lead to off-line conversations where you can personally pitch your offer. (Takes considerable time-investment.)

All of these have minimal finances invested if you know what you are doing. Mostly you are investing time. And as you get better at writing and posting online, you'll get improved results (income).

The reason affiliate programs are easier to get started than developing your own product is that these companies are doing the research to create effective landing pages. (Nothing like spending years perfecting a product or service which wasn't ever an item people really need in their lives.)

Affiliate Products of Mention

The programs I recommend all have affiliate links and can give you some income, although it's been spotty for me as I'd rather do research than promote their products all the time. Pushing any of the 6 that I lay out below will give you some regular on-going income, plus the ability to put affiliates under you and increase your income from their sales. (Win-win-win.)

Here's the short list, though I'll tell you more of why these work below (and note all the affiliate links, as well as how they are set up):

Top of the list right now: Shaklee (http://order-online-today.myshaklee.com/us/en/whyshaklee.html) and a fairly complete set of pages for you to do your due diligence on this company - with lots of videos: http://order-online-today.myshaklee.com/us/en/about.html
SBI - http://affiliates.sitesell.com/limited_offer0.html - they have an incredible amount of training offered, which push their time-proved site-building services.

Synnd - Social Media Marketing - http://socialmediascience.com/affiliates/?p=worstell&w=afflink - these guys are a leader in this area for serious SEO users.

Silva Life Systems (plus other self-help/enlightenment programs) - http://mindvalley.hasoffers.com/signup/1081 - lots of programs an regular new releases for people.

Peak Potentials - Millionaire Mind Intensive / T. Harv Eker - http://peakstrategicalliancetools.com/cmd.php?af=mmi8806&p=1 - their Millionaire Mind Intensive or http://www.peakambassador.com/cmd.php?af=mmi8806&p=fbw-speedwealth -Their current Facebook webinar, which is a good informative deal on its own. Sign up as an affiliate at peakpotentials.com, but you'll want to get on their mailing list to see how they do things.

And here's an odd little one I just recently found, which is a good study of how network marketing works: Magnetic Sponsoring - http://robertworstell.magneticsponsoringonline.com - once you buy one of their products (about $30), then you are automatically in on their affiliate scene. And they give 7 free video lessons on how network marketing works in general. And the ongoing emails from them are a hoot - entertaining and educational as to what good copywriting (mostly) consists of (though my own style wouldn't be so brash - or so frequent.)

Another, found only a few days ago, is Domain Samurai, as I've told you about before. 2-tier affiliate, but no real work at promoting their product - so it's not rated well on the scale below.

In most of these cases above, I've given you the straight affiliate sign-up link if they have one. But do look around their sites and see what you can find out - sign up for newsletters and so on (you can always opt-out.)

- - - -

10 Ways to Accurately Pick Affilate Programs That Do Earn You Extra Income Online

Yes, this is opening a can of worms. People who have been burned by affiliate schemes in the past - not to mention Network- and what passes for "Internet" Marketing - will be heading toward the door or hitting their browser's back button right about now.

Because about 97% of all the programs out there are utter crap. Worthless. Shinola. Scams.

True. And you know it.


So what makes a good one? And which ones should you invest your hard-earned money and valuable spare time into?

Let's look at what you would want to buy as a product - if you were the customer (an acid test):

1. Does it actually have a valuable product which solves  some problem you have?

2. Does it actually give more in return than you expected?

3. Is it ethical - does it actually improve the culture you live in? (Could you easily tell your mother or partner what you just emptied your savings account for?)

4. Is this product or service you can keep buying for the rest of your life - because it keeps helping you? (Like food, vitamins, insurance...)

5. Has the company been in business for a long time and doing well even during recessions?

Now, given that this is a product which is high-quality and useful, and you'd tell your friends, family, and anyone else who asks you about it - let's now look at how you could earn extra income doing just that. Is it worth becoming an affiliate sales outlet?

6. Does this company have an affiliate program which pays a substantial return?

7. Does this company enable you to put 2nd tier, or even more sales people under you who can in turn sell (and make you even more commissions)?

8. Does this company put out regular helpful marketing material which helps you get these offers out to people who are looking for this solution?

9. Does this company offer substantial training to help you succeed in selling their program?

10. Does this company take care of product delivery and returns? Has effective online presence and converting landing pages?

Those 10 points will tell you everything about whether that company is a fly-by-night scene, or will give you effective return on your investment of both time and money. Obviously, we don't want to get into something which will tie up either time or money which we can't get a decent return out of.

(One scam I was suckered into had a fee of about 1/4 year's salary, and some 20 hours a week going through their training - and when it failed, they would say you didn't put enough time and effort into it. Not "their fault" you failed. Actual success rate was around 1 in 10,000...)

Just to keep a regular job you are already putting more than 40 hours in - not counting commutes, which is a sizable hidden drain on your take-home pay just in fuel prices alone.  Having a regular job is often the worst example of how something cannot be leveraged, isn't something you'd recruit other people to join, and isn't something you'd want to do for the rest of your life.

I've found maybe 6 product lines which are effective and rank highly on this scale above.

Company	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Shaklee - health supplements	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*
SiteBuildIt! - site building, online marketing	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*	*
Synnd - social media marketing	*	*	*		*	*	*		*	*
Silva Life Systems - meditation and clearing	*	*	*		*	*	*			*
Peak Potentials - Millionaire Mind Intensive	*	*	*			*		*	*	*
Magnetic Sponsoring - network marketing training	*	*	*				*	*	*	*

The results:

10 stars - Shaklee, SiteBuildIt!
8 stars - Synnd
7 stars - Silva Life Systems, Peak Potentials, Magnetic Sponsoring


This doesn't say these are the last word in affiliate products you can try. This does give you a sensible 10-point approach to figuring out which ones are the best. Practically, you can find affiliate programs in almost every product line. Just type in [product line phrase] and then the word "affiliate" after it. The checklist above helps you with finding programs which are more than just "making money online". 

They give you the chance to find real products which you can enjoy putting content online to promote - because you are helping people improve their lives with every purchase. In some of these, just reading the materials alone can give them a life-changing experience. And really good programs, in my experience, offer substantial free material which shows their value and excites interest in purchasing the full product.

Additional note is that the best affiliate programs have a substantial library of data you can use to educate yourself on how to promote, how to convert leads, how to keep yourself enthusiastic - lots of free training. Because their success is based on how well you succeed...
 

- - - -

Assignment:

1. Go over the evergreen product lines above - with a modern popular (or tabloid) magazine to hand (or study the ads on TV or in Internet sidebars for awhile). Which do you find represented?

2. Visit http://www.affiliateseeking.com/ and search around for various affiliate products. Note those which have multi-tier affiliate structures as well as those with continuing payments. Do some rough calculations to see how many sales of what you would need to make your own income goals.

Freebie:

This week it's Inside the Mind of Winners - a nice little inspirational essay collection which should be a nice reference to come back to now and again. (Or even offer as a giveaway on your own site...)

Day 07 - What Search Engines Really Need

(...probably a kick in the pants - just kidding.)

This is perhaps a revolutionary version of what you really need to know about these guys. It's based on Section V of The Online Sunshine Plan.

And might be quite shorter than what you may be expecting. (That section is your pre-assignment, BTW.)

I. What search engines make their money from: Advertising.
And Google admitted, finally, that buying ads "helps" your organic PPC. Ostensibly, they make their money by helping people convert to buyers. Or so they think. (Advertising is an addiction businesses have, which I've covered elsewhere. That's why they got the government to write it in as an exemption in the Tax Codes.)

II. What search engines are good for: New customers.
Once you have a person buying from you, you want to turn them into clients so they will continually and regularly buy your products or services. At that point, they already know your site address (or will find it by searching for your brand, not your keywords) and so no longer need to use search engines.

III. What search engines think in: Words.
All their algorithms are based in whole or in part on what associated words are used. Videos are "read" by the descriptions (and links) left below or near them, as well as their actual file title. Pictures - the same (so next time you see an image with a number or code, realize an opportunity was missed.) PDF's are turned into text and then read (so make your PDF's out of text, not scanned images.) Podcasts are slightly different as they can transliterate text out of voices (so be sure to have high-quality enunciation used, not slang or technical words so much.)

IV. What search engines hate: the same stuff we do - spammy, low-quality content which is designed to "game" the system instead of producing real value. Search engine algorithms are based on people-usage. If people click off a page, then it's not very good quality. (And why you want to include catchy phrases, video's and images - all good "infotainment" value - as long as they contribute to the actual content of the page.

And that's about all the new data I have to share. Not because this particular section was well written,  more that Google really hasn't changed much over the years. Basically, anyhow (we'll leave Android and Google+ out of the picture for now.)

Your freebie today (and assignment) is to simply get and study Google's SEO Starter Guide. The reason people don't have top ranking pages are due to not making a checklist out of this guide and comparing their own site against it. Period.

I've been working freelance for a guy who built his backend to simply do just that. Because he couldn't find anything out there which did. And years later, I did a study of some 58 different Content Management Systems and found only one which would do it (nearly) right out of the box. (And the other drawback was that these CMS's were very clunky and poorly built. Design by committee or something.) His just gets right to the point and is simple to use. I've helped improve it a bit, but just in terms of tweaks (and he's been talking about ripping it all down and starting from scratch to really do it right.)

Now, I didn't get into social media, which is another animal. And we'll also tackle "backlinking" at that point. Both of these have been buzz-words for some time. And both are poorly understood. In the upcoming section I've labeled "Secret Sauce", I'm going to let fly some strategies - while painfully honest - are highly effective, but are simple for search engines to thwart if they ever become mis-used. (And I also have the solution to make your use of them proof against any "Google-slap".)

OK?  Tomorrow we dig into the many types of content you can (and should) be producing from your original piece and the 3 styles you can (and should) be using to write their variations...

Day 06 - Sales, Funnels, and Human Nature

Today we are reviewing Section IV of An Online Sunshine Plan.

It's titled "Your Sales Funnel", but you might as well call it human nature.

And an additional ebook you should be familiar with is "Get Your Self Scam Free". 

Because what we are doing with sales is using the built-in foibles which pretty much all humankind has already programmed in. And "Scam Free" was written after I got very interested in how I was duped into a scam. Interestingly, that research allowed me to get out from under and help several others get their own money back as well. (Even though I told these scammers exactly what I was doing - they wouldn't believe it until it cost them far more...)

You simply take the data in that book and reverse it to find out how something like 99.99997% of this population works.

And of course, I was introduced to this by studying how to write "sales pages".

This data in OSP starts about page 187. And you'll see how Cialdini and Maslow were used in "Scam Free". Too simple, though.

Sales pages are just one style of writing, though. In a couple of days, I'll go over the others and how they differ - so stay tuned.

Sales Funnels

Whoever thought this term up should probably be shot. It's not all that accurate. (See page 184 as to why.)

But the general concept is that you have not just a single product to offer your new customers. Regular income is built on having a string of products which anyone can buy, so they continue to give you valuables in exchange for their trust in your on-going valuable offers.

And (though I'll go over this point in a few days in more detail) you should be investing in product lines which are consumables, or have regular service payments. All this other stuff about "income on autopilot" is a bunch of hooey. You want to deliver value and continue delivering value. You want leads to turn into clients and so your cost-per-lead drops considerably, since you don't have to spend a great deal in finding new customers in order to make your extra income goals.

The article on "Adding Value" (page 193-200) is quite interesting from this view.

You'll see from what you've covered before this, that I've changed some views on things. However, the base of this is still straight.

Mostly, this is pretty pat stuff when you review it from the data above.  So I'll leave you to this study.

I do recommend you check out the free or one-time payment for Market Samurai. Their ability search for affiliate programs is quite good. And you can tell what would be a good match and value you can deliver that supports your purpose - or simply more Internet Marketing Sleaze.

Another entertaining set of sales pages and an opt-in email series is found with "Magnetic Sponsoring". It's really worth the study. And for only about $30, you can get into their affiliate scene, where you get even more info on how their system works from an insider's view.

- - - -

Freebie today is another ebook by Michel Campbell - "Nothing but 'Net". I think you'll find his style refreshingly honest, plus you get some insider history of the early Internet. And some good ideas on how to build your own business these days.

Assignment is as above - check out some various products and services you might be interested in offering. And sign up for some newsletters so  you can study their sales funnel. (Just put your credit card well out of reach - like in another room or with someone you trust.)

Tomorrow, we'll be covering Search Engines - their supposed care and feeding...

Day 05 - Insider's Guide to Marketing Research

Good marketing research pays off well.

Now we are in the thick of it.

We are still on section III of An Online Sunshine Plan - Market Research (pg 115-154, sans Articles).

As a note: review the three main essays on this in that book -

• Where to look for your keyword research - Part I - Basics (pg 141)
• Where to look for your keyword research - Part 2 - The Real World (pg 144)
• Where's the money? I'm from Missouri - show  me. (pg 146)

These cover a very distilled research cycle and how to go about it. (Hint: Get a 3-hole punch and some binders to hold it all.)

Marketing Definition - Revisited

As covered on that first page of Section III - "Marketing" is simply finding and building markets. A "market" is anywhere people exchanges goods and services. Anywhere.

This, of course, plays right into our hands, as we are interested in earning extra income by leveraging our online investments (time, money - but mostly time.)

Market research is NOT: "Look for a niche, find a niche product, promote that product, get the sale/get the commission." That is just one step shy of a scam. Impersonal, and non-rewarding personally. It will simply tire you out.

The other reason (besides having endless content inspiration you can tap) is to work out your purpose/bliss first is so that you can stay involved and interested in what you are doing. Money has to go somewhere - your wealth has to be for a reason. (And that's not good enough  to be able to "buy stuff and show it off.")  There is no reason you can't enjoy every single moment of every single day and also be richly rewarded for your efforts. It's not work, it's a passion you are following.

Market research, you may recall from yesterday, is figuring out

• Who
• wants What
• Where and 
• for How Much.

Who - is market demographics.
What - is product selection.
Where - is product production and delivery.
How Much - is pricing.

In all of these, as covered in the book, you want to look for a viable scene which matches what you are most interested in doing to provide real value to those who find you.

Demographics can be simply found by looking at Quantcast.com or MSN adCenter Labs

Product selection can be studied by looking up Ebay, Amazon, Clickbank, About.com, etc. (see pg 148).

As we are dealing with affiliate products, you can see that they will take care of delivery and guarantees. Some sites, like Clickbank, will also show a quality score - which is the rate of returns for that product.

Note: Frankly, I don't recommend settling for Clickbank or Commission Junction or Amazon when you do adopt an affiliate product. Reasons - mostly in how they treat their affiliates. Clickbank has a nasty habit of taking back commissions if you don't meat their minimum every month, bit by bit. Commission Junction will simply dump your membership after 6 months with no sales. Amazon - unless you are pushing big-ticket items (not books) gives you only tiny payments.

But these three tell you what type of products people are buying and what to look for (and look out for).

In a later post, I'm going to give you a fuller breakdown later on what makes a good affiliate product, along with my own recommendations of a handful which have tested out over years. Right now we are looking through our Market Research to find a community which is viable and you can give value to.

An article you should review is on page 177 of An Online Sunshine Plan. Charles Heflin is quoted where he gives more steps to study the community in order to best serve it. His steps: Observe, Gather, Reward, Engage, Seek - and you are already doing these in life, so his article simply enables you to apply this to your online income production.

Paid Tool

Again, I go to Market Samurai to get a lot of this homework done faster.

Unfortunately, their "Samurai Dojo" doesn't go into much detail here about the tools in their product. 

There is one lesson, which tells you the "commerciality" of a keyword phrase.

But consider this screenshot:

(click to enlarge)

This is their "monetization" page. "Be Healthy" came up as a keyword, so searching in Amazon found a nifty little set of products you can promote. Note that if you sold the Cuisinart Griddler, you'd get a tidy sum (take about 4-8% of that price).

If your passion was cooking, then this would be a nice review page to do with an affiliate payment for every sale.  However, the much cheaper coffee filters are in much higher demand - and would require much more research to get that figured out.

They also allow you to search from  ClickBank, Commission Junction, and PayDotCom.

Again: you start out with your own best interests at heart - your purpose/bliss - and find what community already exists which you can serve, find out their keywords, find out what they are like, find the products they are buying.

Once you settle on that community, then you can go to the next phase - which is figuring out how to tell them what they want to hear - which is not politics (although they undoubtedly got it from marketing) - it's so you can help them improve their lives by offering and delivering true value.

- - - -

Here's an ebook which really builds on what we covered today: "Clickin' It Rich" by Michael Campbell. He used to sell it, then gave it away, and now it's hard to find as he's only dealing directly with a select group of clients.

He'll take you quite beyond what we deal with here and starts to give you an inkling of what is needed to make extra income online. Whole picture stuff.

Assignment today: catch up on your reading above.

And it would be smart to go ahead and get your binders, yellowpads, and 3-hole punch to start collecting and organizing all this data for your niche.

(Also - catch up on your comments below. It's key to be writing something every day as part of learning the discipline of creating content.)

Day 04 - Why is Market Research Dreaded?

You'd think that something so fascinating would have people lining up to start it.

With the right tools, I can stay on the trail of discovery for hours and even days.

But missing adequate tools, it becomes arduous - with results that are sketchy at best.

Before we get into todays' content, let me say that this is based on Section III of The Online Sunshine Plan - which is a hint to review this as part of your studies today. (But just as there is a lot in this section, we are also not going to attempt to cover this subject in a single day's lesson.)

Let's see how we've gotten here:

• To make extra income online, you have to provide something valuable to exchange with someone else. 
• You need to promote solutions to people's problems. 
• And you have to give good content so people can trust your solution and ask for more information (become "leads").

There are 3 myths that I mention in this section of that book:

1.  "Markets are impersonal." Truth is that they are very personal and the more interaction you have with your prospective buyers, the better will be your sales and income.
2. "Customers and Consumers." There are no customers (literally means people of habit) or consumers (people who use things up.) There are really only clients - people who you service for as long as they need your help.
3. "Competition." Also doesn't exist in actuality. There are levels of creativity - and if you don't have enough income, you can become more creative in finding valuable solutions to offer. Nature is abundant. Only people create "competitors" so they can have a game to play, figuring that they need opponents.

I continue (pg 117 by now) to logically define marketing as an extension of the Golden Rule. The subject is summarized by the statement that you have to give in order to receive.

So what, then, is marketing research? 

A nutshell definition: Finding who has problems and how they talk about it so you can provide solutions in a way they can easily understand.

In that statement, you see that we are working to find out:

Who are the potential buyers.
What they are looking for.
What phrases they used to describe it.
Where they are using these phrases to find it.

Those phrases are known as "keyword phrases" or "keywords".  They define what people are looking for. 

Now, how to find these keyword phrases has free tools and paid tools. And the ones I recommend in the book aren't (now) the ones I use. KeywordResearchPro quit working when they had a major Google Algorithm change. RankTracker has an annual payment (plus add-on's which also cost you), and is mostly good for tracking your site ranking. Otherwise, the tools they offer are based on older Internet traffic theories, which have either changed or been superceded in the last 2 years.

(I favor buying a tool once, and ensuring that the company who offers it supports continued development. Continuing subscriptions need to be really worth it. (Other than my Internet provider and site hosting, I have just one service I pay for. Food, clothing, and housing and cel phone are different - we're talking about our online business activities...)

Free tools to find keywords. 

Mostly, these come from Google. Almost everything else online either uses Google as a backend, or has been bought up and now doesn't work. Not that Google has a monopoly, but rather that they are far more effective.

1st Google tool: Adwords Keyword Tool
(Go ahead and open that up in another window so you can look at it. ) This was designed around people looking for keywords to use in their advertising. But it's far more versatile than that. Enter a search term and you'll see lots of columns of data. And you can export these to a spreadsheet (CSV) and play around with the data offline.

Key columns to notice: 
Global Monthly Searches - how many searches are done for a given term. Doesn't mean people - it means how many times this phrase is looked for. If there aren't very many, then it's probably not an easy phrase to earn income with.
Approximate CPC - tells whether other people consider it worth running an ad for. If you have .05 or less, it's basically not. (You can set the filters at the top and eliminate those where no one is running ads for them.) If people are paying money to run ads, they figure that they can get that money back with sales. Means you can make income here.
Local Search Trends - shows whether its a fad, has seasonal issues, or is a regularly searched phrase. Lack of any trends usually means the volume of searches is too low to register.

The next free tool you'll need is to simply look up those top words in Google search. Unfortunately, this is a one-by-one approach. The good part of this is that you can find out who the top-linked sites are. Plug all this data into a spreadsheet and you'll have a lot of your market research right there.

What you want to find out is what Google says are how many sites exist with that keyword phrase in them - in some type or kind of combination. Remember that while others refer to this as "competition", you can also use this number to see the probability of how many sites are actually search engine optimized. (Rough rule of thumb - less than 1%. So just knock off 2 zero's to start with.)

However, it gets even wilder - those Charles Heflin links I gave you in the book (page  128) will show you how you are really only having to be interested in the first 2 or 3 pages, since the rest aren't even using your exact phrase.

Meaning that if you optimize your page well, you will pretty easily rank at the top for that phrase (well, we have some additional tools - both free and paid - which can cement your top standings.)

The thing to worry about is the SEO'd pages. And in the book, I have you Web1Marketing had a tool to check "all in title", "all in anchor" and "exact phrase", which would give you a good indicator if those pages were optimized. Unfortunately, this page now produces no results for Google. (Meaning the algorithm was changed - or that page was blocked by Google.) But you can do these searches on your own. Check out Google Guide (http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html) and find the operators you can prefix your searches with.

You can string these operators together with "AND" in between, but be warned that Google will shut you down after just a few searches like this. (Spammers have been there, done that ahead of you.)

All told, it's possible to do this for free, but time consuming and frustrating. You may need to wait hours between a few searches (and I have, many times.)

A word on Wordtracker. Their free tool isn't worth it, and their paid tool costs too much for what you get from it - because it is again, a subscription. IMHO. Tried it, didn't get the results I needed.

Paid Tools. 

And I finally found a replacement. (Told you I was doing this for hours and days at a time...) It's a one-time purchase and they keep improving it. It's called Market Samurai. (And it has a free intro version you can try out...) They've signed up for various professional-level/corporate API's to keep their tool running. Those API's are prohibitive for an individual or small start-up.

They have substantial pages on Keyword Research, which I recommend to you as part of the homework assignment today. Because they explain things with videos and also provide a transcript - doing this so well, that it's ridiculous for me to try to reinvent this wheel. (And did I say their training is free?!?)

Even though they discuss their tool through out, the simple points they present are very basic.

Introduction to Keyword Research
The Golden Rules of finding remunerative keywords

Now, skip to the next lesson we need - which concerns how to find pages which are already SEO'd and which are ranking for some reason with no real SEO (yes, these do exist - and I'll mention some probable reasons in later lessons)

Discovering SEO'd pages existing for your keyword

- - - -

And that's more than enough for today. This will get you started on the basics. We have some more work to do on our keywords, and our market research. But that's another day.

Do let me know what comments and questions you have. Either post them below, or send me an email.

Today's freebie: A Millionaire's Secret

- - - -

Coming up tomorrow is more about how to discover who needs your help and how to help them find your solution...

Day 03 - Why blog? Because somebody's gotta.

What to write about and what is this "authority" stuff, anyway?

The pre-assignment for today is to review Section II of OSP. So I don't have to repeat the data on how and why you set up your online activities in order to succeed.

We figure that regardless of whether you have settled on a niche or a service or a product, you have covered this material and know basically that you'll be setting up a business. And running it as a business, not a hobby.

The next set of logic:

• The Internet is based on content and speed.
• If you want to promote your service or product, you'll need to develop content and host it on a platform which loads quickly.
• If you do this, and optimize your web pages for the search engines, they will rank you well. 
• Mostly, anyway.

In the last essay before the articles, entitled "What you should really be going for - just the cherry on top, not whole sundae" - once you get past that embarrassing typo (well, it was a beta edition...) you see what I call this repeating graph called the Bell Curve. Key point on this is that it predicts that a small minority of people are creating all the content on the web. (Not my fact, but it does support the graph.)

Out of that, the same percentage actually set up their content to be search engine friendly (optimized). So now we see that 1 out of a thousand will create any usable content - that the search engines will place high in the rankings just because the way it was composed.

This is where Search Engines start to decide who is the actual authority that they will put on top. Where they start. In the last few years, they've moved beyond just how content was written - but not too far. Given about 3 months, a webpage will start ranking well on it's own if it's SEO'd.

Sidebar: What am I talking about - this SEO stuff?

On page 216 points out the main 5 points you have to keep in mind in order to optimize your site. And then explains the rest of the key points, which we'll revisit as they have refined (or I have) since this book was written.

However, this reminds me of a caveat - I don't recommend Wordpress (WP) anymore. It simply doesn't SEO well. And can (by personal experience) get you kicked off servers from tying up their machines with runaway scripts. Best advice right now - if you must do Wordpress - is to pay them to host your domain. You lose a lot of back-end analytics, but it will be worry free.

The real backend is always custom-built to actually SEO from the outset - and isn't something cobbled on top of a WP backend. (And if you are desperate to run your own server, try "PivotX" as it can be made to SEO properly, but can be uploaded just about anywhere.)

When I say most people don't SEO their sites, this means they don't include all the 5 points mentioned on that page.

Your community

This gets us back to Section II. A business will develop a community. If it serves it well, they will be supportive. Scammers develop anti-communities which work to bring them down. (And will hunt them even if they change their name.) It's all the value you give.

In our lessons leading up to this point, you've more or less figured out just what your interests are and a vague idea of what value you want to give.

I want to tell you right now to not fall for the trap it took me years (literally) to get out from under. And while I recommend The Challenge to anyone, I split with them on this one point:

You have to follow your bliss (purpose) to get anywhere, to make any real success.

There is a common misconception that you can simply find "hot niches" to work from and find products which are being sold there, and then simply "dominate" that niche to rake in all sorts of cash.

Doesn't work that way. You need to be working at something you could do forever. Like this: FOREVER. "Making money" is another trap. Having a "job" is another trap. You are an individual and need to be living your own life, not someone else's.

The simple way to do this is to

• Find your bliss, your purpose, your main line of fascination - what perpetually interests you.
• Develop or discover a product or service which aligns with this. And which can be leveraged to produce all the extra income you could want.
• Do your market research (next lesson) to figure out what people are looking for in the area of your bliss.
• Tailor your content to contain those keyword phrases so that you essentially move your target in front of where they are searching.

After that, it's a case of simply converting viewers to leads to customers to clients.

Not that this all isn't a bunch of work, but that's the sequence.

This ties into communities in this fashion - when you find your bliss, you'll find other people share that purpose. And you'll find forums and blogs about it. And what keywords they are using - you've just started your market research. As you continue to study the communities which have developed around this niche, you'll have the common itch they all need scratched. Provide the product or service which does the scratching and you'll have as much income as you can promote and deliver to them.

Back to Authority

This is what the Search Engines are fixated on - and playing catch up to. Social media says what people are interested in. And Search Engines use this (and how well your pages are SEO'd) to serve up pages which match those interests. (Which is why Google came out with Chrome browser, the Chromebooks, and Google+. All to figure out what people want served up to them.

So people who write SEO'd content routinely and are regularly bookmarked, liked, commented on, tweeted, and +1'd - their pages will wind up on the top of Google regularly. Infallible. Really.

That's called authority - earning Google's trust for your content.

And the simplicity of how to accomplish this is what prompted me to write all this up and give back to the community.

I'm not worried about some spammer mis-using this. They can't. Because it's too easy to see what they are doing. (And was the recent "penguin" update as they took out some social media spammers.)

Main thing is to enable you to earn some extra income and perhaps - just perhaps - be able to replace any day job income and benefits you currently have going.

- - - -

Again, I've written way too much today. That's my over-verbose fingers going again.

Assignment:

Take that list of interests and start punching around on the Internet to see what forums and groups you can find about them. Wade around a bit and see what people are talking about, what the biggest threads are.

And finish reading the rest of Section II if you can. (It will come in handy later on.)

Today's freebie - Turning Dreams into Dollars. I don't agree with everything she says, but she gives a great lot of things to start with.

Day 01 - Welcome! Some Ground Rules...

Day 01 - Ground Rules

photocredit: downrangereport.blogspot.com

Glad to have you all here. This should be interesting for all concerned.

There are just a few pointers to go over:

1. We are here to share information and get feedback. So let's keep it politely interesting. If you wouldn't like to be referred to in that manner, then...

2. I don't expect you to buy anything. And that includes buying what I say works. The only way something works is if you test it out for yourself. (Of course, if you want to get copies of my books or sign up through my links for some program or other, I'd be more than happy to accept the commission or royalty.) But this program isn't here to get you to do anything except help you get information on how to get started earning online income.

3. The material on this blog is licensed under Creative Commons - meaning that you can use it for what you want (except commercially without license) as long as you share it similarly - here's the blurb:

Online Secrets Review by Robert C. Worstell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Based on a work at onlinesecretsreview.blogspot.com.

 Now, all that said, the intent of this is to enable you to also develop habits to create your own content. I'll go over in more detail about these later - but know these 2 things: 

• Content is King on the Internet.
• Habits are made in 30 days (both good and bad) and can be re-made in 30 days.

Suggested here is that you subscribe to receive this in your email, so you don't miss any. As I can, I'll set each individual lesson up as a PDF, though that might lag, as getting the content up on the blog comes first - not polishing it until it shines as midnight.

And the polish is where you come in as well. Leave a comment as often as you can and help the discussion along. Contribute as you can and point out anything and everything you think is questionable or could be improved. We'll hash this stuff out as we go.

The reason I've asked you here is to point out where I go over the average newbie's head. I've been doing this for a decade, so may have lost track of how to set this up simply enough that anyone could follow it.

Now stuff that's common knowledge like how to set up a Wordpress blog, I won't get into. Mainly because there are just too many good tutorials on this. I'll hit the highlights learned from my use/misuse/abuse of that platform, but not what plug-ins I suggest you get - other than in broad terms.

However, there will be numerous freebie materials which will take you more than just 30 minutes a day to go through. It's all this stuff I've been hoarding all these years, after I went through and found what works (yes, my hard-drives are a mess, but they are chock full of goodies.)

2 books this is based on

You all probably know the 2 books I've written some years back:

• Online Sunshine Plan
• Get Your Self Scam Free

And you should have a copy to hand for use. Both were written (and revised from earlier versions) based on hard-lived experience with real-life scammers - who really, factually didn't give a damn about people they were screwing over.

But we won't rehash this here - other than to say it was a great learning experience and I not only got my money back, but helped some other people get theirs back as well. These two books were the result of this, and will tell you the basics of what you need to know to succeed with any online venture.

This 30-day program is a successor to these books (and my wind up being a book on it's own, I haven't decided yet.)

So if you don't already have a copy, you can pick one up from Lulu, (where you can also get the printed versions) or visit the below blogs/sites which cover this material:

• http://midwestjournalpress.storeblogs.com/online-sunshine-plan-book-2
• http://robertworstell.com/lessons/get-scam-free.php

Credits

I've been around the pike more than once, and have attended many courses online. Some good, some not so good. One which has evolved over the years (since 2005) is what is now known as The Challenge, created by an Australian Ed Dale. It's a free sign-up and once you are in, you are able to proceed at your own pace. They do a decent job of taking you through all the steps you need to in order to figure out how to find a product, promote it, and earn income with it.

Practically, this would be a good start for anyone. It's laced with affiliate links and has just a few places where you'd have to pay money to get going.

My exception to this is that I've worked out how to get almost everything figured out about how to start for nothing. Not that I haven't paid good money for certain products/services. But I intend to tell you right off how to get it done, how to save your time doing it, and then if there is a decent service or product that I've tried and recommend that will make your results much much better.

Additional to this is the benefit of working with this material for years. Not only do I know some professional short-cuts, but I also have a different take on what passes for how to get a site ranking and getting people to buy your product or services. It's simpler than most self-proclaimed "guru's" make it out to be.

- - - -

And that is more than enough for today. Of course, I reserve the right to change these things around if I find some material is better.

Assignment today is to get your copies of these books. And dust them off. 

Today's freebie: I put a short version of "Get Your Self Scam Free" up on Scribd a few years back - http://www.scribd.com/doc/24665551/Get-Yourself-Scam-Free-Handbook-for-Personal-Freedom

See you tomorrow, where we get into some meat about how to earn extra income online - based on how the Internet is set up and what makes or breaks online success - Natural Laws to be followed, that sort of thing...

UPDATE: I've been finding stuff here and there about these various subjects. It's been easiest for me to add these as comments. So do check for comments to get your latest updates. And also, I'm still alerted about comments here - so if you don't want to send me a personal email, then you can leave a comment.