But tomorrow (Wednesday in the USA, Thursday in Australia and Asia), Better Networker is presenting a free webinar by Katie Freiling, a genuine whiz at building FREE network marketing leads using social media like Facebook and Twitter. She has the runs on the board over the past year to get my attention, very firmly. She’ll be outlining her exact formula in an in-depth interview by Tim Erway, Mike Dillard’s partner.

(Sorry… the webinar is now over.)

That’s 10am Thursday for anyone in Eastern Australia. (Time zone finder here.)

Yes, there’ll doubtless be a sales pitch involved, but that’s fine… fair exchange. (It’s only when a webinar is all feathers and no meat that I lose interest, fast.)

Details and registration are at http://getwwn.com/.

To make a tortuous saga somewhat shorter, I’ve been unwell again. I returned about 3-4 weeks ago very briefly, overdid things and ended up keeling over yet again. Now I’m back to some kind of balance and I’m determined to pace myself a whole lot better this time. Lynne, some of our daughters and their offspring have been hit hard by the current gastric flu strain. I haven’t yet succumbed (still fighting off early symptoms), thankfully. My immune system seems to be stronger than ever when it comes to contagious stuff.

My health issues are due to three progressive, degenerative neurological conditions (congenital) and spondylitis, which I inherited from my Dad, which is slowly disintegrating my upper spine. I’ve shrunk more than two-and-a-half inches (about 35 mm) in recent years and I suffer a lot of neck and upper spinal problems. My uncle shrank almost 7 inches in a few days when he was in his early 70s. He didn’t survive it. I’ll be 65 in December, so the outlook isn’t too encouraging.

I’ll keep you better-informed now that I’m back on deck. I’m back working with the second generation, in Australia and the USA, to bring them up to speed so that they can take over the day-to-day running of The Profit Clinic and Income Security Network. I’ll introduce them to you over coming months.

Thanks again for your concern, and my sincere apologies for any anxiety or inconvenience caused.

John

Early this morning (when I do most of my research and writing, posting, etc) I clicked on a link that took me back to Glenn’s post and his reply, which I hadn’t seen before. You can view the entire thread at the link above.

I’ve posted a more detailed response, but it takes time to moderate comments and replies, so I’m posting it here before I forget about it (again). It clarifies the source of my own use of the 97% statistic — which I suspect was where the increasingly-widespread use (unattributed, unsubstantiated and unqualified) stems from.

Glenn raised the following points about my comment (quite reasonably and properly, too):

It would be very interesting to see what you used for the criteria, not that I doubt what you are saying. But, in using the internet archives I can only find where you said this online in 2005 and stated 90% failure rate.

And, since both of these studies occurred before the internet came into the picture, how has it changed since then?

The interesting story would be, has anything really changed? We have more support services today than we probably have network marketers.

Now finally at least here in the U.S. the FTC rulings companies have to show average earnings in their disclosures.

I finally found one network marketing lead generation system that coincidentally used almost the same numbers from Leaders Club. Which was definitely not what their advertising had claimed for years.

The real issues is why is this failure rate so high?

Why has it not change with all the information available today?

Here’s my reply:

Glenn,

If you used archive.org, my main site (profitclinic.com) is blocked (because of copyright abuse a long [time] ago), so you may not have received a definitive search result. I typically refer to a 90% failure rate in the context of more general results from our own and other surveys related to small and home-based business owners and their survival rates. [Example: click here — opens in a new window.]

The criteria for the 97% estimate from our own (anonymous) survey results were quite simple, and included:

• How long have you been actively involved in network marketing?
• How many companies have you represented in that time?
• Which companies do you currently represent?
• A check list of companies for them to identify.
• Does your total income from retail commissions and bonuses usually exceed your costs of doing business each month? (Explanation included with survey, either live or printed.)
• How many people have you sponsored personally?
• How many are still active? (Explanation included with survey, either live or printed.)
• How many people are there in your downline organization?  (Explanation included with survey, either live or printed.)
• How many of them receive bonuses each month (on average)?
• What are the mean and medium incomes of your downline members?  (Explanation included with survey, either live or printed.)

These are the main criteria used. Depending on the situation — which can be live seminars and workshops, online surveys, mailing list surveys, etc — we may use additional criteria, but this is typically related to other metrics not related directly to their survival or success, such as trend spotting.

Not surprisingly, we haven’t seen any kind of statistically-significant changes in this 97% rate from survey to survey over more than 20 years. The fundamental reasons for failure remain the same:

1. Most people join a network marketing opportunity based on EMOTIONAL appeal, not rational, objective BUSINESS criteria.
2. Those emotional appeals are usually to some form of…
   — fear of loss
   — ignorance
   — greed
   — laziness
   — gullibility

(Yes, most of these fit into the overall category of fear-of-loss, but we like to drill down a bit [further] for an indication of which manifestations are most prevalent or currently in vogue.)

Most systems that come and go are focused on lead generation and recruiting and, yes, some are quite effective. Some are duplicable, which does influence the failure rates in the short to medium term, but eventually it all comes down to the usual suspects:

• Are people making profit from their involvement?
• Are those profits consistent and growing?
• How long are people prepared to wait to acknowledge their lack of success and quit?

Interestingly, there has been a quite consistent pattern amongst people who are successful in network marketing (by our criteria, earning a regular monthly income equivalent to a reasonable full-time income under local conditions).

They tend to be people who learn to fail fast: to recognize and acknowledge that they’ve chosen a program that doesn’t meet their own needs, especially financially and, surprisingly often, ethically and to abandon it and search for one that does.

But this doesn’t alter the overall picture. Network marketing is still predominantly made up of people whose life-long conditioning has been to make them employees, consumers and imitators… not the entrepreneurs, marketers and innovators that they need to become to survive and thrive.

Hope this clarifies things a bit more for you.

John

Spammers discovered long ago how to use the ignorance, inexperience, laziness and thoughtlessness of other people to build their illegal mailing lists.

They do it by starting all kinds of viral email messages — jokes, weird photos, cartoons, music clips, etc — that other people will mindlessly forward to their friends and colleagues, continually adding to the list of fresh, valid email addresses listed in that ever-expanding message.

The spammers can then harvest and add them to their own mailing lists — and sell them to other spammers.

What most people who forward messages so thoughtlessly fail to realize is that they expose themselves to prosecution and heavy fines for breaching most countries’ privacy laws.

Discover why — and how YOU can prevent it — here:

http://suckerbait.info/how-YOU-support-spammers

.

Michael Stelzner

For the past year he’s also been publishing outstanding content on using social media for marketing and business building in his excellent “Social Media Examiner” newsletter and blog.

If you’re using social media — including social bookmarking and social networking — signing up for Michael’s FREE newsletter (and visiting his super-useful blog) could be the best move you make in 2010.

You can also download, free of charge (and no sign-up required), Michael’s 33-page “Social Media Marketing 2010” report. Excellent, useful, high-value content with lots of graphs and illustrations.

(The report is a masterful example of how Michael has achieved top spot as the expert on using white papers to build awareness and credibility online.)

Do yourself a huge favour. Visit soon!

You’ll find them here…

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com

[Unconscionable: adjective — not right or reasonable : the unconscionable conduct of his son.
• unreasonably excessive : shareholders have had to wait an unconscionable time for the facts to be established.
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from un- 1 [not] + obsolete conscionable, from conscience (interpreted as a plural) + -able .

In other words, it’s a blatant abuse of the company’s superior negotiating position that stacks the process against the IBO and in the company’s favour. Download the court’s ruling here (PDF).

This is precisely the kind of abuse that I wrote about in my 2007 Insight Report “Is Network Marketing REALLY Dead? (Or does it just smell that way?)” — download your FREE copy from http://isitREALLYdead.com.

Visit Rod Cook’s MLM Watchdog Court Action directory for more information.

(One can only look forward to the day when some US-based opportunist applies for a patent on the process of breathing in and out sequentially. There seems little doubt that the drones at the US Patents Office will grant their application.)

Specialist MLM attorney, Gerald Nehra, reports today about lawsuits issued against several MLM companies for patent infringement, to wit, a patent on the process of rewarding channel partners for orders placed directly with a brand owner online.

In other words, if a distributor with an MLM company has customers who order directly from that company online, the distributor gets paid their entitlements on that sale.

Anywhere else, patents, copyrights, trade and service marks and design registrations are issued only for very specific implementations, not for ideas.

The US Patents Office is notorious for issuing patents that are, at best, questionable — like Amazon’s dubious patent on affiliate marketing. (Yes, Virginia, if you operate an affiliate program online you are probably in breach of Amazon’s absurd patent, at least in the USA. Fortunately, Amazon is not run by fools, so they’ve never attempted to enforce it.)

In any other country, patents offices consider issues like “prior art” — existing precedents — before even giving the time of day to a patent application. True to form, the US Patents Office appears to adopt the position that prior art, or state-of-the-art, is a separate legal issue that can be fought out in court by anyone taking exception to a patent being issued to some johnny-come-lately opportunist who tries to stake a claim to what others have been doing for years.

This is no different to the issuing of domain names in the USA. So domain squatting, hijacking and claim-jumping have been rife with US-based domain names from the beginning.

The ONLY real winners in these legal contests are the lawyers. These are battles that the combatants can barely afford to win, let alone lose. So how on earth does this kind of lunatic system come to be — or, worse still, allowed to continue to exist?

It may have something to do with the fact that the majority of law-makers are — you guessed it — lawyers (attorneys).

Patents Offices tend to be run by — yes, you guessed it again — lawyers (attorneys).

And judges are almost always former — amazing! You’re right again! — lawyers (attorneys).

Can you spot any kind of common denominators or possible “jobs for the boys” patterns here?

So what do we do about this lunacy?

If you live outside the US or its territories:

Don’t worry. This particular form of lunacy exists only in the USA. No other country would dare to try pushing the boundaries of intelligence and integrity to this extent.

Warning: Lawyers representing US patent holders constantly try to intimidate and bluff people and companies overseas in the hope that their bluff won’t be called and their victims will comply with their outrageous — and illegal — demands.

How do I know this?

Because I’ve been the intended victim, many times, in the past. But I fight back — I write to them, pointing out that they’re either incompetent and ignorant, or else they’re guilty of attempted blackmail, and asking them which it is, because I plan to publicize them and their attempted bluff, long and loud, online and offline, in my national business columns.

For them, it’s like pulling the pin on a hand grenade and handing it to me, only to have it tossed back to them. Not very smart.

(These days I seem to be left well alone by these rapacious parasites. It’s a fairly small world that they operate in, and word soon gets around.)

If you live in the USA or its territories:

1. Pray that your company isn’t like Avon® or several other companies that have succumbed and taken out licenses from these legalized predators and parasites.

2. Get organized! Team up with others to pressure your congressional reps and Senators to change the way the US Patents Office operates, and introduce some sanity to the process. And keep it up! Research shows that it can take as few as 8-9 handwritten letters to change a lawmaker’s position. (Not emails, circular or pro-forma letters. They must be hand-written, by individual constituents.)

3. If you operate an affiliate program, you WILL be targeted for patent infringement, sooner or later, because ALL affiliate programs based in the USA infringe this ludicrous patent. Count on it. These leeches will sool their lawyers onto affiliate merchants, en masse, once they’re have the case law awards or the compliant victims, in order to license their proprietary solution to every merchant in the USA.

Get active and organized to fight this NOW! Once the demand letter from the attorneys arrives, it will too late for you to get organized.

An alternative solution: set up an offshore business, outside US jurisdiction, to handle all affiliate sales, orders and payment processing. (And don’t make the mistake of hosting your merchant site on US-based or owned servers!)

Think this is over-the-top? Think again!

Here’s proof that they’re targeting network marketing companies:

http://www.reshare.com/papers/mlm.jsp

“If you ambition to abolish your cable to this autoresponder, artlessly bang already on the hotlink below.”

That’s one spun version of “If you want to unsubscribe from this autoresponder, simply click on the link below.” It concludes an almost-indecipherable bunch of gibberish that showed up in a Google Alert just now, featuring The Profit Clinic and me. And while the backlink is acceptable to me, the spun content isn’t.

If you want to know the future, look for trends and marry them with known conditions. In this case, spun content — the Internet equivalent of toxic waste — and Google’s stated mission.

This is a company that takes relevance and quality of content very seriously… and punishes offenders mercilessly. Otherwise, it’s pre-eminence as the #1 arbiter of what’s worth looking at online is at risk.(Hmm… that reads like spun content!)

In other words, if Google lets down its guard, it risks losing its credibility with its target audience. If that happens, Adwords and Adsense — 90% of Google’s revenue base — quickly disappear down the gurgler! (Plug-hole for the purists.)

Think of spun articles as like the “flitter” that military aircraft scatter to avoid detection by enemy radar — or the phosphorus flares they drop as decoys for heat-seeking missiles — when flying through enemy airspace.

Their purpose?

To conceal duplicate content from the search engines, especially Google.

It’s not hard to see where this suicidal online version of “crapping in your own nest” is headed. Don’t say you weren’t warned!

You can see the rest of this spun blog post (obviously an autoblog, badly done) here:

http://franchisebusiness.cleanlend.com/

It reads like a 1970s VRC User Manual written by Japanese lab technicians… a nightmare to comprehend.

(Are you a member yet?)

It’s rare on several counts:

• I look almost respectable and reasonably well-groomed.
• I’m live (well, recorded live. Next best/worst thing.)
• I don’t dribble or spit for the entire interview.
• I’m surprisingly coherent.
• I don’t bite George.
• I smile occasionally!

(I’ll leave it to you to sort out which are true. Or not.)

But the interview does manage to give you some sense of where I come from in terms of training for network marketers. You can view it here.