The research behind a follow up to last month’s Money post grew past expectations. The history of the U.S. since 1934 involves complex and complicated financial creativity that appears challenging to break down in to understandable units.

I will persevere. IMHO, this history represents a significant force bearing upon our society.

Also, a follow up to First Four Steps To An Online Business is in the works. A hint: it all revolves around the capacity to produce content.

But recently, two revelations seem to have hit me in the head simultaneously. They both involve revealing limits of control and expanded freedom.

First, meditation upon the idea that maybe the universe we live in proceeds as a stochastic process, as opposed to a deterministic one, presents new understandings of the universe to me. For a moment, think about how a non-deterministic universe would work.

If one could no longer say, for example, that action “A” always caused consequence “C”, then how would things happen? Well, for a clue, stochastic processes are central to probability theory.

So, you may be able to affect the probable outcomes of a specific situation but not absolutely determine them. You may be able to shift the odds and make one thing or another more or less likely but never be assured of a “sure thing”.

Sound familiar?

1. Nothing for certain,
2. everything ultimately unknown and in a universe proceeding as a stochastic process,
3. unknowable.

How about all the plans of mice and men?

All of a sudden, a world of anomalous events may come out of the closet. And this says nothing about magical thinking.

Correlation was never accepted as causation by dogmatically deterministic mainstream science. But now the entire idea of causation seems out the window.

Activities once condescendingly dismissed as magical thinking have been proven to have a noticeable, but difficult to quantify, affect on situations. Mental causation proves to be a tough sell but mental influence appears to be another issue all together.

Remember, in a stochastic process causation seems out the window. Mental causation becomes a non-issue, misdirection and an example of the illogical straw man fallacy.

In a stochastic process there could never be blame. Nothing and no body could ever be found at fault.

Sure, someone could influence an environment modifying probabilities to favor certain outcomes, even pull the trigger themselves, yet still not be the cause of any specific outcome.

How would it change your life if you understood beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything, even your next breath and the very next beat of your heart, was no more certain than the results of a roll of the dice? Well, needless to say, the theological implications alone are staggering.

I could go on and on about where this particular revelation has taken my thoughts but I need to mention the second revelation. It concerns the psychological dimension and once again challenges the limits of control with the potential for expanded freedom.

I will get around to writing something about that, too, maybe.

Recently, a woman expressed a concern to me that she had “nothing going” and needed to rely on another person. She felt insecure to the extent she was dependent and asked me what I thought she could do.

The resources for a brick and mortar business just were not available and she knew enough about the online world to think she could get “something going” online. Undecided about specific niches in her broad general areas of interest, she “got going” by creating an online persona.

Her first 4 Steps were:

1. Purchase a domain name and blog hosting and set up an email address for the persona
2. Use the persona email address to obtain a Google user-name and password for the persona
3. Use the Google account to create a YouTube account for the persona
4. Create a Twitter account for the persona

This seems like the essential groundwork required to begin vblogging or video blogging. The technical requirements appear minimal, especially regarding media production with the technology getting simpler every year.

Producing a stream of content remains one absolute requirement. This one requirement shows up everywhere online.

Do not blog if you are not a writer.

Do not vblog if you are not a videographer.

If you can get past the 2 month hump, then you have the 6 month hump and the 2 year hump. You get past the humps by being productive.

The possibility of Jumping The Shark looms as a constant threat.

Being productive may include any activity that produces more value than went into it. Some people, for example, make money online by selling artisan food products.

The next step involves understanding and working with Key Words. Since I feel the topic of Key Words deserves its own article, I’ll leave that for later.

Significantly,  we currently see 4 dominant methods to enjoy Internet Traffic.

1. Pay for advertising using AdWords, Pay-Per-Click advertising, banners or any other method that involves you paying for traffic before you sell anything.
2. Affiliates and Joint Venture Partners send you their traffic and their payment comes from a percentage of the purchasing customers they send.
3. Organic Search Engine Traffic, notably from Google these days.
4. Leveraging Social Media and Social Bookmarking sites.

In my mind, their relative desirability ranks in reverse order to my listing. One could start with Method 4 and never need to try anything else.

If you do your part with being productive, Method 3 should take off before Method 4 peaks. These two methods will give you the proof needed to interest useful Affiliates and Joint Venture Partners.

Until you can prove your production sells, useful Affiliates and Joint Venture Partners will not be interested. Once you prove you have a winner, Method 2 can increase your income dramatically.

If your product successfully sells online, then Affiliates and Joint Venture Partners will be interested. Paying for advertising may never become necessary.

With the above 4 Steps in place, you will be in the position to publish content online. Your content will create a following.

Once you have a following you will be ready for the next steps and that will take another post.

In the mean time
check out my article about:

• Mike Masnick
• Seth Godwin
• Trevor Reznik

and the articles by Yaro Starak

Leave your questions in the comments and I will answer them there or in a new post.

The bear is out of the woods and the bull is running for cover. Forget about out running the bear, that is never going to happen. I will tell you why in a second.

All you really need to do is run faster than the slowest camper.

96 years ago, December 23, Woodrow Wilson used four gold pens to sign the Federal Reserve Act into law. This act is arguably the most destructive and harmful law enacted by a United States President up to that time.

The Federal Reserve Act allowed the inflationary bubbles that created the snowball of debt that currently engulfs us today. Nothing is at all mysterious about inflation;

inflation is government intervention pure and simple.

This proves the lie of the myth that regulators actually regulate rather than serve the interests of corporate beneficiaries. Debasing money is an old trick of governments going back at least as far as Biblical times.

¹⁵And when money failed in the land of Egypt, and in the land of Canaan, all the Egyptians came unto Joseph, and said, Give us bread: for why should we die in thy presence? for the money faileth.

¹⁶And Joseph said, Give your cattle; and I will give you for your cattle, if money fail.

¹⁷And they brought their cattle unto Joseph: and Joseph gave them bread in exchange for horses, and for the flocks, and for the cattle of the herds, and for the asses: and he fed them with bread for all their cattle for that year.

¹⁸When that year was ended, they came unto him the second year, and said unto him, We will not hide it from my lord, how that our money is spent; my lord also hath our herds of cattle; there is not ought left in the sight of my lord, but our bodies, and our lands:

¹⁹Wherefore shall we die before thine eyes, both we and our land? buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants unto Pharaoh: and give us seed, that we may live, and not die, that the land be not desolate.

²⁰And Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine prevailed over them: so the land became Pharaoh’s.

²¹And as for the people, he removed them to cities from one end of the borders of Egypt even to the other end thereof.
Genesis 47

What happened in Egypt is that the grain harvest was deposited into the secure government storage facility. The government then issued script (money) against the grain reserves.

When the government wanted to spend more than they could back up with grain reserves, they just went ahead and printed up more script anyway betting on ever increasing harvests to make the script good. Of course, with crop failures not only was the inflated script no good, in that it never had backing, but the original script could not be redeemed for grain either because there was none.

Fiscal policy cannot stimulate the economy.
The government has no money of its own.
It has only the power to tax and spend the money of others.

Financial collapse and food collapse have proven to be the consistent downfall of empires throughout human history. I write about the food collapse a little bit further down but first I want to touch upon the evidence of the advanced fear the government exhibits toward the governed.

Of course, since war has been declared upon United States citizens with the War On Drugs that allows the United States government to set new international records in the both the percentage of the population and total numbers of citizens that have been sent to prison by their own government.

The few shreds of the Bill of Rights remaining after the War On Drugs have now been completely obliterated by the subsequent War On Terrorism. The government appears so on edge that any excuse seems provocation enough to justify A Visit And Subpoena From Homeland Security.

The U.S. government fears and wages war upon the U.S. governed for reasons similar to why the Israeli government fears and wages war upon the Palestinians. Neither government would expect anyone to sit still for the wholesale fraud and abuse they dish out for very long.

They wish to avoid judgment and the consequences of their actions, also spelled out in the Bible.

¹Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.

²Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth eaten.

³Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.

⁴Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabbath.

⁵Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.

⁶Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.
James 5

When the wealthy cheat farmers out of what the farmer is due the financial system tanks regardless of the unjust wars the wealthy wage.

This truth from Biblical times held up as a key point concerning the Fall of the Roman Empire and still holds true today. Truth seems to endure even if empires do not.

Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’:
the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US

Despite appearances, we are not merely revisiting old mistakes. Our very way of life has been transformed into dependency upon an unsustainable system now running out of resources.

Die-off is a bottom-up phenomena affecting the lowest rungs of the human socioeconomic ladder first. This is already happening at a scale that is increasingly impossible to ignore.

Spiritual Leaders, scientists, climatologists, anthropologists and leading researchers unsuccessfully try to convince humanity that our self-destructive path is the true root cause of the collapse.

Prepare now.

Prepare now by becoming productive in your own name. Prepare now by connecting with people who appreciate your products.

Those who cannot connect with a personal fan base will be without the opportunity to sell their products directly. Lacking that opportunity, the only recourse will be self-reliance and self-sufficiency.

A lonely path at best.

Click here to view the embedded video.

CwF + RtB = $$$$

This video spells out the somewhat cryptic title as meaning Connect with Fans and give them a Reason to Buy to Make Serious Money through an explanation with examples by Mike Masnick. A suitable subtitle might be The Essence Of Marketing Reduced To A Simple Formula.

It really doesn’t get any more straightforward than this. While the formula tells you what to do, it does not tell you how to do it.

The examples Mike Masnick gives here, and in an earlier video where he used Trevor Reznik of Nine Inch Nails fame as an example, indicates that giving away valuable free stuff is one way how to do it. This is the same advice widely offered for Internet marketing in general.

Click here to view the embedded video.

NARM (the National Association of Recording Merchandisers) 2009 Keynote Interview presents Eliot Van Buskirk (WIRED) interviewing Ian Rogers (Topspin Media). A long time innovator in the online media scene, he feels that real progress is most likely on the creative side rather than on the consumer side and hence his move from Yahoo to Topspin.

Seth Godwin coined the phrase Permission Marketing over 10 years ago. It is just one more attempt to explain something that should never require explaining.

Intentional system controls implemented by monopolies preserve artificial scarcity. Monopolies maintain their control in part by paying politicians to legislate barriers to entry into monopolized industries.

Globalization and the Internet make it much more difficult, if not impossible, to maintain some monopolies. With this freedom from monopoly controlled markets, consumers can choose who to give their money to.

Without monopolies everything in the market eventually becomes a commodity distinguished only by private label branding. The private label brands survive only by becoming recognized and trusted by consumers.

Only when private label brands cannot be trusted do consumers default to making buying decisions based on the lowest price. Any place you go you will find many people who would prefer to give their business to someone they know and trust even if that means paying more.

People only know and trust their friends. If you want loyal customers who will buy your offerings time after time, even if they are more expensive, then you need to make them your friends.

Of course, because they are your friends, you will want to offer value added products. You will see more limited and signed editions, lots of additional posters, patches and such, as well as the unique opportunities to spend more time with the artists.

In industries with low barriers to entry, such as music and marketing, financial survival depends upon becoming friends with potential customers before you ask them for money. No one views an attempt to sell them something first as an invitation to friendship.

Since making friends seems to have become a lost art, especially in the United States, here is the number one way to make someone your friend. The number one way to make someone your friend is to give them something they value for free.

Do someone a favor, that is, help them out or solve a problem without setting a price and demanding payment. This is how people socialized for thousands of years but recently more and more of these social norms have been monetized.

The monetization of social norms, pricing and demanding payment for what was once freely shared, represents theft from the common wealth of all people. This theft from the common wealth of all people started over 10,000 years ago and has grown by fits and starts ever since.

Recently this practice of theft from the common wealth of all people through privatization has accelerated, especially in the United States. I can identify this dysfunctional practice as sociopathic at best but that serves little purpose now that it has permeated nearly every facet of modern life including all areas of public service.

Thoughtful feeling people feel repelled by this nearly ubiquitous trend, as well they should. Thoughtful feeling people instinctually avoid giving money to artificial monopolies by seeking out friends who can meet their needs, often even if their needs are more poorly met.

Celebrity status merely indicates that someone has more friends than they can personally directly respond to. It has become customary to call these friends, fans.

Make no mistake, every fan feels a personal connection to the celebrity. This feeling is the same as what someone feels for a friend, for someone who has helped them out far beyond any compensation that may have been offered.

The perceived need to obtain financial compensation for every act of aid and human kindness has become the single greatest impediment to business growth. Monopolies may be in the position to demand such payment anyway but they are not making friends and no one feels any trust or loyalty towards them.

So unless you run a monopoly, start making friends if you want your business to survive and prosper.

FNORD

My dad, 84 years old and counting, lifelong salesman, sales manager, sales trainer and independent representative speaks with open disdain about marketers. Yet, when you listen to him talk about his sales process it becomes clear that he takes a straight up marketing approach.

The first thing he does as a “salesman” is to identify companies ready to purchase in commercial volumes. Among marketers this is known as locating a market.

Next he connects with a decision maker and during the interview clarifies what problems they have. Marketers often use polls and questionnaires to discover a market’s needs, wants and desires.

Then, my dad works with one of the companies he represents, or even locates a company he has never represented before, to come up with a solution. Marketers follow the same process and if the solution is an information product either hires an expert, obtains the rights or creates the product themselves.

Finally, he goes back to the prospect company with the solution in hand complete with pricing and delivery information. It also works exactly this way for marketers.

When someone believes they have come up with what they perceive someone else needs, without their input or guidance, they then must attempt to sell it to them in order to regain their investment, personal  power and self esteem. Whenever you start with a product before you have a market you are faced with a sales proposition.

This is why marketing may be approached as a science but all sales initiatives originate in ideologies. I’ve lost count of how many people have approached me with their absolute need to sell something they just dreamed up or discovered in a bargain bin somewhere.

Science observes the natural world and creates mind maps to make sense of it. These scientific ideas never achieve closure and remain open to modification and obsolescence.

We create ideologies as mind maps to which the natural world is abused into conforming. These ideologies arrive as a package deal usually complete with a supportive all-encompassing world view.

The map is not the terrain.

Science knows the history of their mind maps and constantly compares them to the natural world so to modify the mind maps and increase their accuracy. Ideology acts as if their mind maps are the terrain while becoming proactive in manipulating the natural world to conform to the mind maps.

It speaks to the power of ideologies that this distinction between marketing and sales often seems to be the biggest conceptual challenge limiting my students. Indeed, they often insist upon just being delivered an ideology while ironically demanding that it accurately correspond to the natural world.

Offered the appearance of free choice, people seem to prefer ideologies which inevitably conflict with the natural world over science that never arrives at closure and always seems as work in progress. Ironically, successful ideologies often masquerade as science while science then comes under attack as ideology.

The weakness of science is the willingness to consider alternative solutions to real problems. In other words, the reluctance to become an ideology also becomes the weakness of science.

The strength of ideology is the high acceptance it finds for the quick and simple answers it provides to real world problems. Unfortunately, the answers are always wrong, regardless of first impressions or our desires for closure.

This problem manifests when a vendor becomes a consumer. Their consumer training to only accept the quick and easy, cheap and simple, silver bullet one-shot solution betrays them when they wish to provide products and services to consumers.

While consumers feel justified in thinking it is all about them this feeding of the ego sets up business people for failure if they cannot make the adjustment to the other side of the coin. This failure to adjust results in a selling ideology.

While a person’s ideas may be interesting and welcome as long as they are a consumer, once they become a vendor of products and services their ideas become irrelevant. The world is full of great ideas that few care about.

This ego driven need to see personal ideas accepted by other people, through deception, fraud and the threat of harm if need be, meets the definition of ideology. This also describes the underlying methodologies of many mainstream selling techniques.

Ideology and selling lack resilience.

The narrow point of view generated by a consumer perspective holds no more attractiveness to others than any other inflexible ideological opinion. This leads to the failures of businesses and the collapse of empires.

Resilience relies upon both the willingness to competently observe reality regardless of what we wish to see and the ability to modify activities accordingly regardless of how habitualized we may have become to them. A fixed belief in our own correctness, self-righteousness in other words, inevitably leads to both our unhappiness and the unhappiness of others.

That is why I do not accept students as clients who insist they have invented the next best thing, whether it be a business service, a physical device or social idea. They are always wrong and doomed to failure.

If you wish to make money, online or face-to-face, it is enough to start with that desire. When you bring your own preconceptions along you limit your resilience according to the strength of your beliefs.

Accordingly, my first question to you then is not concerning your product but concerning the market you wish to join. Identify a market first and the market will identify a successful product for you.