NETWORK MARKETING

‘To have faith is to believe unconditionally’

Don Miguel Ruiz speaks about the domestication of humans and how, as humans, we learn how to live and how to dream through a constant series of agreements that we make with ourselves. These agreements that we choose to make with ourselves are a direct result of the most powerful influences in our lives as children such as parents, school, church, the media, social netorks, etc. These influences shape and form who we are as well as who we choose to become and we have no more control over them than we do in choosing our own names. Because these influences possess the power to formulate and mold our belief systems we really have very little control over who we choose to become in life.

Often the belief systems that we choose to subscribe to don’t always provide us with the type of freedom, happiness, love, and success that so many of us seek out on a daily basis. In fact, for many of us, the agreements that we make with ourselves as a result of the powerful influences in our personal lives often lead us in the opposite direction of that which we seek.

In his book, ‘The Four Agreements‘, Don Miguel Ruiz suggests four simple agreements that you can make with yourself in order to manifest freedom, true happiness, love, and success in your life. I have read and applied the four agreements to my own life and I can assure you that, if you practice theese simple agreements with yourself on a daily basis, you can rapidly and efficiently transform your life into a constant state of bliss.

By making these four agreements with myself I was able to eliminate nearly all of the things in my life that I perceived as problems. It’s a simple, quick little read that possesses the power to transform your life.

Here is a quick summary of the four agreements:

agreement 1

Be impeccable with your word – Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.

agreement 2

Don’t take anything personally – Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won’t be the victim of needless suffering.

agreement 3

Don’t make assumptions – Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.

agreement 4

Always do your best – Your best is going to change from moment to moment; it will be different when you are healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstance, simply do your best, and you will avoid self-judgment, self-abuse and regret.

I hope you read and enjoy this book as much as I did. If you do choose to purchase this book, I suggest you place an order for the following list of books as it will save you in shipping costs.

1. The Four Agreements
2. Think & Grow Rich
3. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
4. The Tipping Point

Take care, have a great day, and peace to you and your kin,

Sincerely,

Trev.

First of all, I’d like to make it clear that this Blog is for anyone interested in learning about promoting themselves online. If you’re already getting 50, 000 hits a day on your website/blog and YouTube channel then perhaps you are already a few steps ahead of me and do not require my assistance, although you never know. For you see this Blog is an attempt to document the process of building a successful online enterprise from the ground up so I am learning new things everyday. You never know what types of new and useful information you may acquire by reading this Blog.

I suppose that this particular Blog will appeal to independent musicians and other creative individuals interested in increasing their exposure on the world wide web. If you want to make money and establish a full time career doing what you love, then you are going to need to increase your exposure.

I think that a lot of people lose faith in their artistic careers due to a lack of knowledge. I could have quite easily given up on my dreams and pursued a typical 9-5 job working to make somebody else rich. I mean, I love Gogo Bonkers. There is an incredible amount of creative and artistic freedom involved as a result of being in this group not to mention the personal satisfaction in knowing that our motivation stems from a genuine desire to want to help make the world a better place.

Iain and I also work very hard developing new ideas and projects. The problem with pursuing creative endeavours is that they typically don’t pay the rent. Not at first anyways. In fact, in many cases, they can actually interfere with your day job and cut into time that would otherwise be spent with family and friends.

In other words, pursuing creative endeavours as a full time career often winds up being littered with stress and frustration. I can’t begin to tell you how many times my wife and I fought over the amount of time I was investing in my creative projects versus the amount of monetary gain we were receiving as a result of my efforts. Which is ironic, seeing as I won her over with a song. I actually drove down to her house one night and played a song I had written for her. I even went into the studio and recorded it for. I do believe it was the single most romantic thing I have ever done.

Being productive in regards to the creative process has never been an issue for me. I used to have the ability to procrastinate about a great many things in exchange for time spent working on creative projects. Don’t miss the point here though. You still need to put in significant amounts of time into developing your craft. If you are going to market and promote your products and services, you’d best be sure that they posses value and quality for the people you are marketing them to. Setting aside time every day to developing and improving your craft is vitally important to your success as a creative individual whether you are a musician, filmmaker, writer, artist, cartoonist, inventor, or entrepreneur.

You also need to set aside time every day for learning. Make sure you learn at least one new thing every day. Even if you only spend 30 minutes reading, make sure you are constantly learning.

Also, be sure to take notes on what you have learned and brainstorm some quick ideas on how you can apply that knowledge to your marketing strategies.

In my case, I had just begun doing research online about how to effectively promote yourself on the Internet. Iain and I put a lot of our personal hours into Gogo Bonkers which means that a lot of personal and financial sacrifices need to be made in order to keep it afloat.

Take our videos on YouTube for example. Today we are going out to film a new episode called ‘Plastic Tears’. The first thing we need is a script. This is a job that alternates between the two of us. One week we shoot a script that I wrote and the next week we shoot one that Iain wrote.

So the first task is to sit down and write the script. We’ve decided to keep our webisodes as short and to the point as possible while at the same time keeping them fun, entertaining, and engaging. They range in length anywhere from 4 minutes to 8 minutes. I think we agreed that we would keep them all under ten minutes. And trust me, the shorter they are, the easier it is to pump them out.

So, an 8 minute episode takes, on average, about 3 hours to write. Once a script is written, it takes another 3 hours to memorize lines. Keep in mind that Iain and I do everything. And when I say everything, I mean everything.

Next, we need to make sure we have all the necessary props and costumes. A costume alone can take anywhere between 5-10 hours to design and make. (although I just found out that Iain dumped about 20 hours or more into PlastiVor. You’ll know why when you see the costume. It’s amazing and Iain is a pro when it comes to zoning out on a creative project). All of our costumes are made from recycled materials which means that these materials need to be both saved and gathered. Much of our typical household garbage and recycling is viewed as potential costume material.

Okay, so that’s:

Script Writing- 3 hours
Costumes & Props- 8 hours
Memorizing Lines- 3 hours

The next step is to go out and film the episode. Again, this varies based on the length of the script but, on average, a typical webisode takes about 6 hours to film.

Iain does all the editing. He spends about another 6 hours doing this. Once we have our master edit complete we need to finish all of the post production which includes music, voice over, and sound effects (sound design). We get together once a week and dump about 4 hours into the music and voice over. I typically do the sound effects, audio editing, mixing, bouncing out of files, and uploading to the Internet. This is about 8 hours worth of work.

Total Hours: 39 hours

And this does not include time devoted to promoting the webisodes. Which brings us full circle. If you visit our YouTube channel you’ll notice we have yet to crack 200 views on one of our videos. In fact, I think our maximum amount of views for one video is about 120. We were getting frustrated to say the least. 40 hours of work a week for less than a hundred views seems hardly worth it. We really had to ask ourselves whether we should continue or not. This is where belief in yourself and what you have to offer comes in to play. Sure we were spending 40 hours a week on our webisodes but how much time were we spending promoting those episodes. Uh….maybe 30 minutes. Promoting our band could be broken down to about 1 hour a week posting updates on Facebook and MySpace to less than 100 fans. Yikes. I was getting frustrated. Particularly when I was witnessing other local children’s bands achieving incredible results online (over 20, 000 hits on one YouTube video.)

The issue was marketing. Somehow, Gogo Bonkers was missing some key elements in their marketing strategy and would need to discover what those elements were in order to turn their creative hobby into a full time endeavour. And that is when I began doing research online on how to effectively market and promote yourself.

Marketing yourself begins with educating youself. And sometimes you need to spend a bit of time and money in order to streamline your efforts. Well, I stumbled upon an online marketing platform called http://trevsnetbiz.com/?page_id=31. It cost me a few dollars but I believe it was worth every penny. The learning curve was steep and I had to dump a month’s worth of time into setting everything up. Fortunately, as you continue to learn, the curve becomes less steep every day and things start to become a lot more fun.

The first thing I Iearned about was the importance of blogging. If you are a creative individual and are looking for ways to make money from your products and services and you do not yet have a blog- GET ONE!

Big day ahead of me. Unfortunately I will have to continue this post when I get home from filming. Hope you enjoyed reading.

Trev.

This is really one of the most important steps in setting up your business. You need to think long and hard on who exactly is your target market. If you can’t narrow this down and get it clearly stapled to your brain, then how are you supposed to know who to tailor your marketing strategies to. You can’t target everybody. You need to choose a market, find out where that market spends it’s time online and then target your online activities exclusively in those areas.

One of the dangers, I think, of online marketing is spreading yourself too thin. You only have so many hours in a day to spend building your business, so you need to make them count. Targeting specific markets repeatedly is a sure fire way of building a healthy foundation for success. Build relationships with those that you have most in common with.

If you are an independent musician looking to make more money doing what you love to do, then network with other like minded individuals. Find people that like what you like. Share ideas, develop a relationship and then brainstorm ways of making each other money.

It’s all about building relationships with your target market by offering them something in exchange for their ‘word of mouth’ activities.

So, what I have decided to do is ask for assistance. Please, follow the links to the Gogo Bonkers Blog and YouTube page. We are looking to increase traffic to our sites as we feel that we have a noble message to share with the children of today. We believe that sustainability is achievable and that the more children hear about how they can make a healthy difference in their communities, the more they will be inspired to act.

If you like our message and our music and our webisodes, please help us by sharing links with all of your friends. In order for us to work full time doing what we love, we need to sell a few more albums and t-shirts.

What we can offer at this point is that you sign up for an affiliate member account at amazon.com. Once you’ve done this all you have to do is steer some traffic to our album on amazon.com and you will receive a fee from amazon.com for the ad. It’s pretty straight forward. If you are interested, please be sure to contact me and I will be happy to send you a series of emails instructing you how to set up your account. If you already have an account and want to become an affiliate, great. Let us know what the purpose of your marketing is and we’ll see if we can work together. You steer traffic our way and we’ll steer traffic yours.

Now, back to our target market. What is the Gogo Bonkers target market anyways? Well, I’ve created a detailed analysis and will include it in my next post. Thanks for reading and I look forward to working with some of you soon.

Trevor Mason

Trevor Mason

Create Your Badge

I get up every morning at 5 AM and I write. I love to write. It has become a part of my daily routine and I thoroughly enjoy it. I used to hand write everything. In fact my first novel was hand written in a series of notebooks. Though I really enjoy writing by hand, it is definitely not conducive to effective time management, as I find myself spending too much time typing out what I’ve already written.

So now I sit here in the mornings punching letters with my thumbs into my iPhone and emailing the documents to myself. Now it’s just a matter of cut and paste.

I started out my morning by reading my Facebook updates which I’m not supposed to do. My day is scheduled in a series of priorities and my early mornings are clearly set aside for writing. However, my temporary Facebook distraction has effectively inspired today’s Blog post.

Facebook. What does it mean? What is its purpose? How can I utilize this technological phenomenon to assist me in achieving my goals? These are all important questions that I must ask myself.

I have been using Facebook for 3 years now. And up until recently I have only used it as a tool to connect with friends of the past and present. It has, for sure, been a particularly useful tool in connecting with certain people. It is by far the most efficient way of connecting with my son Tai (14) and daughter Alex (18). It’s also been a great way to keep tabs on how they are handling themselves socially.

At first I enjoyed the ability to connect with friends of the past. It was kind of fun at first to find out what past friends are up to but after a while, it just got to be a bit tedious.

My second phase of Facebook began with the intent of using it to promote my band Gogo Bonkers. I started a fan page and sent out a message to all of my current Facebook friends and managed to snare about 100 of them, but many of them became fans simply because they knew me and not necessarily because they were true fans.

What I really needed was to connect with potential customers. Old high school chums are fine but unless they have young kids they don’t buy my music or come to my shows. After about 3 years of casual social networking I decided to start researching how to effectively market and promote one’s creative endeavours online.

It was at this time that I discovered ‘Affiliate Marketing’ and that there was an entire Facebook community completely devoted to making money online. Online marketing requires the ability to copy and mimic. Reinventing the wheel can be a big waste of time and energy. Most of the successful online marketers have achieved their levels of succes by copying the strategies suggested by their uplines.

Social Networking is high on the list of priorities because it is a very effective way of steering traffic through your website and therefore exposing more potential buyers to your products, services, and business opportunities.

So I decided to shift my focus and use Facebook as a means to connect with other Internet marketers. Now, instead of friending up with people I know, I find myself adding complete strangers as friends. In the past, if someone I did not know requested friendship, I just declined them.

But when I look at the number of friends that people have I am overwhelmed. 5, 000 friends!? How am I supposed to maintain a relationship with 5, 000 people? Heck, even 500 is going to be a stretch.

Have any of you read the book, ‘The Tipping Point’ by Malcolm Gladwell? Read it.

There is an eye opening chapter in that book about the RULE OF 150. This rule is scientfic and relates to the size of our neo cortex relative to the size of our brain and that the larger the neocortex, the larger the average size of the group that a species lives with.

The basic gist is that the size of our neo cortex is directly related to the size of a manageable social network. Anything bigger than 150 people and your brain loses its ability to keep track. The neo cortex is just simply not big enough to handle a social group larger than 150 people. It’s scientifically and physically impossible.

So when I look at Facebook, I’m thinking to myself, ‘how am I supposed to maintain a genuine and sincere relationship with all of these people. The answer is, I can’t. So I have a choice. I can either follow the advice of those that came before me and add as many friends as possible in an effort to steer as much traffic to my website and therefore sell more products, services, and business opportunities, or I can conduct an experiment.

I have roughly 50 friends on Facebook right now. All of them are involved in some form or other of Internet marketing; some successful, some maybe not so much. I have made the decision to add no more than 150 friends. That’s it. I am going to pour all of my efforts into getting to know those 150 people as best I can.

My goal in life is to do my very best to make the world a better place for ALL, by doing something I love. So, I have decided to reach out to 150 people on Facebook and see what I can do to help them achieve their goals.

I suggested this experiment in my status update, but received no responses. Perhaps a video message will be more effective.

Because I have set SUCCESS as a personal goal for myself, I want to network with success minded people. I have 99 friend spots available and I want to make them all count. So the first thing I need to do is ask myself, what types of friends will best able to assist me in achieving my goal of acquiring 10 million by December 17th, 2015 and what types of goals do they have themselves and how may I assist them in achieving theirs. My first 50 friends were chosen at random, so the first order of business is to send each and every one of them a personal message. The first thing I’m going to do is invite them to my birthday party on December 17th, 2015.

Now that I think of it, this should be an interesting experiment. I can’t wait to get started.

As I’m sure you have discovered, I’ve included a link to my profile page. If you do make a friend request, be sure to send me a personalized message so that I can ensure that I am befriending legitimate people. Thanks.