Last week, the social media platforms were flooded with criticism of the proposed C-30 “Internet predator” bill – mine included. Quite right too, I gave my reasons in a previous post linking this bill to an increase in school bullying.

Two things about this are both interesting and disturbing.

One, when the liberals tried to introduce an even more onerous bill in 2005, there was far less outcry in the media, social or conventional.

Two, on this occasion, a twitter user launched a social media attack on the minister Vic Toews  disclosing personal details that were neither relevant, nor warranted.

Why are these  interesting and disturbing?

• Is it because liberals are more vocal and active in their opposition to everything a Conservative government does?
• Is a Conservative minister’s private life seen as fair game, but not a Liberal ministers?
• Are Conservative critics more active on social media than Liberal critics?
• Are more of us waking up to the perils of increasing government interference in our private lives?
• Are more of us becoming concerned enough to make our voices heard?
• Is the huge growth in users of social media turning more of us into activists?
• Is the ease of spreading a message by social media overcoming the inertia that would prevent us mailing a letter or making a phone call?

Is this a sign that we have had enough of our individual rights and freedoms being steadily eroded under a creeping tide of political correctness? The start of a revolt against a suffocating blanket of  big brother government trying to control every last detail of our lives?

Does it signal the beginning of a return to an era of common sense?

Is the pendulum starting to swing back to the realisation that we all need to be responsible for our own futures? A realisation that every individual right and responsibility we surrender to the state leads us one step closer to the situation in Greece?

Is this the first act in a campaign to restore freedom and secure a future for us in the West? Much as the “Arab Spring” was supposed to usher in a new era of freedom in the Middle East and North Africa.

I don’t know the answers and for once I find myself in the interesting position of being on the same side as my more liberal friends.

It doesn’t matter, the more of us who work for the good of the country and personal freedom the better.

Perhaps Social Media is more powerful than a referendum.

What do you think? Is this the dawn of a new era powered by social media?

Leave your comment below, share your ideas.

Wishing you success in all your endeavours.

p.s  Want to discover how writing could change your life?

Check out Bob Bly’s Write and Grow rich programme.

(Affiliate link)

What doesn’t kill cures. Variations of that old idea have been around for centuries. 

There is even a word to describe something that is beneficial in small amounts but harmful in high doses.

Hormesis “ a theoretical phenomenon of dose-response relationships in which something (as a heavy metal or ionizing radiation) that produces harmful biological effects at moderate to high doses may produce beneficial effects at low doses.” - Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary.

What prompted me to remember that ancient word was a post by Daniel Donahoo on Huffington Post today. In his post he accurately explains how:

“Sometimes social media makes it impossible for me to do anything.

It stuns and silences me.”

He writes about the problem exceptionally well, I am not going to steal his thunder by repeating it, so click on his name above and read it, it will make you chuckle and wonder if you are affected as much as others.

Reading about it, I recalled a tweet I read earlier today when @KDCaulfield commented on a news item which stated that supposedly healthy brown rice was found to contain high levels of arsenic.

Thoughts about “Arsenic” and the debilitating effect of social media overload must have been  twirling around in some dim recess of my subconscious for the afternoon and coalesced to remind me of the word Hormesis. (I had to check the spelling in the dictionary).

Very many years ago on a different continent – and it seems like in a former life- my first job after leaving the farm for the city was with a pharmaceutical manufacturer which still produced remedies containing small doses of arsenic. The business also sold concentrated cattle dips for ticks and ant treatments for ant infestations containing arsenic.

I really believe the word “hormesis” is ideally suited to social media. In small doses it is good for us. It expands our network of connections, helps us meet some amazing and interesting people, and if we get it all right, directly or indirectly, connects us with new people to do business with. All beneficial, like any good medicine or tonic should be.

But in higher doses, it can kill our productivity, stop us doing more important work, increase our stress levels and totally overwhelm us. It can completely shut down our creative juices, deprive us of sleep and turn us into zombies.

One of the most sneaky side effects of an overdose of social media is its ability to lead us down convoluted rabbit holes following threads that never end, just change form, direction and purpose. It is quite simple to allocate time for most business tasks or activities. I know I can usually write a 800 word blog post in 45 to 60 minutes, spend another 30 editing and polishing it, adding an image, choosing tags and it’s published in about an hour and a half from the start.

Let me spot a tweet or update from an interesting source on Google+, Facebook or Linked In with an interesting link, and that could have me tied up for a couple of hours. First, the link needs checking out, that often involves a video on You tube, while I am there I need to check my in box which can lead to more paths to follow, then back to respond to the original update, perhaps add something on that platform. Along the way links might need to be bookmarked, good snippets scooped or photos pinned, other bits buffered.

My remedy for this is ruthless use of a timer whenever I venture onto a social media site during the day, (I do spend more time in the evening rather than watching TV) and using Google Reader to subscribe to Rss feeds of blogs I follow. This keeps my email in box down to manageable levels and allows me to scan a lot of blogs quickly. I also have a regular pruning schedule to trim the number of subscriptions and I aim to mark all unread items “read” at the end of each week whether they have been read or not.

That’s how I generally keep my social media at the level where it works like a tonic or stimulant, but some days I do still overdose and suffer the consequences of “harmful biological effects”

I really do believe social media is hormetic.

What about you? Do you also overdose or do you have a strategy to keep your exposure down to beneficial levels?

Leave a comment, you might help other sufferers.

Wishing you success in all your endeavours.

This could be a stretch to connect the dots on this and the concept will certainly irritate my local Conservative Party MP.

I have written previously how concerned I am by the steady erosion of individual rights that I have witnessed since arriving in Canada in 2004. Having seen my own country destroyed by an out of control government that ignored the constitution and introduced new laws in an attempt to legitimise the wholesale theft of property, the imprisonment and murder of  opponents, I am perhaps more sensitive to these things than most peace-loving Canadians.

It will not surprise readers that I am a Conservative Party supporter. But that is simply because they are less socialist than the alternatives. “Conservative” is not an accurate description of some of their activities. I have witnessed and suffered dearly from the efforts of liberal governments to export their brand of socialism to Africa. Most of the economic problems in the failing European Union are a result of the stronger economies being crippled by the more socialist states that did not have the good sense or political backbone to balance their books.

But supporter or not, I cannot support this new “Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act”, bill. For three reasons:

• I am against censorship.
• I am even more against allowing big government increasing control over our lives.
• This is more evidence of the erosion of individual rights.

In December I published a post about how I believed the “wimpification” of Canada is leading to amongst other problems, an increase in school bullying. I also wrote about “Is Canada becoming a Police State” . This bill, if approved, will be yet another example of misguided legislation handicapping law-abiding citizens but having little or no effect on the criminals. Much like how the crazy gun regulations criminalize  most legitimate gun owners but have little effect on gang members or others using firearms for criminal purposes.

My understanding of the situation is that under existing legislation, the police can request the identification,  internet and email traffic details of a suspected criminal from an Internet Service Provider (ISP), but they cannot compel the ISP to divulge any information without a warrant. It would seem that most ISP’s have voluntarily assisted the authorities when a good enough case has been presented to them. According to the industry, the recent success against a huge number of paedophiles  being an example of this voluntary co-operation.

It seems that under the proposed legislation, the police will neither need a warrant nor valid reason to compel your ISP to hand over your identity and the most intimate details of your internet searches and emails.

So, if you in complete innocence, click on a link in an email from a source you assume to be genuine, and end up on a website that has been flagged by the authorities, you could have the security police beating down your door to cart you away or worse, your name and photo splashed all over the media as a child molester and your reputation ruined.

The proposed act goes further, it would allow the competition board and other government agencies to get in on the act and share the spoils of their legal piracy. This is a horror story waiting to happen. Suppose you ask advice in an email to your banker on how to AVOID paying more TAX than you should on a purchase of a vehicle, let’s assume you are trying to decide between leasing and purchase. If there is an alert for any incidence of the words TAX and AVOID in the same email, you could have the revenue agency on your backs.

Many otherwise sensible people will have the opinion that if you keep away from risky websites and activities you will be safe, the scenario above is clear evidence that you will not be. It would mean that every single internet activity that we currently take for granted: email, browser searches, social media updates could be a weapon that could be used against us at some time in the future. Even a blog post like this one could be considered sufficiently inflammatory for me to receive a visit from the authorities, I have used the words GUNS, POLICE, INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS and FREEDOM on the same page. Suspicious and seditious enough to have me locked away for years.

It will make any cautious business person extremely reluctant to communicate legitimate, but perhaps sensitive, information electronically.

Back to my title, how will this increase school bullying?

I am convinced that the “wimpification” of the West in general and Canada in particular is a cause of many of the social ills of our time. By penalizing and even criminalising law-abiding people who dare to stand up to criminals to protect their lives and their property, we are emasculating the good people amongst us and making it easier for the bad. This is apparent in everything from schools punishing young kids who dare to stand up to play ground bullies by hitting back physically, to arresting a shopkeeper for detaining a shoplifter. To persecuting a home owner who used a licensed weapon to scare off people in the process of fire bombing his house. And the most ridiculous waste of taxpayers money of all, if the media reports are correct, finding a man guilty just because he posed with a hand gun for a Facebook photo.

The point here is that, as a population, we have been so bullied into submission by the nanny state government and political correctness, that we are now too cowed to stand up for ourselves in any respect. Some examples of individual rights that have been taken away from us in the last few years:

• The breed of dog we can own is dictated by the government.
• The police can confiscate our vehicles or an innocent third party’s vehicle BEFORE we have been proven to be speeding.
• The same when we are BELOW the legal limit of alcohol in our blood.
• We are no longer allowed to express an opinion that could be construed as “offensive” racially or sexually. (unless we belong to a minority)
• Our children can be taught inappropriate and biased information at school and we are prevented from objecting.
• Tobacco (legal) smokers are increasingly penalised but pot and crack (illegal) users get given equipment or venues.

That this nonsense can happen in a country that carved such a great nation out of inhospitable terrain and whose armed forces fought so valiantly in the two world wars and other conflicts is beyond belief. This is 21st century Canada, not medieval England under a particularly nasty king.

For once I find myself on the same side of the political divide as the liberals, this bill will be another nail in the coffin of personal freedom in what is supposed to be one of the best democratic nations in the world. It is a moment of political irony that those on the extreme left who so rabidly support gun control will now find their own freedoms limited by the exact big government action they usually support. Poetic Justice?

Let me state clearly and unapologetically that I am not against most of what the police try to do, I know they have a difficult task. I was behind them 100% in their handling of the violence at the G8 summit, if anything they did not use enough force against some of the more violent criminals. My criticism is related to treating law-abiding people as criminals and not taking enough action when they should, for example Caledonia and the Vancouver riot.

For those of you whom I have now irritated enough to suggest I go back from whence I came, my answer is that I would not be here if Canada and our other so-called allies from both world wars, had not supported terrorists and sacrificed the peaceful, economically successful country of Rhodesia to appease the third world rabble. In the process condemning millions of innocent people to brutal, short and miserable lives in the hell that is Zimbabwe today.

Finally for those who promote this nonsense in the name of “multiculturalism” remember that immigrants come to Canada because the conditions and opportunities are infinitely better than the places they are leaving, not in the hopes that Canada will be reduced to the miserable level of their former countries.

Wake up Canadians and email your MP, if we do not show massive opposition to this bill right now, we will be one step closer to a 21st century version of George Orwell’s 1984 and on the way to having one of the most dictatorial governments since the old USSR, communist China or until recently Burma.

Wishing you the freedom to succeed in your endeavours, do something to protect it now while you still can.

Whitney Houston dead at 48, another in a long line of talented performers dead before her time. Media reports speculate that it may be months before the actual cause of death is released. It could have been a tragic accident, people do fall in bathrooms but the reports do not seem to be promoting this theory.

If it was not a freak accident then why?

Is it another case, as some are reporting of a talented singer unable to handle the stresses of success? Did the loneliness of being at the summit of her career get to her? We will probably never know, but it raises the question of why the lives of comparatively many successful artists and others in the spotlight, like sports stars, end prematurely.

Is a pre-disposition to substance abuse or other types of self-destructive behaviour part of what makes stars successful? Is it the dark side of the character traits of dedication, perseverance, un-relenting commitment to perform at one’s best. The strength needed to overcome shyness and the fear of performing before an audience.  A dependency on public adulation from throngs of adoring fans?

Or is it more simple than that?

Is it a case of too much success at an early age, with the rewards and temptations associated with it, just being too much for even the most well-balanced amongst us to handle? We all tend to think that we would behave more sensibly in similar situations, but the evidence of what happens to the majority of “ordinary” people winning fortunes on the lottery or inheriting large sums shows the opposite. The majority blow through their new-found fortunes within a short time, often abandoning life-long spouses and friends in the process and ending up worse off financially and emotionally than before.

I suspect it is a combination of both, it takes a certain type of person to reach the pinnacle of success as a performer which may exaggerate some of the weaknesses we all have. Until we are put to the same test we will never know how we would react to the same pressures and temptations, history shows many of us would not score much better.

What does this all mean to us mere mortals?

Firstly balance, success is important, but true success means surviving the journey with our relationships and integrity intact. Being able to sleep at night without needing medication or alcohol to quieten the demons.

It also means that we should be careful what we wish for, make sure the goals we set are our own goals, not the ones that sound good or that others think we should strive for.

I am not a great music fan, can probably only recognise the voices of less than a dozen singers, but Whitney Houston was one of them. What a loss of a great talent.

Wishing you success in all your endeavours (and the wisdom to survive and enjoy them.)

Thanks to Tom Ewer and his post on the blog wpmu.org The WordPress Experts for alerting me to  a new plugin for WordPress that helps bloggers discover what their readers really think about blog posts.

Numbers of visitors or comments can be misleading and easily biased by external factors as Tom explains so well in his post.

This new plugin Moodthingy gives visitors an opportunity to rate each post just by clicking on a voting panel in a box at the bottom of each blog post. Votes can be cast for each of a range of 6 moods from Bored to Amused, Angry to Fascinated.

The dashboard on the Moodthingy site  provides statistics to show the popularity of each post.

So this is just a short post to test how it works, go ahead and vote on the panel at the bottom of this post.

Try the plug in, it’s free.

Wishing you success in all your endeavours.

I have not posted about network marketing for a while, but several totally disconnected snippets of information about marketing in general and a few about network marketing in particular showed up on my radar this week.

These have been occupying my mind and have now settled into some questions to which I do not have all the answers, but the questions invite thought and speculation, so here goes – a post of half formed questions without answers.

A video of an interview with Seth Godin in which he makes the comment “This is a forever recession…..The end of the Industrial age ” was the first trigger. It reinforced what I have been thinking for some time, but I do not believe that the Industrial Age is over completely, just moved out of the developed countries into the top tier of the developing (at the moment India, China, Brazil). Sooner or later these countries will find that the factors that are making them competitive now (for example, a rapidly expanding middle class) will make them as uncompetitive as the developed countries and the next tier will become the competitive manufacturers of the day.

Here is Seth Godin’s interview. It’s under 9 minutes and well worth watching.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJj_WHCdLtQ

Then more than one network marketer commented that finding customers and distributors for nutritional and wellness products seems to be getting more difficult.

This could be a seasonal problem, most of us have a financial hangover after the Christmas Holidays.

Or is it the  wave of change in how we buy things that has converted many of the most wary consumers into ecommerce fans? Is the ease, convenience and security of buying on-line  eroding the power of the staple of network marketing, the “autoship”. Is the flood of on-line information making the role of the network marketing distributor obsolete? Is the same medium that is helping some network marketers become highly successful, social media, working against those who do not know how to harness its power? There are still many highly successful network marketers and network marketing companies, but like all businesses, they will have to adapt to the new realities to stay successful.

Another interesting snippet. An article a few days ago (I did not bookmark it and now cannot find it) stated that sales of erotic books were soaring. We are not talking about hard core pornography here, just slightly more descriptive “bodice rippers” than the likes of Barbara Cartland wrote for earlier generations. The growth is in eBooks, they can be discreetly bought on-line by respectable lady readers. No red faces in book stores or sniggers from mail delivery people. One publishing house is desperately looking for more authors because it cannot keep up with the demand for new books.

That is fascinating, technology enabling an old product – juicy novels have been around for generations – to be distributed to a much wider customer base at a lower cost.

Our economies, our societies and our whole way of earning an income are changing, are you riding the wave or about to be swamped by it?

Wishing you success in all your endeavours.

I am not enough.

Psychologists report that the most common limiting belief that we humans suffer from is ” I am not enough”

Put what ever adjective we can think of before “enough” and we can come up with reasons to prevent us doing almost anything.

• Not good enough.
• Not smart enough.
• Not attractive enough.
• Not strong enough.
• Not old enough.
• Not young enough.

That belief that we lack some essential quality stops us from reaching our potential or achieving our goals in everything from relationships with the opposite sex, to parenting, careers or business, sports.  Practically everything in life that requires us to stretch a bit, go out on a limb, take a chance or move beyond our self-imposed boundaries of familiarity.

Note that I use familiarity deliberately and not the more common “comfort zone” term. This is for two reasons:

• We can be decidedly “uncomfortable” in a situation, but accept it because it is familiar.
• The term has been so overused that it no longer commands attention.

One of the most common motivators for people to overcome their limiting beliefs is when action is required to protect, support or help a close family member, especially a child. That could be protection from a physical threat resulting in heroic action by the parent beyond what that parent ever dreamed was possible. Or action to get information or cut through bureaucratic red tape to get the necessary treatment for a sick child.

A person I have been coaching had difficulty in believing that she was capable of taking on new challenges in her job that required new skills. Then her daughter became ill with an uncommon condition. She had no difficulty researching the condition, locating experts, being assertive with unhelpful officials and doing whatever it took to get her daughter seen by specialists who could help her.

She acted totally out of character, completely different behaviour from her normal self. Why? Because she had a cause (her daughter’s health) that was big and important enough for her to overcome her limiting beliefs, smash through her boundaries of familiarity and just do it.

Why do we let these limiting beliefs hold us back?

One of the reasons is our perception of how others see us, the fear of being seen as a fool, inadequate or incapable. Being seen as a failure and fear of the humiliation that would result from that.

Luckily for me, having lived most of my life in much more rugged parts of the world where common sense was far more important than political correctness, I have had more than my share of unpleasant and dangerous situations, heartbreak and humiliation. What this has taught me is that most of the world lives without the security nets most Westerners take for granted.  For millions of people, their very survival depends on them breaking those boundaries of familiarity every day, if anything other than poverty and starvation  could be called familiar.

When risk becomes part of daily life, as it was for a big part of mine, it loses its ability to paralyse. When mobs of people are threatening to kill you, burn your house and kill your livestock, you soon stop worrying about what the neighbours might think of your speech at the last district wedding.

What all of this means is that most people, including us here in the West, have far more important things to concern ourselves with than what other people would think of us if we failed at something new.

Even the sensational headlines of a great scandal soon lose their appeal, do many people give President Bill Clinton’s adventures with Monica in the White House any thought today? No if anything it may have enhanced his marketability as a highly paid speaker.

If I look back along my exciting journey through life, every time I achieved something worthwhile was as a result of taking a risk of some sort, venturing into unfamiliar territory, sure some of those ventures were imposed by external forces, some ventures failed. There were some parts I could have cheerfully done without but it has been an amazing journey.

Last night I had another personal reminder of the value of moving beyond those boundaries and of how badly we over estimate our fears of not being enough, in my case prepared enough.

I joined a local Toastmasters club last year, because I wanted to improve my public speaking skills. In the course of working through the ten projects to become a certified communicator I have given four prepared speeches of between five to seven minutes before an audience. I had volunteered to give a speech at another club for their members to evaluate. The organiser gave me a weeks warning to prepare the speech which is to be given tomorrow (Wednesday). Over the last weekend, I spent a couple of hours planning the speech and practised speaking it twice, intending to polish it up yesterday and today.

Last night (Monday), at our club meeting, the member designated to give a speech was late, so certified risk taker that I am, I volunteered to give my partly prepared speech if he did not arrive. He did arrive but our chairman invited me to present mine as well, feeling somewhat unprepared but never one to back down from a challenge I went ahead.

I had no notes with me, I mentioned to the audience that I had volunteered to fill a potential gap in the evening’s programme and that I was not completely prepared.

The speech went well, I did forget two minor points but I kept to the sequence and within the time limit. I got a good evaluation and here is the important bit. The evaluator said that if I had not mentioned my incomplete preparation, no one would have known.

I mention this not to draw attention to myself, but to illustrate 3 lessons:

• Until I mentioned it, no one knew that my preparation was incomplete.
• My fear of not being prepared enough was totally unfounded.
• I crossed that boundary of familiarity and reaped a big reward – completion of a project, good evaluation and another practice opportunity.

On that subject, I would highly recommend Toastmasters for any one needing to improve their speaking skills or just to gain confidence and practise in their ability to communicate effectively in a business or social environment. Here is the link to the official website where you can find the branch nearest you. Toastmasters International.

What are your thoughts on limiting beliefs? Leave a comment below.

Someone who is an expert communicator is Bob Bly, he has a series of eBooks that will help you become confident and competent as a writer so that you can break through your boundaries of familiarity and start a business from home that could grow into your own retirement fund. Check his site out here. CTCPublishing.  (this is an affiliate link, if you order you will not pay any more but I may get a commission)

Wishing you success in all your endeavours.

There has been an ugly labour dispute up the road from us in London. A subsidiary of Caterpillar that makes locomotives was unprofitable and informed the union that to stay in business, it needed to cut the wages of its workers, some by (allegedly) 50% to bring them in line with wage levels at its US plants.

When negotiations stalled and suspecting that the union would cause trouble, the company erected a security fence around the factory over the new year holiday weekend and locked the workers out.

Predictably the union has been squealing like a stuck pig, picketing the entrance to the factory, on a particularly cold day forcing some temporary workers to wait 5 hours in the freezing cold.

When the company did not relent, the union prevented a locomotive from leaving the factory by blocking the rail lines. If an ordinary person did that, he would be immediately arrested by the police and charged with trespass and probably more, but in Ontario there seems to be two sets of laws, one for unhappy aboriginal people or union members occupying and even destroying private property, and another much harsher for law abiding citizens and tax payers.

The company has now put up with enough nonsense and announced that the plant will be closed and production moved to a plant in the US. Well done to the union, 400 people have now lost their jobs. An own goal in soccer terminology or a self inflicted black eye with devastating consequences for those workers and their families, the effects will ripple through many businesses in the London area.

As a former employer and now self employed, I believe that the time for unions, if there ever was one, has long since passed. My personal view is that they are the biggest single factor in the export of jobs to developing countries. In times of recession like the last 3 years, I believe they should be banned. To actively prevent a business from operating and selling its products especially for export is unpatriotic and economically suicidal.

Was the company being harsh? Undoubtedly, particularly as Caterpillar made record profits in the last year and it is tough on those who lost their jobs. But this is the real world, we do not practice slave labour, no one is compelled to work for any one else. A job is a privilege not a right, any one who is unhappy with their employment conditions is completely free to find another job, or even better start a business and create jobs for more people.

A business has one purpose only, that is to give its owners or shareholders a return on their investment. It could well be argued that many of those now unemployed  workers were benefiting from Caterpillars success through investments with insurance companies or mutual funds. All the other reasons corporations give for being in business, like giving back to the community, providing enlightened employment conditions, protecting the environment, sound wonderful and are welcome, but not a single dollar can be sustainably diverted to those causes until that business makes a profit.

The purpose of this post was not to continue my crusade against unions, but it was necessary to provide the background.

What intrigues me is that a retailer of work clothes and footwear, Marks Work Wear, has publicly announced that it is boycotting the Caterpillar brand of work boots in sympathy with the workers who lost their jobs. It appears that the removal of the brand will only apply to stores in the London area and will probably be a temporary measure. Many of its customers were amongst those who lost their jobs.

Is this a clever marketing tactic? While it may generate some good feelings amongst the fired workers, they are not going to be buying boots again until they get new jobs. Will it help switch customers from competitors stores? Or will it cause dedicated Caterpillar brand fans to buy elsewhere? What about shareholders? I would seriously question the wisdom of the gesture if I was a shareholder. Will it backfire, like those businesses that banned Christmas from their stores not realising (or ignoring) that 76% of Canadians preferred the word to the politically correct alternatives.

I do not know the answers, it will be interesting to see the outcome but I suspect that a local, temporary,  boycott will not have much effect either way. It would be poetic justice though, if the boots manufacturer elected to use a different sales channel and decide not to supply this retailer in the future.

Boycotts can be double edged swords, it can be very dangerous for businesses to enter conflicts like this, which is why most marketers steer clear of them.

What are your thoughts?

Wishing you success in all your endeavours.

Image from artvex.com and Dreamstime 

Sunset near Macheke, Zimbabwe

Thanks to an old friend and the magic of social media, a fellow ex-Zimbabwean farmer now living in Australia  recently visited my blog and became a subscriber. We have

been exchanging emails and catching up on the ups and downs of life after being forced out of one’s home and country.

Most ex-Rhodesians and Zimbabweans are a reticent bunch and tend to stay out of the spotlight, so I will just refer to him as R. R asked me about my journey to become an internet marketer, was it as lucrative as many “gurus” with their stories and videos of rags to riches or sleeping in a car to a Miami mansion-with-expensive-sports-car-in-the-driveway, sales pitches promised?

After emailing R a frank account of my own experiences, I realised that many other aspiring entrepreneurs would find it interesting and that it could save some of my readers a lot of time, money and heartache.

So here is my reply to R with some of the more personal and (to non-displaced ex farmers) irrelevant details omitted:

_______________________________________

I don’t mind you asking at all. If I can help others avoid some of the pitfalls and hurdles I have stumbled over and blind alleys I have been led up during my own journey to get to Robert Kiyosaki’s 4th quadrant I will do so with pleasure. (We had been discussing the book “Cash Flow Quadrant”)

No I am not anywhere near earning a huge income from the internet or eBooks. I am living from month to month, but surviving quite happily. I don’t let it worry me, I reckon nothing can be worse than the Zim experience of losing our farms and being in a police cell with 26 criminals for a few days.

I first arrived in Canada in June 2003, to a) put some distance between me and Mugabe’s men who wanted to put me back in the police cells and b) to start the immigration process which we were allowed to do while living in Canada on “Humanitarian and Compassionate grounds”. Sue stayed in Zim, unlike me, she was able to keep her mouth shut and stayed in a cottage on my brothers 50 acres in Marondera which was at that time not threatened.

The conditions of applying for permanent resident status while living here mean you are not permitted to work.

With no money and no income, I had no option but to live with my son, his wife and 2 kids in a small semi-detached house in the city. I was going out of my mind with boredom. Then through another ex Zim farmer who had moved here, I met the owner of a large vegetable, berry and sweetcorn farm. I asked him if I could just spend time on his farm. To cut a long story short, we got on well and that eventually turned into a full-time business relationship which lasted until my heart attack in 2010.

When we got our immigration approval in 2004, Sue came over and we rented this old farmhouse where we still live.

Prospects of a higher paying management job at my age and with my lack of Canadian business experience were not good. I had been out of the corporate world for 15 years and I did not want to commute 50 or more km a day to the bigger cities. I could probably have got a better paying job on the factory floor, but I would rather die than be exposed to the union mentality,  boredom and stress of being an employee after 15 years as a business owner and employer. There was also truck driving but it would have meant many days and nights away from home.

As much as I enjoyed being outside, my farm responsibilities took 7 days a week and up to 12 hours a day right through summer which meant that we had no life of our own, the few hours I could take off on a Sunday afternoon had to be spent cutting wood to keep us warm in winter.

In 2006, I joined a network marketing company. It was not a planned thing, a distributor contacted me when I was really fed up with the farm work. I (naively) believed that it would be a ticket to the wealth quadrant in a short space of time! (Robert Kiyosaki again)

Of course, with no local network of business or social contacts or old school friends, it did not take off, I spent a small fortune on buying leads, advertising, courses, magazines, books, but nothing helped. I then tried about 6 different network marketing companies selling everything from vitamins to cheap electricity and gas and discount coupons for groceries. I continued to accumulate credit card debt by buying more information, maintaining the monthly autoship where applicable. I am sure I was not the first and won’t be the last to tell this story!

About 2 1/2 years ago, I saw a sales page for an internet marketing system that was designed to help you make money out of all the people who said “NO” to your network marketing opportunity. I had tried something similar a few months earlier which relied on automated blogging but which I thought was unethical and bordering on fraudulent, so I dropped that. However this new system did introduce me to blogging and the idea of affiliate marketing, it also included some good training. That is what convinced me that I should really become good at blogging and social media. Although the system was good and I did get quite a few sign ups, none stayed with it for more than a few months so I did not make money with it.

After a year or so, I also began to feel that the promises were bordering on the unethical, it was costing me money to stay with it and I could not afford to continue spending a few hundred $ a month on adwords.

When my heart attack in September 2010 put a sudden stop to my involvement in the farm business, I vowed that I would starve before going back to it or getting a “job”. After a couple of weeks of rest, I started applying myself to building an online business.

I am still involved with Asea, a network marketing company selling a health product that helps cells communicate, that brings in money every month. Most of the promotion for it is online. Affiliate commissions from links that I put on my blogs, or ads on the blogs, my fan page and updates on Facebook, twitter and many other sites bring in more. Consulting gets me a bit more, I did a bit of off-line work last year. My wife Sue works mornings only on a horse farm, that helps our finances and gives her an outside interest.

As yet, I have only sold a few copies of my first eBook, I will be adding new promotions for it to increase  sales.

The biggest mistakes I have made are:

• Being too believing about how “easy” network marketing would be.
• Going in too many directions at the same time and getting nowhere.
• Spending far too much time reading and learning and not taking action.
• Buying too many “solutions” – Looking for that “Magic Bullet”
• Paying for those solutions by credit card.
• Trying to replicate our Zimbabwe lifestyle.
• Plugging on, not recognising that a change of course is needed. (different to not giving up)
• Not using time effectively – being seduced by “busy work”.

I am convinced that it is possible to earn a very good income on the internet, but it is necessary to act strategically and not just chase opportunities which is the biggest failing with most of us. However, I do think that the easy days are over, some of the earlier high flyers of online information marketing are not doing so well and it might not be quite so easy to earn big incomes very quickly.

One of the best models I have come across is the “Agora” model, so named after the publishing company that refined it. Now a multi million $ operation.

It is this;

• Determine what you are both good at and what gets you excited. (Your Passion)
• Work out how that could help people.
• Find a group of people with a problem / need/ desire/ that your solution can help. Your niche.
• Start a blog that will get read by those people. – Drive traffic to it.
• Offer them something for free as an incentive to subscribe to your list.
• Send them email newsletter offering a mix of free information, interesting stories and links to things for them to buy.
• Rinse and repeat, then find another niche and follow the same strategy.

Over the Christmas holidays, I gave a lot of thought to how to get my business moving up to a new level, here is my strategy:

• As a priority, develop more offline income using one of my major strengths– Social Media Consulting for small business.
• Abandon 2 niche blogs and concentrate on this blog and my new Social Media site / blog.
• Make a better selection of affiliate products to promote for my 2 niches.
• Narrow the focus of this blog.
• Increase my online promotion activity for my network marketing business.
• Improve my time management.
• Take consistent action every day.
• Provide value in every interaction with clients, customers and those whose paths I cross.

In a nutshell, I think the way to go is to spend a bit of time finding that niche and what value you can provide to it, then apply yourself 100% to that and forget dabbling with all the other peripheral stuff like network marketing, coaching, copywriting, website design, and trying to promote too many incompatible products or services – all traps I have fallen into.  There is nothing wrong with any of those on their own, but to be successful, I believe we can only afford to focus on one or two major activities.

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That’s it, hope it helps people understand four things:

• There is no “Magic Bullet”.
• Focus and consistent, persistent action are essential ingredients for success.
• Perseverance and not giving up are admirable and important but so is recognising what is not working.
• In the real world, very few people find instant success – in any field.

Wishing you success in all your endeavours.

Michael Stelzner’s excellent social media blog, Social Media Examiner, has published the top 10 blogs in his third annual social media blog contest. The full list with links to all ten blogs is published in this post on Social Media Examiner.

It is an impressive list, I was already following some of them, others are new to me. Despite promising myself not to get distracted from getting this post published, I spent a couple of fascinating hours visiting all 10 blogs today. They are all good, all subtly or in a few cases, blatantly, different and all have good content.

In a post on 3 January “Will women dominate Social Media” while looking at the readership profile of other successful blogs, I noticed how the gender mix of most social media blogs is heavily biased towards women visitors. I wondered if it would be the same with Social Media Examiners top 10. Sure enough it is, only 1 blog, Marketing Tech Blog at #8 has a higher than average male readership. Is it because it has the word “Tech” in its name?

Before checking the audience stats on Alexa, I tried to guess which blogs would be more attractive to male readers and which to older readers. Here I was hopelessly wrong again. The one blog Hubze, which because of its dark colours and flashy design, I thought would appeal to younger, male viewers did not. It  had one of the highest over-representations of 45 to 54-year-old, primarily female visitors.

Although women made up the majority of visitors, that was not the case with the blog publishers. It seems that Heidi Cohen was the lone female publisher in the group, and interestingly, she had good support from visitors age 35 to 64 with significant appeal to the 45 to 54 group. She was one of the 3 blogs with a significant Baby Boomer following.

Very interesting.

Does this mean that us men are destined to play second fiddle in social media? Not necessarily, but it does show that women’s natural talent for networking, relationship building and caring is proving to be an advantage in the brave new world of social media.

I would highly recommend that you put these 11 blogs (including Social Media Examiner) on your lists of blogs to follow – especially if you are a male wanting to compete in an increasingly female dominated world of social media!

I would hazard a guess that next years list will have more than one female publisher.

Security tip

Observant readers will notice that I am no longer posting as “admin” which is the default user name on a new WordPress installation. It is a security weakness to use the admin user name any more than necessary and one that hackers can easily exploit.

Here are some recommended security plugins for WordPress that will help protect your blog against hackers:

WP Security Scan

WP MalWatch

WP Secure

They are all free and easy to install, search for them from your WordPress dashboard.

Wishing you success in all your endeavours.