Archives for August 2018

You may have heard of Site Rubix and asked, “What is the Site Rubix website builder about?  In this review, I will answer this question, first, a brief introduction as to what this application does, its history and a break-down of what it does today, in comparison to its early predecessor.

What Is Site Rubix and What Does It Do?

Site Rubix initially was a module-based website builder offered on the Wealthy Affiliate platform in its earlier years of existence.  The object of the application was to eliminate the need to hand code web documents (pages) which was extremely arduous and time-consuming.  It allowed users to buid a website in a modularized way, specifying height and widths of the major elements in a website, such as header, sidebars, content areas and footer.

Today, Site Rubix is completely different and bears no resemblence to its predecessor.  The modern version is packed with awesome, highly valuable add-ons.  While the original object of the application is still the same, that being a time-saver for serious folks running online businesses, this is far improved over the early version, with all the current extras!

A Short History of Site Rubix

My experience with the early application was that, though it did save the valuable time it took to build out a web page by hand, it was very limited in effects and somewhat buggy.  Styling was also limited.  My best description of the results was the sacrifice of unlimited possibilities that came with hand coding for results that were acceptable in a much timlier fashion.  I successfully built a fair-looking website with it, which I later went back to handcoding anyway, since the quality doing it the old way was much nicer, and I simply was not happy with the results gotten from Site Rubix at the time.

When Site Rubix phased out, it was very soon replaced with what was known as WordPress Express.  Again, I was not sold on the WordPress availability of themes available at the time, but nonetheless, finally replaced handcoding to using this new feature.  It only got better over time, both in updates and improvements at Wealthy Affiliate and WordPress.

WordPress Express phased out in name, but the application stuck.  Today, the way websites are created on Wealthy Affiliate bear little difference than what they were six years ago, but have vastly improved, as already noted.  Once again, Site Rubix would reappear as the phoenix.  To build a core website now, using the application takes about 30 seconds!

Content creation for the website still takes work and to build out the site with content takes patience and diligence.

More Than a Website Builder – Site Management

For most if its existence, Wealthy Affiliate has offered web hosting for its members, offered free of charge.  These details will be covered in another review.  With this in mind though, one of the first developments came the added software used for various requirements in website maintenance and security.  In its basics, this included website and domain lists, password creation and other basics.

A major development to Site Management came with the introduction of SiteHealth.  This application analyzes the condition of any website on Wealthy Affiliate servers and reports what it finds on each website.  It also offers suggestions on what needs to be done to correct the flaws it finds.  This of course, is fortified by the massive library of tutorials and training modules found on the Platform and through community support.  Proper maintenace is also stressed and taught in the courses, most notably Jay Magistudio’s weekly Live Video Classes which also sports a sizable library with such sourcess in it!

Of the more recent upgrades, SiteSSL and SiteProtect, have proven their value with site security offered freely to all premium members – something that doesn’t come free on other hosting sites such as HostGator and NameCheap.  There are hundreds of thousands of websites on Wealthy Affiliate servers protected by SSL (HTTPS,) making Wealthy Affiliate one of the safest places to host websites!  SiteProtect is Wealthy Affiliate’s expanded version of spam and malware protection software, also offered freely to all premium members.  This application far exceeds and is far more effective than the famous free WordPress plugins, such as Akismet and others.

SiteSpeed is yet another notable addition to this lineup.  Sitespeed compresses image files enabling websites to load faster than in any other setting.  There is much more  to be said of Site Management, but these are the most notable.

More Than a Website Builder – Reading & Writing

There are three notable applications incorporated into Site Management that aid in content creation.  These include SiteContent, SiteComments and SiteFeedback

SiteContent does everything one could easily do right in the WordPress back office of a website.  Instead of going there to do the work, members use SiteContent because it offers templates, records the number of words per article and how many articles have been written.  These items, which are not available in the WordPress back office, are a spin-off of features found on the earlier article directories that used to be found in great abundance on the Internet.  In fact, the owners still maintain their article directory, StreetArticles, which like the others, has been in the decline due to changes in search engine algorithm.  Albeit, the features are highly useful and are found here.

SiteComments is a member-friendly application which allows a Pay-It-Forward approach to exchanging comments.  The basic stipulations for this exchange is,the request for comments on one’s website following the careful reading of the article and a returned favour wherein the beneficiary does the same for at least two other members and their websites.  This has been a win-win propasition for a number of years which helps one another achieve valuable search engine ranking and SEO, under the fact that “Content Is King.”

SiteFeedback is a Pay-It-Forward system that uses WA Credits (WA has always had some sort of credits that could be used for incentives and can be exchanged like currency.) There are two ways one can go in this system – requesting feedback on any one of several areas on a website, and offering to take part in the Feedback system for other members.  There are requirements in length and quality of any given feedback, and does come with credit compensation.  On the other hand, requesting feedback for one’s own website costs credits.   The system is invaluable to the overall quality found on websites that have been generated at Wealthy Affiliate!

Site Support

Last, but not least is Wealthy Affiliate’s Site Support, which is a 24/7 operation that goes on at the server level, coming directly from the team that maintains the hosting servers at Wealthy Affiliate.  This team takes on everything related to server operation, websites that are on the servers and everything mentioned in this review.  Service is prompt and usually on the hour at just any time of the day or night!  This is a ticket-based request format and communications between the team and members is through Wealthy Affiliate’s Private Message (PM) system.  It is also worth noting that, unlike most hosting services available, Wealthy Affiliate does not jam its servers chock full.  All websites on the servers have current backups, which are conducted every 24 hours.  If your website goes down, the backup is immediately powerd up and no loss occurs!

Conclusion

Site Rubix is but one of the major fixtures found on the Wealthy Affiliate Platform.  This review shows the incredible detail that has gone into this massively successful operation at pricing that essentially hasn’t changed since Wealthy Affiliate was a mere keyword list site!  The same 29.99 per month amount (which totals to the yearly 359.88 can still be purchased at this price if purchased as a yearly subscription.  This is a sizable savings over the current $47 monthly subscription rate now in force.  For more information about Wealthy Affiliate and its community, Platform, tools and services, please consult my main Wealthy Affiliate Review.  From there you can either check out other related articles or go straight to Wealthy Affiliate itself for further information.  Looking forward to seeing YOU inside!

text

It’s in the Training, the Community and the Mindset.  Is there any training online that you can get that will indeed teach you what it takes to be successful, to be able to make a positive mark in humanity and truly make a living?  Is there a community out there that makes up a herd going in the right direction?  Does a mindset exist that goes outside the box of consumerism and employment? YES, there is. Wealthy Affiliate is the place!

But, can you really make money at Wealthy Affiliate?

Getting Your Business Rolling

In all of the courses presented at Wealthy Affiliate, not to mention the very mind set of the community as a whole, the humming of busy activity found on the Platform every day, the live classes held every Friday night, the same goes – Get up, get going and get your show on the road.

The first thing Wealthy Affiliate teaches is taking action and putting away the things that cause distraction.  You are taught how to be responsible through example and word at Wealthy Affiliate.  Your passions are no longer just a hobby, they’re your business.  Choose your best one and go with it!  This is called a niche.  If this is too broad, what you have is an industry.  You are taught how to break this down until you finally reach a manageable sector of your chosen topic.  You can always expand on this later.  A niche website can easily be converted to an authority website!

Let’s go!

Building Your Website

Wealthy Affiliate, from the start, has attempted to take the website-building out of the way and making way for content creation – where the money is made!  At a time, when many were still hand-coding their websites (an extremely time-consuming process or expensive if you had someone qualified do that for you, Kyle & Carson came up with a website builder that came with the major elements of a website modularization.

The Header, the content area, the sidebar and the footer, and other elements.  With these elements you built a website in about a half-hour’s time and decorated it.  Then you added the content to it.  Having used this website builder myself, I never built one with it with more than one page, but it could have been possible, and in fact probably was, because you could do that anyway hand-coding.

Today, with WordPress and an outstanding suite of tools that exists at Wealthy Affiliate today, you can have your core website up in seconds!

This is the ultimate in taking time consumption away from the mechanics of website-building, at its best!

Keywords, Content and SEO

We get down to the nitty-gritty – populating that website with content that is aesthetic, and content that, not only makes sense, but is professional, looks like any well-crafted magazine and a website that the search engines love!

Wealthy Affiliate teaches you how to work with keywords, what to do, what not to do and to do your keywords just as the search engines would like to see them.  You learn what works, what doesn’t and you will recognize that you’re at an advantage because most affiliate marketers out there are still in the dark ages whilst you are on your way to MARS!

The SEO spectrum is seriously misunderstood by affiliate marketers who are still trying to follow advice from the still, ever present, mixed-up and contradictory information out there that comes from out-dated methods that used to work but no longer do.  At Wealthy Affiliate, with its instruction and community, all influence by two owners and many other high-standing highly successful members who know what they are doing and are always on the front-lines of web technology!

With Wealthy Affiliate to stand upon, you come out on top.  The many, many success stories that have come out of Wealthy Affiliate is never-testimony of Wealthy Affiliate’s legacy in the online marketing world!

Social Media and Knowing Your Audience

The owners know social media and audiences.  How do you learn about your audience? What makes people tick? How do you approach your referrals and make them feel welcome and not fish on a baited hook?

Unlike most online marketers out there today, you learn the value of paying-it-forward.  What is that?

You lay it all out on the table.  You are honest with your audience and you give them everything they need to succeed themselves.  You know that in the wake of success, you must be a servant.  The term, serve is not a cuss word and something to frown upon. You take the time to see to the best of your audience’s experience.  This is what made Google into the powerhouse that it is today.  This is why Amazon is the empire that it is today.  This is why Wealthy Affiliate and it’s community is world-renowned as it is today!

You won’t use social media, like Facebook like most people do.  Instead, places like this become a tool to you and a platform where you show others something ideally legitimate.  It’s not about stupid videos, joking and endless entertainment that goes on in a place like Facebook, it’s a place where you can also teach.  This is paying it forward.  This is one of the ways you learn how to lay it all out.  There are no guarded secrets here.  That’s a thing that belongs in the Middle Ages!

Scaling Success with an Entrepreneurial Mind Set

Above all, you will enter the realms of the entrepreneur’s mind.  Wealthy Affiliate is all about entrepreneurship at its core.  Most places you go to learn, the entrepreneurs that started the school are out of sight and out of your mind.  You don’t ever know they exist.  You never see them.

Not so at Wealthy Affiliate.  Kyle & Carson and literallythousands of highly successful Internet marketers fill the halls of Wealthy Affiliate.  Entrepreneurship is the very essence of what you find at Wealthy Affiliate.  Not only do you see this, you are encouraged to take on this mind set.  It is intended that you do.  You, yourself, are encouraged to pass this on.  It’s what captivates the new comers.  It’s what gains trust from your audience and customers.

This mindset is the success-scaling element that makes ordinary people go above the ranks, out of the box of the ordiary and into realms above and beyond.  The proof is in the pudding!

Conclusion

The Proof is in the success stories from Wealthy Affiliate.  Join the Starter Membership yourself.  Go inside and the very first thing you see in front of you is the newsfeed in front of you.  Scroll down until you find the latest set of notifications under a heading called, Success Is Happening at Wealthy Affiliate.  Whilst you are at it, check out this newsfeed.  It’s literally filled with things you never thought possible.  There are too many items on there to list.  You just have to see for yourself!

See my  Wealthy Affiliate Review.  at the bottom is my affiliate link.  I don’t have it here because the search engines don’t like to see websites with plastered with affiliate links.  Would you have known this?  Probably not.  Most people don’t know and it’s something that is taught at Wealthy Affiliate.  I might make this a challenge to you but instead, I invite you to do what I ask.  It might very well change your life.  Click here or the banner just below.  You will be glad you did.  Look for those success stories.  They’re there.  They’re always there and are always current.

Thanks for reading!

Daniel Euergetes

 

 

 

 

The Internet has been said to be a house of smoke and mirrors.  This is very true, but you can dissipate the smoke and not look into mirrors with a little bit of knowledge.

Are you willing to spend a few minutes on this post? It entails watching a video or two and the rest is a bit of reading and veiwing some images.  The material I am about to show you here is from actual campaigns that were run a few years ago.  I did reviews on them and these are on this website.  I’m going to show you the most vital argument you can win anytime! How can you tell you are being scammed?

Let me show you…

Yes, You Can!

There’s no doubt that, when armed with the right knowledge, you certainly can spot bad offers before you even see the product or pull out your wallet. Let’s take a quick look at a now-defunct digital online product called EZ Cash Creator. The video is a short clip of one of the testimonials in this product’s sales video.  It does not constitute the entirety of the original video, just a clip from it.

What did you think about this testimonial?  Did you find it somewhat convincing?  If you were veiwing this in its context, might you have taken this as something to be trusted?  Now, look at the following image…

That’s right.  There’s the same clown you saw in the video and guess what?  The video you saw was a fake testimonial  It, along with a few others, were actually used in the marketing campaign for this product.

Now, take a look at this…

This was the domain name used for the product.  These snakes made so much money on this that the domain has become incredibly expensive!  Like literally millions of other campaigns like this, these pirates created it, put it out there through an affiliate network out of China (Clicksure,) ran the promotion and with an army of affiliates, made a killing, duping everybody who were fooled by its advertising.  When they made the money, they took it down. This takes us to the next point…

How Unscrupulous Marketers Draw You In

The advertising industry knows every trick in the book, down to an exact science.  This is beyond the scope of this little article, but in a nutshell, effective marketing is designed to bypass your intellect, your cognative thinking mind, and enter in through your emotions.  This constitutes a whole array of logical fallacies that are effectively used to manipulate people through sales psychology.

You get this from all directions, from the media and it all seems so innocent and harmless.  The most common ploy used is the appeal to emotion, a logical fallacy.

My point is, the advertisement is the first place to look, with a critical mind, because this is the front line of what takes you in. Note that there is always the element of an appeal to emotion is the most basic of human communication, however, it can be used against you without your knowledge and stick you with a scam!  The next video is 12 minutes long.  I need you to watch it and then let’s take it apart.  This video was quite convicing and has pulled in millions in revenue for the scam that it was!

The following is from another online scan entitled, Affiliate Millionaire Club.  This was an offer hosted by Clicksure (see above.)  The product has since been discontinued and is now being offered again with improved, advertising and some of the more obvious tactics removed.  The lies, fake testimonials (including one from the actor shown above) and obscurities about the actual product stil exist.

Here’s what to look for…

Tell-Tale Signs Something Is Not Right

Rather than take the time to upload the current sales video and have it processed, I’m going to use the original one here.  This will save me time and I will provide screenshots of the current version in this section.

Flaunting of Wealth

Usually, the first thing that comes down is the fantastic wealth of the supposed owner of this product.  the person might be wealthy, but this wealth didn’t come from the product being advertised but the sales from the scam products themselves.  Flaunting of wealth, be it expensive cars, mansions, flashing of money, etc as a pervading theme in the advertising is a dead-sure giveaway that you should leave the page!

Hollywood-Style Presentation

You may seem well at home with this, but in an advertisement for a supposedly legitimate product, this is a bad sign.  Hollywood knows how to get to the audience through emotion.  It’s what makes the movie industry so massive.  The dramatic music and hyped-up talk in these video ads are geared to slide on past your intellect.  The fake testimonials present, not only actors, but poor acting at best!

You Don’t Get to See the Product

Pay attention to this!  Showing the product itself appeals to the intellect.  This is not the objective of the campaign, so that’s left out.  What you get is the Sizzle, not the steak! In both versions of Affiliate Millionaire Club, all is known is that you get an affiliate website already up and running. In reality, you get website-building software that creates cookie-cutter websites that the search engines hate. You get bare minimum instructions on how to do this, and no – you pay $47 for this rubbish and where’s the $1,200-per-day income you’re supposed to be getting? It’s not there. The Internet is teeming with negative reviews and complaints and there’s good reason why you are not shown the product nor how it works!

Fantastic Claims

Consider the following screenshots from the newer sales video…

In v. 02 of this product, the advertising does what the previous didn’t – It claims to have set up an affiliate website already for you, even as you are watching the video!  Throughout the video, it goes back to the “stats” of that website to show you what you are already making within the time of the video and then proposes the question, “If you’ve already made this much, imagine what it will be in 24 hour’s time!” Fantastic claims in an advertisement are as divers as the products themselves. Consider the next few images as pictures are worth a thousand words…

Incoming Wealth Is Instant!

Most people know this as a Get-Rich-Quck offer.  This is fake but it is astounding how many people fall for this! No ideal situation comes from low cost, free, or little effort put into them!  Watch out for the glitter, glamour, money falling out of the sky or bursting out of the computer monitor.  It doesn’t happen!

Little/No Work On Your Part, We Do It All for You!

When it comes to effort being put into something, most people tend to shrink from the work involved, It goes without saying that the proposal that you won’t have to lift a finger, or at best, check your stats or click your mouse two or three times, and that the work has/will be done for you, is meant to pull you in on these premises. Anything worthwhile requires work and expense.  This goes for a business, and even more so!

But Wait!

You’ve seen this in infomercials.  You get offered two for the price of one for the piece of junk you are looking at. Similarly, when you go to leave the page, you may get a Wait, Don’t Go! message. There are many varieties of this message but they all do the same thing – offer the product at a reduced price, sometimes multiple times, and even downsell the product to FREE!

They want to hook you.  If you see this, they’re not done making money off you with what’s known as upsells.  Be careful!

What to Look For in Legitimate Advertising

Certainly, the items I have gone over above will not be present in the advertising of something that is legitimate.  Products that have real value and do what they’re intended do not need to resort to ploys shown above. There will be no scenes of flashing money or houses or cars, no exotic beaches, no fantastic claims nor promises that you will become rich immediately.

The owners of such a product or service wants you to know what it is and what it does and this is what prevails throughout the message.  The testimonials (if any) can be readily verified.  What you see in the ad, is what you get, no more, no less. The product has an excellent track record and can be verified as well.  The owner(s) are real and well-known and often respected.  This too is readlily verifiable.

You are told what to expect, and this almost always includes the fact that you will need to do your part.  No product, especially training or learning programs, products or services will do you any good if you don’t do the work and put into action what you’ve learnt.

There are definitely real, genuine and wholesome opportunities online but these are vastly outnumbered by the fraudulent ones!

My Final Thoughts…

As an honest affiliate marketer, my reputation comes first.  There are many of us around, but we are out-numbered by many, many, many more who stumble over themselves to promote the likes of programs, products, services and courses that resort to the sinister tactics shown above. Affiliate marketing is in fact, an honest and a very legitimate business opportunity to get into. However great care on your part is needed to find the excellent opportunities out there.

People are not fish. Customers are not there to be baited and then caught. They are human beings, to be treated with respect and dignity. The top products and services are there, not to take customers to the cleaners, but to provide value and to serve their needs. I am currently working on an extensive multi-part Tutorial on avoiding scams on the Internet. This Article is but a small version of that.

I have an avid passion for affiliate marketing and have found it to be the ultimate business model which is versatile and relatively easy to start. It is also lucrative. This website is dedicated to a single learning opportunity which I promote on here. Please click the banner below to be taken to my Wealthy Affiliate Review…

Over the years, the life and business of the entrepreneur has, not only been a secret, but a highly-guarded secret. Every effort has been made to keep the masses out-of-the-know in matters of politics, government and big business.  Today the Internet, though it too is a house of smoke and mirrors, the veil has been lifted on these issues and some entrepreneurs are willing to train the aspiring.  What is entrepreneur mentality and can we really learn how to be one?

Employee and Entrepreneur Mentality Are in Opposite Corners

The entrepreneur starts his day with work in mind.  The employee starts his waiting for that time to quit for the day.  The entrepreneur seeks challenges and delves into them.  The employee seeks security and stays inside.

These are but two of many opposing viewpoints held between the entrepreneur and the employee.  There are many more known differences. Much of what develops the mentality of a person is experience, influence and education.  The son of an entrepreneur is likely to become one himself because that’s the environment in which he was raised, though this doesn’t always happen.  Though it is highly likely, due to employee mentality and consumerism being so common and widespread, that most employees never consider the life of an entrepreneur nor what’s involved, some do become exposed to entrepreneurship, mainly because of the Internet.

Employee mentality is far more common because there are vastly way more employees than there are entrepreneurs, and peer/group pressure acts as a wall in itself.  Let’s take a look at a few items of interest here…

Creativity

Passion and Interest

You may have been fortunate enough to have taken your passions seriously and persued your interests at an early age in spite of the tremendous pressures all around you to be just anothe average Joe.  Your thing may have appeared wierd, corny, downright stupid to those around you, but you are interested in it and you have a driving passion for it.  Perhaps you get mocked and people laugh at you.  Naysayers abound, telling you that you can’t do it!  You’ve proved them wrong because you believe it can be done!  You love what you are passionate for and this is what you desire to spend your time, your pastime and even your leisure time!  You may even become a recluse, even a bit mentally-challenged, but the thing you are passionate for is your life and purpose.  You won’t let anybody take that away from you!

Vision

Being highly successful requires the ability to look outside the box.  Mediocrity won’t help you here nor will doing what everybody else is doing.  Appearance doesn’t fool you and you can see things as they really are.  As can happen, the wrong kind of education, superiors, family, friends, and other important people and entities can strip you of your creativity.  However, you resist the temptation to succomb to conformity.  Vision and creativity is different than knowledge and empirical knowledge, but these work hand-in-hand, the vehicle that takes you to unlimited heights, often leaving your competitors in the dust. Visionaries are the entrepreneurs behind the businesses that become a legacy.

Learning

You know the saying, “Fools despise wisdom.”  You are well aware of the importance education has in the life of an entrepreneur and that learning never stops.  Nothing is permanent and everything requires updating and improvement.  This comes from trial and error, but it also comes from calculated risk-taking.  If something doesn’t work, you try again and again and again until you rule out what does not work. This is a learning process.  Your mind is the most important instrument that you use, so you stay healthy, excercise and eat right.  It is likely you don’t fill your mind with the kind of stuff that offers little or no value.  You don’t want that to keep you from moving forward.

Decision-Making

No doubt about it here – you are in charge and what you say goes.  Of course, you do have a team behind you to help with the brainstorming.  You know that knowledge is the key to making the right decisions and you listen to the advice of others knowing that more heads are better than one and more likely will leave no stone upturned.  However, when all is said and done, you know how best to organize your business and you have the final say.  You know that if you are not good at decision-making, you won’t get very far as others will quickly walk all over you!

Parameters

Nobody dictates how you run your business except perhaps government and legislation, but you run a tight ship and are law=abiding, so there’s no problem here.  You can break the rules that is, the rules of industry, for this is what puts you at the top.  It’s only people like yourself who are not afraid to go beyond the parameters of what everybody else does and not afraid to be called insane or a nut because you have vision and can see your way through it.  You can afford to step away from your work but you are also disciplined and too eager to not stop.  If you lack in critical areas in what you do, you outsource that and still get the job done in fact, you start businesses and get them running.  From here on, you have commissioned an executive panel that will take the business where it is supposed to go so you can create new business.  With enough thrust, your parameters could extend on out to Mars!

Time and Effort

Security

You depend on traversing the unknown.  Unlike most employees, the comfort zone is the thrill of creating from nothing, exploration and discovery.  You blaze your own trail and your borders are virtually non-existant.  Outside of advisors, mentors and co-partners, every day is an adventure as you create your own security.  You are not alone however, because you have dedicated teams to back you.

Time

You would make every minute count in your quest to formulate, plan, build, start up, run and maintain your business.  Unlike most employees who, more likely than not, cherish the time they have off from their jobs.  Your business is your passion and you love what you do, so you watch the clock, not for the quitting time, but for the starting time.  It’s what you get out of bed every morning for.  Unlike the employee, you don’t merely work like the cog in a machine, as an entrepreneur, you make sure every cog is in its place, oiled and working as good as it can.  You own the machine and it is self-sufficient.

Quota

As an entrepreneur, you don’t worry about meeting quotas, certainly not the same ways employees do.  The quotas employees are expected to meet are set by companies they work for.  It’s not so much to do with quotas themselves but superiors imposing them.  A better term for production by entrepreneurs would be the goal.  Entrepreneurs must set and achieve goals to get things done, or have them done. Goal-setting of course, is beneficial to everyone.  You would depend greatly upon setting and achieving goals, both short and long-term.  Whilst the business plan is the framework in a proposed business, goals make up all of the roughing-in and finish work.  Then, goals are an important part of running and maintaining the business as well!

Conclusion

To contrast what I’ve written in this article to that of an employee, I have written a sister article entitled, What Is Employee Mentality?  This will probably help you come to a clearer understanding of entrepreneur mentality as you see both sides.  The format and outline of both articles are very similar, producing the contrasts on the points made above.

Note that often, employee mentality goes hand in hand with consumer and entitlement mentalities.  All these things are taught and encouraged by society itself and is learnt behaviour.  This is not a one-size-fits-all situation.  Each person is unique and may have varying degrees of each mentality, and one or more, not at all.

Today, more than ever, it is very possible to acquire the attributes that make up entrepreneur mentality.  There isn’t any one of the things discussed above that you couldn’t acquire into your mind if you have average intelligence.  The challenges of doing so does not rest with the education in learning them but do you the willpower, tenacity and determination to not only learn and master them, but to implement them into your life?

Aspiring entrepreneurs have to use what they have at their disposal (working in a sales department somewhere to learn how to sell for example) to get the experience.  However, I have an opportunity for you where you do not even have to know how to sell, though some of the required concepts are taught.  Your learning environment will be in an entrepreneur setting and the business model, affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is, like any other new adventure – it can be intimidating at first, but with the right support and educational environment, you will overcome this normal issue.  Wealthy Affiliate is well-known to be the very best online business training platform where you will get several layers of support, a million like-minded member-strong community and all of the education and tools you need to start and run an affiliate marketing business.  Note that this is NOT multi-level marketing by any means!  You actually work with businesses that provide products and services that you have high interest and are passionate about.  You will be promoting for them.  You will not be selling though you will be pre-selling.  Your job is to align the prospective customer with the business whose affiliate program you have chosen.

If this sounds good to you, please check out my Wealthy Affiliate Review.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article!

 

Have you ever given any thought as to why the noun, “consumer” even exists to the extent that it does? We have consumer reports, conumer products, conumer electronics, consumer demand, Consumer Magazine, Consumer Cellular, Consumer Reports, the Consumer Protection Agency, consumer trends, consumer price index … and on, and on, and on…

What we have, is a class of society.  However everybody consumes, so what is the definition of a consumer?  Why is there such a astronomical play on this word?  Let’s start with a simple definition:

Here’s the Economic Definition:

There’s no question about it.  Dictionaries define the term as, “A person or thing that eats or uses something.” Okay, so we are all consumers.  Not so fast!  There’s a second definition which is very similar to the first (which in some cases, is considered secondary.) Yes, biologically, everything that has ever lived, and even everything set in the universe consumes.  Therefore everything is a consumer, practially no matter what it is!

As early as the 15th century, the notion of a conumer developed as a person who squanders or destroyes.  By 1745, this rather negative view became more economic: the conumer is someone who does not produce and a producer is someone who does not consume.  We can see that there’s a definite second definition for consumer.

In the 21st century in developed nations, the original meaning has been virtually lost and is now denotes a person’s position in the society in which he lives.

Why Is There Such Thing as a Consumer?

Though most people wouldn’t shake a stick at it, I find the term a little disquieting.  I tend to look at the term in its original meaning.  I squirm a little when someone calls me a consumer.  Maybe this has to do with what I’ve learnt about it.  There’s a sense of inferiority in the designation.  For example, I visited a health and medical website.  I was a little dismayed when I in the Q&A section of the site.  It poses a commonly-asked question, and provides two separate pages:

• One page, entitled, Consumer Version answers the question in a two short sentences a third grader could understand.
• The other, entitled, Professional Version, covered most of the page in scientific, using complicated sentence structure.

Why not say, Non-Professional Version? It perturbed me and I left the site.  Maybe not the best example, but in many ways, economically and even in mindset, consumers are thought of as dumb and even stupid.  Generally there is yet another item I had not added to the list above, and that is, consumer grade.  That’s right.  Non-consumer grade products are built to last, are highly serviceable and the highest quality.  Consumer drive around in tin cans.  Electronic equipment, though designed well, literally turn to dust in a few years. There is a reason for this.  In two words, planned obsolescence.  Yes, consumer goods are made to wear out after specified use or duration.  It’s researched and engineered into products as much as the functionality of them! I could go on. I will be revisiting this again throughout this article which I know is going to become quite long.

There has, and always will be the working class.  There will always be the poor amongst us.  The term, “consumer” was first thought to be the wasteful, destructive person.  Today, this very concept has been replaced by economists to be that of consumer-based societies in more of an agricultural sense.  Consumers have their place in the scheme of economic reality.  However as such, consumerism is greatly encouraged through mind manipulation overtly without peoples’ knowledge.  This is intended and is greatly why the consumer exists today.  Moreover, it’s not the masses being wasteful, but four major industries that promote it.  There will be more on these four below.

The Consumer Is the Modern-Day Peasant

This may be a little off the wall, but kingdoms had their peasants and serfs.  These people lived their lives in desperation and every generation unfortunate to be in this position endured the same hardships their predecessors went through.  They were sucked dry, often forcefully by over-taxation and other whims.  They were the low class of socieity and in the minds of the aristocrats of the day, to be amongst these folks was unthinkable and vulgar.

There’s no doubt the modern consumer in most developed nations have it much better off than the earlier peasants, but some of the characteristics still faintly exist.  Some characteristics between the peasant and today’s consumer are strikingly similar.  One major point here is that, like the peasant, the slave, and serf of days gone by, the consumer is by far, the vast percentage of the population.  Consumers do essentially what their counterparts did – they are the workers, the segment that makes up the cow to be milked.  A little brunt, but true.

Today, the conumer in many modern nations have it far better than the counterpart.  There’s far more opportunity, more education, far better health, living, just everything one could imagine. This of course provides a contrast.

Adult Consumers Beget Little Consumers

The consumer has a definite role to play and the development of the economical consumer has slipped under the noses of most of the masses.  Silent education continues on from generation to generation and the young are taught well.  Just the other day, I noted one of the local grocery stores, Winn-Dixie, took their marketing a step too far – they actually put child-sized shopping carts in the store!  Target is another store adding the mini carts to greet the little ones coming in with their parents.  Anti-consumer activists have been heavy on the cases of these outlets and both of these have removed the carts.

Doing this has been thought of as clever on the part of the stores that introduced them and many thought they were cute, and perhaps it is, but the practical instruction is there – as consumers, you do whaat you are supposed to be doing as one – do what the big consumers do.

There are untold amounts of driving forces that infiltrate the minds of almost every child.  It is the default.  It’s the protocol.  Children of consumers are necessarily to be taught how to become consumers, the earliest the better.

Consumerism Is Encouraged

In many ways similar to ancient, medieval and into the age of discovery, the role of the common folk is laid out. It’s all hidden in plain sight, and an example I can think of is in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.   George Bush’s announcements, in spite of enemy use of commercial passenter planes as bombs, “If you don’t shop, they [the terrorists] have won […] this is what the terrorists want.” The president goes on to encourage Americans to get on those planes, travel, go to work, shop and be happy.

In the face of economic hard times when the attacks occurred, the noted historian Andrew Bacevich suggests that the President was attempting to remove the attention drawn by his irresponsible actions by encouraging Americans to not stop being consumers and dig into what they are supposed to do – earn income, engage in uncontrolled financial irresponsibility. You (the American people) do your job and let us take care of the problems for you.

Consumers exist to move the economy.  As in ages past, in spite of happier, healthier economies today, another reality strikingly resembles those of earlier civilizations – the masses exist to get by on a tiny fraction of the total wealth whilst the tiny percentage that make up the super-rich, collect more than the lion’s share of the wealth generated by the common folk.

In today’s terms, especially in the United States, it is said that 10% (and probably much less) of the total population control 90% of all the wealth and the vast majority (90% or more) live on the remaining 10% of the wealth.  Due to the advances in science and technology, the world’s population enjoys a far better life (in most places) than did our ancestors however, the inequality of wealth distribution remains a stark reality.

Important People in Our Lives

From the time we are born, we have always had those important folks in our lives, starting with our parents and on up, even to the President of the United States (or any other national leadership.)  It has been estimated that those that do not have consumer mindset is about 4%.  The entire world population is about 7.2 billion.  About 15,000 of those are millionaires (a high percentage of these being entrepreneurs,) and less than 2000 are billionaires.  This comes up to about 0.02%.  Of course there are many aspiring entrepreneurs who have entrepreneur role-models in their lives.

In every social class, from that of the working poor to the upper middle class, and in some instances, above this, employment is the socially-acceptable means to earn a living through wages.  Today we are not so much locked into these classes as much as how traditionalism keeps us in them.  It is true, the idea of business becomes more prevalent in the upper classes, but opportunity affords itself to every class these days.

Dad worked and Mom kept house, but after awhile, as the economy became more of a challenge and the cost of living skyrocketed, it became necessary for both parents to go out and work.  The so-called orbital family model dissolved.

From the time w are very young, we see this activity and almost everyone we have contact with, be it our teachers in schools, our close immediate relatives and our friends, even our religious affiliations teach both, by example and through lessons that it is the way of life to learn how to work, get a good education, land a deceent career in a chosen profession or employment.  Buy a house, get a car, furnish the house with the usual consumer goods, raise a family, and then see the kids off to school – where they are systematically taught to repeat the exact same process.

In our day, higher education is still extremely popular though now only a small percentage ever achieve from the regular education which they paid a fortune for instead, wind up in jobs, debt up to their their necks, one or two paychecks away from ruin and rare occasions to come up for air.

The same idea of getting a good education and then landing that dream job persists today and unfortunately, there’s no steak being sold to them, just the sizzle!

People Are Taught to Be Consumers

In, or around, 1938, Elmer Wheeler came up with one of his famous selling one-liners, “Sell the sizzle, not the steak.” His selling techniques took the advertising industry by storm and the techniques can still be seen all around us in advertising today.  A whole new breed of of salesmen came into being, making use of human psychology and emotion, a power that changed the population, and made it far more susceptible to the uncanny powers of suggestion.

Consumer Seduction in a Nutshell…

Better known as customer seduction, Elmer Wheeler’s deductions developed into a science we know today as the magic of deploying the deliberate use of a number of logical fallacies, twisted like a lemon rind to get every bit of tang out possible.  Today, very often, in advertising, there isn’t even any need to include the steak, but the sizzle only.  customer emotion does the rest, and when driven by emotion, folks do not take the time, especially when encouraged to spend impulsively, to think first before committing to an offer.

Today, the scence of advertising is so developed that the right messages are flashed before avid television watchers who are literally hypnotized (takes focus and relaxation to cause this) by the programming they have been watching and, with approximately 22.5 minutes of commercial advertising per viewing hour,  there isn’t any wonder why the entire population has been effectively seduced and dumbed-down.  This phenomenon is carefully and deliberately engineered by the producers and advertizers.  There is far more truth to this than most people will admit or even know is happening right in fromt of them!  Most of the advertizing, emotionally inert, as is with the feature programming itself, has made the average consumer what he is today.  This is a known fact and is also mind control.

It gets worse…

Four Major Industries form an  Alliance

There are five industries that have teamed up to make a massive killing off the consumer population, and I say the conumer population because the tactics used by these industries do not fool the wealthy, many of which have taken the time to learn about the tactics these industries, in alliance with each other, carry out.  These industries are:

• Advertising industry
• Media
• Merchants
• Banks

The advertising industry has the scientific knowhow to push your buttons and pry at your emotions.  Consumers are shown products, and the procedure is to get them to buy through your emotions and not your cognative mind.  In other words, they don’t want you to think – and they succeed.

The media takes the advertising and performs strategic placements of products in commercials, television and theatrical productions, and pay celebrities big money to achieve the emotional pull you experience, usually without your knowledge! Remember how hypnosis works??  Why you see the can of coke, the Harley-Davidson, the Audi, and so many other familiar products, is not an accident by any means.  Their job is to put products in the face of consumers and it’s so bad that you can’t get away from it coming at you from every direction!

These first two industries lay siege against your emotion, common sense and intellect.  They’re not done!

They remarket products to you in many different ways.  You have peer pressure, computer cookies (very good reason to have AdBlock and other advertising killers on your browser and do NOT turn them off!) and any number of other ways to implement what is called retargeting technology. The concept here is simple – repetition.  The nasty thing about this that you visit merchant’s websites and this results in the transferring of a cookie about the product you were interested in.  Without an ad blocking device installed, you get ad banners on websites you visit that have no connection to the product you are now seeing again!

This is an important formula:  Attention > Interest > Desire > Action.  This is self explanitory.

The merchant’s role is very simple.  They come up with more junk for the advertising and media industries to take and process.  They also create ploys, especially in brick-and-mortar stores with attention getters, eye-level to sellers, end caps displaying top products in more than one place, and impulse-buying goodies at the cash registers.  Maybe there’s not as many lines open as you might like!  It’s a game to break your will power literally everywhere you go!.  Notice the classic Converse sneakers have ome back out?  What about the As Seen on TV products that are basically junk?  it’s no accident!

The final industry that binds it all together?  The banks!  These work in coalition with the other industries and they do go after the consumer as well!  Consumer credit is legal robbery.  They don’t want you to be financially literate.  Can you think of ever being taught how to manage money in school?  Conspiratorial as this may sound, that too is no accident.  Aside from learning how to count money when you are very young to balancing a budget if you’ve decided to go to a business school, it’s rarely seen!

I have shown you how badly things get stacked up against you and why American consumers are known as materialistic.  Now, let’s begin to close here with one final point I’d like to cover, and then some final thoughts…

Is Being a Consumer a Bad Thing?

I would say not.  Albeit the big four above, for a number of decades now, first independant of each other and then finally creating an alliance with each other, systematically turn the average consumers into financial zombies.  Please do not take offense at this because it’s siege against you from all sides.  It’s legal robbery.  Most consumers have fallen prey and are hopelessly locked up in debt.

The evil consumerism isn’t the consumer.  It’s the coalition described above.  I hope, from this two-part series, have been able to help you see the light and perhaps you’re already aware of some of this stuff.  Maybe it comes as a surprise to you.  You are not alone!

I Don’t Like Being A Consumer.  What Do I Do?

Your greatest alibi is knowledge.  Nobody says you have to be a consumer and you can change this by first, changing your mindset, removing old habits and replacing them with new ones.  I wish I could talk about consumer credit and how damaging that is.  If you knew about interest and how it works (maybe you do) you’d fall out of your chair!

Finally, there’s one more thing you can do…

At the end of the first article I mentioned an opportunity to you.  I have been a member of this community now for almost nine years.  I am very proud of this unique place.  There’s nothing like it in excellence, effectiveness, honesty, straight-forwardness, and is an absolutely family-friendly environment.  It has helped hundreds of thousands of folks like you build affiliate marketing businesses.  To learn more about affilate marketing, please visit my article that explains it.  Wealthy Affiliate is the name of the company.  My review for Wealthy Affiliate is right here.

If you want to go directly to Wealthy Affiliate, you can do that as well.

I do not endorse, in any way, the type of strategies found in the four industries above, nor do I personally like consumerism, however, there is definitely a place for the consumer in many societies around the world.  Their role is needed in societiess like ours.  I don’t see people as consumers nor even producers.  I see them as human beings with souls, not numbers nor cash repositories to steal from.  Most will never venture into entrepreneurship but you can begin today by clicking one the links above!