Jim Yaghi

Why Did I Block You On Facebook?

Did you ask me a stupid question on Facebook and found yourself shut out of my friends list forever? Check out how one Facebookie made me furious with ONE ignorant question!

Look, it’s no secret. I think Home Business owners are the biggest business amateurs. No matter how much training they can access, they will always try to find information that promises a Quick buck with the least effort possible.

Online Scams depend on their belief that such information exists.

After all, any intelligent entrepreneur can sniff them out by the magnitude of the supposed riches and minitude of effort claimed.

Business Amateurs – actually, let’s not even taint the name of entrepreneurship – amateurs are lured into one lie after another, one false hope into another false dream, while claiming to be wary of scams. When really useful training comes their way, they skip over it, dismiss it, because it doesn’t claim anything exciting.

How Big Traffic is Created

Real Web entrepreneurs will tell you that no traffic, no leads, and no sales come without very consistent, persistent effort. Look at the Alexa graphs for most popular websites, and you will notice one pattern:

Their popularity graphs are NEVER exponential.

They are linear and built over as much as five years of consistent effort.

So anyone who expects results in one month or two is sadly misguided. Even if they do get some results, they will be brief.

Early in my online career, I used to graph my website’s monthly income. Each month, it would double. But after a year, it took an unfortunate dip to ZERO. This lasted for nearly two years, before I was able to start over with a fresh outlook.

On Political Correctness

This website has taken a huge turn to filter misguided amateurs from our audience by targeting only the intelligent entrepreneur. It is the only way I could do it while remaining politically correct and without naming names.

But I’m FED up with amateurs and I hope this post will drive them away from me.

I know that you are reading my words, nodding your head, placing yourself into the better category, I also know that many of you hope I’m the one who is wrong: Perhaps your case is different, you’re so close to a breakthrough – you’ll be rich in a few months. Right?

Maybe I am wrong. Prove it. Show me someone who built a large long-term business without effort.

If you can’t prove it, then shut your wishful thinking the heck up. Take that hope inside you, and squash it. Destroy it. Throw it away.

Business requires consistency. Even online.

Daily emails, daily blog posts, new adgroups, new approaches, and frequent updating of your knowledge is critical.

Let me put it VERY bluntly, in case I haven’t been clear in my earlier posts:

Affiliate marketing, network marketing, and any kind of “get rich” Home Business model is a total SHAM unworthy of a real entrepreneur’s time, money, or effort.

The only short-cut out there, is to to destroy your hopes for getting rich from someone else’s business or system and start your own.

Stay away from any product marketer who claims that affiliate marketing is a good starting business. Stay away from anyone who teaches traffic techniques for affiliate marketing; their training is self-serving and it is in their best interest to tell you more silly ways to stake your money and time to promote their affiliate systems.

But, What if There Really is Hope for Affiliates?

Even if there was any hope of succeeding with affiliate systems, the Amateur Entrepreneur will always take only small parts of the advice that seem “fun” and need least effort. The rest is ignored and replaced with a hopeless prayer for something good to happen.

Case in point, today a marketer sent me a message on Facebook asking me how to get started with Affiliate Marketing. Some training he skimmed had him convinced that signing up to Facebook and friending lots of big name marketers was going to somehow magically bring him success to his doorstep.

Several times, he tried to chat with me over the past few months, but offered very little in entertainment or conversation.

The part of the Facebook Marketing advice he skipped over was:

be INTERESTED in the marketing leaders you befriend. We’re people too and we’re busy – what do we gain from your friendship?

If you can believe this, the guy asked me:

“How can I get started with affiliate marketing and make money quickly?”

I was furious. I blocked him from my friends list.

Had he been genuinely interested in me, he would not have asked me such a stupid question. I make daily posts to this blog and share them with my Facebook friends stating my strong viewpoint on Affiliate systems.

Clearly he had never read any of them.

I DESPISE affiliate marketing and everything it stands for. I have written extended blog posts to justify my position and have been explicit about my stand on it.

Yet this Facebookie never read my posts, never left a comment, never asked a relaetd question, or shared anything I’ve posted. Why should we remain friends?

How about you.

How many marketing leaders are on your Facebook friends list?

Do you ignore what they share and only contact them when you want free advice about your own challenges? Or do you take genuine interest in the advice they share freely on their websites and status updates and engage them in their preferred mediums?

Please don’t be an amateur.

You are free to disagree with my point of view on Affiliate marketing, but if you really want our Facebook relationship to be mutually beneficial, stand up to the challenge:

Read what I share.

Write a Blog response to what you disagree with.

Leave me comments and engage me in insightful conversation.

Talk to me about things I am interested in. Only then, can we stay friends.

~jim

P.S. If you are new here and want to see a better way to start a business online that doesn’t use the crude affiliate model, get involved in the YaghiLabs Internet Business Academy here:

http://jimyaghi.com/ylacademy

Here's one reader's opinion - Do you agree?

Duane Cruickshank

1 Nod
Great Post Jim. I love how your Honest in your feelings about Facebook Leaches that want nothing at all but to suck your time and get free stuff or get rich quick stuff. Keep up the good post bro. Proud of you.

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September 13, 2011 at 1:09 am

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4 Responses to Why Did I Block You On Facebook?

Duane Cruickshank

1 Nod
Great Post Jim. I love how your Honest in your feelings about Facebook Leaches that want nothing at all but to suck your time and get free stuff or get rich quick stuff. Keep up the good post bro. Proud of you.

Reply

September 13, 2011 at 1:09 am
Rasheed

Nod
Yo, Jim!

Great post.

I agree that affiliate marketing and network marketing aren’t real businesses in which you have control over every aspect. They’re just ways to make money.

Many people start off with affiliate or network marketing, and then they use the money they made from those ventures to move on to create a real business. One they create, one they’re the mastermind and leader behind.

I think affiliate and network marketing teaches people the fundamentals of marketing in general (you learn how to talk to people, you learn how to sell, how to create landing pages, etc…) and then you can use those principles to create a business of you own.

I know many people who have done that, and that is my plan with network marketing.

Many times a network marketing company goes under, or cancels the contract with a top-earning individual, just because they can. If that can happen to a ‘business,’ then it’s not really a business.

But that doesn’t make it bad, in my opinion.

I’ll take MLSP for example (I’m not a part of it). It’s technically not an “income opportunity” (according to their disclaimer, but many people use it as an extra source of revenue), but it’s based off of affiliate marketing. Almost all of the top producers for MLSP have something of their own.

Dave Wood has his perpetual funnel system. Staci Gauny has TribePro. Even if MLSP cancels their contracts, they’ll still have their own systems in place.

I don’t think Dave Wood would have had the capital to set up his perpetual funnel system if he hadn’t gotten involved in network marketing and MLSP.

Being involved and making lots of money with MLSP does not make one an entrepreneur, but it does give a person the skills and mindset to create an Internet Business.

Of course, that’s just my opinion, I’m just trying to engage with you bro =)

In prosperity & peace,
~Rasheed

Reply

September 14, 2011 at 3:21 am

Jim Yaghi

1 Nod
Rasheed,

thanks for sharing your opinion here. i disagree that Affiliate marketing is a good way to get started. it may have been in the past, but no longer. Getting traffic to affiliate offers has become harder and harder and if one focuses ONLY on traffic and nothing else, they will find they must update their skill CONSTANTLY.

I am not sure if you read my earlier posts on the topic – i’ve argued my case extensively there so i don’t intend to repeat myself in my response.

however, my major objection here is to the common claim that Affiliate/network marketing is a good way to learn marketing.

first of all, to what end?

why do you need to learn marketing if not for some specific product?

you need a product to market, because marketing cannot be applied seamlessly and generically to ANYTHING. it is specific to the product, the market, the medium, and the technology.

so if you’re going to learn marketing to SOMETHING, why let it be someone else’s business instead of your own?

Marketing someone else’s product opens you up to huge restrictions – the most important of which, in my opinion, strikes at the core of entrepreneurship.

one should be passionate about the products they sell. how can you be passionate about something that is not even your own idea?

any network marketing business has some obscure product that if you conducted an honest survey amongst their distributors, you would find NONE of them like the product on its own merits. they are only buying an autoship because the company requires them to do so in order to remain eligible for commissions.

what kind of business is that?

look, entrepreneurs should be creative and find solutions to problems they care about. i for one, care about entrepreneurs who have been fed lie after lie about affiliate marketing and want to show them there is a better way. there is no available product of a network marketing company or affiliate program that i can promote to do that.

but when i became passionate about this problem, i built my business around it. this has been FAR easier to promote and sell and get up and work on day after day than any other project i worked on.

and finally, the thing that motivated me to speak out about these issues with marketing systems is this:

i am a traffic expert often consulted on getting traffic to people’s web businesses. and each time, i see these generic very unoriginal angles people want to get traffic to. I cannot do my job successfully when this is what i have to work with. so i have advised clients and students alike to find a unique spin on their solution, even if they do promote some affiliate product or business. and you know what? most of them cannot get themselves out of that box of “i want to teach….xyz”. where xyz is something they have NEVER succeeded in.

i tried for years to find ways to drive traffic into these offers which have no credibility, no authority, and no transparency and found myself conflicted time and time again.

Finally, i had to say ENOUGH – let’s show people the shortest way to success online.

you look around, and you’ll find that anyone who hasnt been trapped into the affiliate marketing space and started something as simple as a blog in a topic of their own interest – they have more traffic than all the affiliate marketing blogs combined. they get more engagement, more commentary, more audience than most affiliates. so why is that?

do you think they got started with affiliate marketing so they can raise capital to start their own project?

or did they just start a project of their own, on a topic they care about, in something they’re already authorities, where they don’t need to fake or pretend…where people can see them as honest, genuine, regular people with cool opinions?

think about that for a moment.

jim

September 14, 2011 at 4:12 am

Rasheed

Nod
ok, for some reason, google chrome “aw snapped” at me and my comment disappeared. lol.

So I’ll just summarize because I don’t wanna spend a lot of time rewriting.

I don’t think every network marketing company has products that wouldn’t be bought otherwise. The product I market, for example, is one such product. There’s already a market for the same exact product, it’s competitively priced, and some people buy 2 or more even though only 1 is required to be eligible for commissions.

Now, I remember I was in a juice company before, and it wasn’t long that I learned that everyone was passionate about the product… a little bit too much. Looking back, it’s essentially a cult of juice, and all of the distributors look up to the “system owner” (who created an MLM within the MLM, based off of CDs and motivation, you know the type) as if he were the messiah or something.

Honestly, it disgusts me now.

Now, I definitely know the “fake it til you make it” types… I was one, when I was in MLSP for a short while. Don’t get me wrong, MLSP is a great system, but I didn’t like how it branded me as an authority and expert on something of which I had no knowledge.

Sure, eventually I would move on to create my own email campaign, but until then, I was just lying to my list. I didn’t feel that was right, so I left MLSP.

But I did keep my blog, and I grew to be passionate about my blog. I turn personal stories, personal opinions, into ravaging discussions and lessons learned.

Although I support network marketing, I don’t support the network marketing companies that use lie and hype to promote a placebo product.

But I definitely agree that one must be passionate about his product in order to succeed in promoting it. The juice cult I mentioned earlier was definitely passionate, perhaps too much so. My fellow distributors who buy more product than they need to to get commissioned are passionate, for sure. And yes, they are successful in promoting the product.

No, it’s not their idea, but it is an idea that they like.

Yes, entrepreneurs should be creative. There’s no doubt about that. The ones who merely follow the system like drones are the ones who find themselves burning out, because it’s not THEIR system.

Most people are looking for a step-by-step way to get rich, which is fine, but then most of them find that when they apply it, and don’t agree/understand/enjoy it, they don’t find success.

Step-by-step isn’t the way to create entrepreneurs, that’s the way to create a system drone.

I like your YLAcademy because it teaches how to create ideas, and ideas that come from ourselves are the ones that we enjoy best.

I found my passion through network marketing. Being that I’m not an authority in anything, I decided to just go with network marketing.

I understand that brand-building is important, but I never liked the idea of “steal self-proclaimed guru’s method to get traffic and put own twist on it, then pretend it’s my own idea.”

I do read up on SEO sometimes, but I try my best not to say things like, “use this SEO trick to get rich!”

Instead, if I want to share a tip, I cite the source (which is elementary, but it astounds me how many marketers don’t do this). And I cite a source who I KNOW is getting results. It may sound harsh, but I don’t read 90% of MLM blogs, because honestly they’re all the same. They’re beginner network marketers who are proclaiming themselves as authorities.

I know you’re sick of it, Jim, and so am I. I want to try to revive Internet marketing (perhaps not affiliate marketing since that’s just a way I earn extra cash, I don’t teach it or anything). Back in the Amway days, there was no one trying to be authorities of anything. It was just “make the sales, make the sales.” It was ethical back then. Now, we have fakers trying to teach people marketing tips that don’t work, but they don’t know it doesn’t work because they learned it from another faker.

It’s a chain of misinformation, and my goal is to solve the problem of misinformation.

But I think the bottom line is this…

If a person wants to be an entrepreneur, then they’ll apply the steps in the YLAcademy to find an idea they’re passionate about, that they’re an authority of, and learn to monetize it.

But if a person doesn’t want to be an entrepreneur, and just wants to make extra cash (which is the majority of the network marketing population), why not do it with network marketing? Affiliate marketing seems to be dead, unless you’re already an authority (case in point, when Dave Wood sends out an affiliate link to his list, he rakes in a ton of cash), but for newbies, it doesn’t seem to be viable.

Network marketing is a great way to get some cash, perhaps get enough to get out of corporate slavery, and after that, fulfill the passion.

But I definitely agree that many network marketing “businesses” are not really businesses, but just ways to get money. In the end, it seems like it’s just semantics, but as long as a person enjoys what he does, whether it’s start his own business or join a network marketing business, I don’t think we can fault him, as long as he’s doing it ethically and morally, without lying or hyping to anyone.

To be honest, I lost my train of thought several times in the comment, so there may be some disconnects, but hopefully my point gets through. Ranting is what I’m good at!

Reply

September 14, 2011 at 5:17 am

About Jim Yaghi

Jim Yaghi is an advertising consultant and traffic expert, with a background in Artificial Intelligence.

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This entry was posted in Social Media and tagged affiliate, Auto, Business, Draft, Home, home business owners, information, marketing, persistent effort, political correctness, t claim, web entrepreneurs. Bookmark the permalink.

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