The Agreement Seekers Blog

Anyone who has been around internet marketing for any length of time has heard the saying, "The money is in your list".  For some businesses this is true - especially affiliate offers or an Amazon or Shopify store.  Or, for information and private label products.  There are more... Many of these list advocates (you guessed it) market their list-building funnels with an attached affiliate opportunity to push their funnel.  This convenient and ultimately symbiotic function is great for low cost and "free plus shipping" deals, however, they are not necessarily what is needed to build an organization that is built upon a community, support, and interdependence - with a higher ticket, lower volume numbers. Large lists work for what they are intended to do - and many people make a ton of money with this strategy.  However, many would have you believe that the "be-all-and-end-all" in internet marketing is building a large list.  This is simply not true. Our...

The title of this piece is from  The Hurricane , a movie about the boxer Reuben Carter who spent a couple of decades in prison for crimes he did not commit.  Peoples' circumstances are their prison and have the same limiting effect.  Our evangelism about changing peoples' lives speaks to this notion of transcendence through shining a light on an alternative. Most people readily admit they need or want more money.  This is somewhat universal.  At the same time, they are "stuck" in the patterns of their lives.  The lack of awareness of viable alternatives is a prison for some. This being said, we fully recognize that what we do is not for everyone.  The "prison effect" is just one factor. Our mission is to educate people and raise their level of awareness to an alternative.  We then guide them through an information acquisition process and serve as a consultant in their decision-making process. The end-game in our business is to provide a ve...

It is with a degree of pride that we accentuate our differences from many other marketing groups. Our"targets", that is to say, who we choose we want to work with are reasonably specific. This is conscious and intentional.  Our business stability is much stronger if people "join" who are well-grounded in what makes us different.  This blog articulates many of these. However, although we talk about incorporating change into lifestyles, mindset, business models, compensation structures and the like, there are three guiding priorities that build one atop the next (or) are attached in consecutive layers.  The first and most foundational is: A Philosophy of Life and Doing Business - Our goal is to help people and in so doing, help ourselves.  We do this by being as honest and transparent as is humanly possible. We do not sugarcoat the realities but at the same time posture that what we do benefits individuals, families and ultimately society.  As such, on t...

I have been reading (cherry picking) through Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations to try to understand economic theory as it relates to what we do.  The following paragraph is copy and pasted: . In a famous passage, Smith remarks that a human being needs the "help of his brethren, so that "it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favor, and show them that it is to their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them". Our goal (and our success) are dependent upon attracting people to what we do.  This is in the context of a social group where healthy tension exists (in reciprocity) between helping others for one's own benefit.  This is a core construct and this is how all economies function.  The dynamic between self-gain through advancing the goals of others in a group cycle over and over and over again. The "marketing angle" or the message here nee...

At the end of the day, everything we are about circles back to the premise of long-term financial security. There are a lot of different lenses we can look through to bring this into focus.  Ultimately, we "promote" economic self-interest in the context of a social group.  The "group" supports and makes possible the entire framework that incentivizes individual participation. Today there are many internet-enabled ways to make money and most of these are talked about somewhere on this blog.  Among them is what I describe as the "helping people" model.  What this directly infers is attracting people to a community with common values and goals.  The process of educating - and getting people to adopt our values and participate in the attainment of our stated goals. The point here is that first and foremost we are educators who have a story to tell.  Our story explains a viable and realistic path to financial security.  As a people business, our ro...

I was in my car this morning listening to talk radio on my way to the grocery store.  Ric Edelman, a nationally syndicated financial advisor was talking about restructuring Social Security and the impact this will have on how he recommends structuring portfolios.  The point he was making was that Social Security is a common baseline for everyone (in retirement) that he builds upon in projecting future needs.  Surprisingly, the average monthly check is only around $1700. In the context of generating monthly income - if your investment portfolio of resources are not significant - what strategies are there if you have not "saved" or planned for additional sources of income that will grow (and/or) at the minimum, sustain your lifestyle?  What we do is one answer. - one viable alternative. All investment strategies are tied to the amount of risk you are willing to take.  Obviously, the greater the risk, the greater the reward. Younger people are advised to b...

Our Business Plan has three fundamental elements.  They are not equally important. Here's why. 1)  The first (and most important to understand) is the ability to adapt to change.  Integrating something new into your life requires investing your time in different ways.  Most people (attesting to the failure rate in home businesses) do not successfully navigate from point A to point B. 2)  The second is understanding what a "learning community" means.   People and relationships are the foundation of our business.  We need to engender and pass along what we know and help others develop proficiency and competence as marketers. 3)  Third, is the tools we use and the business we promote.  The reality is that there are many, many directions this could take.  There are many, many:  a) tools suites, and; b) compensation models.  We utilize a selected few and at the very top of our marketing funnel we use Working Poor No More" as a d...