I have a feeling you’ll be hearing from me :)

I’ve also unlocked some other cool stuff for you as well. The Jacque Fresco course on drawing is particularly cool (www.simpleology.com/training/drawing). Jacque is a 91 year old mega genius and he has a unique technique for teaching people to draw quite quickly.

Enjoy,

MJ

admin at freeadcentral dot com

Blog is at http://www.markjoyner.name – keep in mind the content has varied a helluva lot. I think the best things were the cartoons earlier on – which we will be bringing back. Might be interesting to you to watch the evolution of it. An interesting post for you to check out is about the campaign we used to make one of my books a best-seller. Good grassroots marketing lessons there.

Listen – we’re actually listening to this kind of feedback about the hoops and so on. We were aware from the beginning that it was incongruent – we just used our normal sign up process which makes more sense from the context of the main site. All of this is in the middle of being revised now. I think giving people the *option* to jump through the hoops in the beginning will be less annoying and will make more sense from an interface design perspective.

The blogging course probably won’t have anything “new” per se – but our endeavor with such “elective” courses is to deliver the juice as densely as possible – in a way that helps someone actually integrate the knowledge into action. The blogging is probably my least favorite of our courseware so far – probably because of my lack of unique input on it. Our staff put it together based on consultations with blogging experts. I think it perhaps also needs more emphasis on pure how-to as well.

Something else interesting you might want to check out:

http://www.kachingtank.com

… and …

http://www.kachingtank.com/blog

I’m sitting in the newly launched KaChing Tank right now on a bean bag chair while the “Tankers” update the kachingtank.com site (we’re moving the blog front and center and I think even you might enjoy the content forthcoming) and edit a video of what they did during their first day yesterday.

MJ

Okay – truce… I’m gonna take a look at it anyway and I’ll tell ya’ Mark, it better be good!!! I’ll get over the hoops and move on.

What’s the URL for your Blog?

It’s actually not a “book” but a many-faceted multi-media course with animated lessons, quizzes, etc.

Those 250,000 are all from the last 2 years – almost all of which were through organic word of mouth. We also have 80,000 people who have elected to get email updates to my personal blog I started two years ago as well.

All of that was from scratch since I sold off my old companies about 5 years ago and started these new initiatives totally anew.

Yet I still has a few things to learn – goodness, I hope I always do.

As for whether or not I’ll take your perspective into consideration you might want to re-think the logic of that assumption given that I’m here spending time asking you. Believe me, it’s not for the warm and friendly reception ;-)

MJ

Oh, you’re correct, I didn’t like all those hoops which I think I made clear. The point is you never mentioned the hoops from the beginning.

Had I known I’d have to accept or decline all of them, I wouldn’t have begun the process at all then be forced to move through each choice just to obtain a simple blogging book. Yes, simple.

Mark, you know I’ve said this – you’re a latecomer to this arena. You were the “king” years ago but now you’re a latecomer. I wanted your “free” book for the purpose of seeing how far you’ve come in the blogosphere and to perhaps give you some shout outs for it but noooooo, you resort to old, archaic, marketing methods I’m fully aware of btw, (oh, and 250,000? Over what period of time did you accumulate them and how many in the last year or so?).

Yes, I would rather have had you take me straight to the “course.” No, I doubt you’ll take my perspective into consideration. As for pleasing the greatest number of people, yeah, I’m glad you finally learned that one…

Peace Backatcha,

Mark

OK, you didn’t like the other offers we included. If you had your druthers, we would have simply had you sign up and take you straight to the course without offering you anything else.

OK, got it. I understand your preference.

Just so you know, what we do there is a common marketing practice to monetize the contacts we have with people (the paid offer you saw is something you can simply so no to – just like the free stuff), and to let people know what else we are offering. All of which you can say no to.

We don’t run our sites on an advertising model, so our business makes money by selling our own products. If we were running on an advertising model we could avoid offering other things to people quite easily. (A business is the business of making money after all. Otherwise it’s charity. Would be nice if we could all do that all day long and not have to make money to survive.)

As for “misleading” people I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. If you didn’t like the extra offers you can simply skip them and go right to the course. I don’t see that as misleading.

Either way, I’ll take your perspective into consideration.

We are actually considering revamping our model so we are more direct with the free offerings and only sell things later on in the relationship when it’s not so hard-sell in the beginning.

Some people don’t mind the selling in the beginning (us having over 250,000 happy members can attest to that), but to others its annoying (your blog post clear evidence of that). In the end we’ll probably move more in a direction that will please everyone. And that’s business – you do what you can to please the greatest number of people.

Peace,

MJ