There were a few reasons I made the trip:

1. Latin America is an extremely pleasant place (if you know where to go)

2. It has a dynamic, growing economy (Many Fortune 500 corporations are getting the majority of their growth from regions like Latin America and Asia as opportunities for growth in North America and Europe diminish.)

3. The US itself is becoming “Latinized.” (One of of five Americans is now of Hispanic origin. Not only that, but the Latin population in the US is growing rapidly. For example, one of my colleagues who has a substantial business selling satellite dishes in the US makes 10% of his sales in Spanish to US residents.)

One of my most surprising experiences on the trip was the discovery that I’m a Libertarian.

Let me explain…

• I’ve always been highly suspicious of big organizations – Big Business, Big Government, Big Media – and the more experience I have, the more convinced I am that these are the most dangerous and destructive elements of our society.
• I’ve always believed in and been an active champion of free enterprise. Real free enterprise. People risking their time and money to provide services, not big banks and big corporations getting massive tax-payer funded handouts to subsidize their inefficiency, incompetence and inherent corruption.
• I’ve always been against any war that is not immediately and absolutely necessary in the service of real (not manufactured) self defense. Having family and friends who’ve suffered through the real horror of combat, I have no illusions about what it means to put men in harm’s way. In my opinion, people who cheerlead for war are idiots at best and demons at worst.

It turns out all these things add up to me being a Libertarian. The funny thing is I had to discover this in Guatemala of all places at a fascinating institution of higher learning called the Universidad Francisco Marroquin (UFM) where I had the pleasure of meeting many faculty members, administrators, and even the Executive President, a remarkable individual named Giancarlo Ibárgüen.

UFM, which just turned 40 years old last year, was the brainchild of young Guatemalans who went to study in the US and came back inflamed with a passion for free markets, liberty, and personal responsibility and the thinking behind these philosophies.

They wanted to create a home for pro free market, pro liberty thinking in education in Guatemala as a way to leverage their country into a better economic position. Actually, I’m understating it a bit. Their long term goal is to lead Guatemala to becoming “the next Hong Kong.”

There are few things more inspiring (to me at least) than a huge and worthy goal. Back when UFM was founded, Guatemala was infused with Leftist propaganda. According to Cuban and Soviet-funded thought leaders, Guatemala’s salvation lay in the direction of Socialism (i.e. Big Government, Big Centrally Controlled Businesses, and a Big Media to keep everyone in line.)

Here’s the strange thing about all this…

When I think of all the colleges and universities I’ve had dealings with (I attended one of the Ivies and have lectured at the business schools of Columbia University, MIT, and NYU), I can’t think of one – not one anywhere in the US – that puts the issues of free markets, liberty and personal responsibility front and center.

Instead, from Day One, students receive an indoctrination in whatever the political correctness of the day happens to be. No values, no search for truth, just systematized conformity with whatever is expedient at the present moment.

Interesting, huh? And in exchange for that “service” countless American students and their families are voluntarily (and I say inadvisedly) shouldering student loan commitments that can hardly fail to become anything less than financially crippling.

Now that I’m back home…

I’m still running businesses (including developing a virtual System Seminar that will cost attendees only a fraction of the live one), but by design I have a lot more free time than I used to.

One of the things I’ve been doing with this free time is sharing a lot of information with my System Club members about topics outside the strict confines of Internet marketing “how to.”  It seems to be working for them.

One of the Big Topics of our day is medical “care.”

50% of all the personal bankruptcies that occur in the US are caused by medical problems and, shockingly, 50% of these cases are individuals and families who had medical insurance. I’ve seen more than one friend financially destroyed by the Medical Industrial Complex. Who can calculate the extent of the financial damage this “industry” has caused the US?

Medical costs have been rising at an annual rate of 9% a year (not unlike college costs). Does the average person get a 9% raise every year? I don’t think so. Meanwhile, the quality of medical service in the US is pathetically bad even for people paying full fees for everything, something I experienced over and over again when I had my knee problem two years ago.

Is there any sign of it getting better? No and government “solutions” threaten to make an already bad situation much worse.

One possible source of a solution, free enterprise, has been studiously ignored by – you guessed it – Big Government, Big Business and Big Media. You know, “free enterprise” that thing that America is supposedly based on?

Here’s an intriguing interview conducted by Lew Rockwell who for my money has one of the most useful and interesting web sites on the Internet.

In this interview, Rockwell interviews a doctor who has returned to free market principles in medicine, thereby lowering his charges to patients and improving service, and is inspiring a quiet revolution among physicians in his home city.

Food for thought about an issue that effects every person and small business in this country (and there’s an important Internet marketing angle to the story too!):

Lew Rockwell’s interview with G. Keith Smith MD about free market medicine.

But numbers can cripple too, or at the very least they can distract you and rob you of your enjoyment of your business.

‘Enjoyment’ is a crucial aspect of busi­ness-building because if, at the end of the day, the process is not satisfying, you’ll never put in the work required to make it really work.

Make-believe numbers

Enron…

For years, people in the legitimate energy industry were scratching their heads over Enron’s numbers.  “How are they doing that? Why can’t we do that?” I’m sure Enron’s ‘success’ agitated many inferiority com­plexes and inspired a lot of boardroom screaming matches.

Then Enron’s chief executives were taken away in handcuffs. They were lying about their numbers.

We’ve got a bit of that in the Internet marketing guru world too.

It can range from things as simple as inflating the number of people on a tele-seminar to claiming sales figures and visitor numbers that bear no relation to reality.

Why do they do it? It’s easy. They want sales now and they don’t care how they get them.  Rather than earn a reputation by making real contributions and real accomplishments, they choose to steal one instead.

Silly numbers hurt too

You’ve seen the formula: “I made X dollars in just one (day, week, month!!!)”

I stay away from this myself. I report success stories in terms of repeating monthly or annual revenue, not one-time, ‘special circumstance’ sales spikes.

Person­ally, I am far more impressed by someone who is regularly bringing in $5,000 a month than someone who once made $50,000 in a day.  The $5,000 a month person has a solid base to build on.  The ‘$50,000 in a day’ windfall guy may or may not be able to repeat it.

Sure, windfalls and huge sales spikes are ‘cool.’ We should all work towards them and enjoy them fully when they take place, but real business is not a fireworks display.

Big pay ‘days’ are invariably the result of lots of behind-the-scenes work, taking care of business day in and day out, for months and years on end, not “magic” or “genius.”

I’ve said before that there is no Great Bean Counter in the sky who decides who can and who cannot make money and how much everyone is ‘allowed’ to make.

Money comes from ‘wiring.’  It’s a matter of put­ting attractive offers in front of receptive buyers and then delivering on your promises.

How to make that happen is really the only thing we should think about.  While we can learn much from the success of others, it’s NOT their reported numbers that is instructive, it’s the reality of what it took to generate those numbers.

Look behind the curtain. Don’t get dazzled by the stage show.

Take pride and satisfaction in your consistent daily efforts and ignore silly numbers.  The real numbers you’ll generate by building a real business will be far more interesting and satisfying – and maybe even bigger too.

**This article was originally published in 2005 and is now available along with fifty-six other articles in the book “The System Club Letters”

For more information:
http://www.RealMarketingBooks.com

This analyst is loud and brash, but hang on. He’s got the goods on these crooks and all the evidence needed to stop them in their tracks. Watch and share. (Audio volume alert.)

And if the illness didn’t kill her, the treatment might.

Not the kind of news a young woman wants to hear.

She and her husband Jeff, a filmaker, embarked on a massive research program to find out what alternatives there were to…death.

Surprisingly, the solution in Sabrina’s case turned out to be pretty simple: get off the Great American Death Diet, the diet that 90% of all Americans eat every day and think nothing.

The illness reversed and has never returned.

Sabrina and Jeff now have three wonderful – and healthy – kids: Miranda, Nina and Willie.

Sabrina and Jeff shared their experience on a little web site VegSource .com which over time has grown to the biggest info clearing house on medically proven healthy eating.

That’s how I discovered them.

My own health was not great. Not bad, but not great.

I was overweight, tired often, and stressed out. I got sick a lot and my energy was all over the place.

I read the material on the Nelson’s web site and watched their film “Processed People” and decided to give this new – too me – approach to eating a try.

Two and half years later, I’m 20 pounds lighter, far more energetic, more resistant to colds and flus, and just all around enjoying life a whole lot more.

The cost?

Just paying attention to what I ate and eating delicious healthy food instead of the junk most Americans think is normal. And I spend LESS on food now, not more.

Two years ago, John Robbins, who helped popularize this better way of eating with his book “Diet for a New America” started a program to bring this knowledge to low income people.

No one needs help and options with their food choices more than people on low incomes – and no one has less access to this help.

The pilot program which ran in Sacramento through a community food bank generated results that exceeded all of our expectations.

If you’re interested in learning more for yourself and perhaps supporting this very worthy project, here’s a video showing the results this way of eating has had for people.

Note – This program, supervised by MDs, is given away to families in need for free:

http://www.earthsave.org/mfh_gift.htm

More about the Earth Save, the organizer of the project:

http://www.earthsave.org

The Veg Source web site:

http://www.VegSource.com

Note: I’m a proud member of the Board of the EarthSave foundation.

If you’ve ever been wondering “Gee, how do I thank Ken for all the help he’s given me over the years?” , supporting this worthy work would be a good way to do it.

These are good people doing good and important work that has the potential to benefit millions. It might even help you or someone you love.

Here’s the pertinent link: http://www.earthsave.org/mfh_gift.htm

Best wishes to you and yours for a happy, healthy, and holy Holiday Season,

- Ken McCarthy

Upstate New York…a little bit of heaven right here on earth.

I used to think the oldest examples could be found in US publications from the late 1800s.

Now I’m not so sure.

Here is a form-perfect sales presentation embedded in the opera L’Elisir d’Amore (”The Elixir of Love”) by Gaetano Donizetti which premiered in Milan, Italy way back in 1832.

Dr. Dulcamara arrives in town as an unknown, catches the villagers attention, establishes his credentials, lays out the problem, shows how his product solves the problem, and then shows what a great deal his solution is.

He creates a sense of scarcity and a time limit to buy; uses testimonials to back up his claims; and then, only after he establishes his product’s value, reveals its price in classic infomericial style which, following his well-crafted build up, appears like a great bargain.

The villagers clamor for the product and the buying frenzy begins.

Yeah, he’s a ham and the whole thing is way over the top. This is a comic opera after all, but his sales sequence is impeccable.

The music isn’t bad either!

Here’s a rough translation:

DULCAMARA: Signore! Signori! Good day dear friends! Come closer…can you all hear me?
Now then, I reckon you’ve heard of me. That’s why you’ve turned out to cheer me.
I’m doctor of posology and modern pharmacology,
of medical essentials I’ve heaps of top credentials.
I’ve cured so many terminal cases
that I’m famous all over the world, and…and…in other places.
As one who loves the human race, my philanthropic feeling
requires my travelling place to place to share my gift of healing.
I empty out the hospitals wherever I arrive

It’s Dulcamara’s magic cure that makes the patients thrive, and eases the diseases so that dying men survive. Without my skill the deathly ill would not still be alive!

For flatulence, anaemia, lock-jaw or septicaemia, this potion here will clear it up… (concocted in Bohemia)
This tonic’s a salvation for chronic constipation,

I have here testimonials in praise of what I’ve done.
Here’s one from a Bavarian, a male octogenarian, who bought my primal water… then sired a baby daughter by Charlotte, who’s a starlet, and has just turned twenty-one!
And since then he has sired another daughter and a son!
The water that he’s taken is certain to awaken the slumbering libido of old men in search of fun!

For ladies of a certain age with bottoms growing bigger…this potion, made from thyme and sage, restores your girlish figure. Two spoonfuls of the liquor, you take each night with dinner.
In just a week, or quicker, you’ll look five kilos thinner.

There’s nothing like it anywhere. My friends, take my advice… because you’re all so nice, Ill give a special price!

As I’m the sole supplier, and stocks may soon expire, the limit’s ONE per buyer…
…unless you want it twice.

I’ve pills for disabilities, from dropsy to asthmatic wheeze, for every sniffle, cough and sneeze, I’ve remedies to stem disease.

And if your veins are varicose, the symptoms I can diagnose. I’d recommend a double dose of potions I suggest.

For gentlemen whose pates are bare, I’ve something here for loss of hair…applied for just a month, I swear, your thatch will match a grizzly bear. There’s nothing like it anywhere – you really have to try it. There’s nowhere else to buy it, from Paris to Trieste. I guarantee you won’t resent the paltry, piddling sum you’ve spent on hair restoring liniment – discovering you are blessed with shocks of locks that manifest – yes, more than you before possessed! The doctor always knows what’s best!

You’re convinced my potions cure you, but you’re looking apprehensive…you’re mistaken, I assure you, if you think that they’re expensive. Fifty lire? No. Thirty? No. Twenty? Some shops would charge you plenty! But for you, a proposition – I’ll discount my own commission and I’ll give away each bottle for ten lire – as a gift.

VILLAGERS: Just ten lire – what a bargain! What a sympathetic man…and honest too!

DULCAMARA: Here’s one more…this one’s stupendous! As a cure-all, it’s tremendous. Throughout Europe I have sold this to crowned heads and big-time spenders…but because my tour has ended, and you folks have been so splendid, it is yours for fifteen lire…twenty less than I intended.
(to assistant) Gelsomina, sound the trumpet! So then nothing could be clearer..each one bought saves twenty lire…so the more you buy, then the more you are saving… buy two, and put one away.
It’s the panacea so many are craving for syndromes unknown to most doctors today.
Time has shown I know better than they!

VILLAGERS: If we profit when we buy it, then we’re fools if we don’t try it. What a wonderful preparation, this all-purpose medication. Doctor, we shall never forget you. We’re so lucky you came to town. We’re so honoured we met you…such a man of great renown.

DULCAMARA: Now, some say doctors may be greedy, but you’ll find I’m kind and fair.
If I treat a patient who’s needy, I only charge what the poor beggar can bear.

VILLAGERS: A more kind, benevolent man you won’t find anywhere.

DULCAMARA: Ah! What I sacrifice, to relieve human suffering…my chief concern is in serving mankind.

VILLAGERS: A fairer man you’ll never find!

It doesn’t compel frantic gift giving (like the commercialized version of Christmas).

It doesn’t promote excessive alcohol consumption and forced gaiety (like New Year’s Day).

In fact Thanksgiving is so laid back, it doesn’t even require that folks exchange cards.

Instead, Thanksgiving celebrates the basics: food, family, and friends and the deep fun that accompanies taking the time to enjoy life’s simple pleasures.

As icing on the cake, Thanksgiving encourages us – in its characteristically quiet and understated way – to take note of the things in our lives that are positive.

— Gratitude is power

It’s easy for entrepreneurs to fall into the trap of feeling that life is a never-ending struggle, where letting your guard down for a moment can mean ruin and every day is another day that the ever-growing “Must Do” list fails to get done.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you are a very fortunate person indeed, but I have a feeling you may know a little about the outlook I’m describing.

How do we get ourselves out of this particular no-win trap?

— Thanksgiving is the answer.

Robert Emmons, a professor at the University of California, Davis, demonstrated through an elegant set of experiments not long ago that if you want to sleep better, feel better, and motivate yourself to take better care of your health, regular Thanksgiving sessions work magic.

Once a month, once a week, once a day

Right now we celebrate Thanksgiving once a year and, truth be told; it can be somewhat of a production and actually be a bit stressful for some people.

But what if we had a Thanksgiving Day once a month?

And what if we defined “Thanksgiving Day” to mean spending a whole day with the people you really want to be with just living: eating, talking, playing, resting, and being militantly free from worries (and ambition) of any kind.

One day per month.

Is there anyone so busy that they can’t arrange at least one day per month for Thanksgiving?

Notice, by the way, that I said “arrange” not “find the time for” In my experience, trying to find the time rarely works. In contrast, arranging life to make the time for things has a nearly 100% success rate.

If it’s a good idea to have Thanksgiving once a month, why not have it once a week?

I’m talking about consistently carving out one day each week where you avoid the “busyness” of life and sit back to enjoy a good meal and revel in the pleasure of spending time with people you love the most.

That’s what weekends used to be for. Remember?

Finally, if Thanksgiving makes sense once a week, why not once a day? A good meal, good company, peace and quiet, and attention not on the things that aren’t working, that need to be improved, that are still undone, but dedicated to enjoying and appreciating the many things good in our lives.

Happy Thanksgiving Day!

Ken McCarthy

Excerpt from the book “The System Club Letters.”

Fast forward to the present: AdWords has revolutionized Internet marketing, formed the basis of thousands of successful businesses, and turned a small, profitless business (Google) into one of the biggest corporations on earth.

When the first comprehensive history of Internet marketing is written, Perry Marshall will be credited as the first person to put a flag in the ground and declare that not only was Google AdWords important, it was far more important than the then current state-of-the-art which at the time was Overture, formerly GoTo.com.

That was quite an huge mental leap back then and it took some deep thinking and courage of conviction to take that stand.

With an accomplishment like that…

What do you do for an encore?

Well, Perry has done plenty. Since first appearing on the scene, he’s continuously pushed the envelope on Internet marketing techniques, identified new trends and uncovered authentic Internet marketing talent.

Now Perry and Thomas Maloche have come out with the definitive book on Facebook advertising: The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising

I have to confess to being a Facebook skeptic. The things I’ve heard about Facebook as an advertising and marketing medium have just not been all that compelling. But as usual, Perry has dug deep – just the way he did with AdWords all those years ago – and come up with a treasure trove of actionable insights.

In my case, thanks to this new book, I realized that Facebook would be a fantastic lead generator for some businesses I own that are normally very difficult to buy leads for economically.

Key takeaway: Facebook is not for everyone. For some some businesses it can’t do much to help at all. But for others it can help mightily.

How can you tell if Facebook advertising is right for your business?

Perry’s created a simple quiz that will help you quickly assess if learning more about Facebook, and the intricasies of how to use it the right way, is worth your effort.

Click here for the quiz: http://isfbforme.com/

- Ken McCarthy

P.S. We did an in depth interview with Perry and Tom for this month’s System Club.

P.P.S. I’ll be on the road a few day so it may take a while for me to approve comments to this post. If you post something legitimate and it doesn’t appear, that’s why. Patience.

There’s a massive shortage of people who understand pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, tracking and testing, conversion and just plain crunching the numbers.

You can’t say I haven’t done my part.

What have we been doing since 1994?

We’ve brought people the best of the best in the hard disciplines of Internet marketing, the skills I’ve referred to for at least 12 years as “the plumbing.”

It’s not glamorous stuff, but folks who make the effort and take the time to learn these things can literally write their own ticket.

So what do people do instead?

They chase the guru, fad and/or whiz bang marketing trick of the month.

As usual, the New York Times is a little slow to pick up on reality, but they’ve finally joined the party:

Advertising companies fret over a digital talent gap

- Ken McCarthy

Keep it simple folks

I never cease to be amazed, and annoyed, by how complicated most software is to learn.

I just don’t get it.

Why should any software be any more complicated than using an ATM machine? No one needs a manual or tutorial to get cash from an unfamiliar ATM machine even though you’re handling some pretty serious data – cash!

Yet just about any software program, and even many websites, require training to use.

OK, end of rant on that point other than to say that providing functions and features doesn’t mean squat if people can’t figure them out and actually use them (Are you listening Microsoft?)

The hazards of giving

Actually,this article is only peripherally about software programs, it’s really about the “software” of charitable giving.

When there is a disaster locally, or even halfway around the world, the natural inclination of many people is to help in some way.

That’s a good thing. That impulse is why the human race still exists.

However, how to help effectively is not so easy. Here are two things that in my opinion either don’t help at all or help a lot less than you’d hope.

First, here’s something that does not help…Packing up stuff from your basement, attic, and closets (mostly clothes) and dropping them off at an emergency collection center.

Here’s the reality of that. During emergencies there is almost always a shortage of storage space and manpower, not to mention the ability to deal with extraneous matters.

In every case I’ve seen, un-asked for bundles of clothes, T-shirts, teddy bears, and other “feel good” donations actually cause more problems than they solve. They take up space, they take up manpower to sort and they take up the mental bandwidth of people who already have too much on their plate.

Donated clothes often end up molding away somewhere and are ultimately taken away by people who are in the business of packaging random clothing donations in bulk and exporting them to the Third World where they are sold by the bale. Probably not what the donor intended and definitely not what the group in need needed.

What about cash?

Cash is better because the people on the ground can use it to buy what they actually need, assuming of course what they need is available for sale which is a big assumption.

But there’s a problem with cash, especially when you give it to what I call the mega-charities.

Without starting a long diatribe, because if I start I may never stop, I invite you to Google and see what groups like the Red Cross did with the donations they received after 9/11 and after the New Orleans levee failures and Gulf Coast storm damage.

I guarantee you will be shocked.

I also guarantee you will be shocked at the salaries of the executive directors of some of the mega-charities, the percentage of the money they receive that goes to “overhead”, and the percentage of the money they receive that goes to “promotion.”

Add that to the fact that most of these groups reserve the right to take money you give for Cause A and redirect to Cause B and you have a situation where when you give a $1, you’re lucky if thirty to as little as 5 cents is actually spent the way you hope.

The mega-charities have well oiled promotion machines, put political people on their boards, and for the most part get a free pass from the news media (except for when they get caught red-handed doing “funny” things with donations…which usually happens a few months after every high profile disaster they’re involved in and is only reported in the back of the newspaper.)

Meanwhile, there are small, highly effective, locally based grassroots help groups that are all but starved of meaningful assistance. Yet somehow these folks, without the oak paneled offices and high six-figure director salaries, find a way to do the heavy lifting of helping folks in grave need after disasters.

It’s time to dis-intermediate the world of giving

People give to the mega-charities because mega-charities have an overwhelming advantage over small, grassroots groups when it comes to getting media attention.

What, if anything, can be done about this?

Well, if the music industry could be dis-intermediated and the stock brokerage industry could be dis-intermediated and just about every industry you can think of these days can be dis-intermediated, then why not charitable giving?

The word “dis-intermediate” means to remove intermediaries, also known as middlemen. The middleman business is a great business – especially for middlemen –  but it doesn’t serve the consumer or, in this case, people in need.

The question is how do you cut the mega-charity middlemen out of the supply chain? Or at least reduce their cut to a reasonable amount and redirect resources to where they are truly needed with a minimum of waste.

The Internet to the rescue again

When you spend time in relief efforts as I have, you always find two things:  a shortage of actionable information and a shortage of the things people actually need where and when they are needed.

For example, after the recent catastrophic flooding in the Catskills, folks who lost everything showed up needing crowbars, hammers, face masks, work gloves and other basic tools to remove the waterlogged sheetrock from their houses so they could begin the process of rebuilding before mold set in.

What they got, initially at least, were bales and bales of T-shirts.

Maybe this kind of thing was unavoidable in the pre-Internet era, but it’s absolutely crazy today.

A simple system for your examination

This month we created a simple website to help address this problem.

Users can go to the site, select the region they want to help, drill down to the town and/or organization they want to help, and read the EXACT items that a specific group on the ground needs right now today.

On the backend, relief groups can easily add to their list of needs, delete items after they have been provided, change the number of a given item that’s needed, and even –  because this does happen due to inefficiencies in the current way of doing things – list their surpluses. (Sometimes a group that has plenty of food will be sent pallets of macaroni, for example, while another group 10 miles away is facing an acute food shortage.)

Each group gets its own account which gives them their own page on the site where they can list their contact info and update their current needs. There is a provision for adding media, like video and audio, to the page as well.

These pages have multiple functions:

1. The group can use its page to help keep their own records straight. An online system beats scraps of paper and memory.

2. If a group doesn’t have a website, and many still don’t, they can use their page to communicate their needs to their volunteers, donors, and their local news media.

3. If a group does have a website, but lacks the in-house sophistication to post the details of their ever-changing needs, they can use the system and link to it from their homepage.

The first phase of this operation is to reach out to local organizations, get them listed, and train them on how to manage their public needs list. We’ve designed the software so that the training process can be accomplished over the telephone in five minutes or less.

The second phase is to promote the website. So far, we’ve seen that people with influence, whether in the media or through their roles in various community organizations, instantly see the value of a simple, common sense-based information clearinghouse like this and are all too happy to spread the word.

If you’re involved in relief activities, or know someone who is, they might find this model worthy of study.

You can check it out here (and if you’re inclined to help any of these groups, all the better):

Click here to see the system in action: http://www.Rebuild123.org

- Ken McCarthy

P.S. This site is just 15 days old and we expect to be listing many more organizations and regions as the days go on. Information on how to have your group listed is at the bottom of the home page. This site is focusing on New York State, though we do plan to add info about Vermont and Massachusetts as well since these regions are so close to each other,