I went above 6,500 referrals yesterday – I seem to be averaging about 100 new referrals a day at this point. I am somewhat amazed by this as I have only picked up one direct referral in the last two weeks (I haven’t asked anyone). So my 59 direct referrals on average have over 100 referrals each.

I have been asked many times what I did to get my 59 direct people. And why do I seem to have such a large number of extended referrals. (Please note – if you are just interested in getting a few referrals and have limited time skip down to the third bullet point on blog…)

• First, I read three pages of AGLOCO website info (how it works page, viewbar page, and FAQ page) to get ready to explain AGLOCO to people I was recruiting and to be ready for their questions
• I personally called (or met at work) the 10 best people I knew for AGLOCO
• These were people who I thought would get excited about changing the way the Internet is run and would be willing to go out and stick their necks out and invite their friends to join AGLOCO
• I can not stress enough how important it is to go after the best people you know and to do it personally. And to tell them this is not a ‘get rich quick scheme’ – most people do not believe that anyway – and if they do they will not be good recruiters for AGLOCO.
• I told the people I personally recruited that I picked them, because I thought they would be very good at recruiting and that in order to leverage this early opportunity they would have to actively recruit.
• Also, tell your recruits that at least half of the people will turn them down
• I was lucky – I got all 10 to join AGLOCO and I am pretty sure at least 6 of them have actively done recruiting like I did (the others did some emails and have said they will do more… “soon”.)
• I emailed to almost all of the people in my email address book (about 400 people) – even those I had not talked to in more than a year.
• I used an email like the ones AGLOCO shows as samples – BUT on each one I added at the top a personal message – it takes time but I think it is very important – and a side benefit was that I got lots of personal emails back from friends and contacts I had not talked to in a while.
• Actual signups from this was just over 10% (49 people to be exact). (Given the result, if I were to do this over again I should have called at least the top 20-25.) - About 20 of the 49 have told me they signed up -  the other 29 - I am not sure who they are.
• I will be sending a repeat email to 400 people (minus the known signups) with an update on the AGLOCO opportunity to see if I can get 5 or 10 more.
• To stimulate the ‘extended’ referrals, I talk and email to the 30 direct referrals I know and give them ideas and encouragement – BUT what I mainly do is answer questions that get when they are recruiting –or  they get from people they have recruited doing their recruiting – see how this works… What is nice about AGLOCO is that you are not ‘selling’ a product for cash- just the opposite, you are helping people get money they already deserve. Most people hate selling anything – but they are happy to give other people’s money away J .

I see this was a long post – but to give a decent answer I needed to put in some details. As I see it, there are three groups of members of AGLOCO and they are all part of the old 80 / 20 rule (20% of the people in any group do 80% of the work/and get 80% of the results). So out of 100 AGLOCO members I think:

·         80 will do no recruiting and will be happy to get their share of the Internet as a regular member

·         20 will do all the building and of that 20:

   o       80% or 16 will do simple email recruiting and do pretty well with it – given how easy that is.

   o       20% or 4 will do what I did and take the extra time to really sit their necks out for AGLOCO

Just make sure that among the people you get that you recruit those 4 and you will do real well….

I have been asked to do two things on this blog recently.

 One is give my status. – I crossed over 6,000 total referrals yesterday.

Two how did I get there.  – Mainly I recruited friends with emails. I have just 58 direct referrals (I plan to get more, but day job is in the way and I have grown a bit lazy.) But I do talk to the friends I have recruited and do two things.

• I give them help in answering AGLOCO questions they may have or people they recruit have. (I read a lot about AGLOCO so this makes me better able to do that than they are. I do this mainly in email so they can forward the information on.
• I act as a cheerleader. Recruiting new members for AGLOCO is sales. And in all sales you get lots of no’s. Sales is numbers you need to get your message to the right people at the right time.  I email my friends often to make sure they are feeling supported by me in the effort. Please note that only 1/3 of my recruits have direct referrals so far – the others have not tried. I am hoping to get this up.

 Sites I like for information are.

 http://aglocoideas.blogspot.com/

http://www.johnchow.com/  

http://jr-infomediary.blogspot.com/

http://aglocoblog.blogspot.com/  

I have been involved with AGLOCO as a founding member and have been actively recruiting new members for three weeks already. I decided to start a blog on my activities, but that has seemed to be a lesser and lesser part of what I like to write here. More and more I find myself thinking about what an economic network can become. I like updates from John Chow http://www.johnchow.com/ . And the official blog http://aglocoblog.blogspot.com/ and one very straight forward one called Infomediary http://jr-infomediary.blogspot.com/ . They are on my list but wanted to point them out up here.

 

My predictions

• AGLOCO will have over 2,000,000 by the end of 2007.
• I will have over 10,000 total referrals by the end of February
• AGLOCO viewbar will be released by the en of February – and then no Mac – just my thought)
• First company between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to do a ‘major’ deal with AGLOCO will be Microsoft (no surprise here, given Bill Gates comments)
• AGLOCO will file to go public the last quarter of 2007 (and I will have 20,000 referrals by then)

 

I promise not to ‘edit these’ to make the right after the fact.

I saw this 'old' Bill Gates quote on John Chow's blog. It was i believe a statement he has made publicly more than once in the last year. (I did a quick search – used live search just for fun.)

Well AGLOCO is one way to do just what Bill Gates says to do (not that he is always right - but maybe this time?) MSN would have trouble paying people to search, but using something like AGLOCO's economic network... it could work. Does Bill know something that Eric Schmidt should be worried about? 

Gates said that search engines like Google Inc. get their revenues from advertising because people use these search engines. “Google’s business model is not based on free software,” Gates said. “Their business model is based on advertisements from which they make a lot of money.”

But they don’t share these advertising revenues with the end users who help them get the revenue, Gates said. “Google keeps all of the money with itself,” he added.

(Through its AdSense program, Google does share advertising revenue with Web site publishers who carry ads that Google sells to advertisers.)

In its bid to share revenues with users, Microsoft may give free software or even cash to users, said Gates, who did not discuss further details.

 

 

 

 

When I first saw the name ACLOCO, I thought it was not the best name I had ever heard for an Internet community. In the three weeks since I have come to say it often enough that it rolls off my tongue easier than Skype (which i can not decide whether to say the e at the end.

 

I did a search of AGLOCO on Google just before writing this. 540,000 page results. I counted the days since launch - 18 -  This means the increase in pages has been an average of 30,000 a day. While not in the league with of a MySpace or YouTube at this point (about 150,000,000) it is already running at a 1,000,000 a month and should rise as it grows in popularity.

 

And this is before the service is launched - wait and see what happens then.

 

 

Carl Anderson, CTA Holdings Gil Penchina, Wikia
Tim Ehrlich, Latham and Watkins LLP Zaw Thet, 4info
Greg Chin, Latham and Watkins LLP Valerie Williamson, OSTG - Open Source Technology Group
Graham Winter, Richards Butler
Guy Connell, Richards Butler David C Martin, IBM Oliver Brock, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Lars Nordwall, SugarCRM, Inc.
John Shoch, Alloy Ventures
Dave Pidwell, Alloy Ventures Thomas Hellmann, University of British Columbia
Dave Robertson, Collegiate Images Bruce Lacey, CarrierIQ Johannes Pohle, Morgen Group
Robb Watters, Madison Group
Justin Everett-Church, Adobe Systems Inc Chad Balch, Ph.D., Stanford University Lisa Busby, George P Johnson Company
J.D. Brasesco, SAVVIS Communications Chad Balch, Ph.D., Stanford University Richard Sze, Software Developer
Geoffrey Shenk – SEM Specialist
David Steinberger, Tickle Inc.
Alexandre Gourevitch, Science Po Paris Jacques Clay, French Tech Tour Victor Tsai, University of California, Berkeley
Jennifer Jackson, Owners Advantage Murray Arenson, Matrix Equities
Allen Gaul, GreenPoint Financial
Mike Depatie, Kimpton Hotels
Sam Ladah, Haas School of Business James Reed II, Plum Tree Technologies Jean-Marc Mommessin, Stanford University Ken Myers, Crushpad, Inc. Gary Capata, Capata and Co.
Greg Stebben, Radio Group
Brandon Blum, University of Michigan Ilya Strebulaev, Ph.D., Stanford University
Dana Duggan, Vanderbilt University

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Just to keep the tally going, I added 250 since the last blog with my total now 4,650. I was to relaxed over the weekend to do any direct recruiting and my small drop off shows it. Unfortuately ths is a busy week for me on the day job so...

 

For those of you who have not visited the new AGLOCO website here are some home page highlights.

 

 

 

 

Ray Everett-Church is the AGLOCO Chief Privacy Officer. He was also the Chief Privacy Officer at AllAdvantage. Ray has been reading the comments in the 1000 AGLOCO Sign Ups post and this is what he had to say about the spyware issue.

I couldn’t disagree more with the characterization of the Viewbar as spyware. In my experience, spyware has four main characteristics: 1) It’s installed without your permission; 2) It surreptitiously tracks you; 3) it is difficult if not impossible to turn off or remove; and, 4) it sends your information to an unknown and untrustworthy entity where you have no control over what happens to it.

AGLOCO’s Viewbar (nor AllAdvantage’s Viewbar before it) does not have those characteristics. Indeed, AGLOCO’s Viewbar is the opposite of spyware: you must actively install it, you have to turn it on in order for it to track you and earn your hours, you can easily turn it off and uninstall at will, and finally you know who’s tracking you and our Privacy Policy gives you explicit information about what happens with your data and how you can delete it from our system if you desire.

I know a thing or two about spyware: I was an expert witness in a series of twelve lawsuits in which I testified against one of the major perpetrators of spyware on the Internet. They actually hired me in part because of my experiences at AllAdvantage with permission-based and privacy-protecting advertising technologies like the Viewbar.

If you’re interested (or can’t sleep!) you can read brief excerpts from my 80-page expert witness report (the whole report is, unfortunately, under seal by the federal court). I submitted the excerpts when I testified at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Workshop on Spyware in 2004. My written materials are here.

I hope that helps clarify things a bit more.

Regards,
Ray Everett-Church
AGLOCO Chief Privacy Officer

Called the “dean of corporate privacy officers” by Inter@ctive Week Magazine, Ray Everett-Church is an internationally recognized expert on privacy law and Internet-related public policy. He is also the author of Internet Privacy For Dummies.

 

 

Picked up 400 referrals since my last post 4,100 in total at this point.  One thing that seems to be helping now is the some of my referrals see the numbers I have in ten day has encouraged the people I have recruited J. Three of my referrals have over 500 each so that helps me a great deal so I have been trying to encourage them to keep recruiting. I have started down my trail to landing 20 more direct referrals. I will post my results.

Saw the new AGLOCO website this morning. New Home Page is very nice and very informative. The new Learn More page is also informative. The new Referral Center page is much better than the old one, but it looks unfinished. I guess the beta site label is still on.

It is good to see progress.

I took last night off – wife and I saw the Bond movie.  But I am up still up another 300 – now 3,700  - the guys I recruited are still working J . AGLOCO member growth seems to be steady.

 My new goal of 10,000 seems high, so I think this weekend I am going to call 20 people and get some more direct recruits.

Have a great weekend all.