I was in San Francisco speaking at Alejandro Reyes’s Illuminate Conference and all the sudden some friends from Edison High School, back in Huntington Beach, California from 1986-1989 found me. They even posted some ridiculous pictures of me when I was 18 years old, scary! 

Those were the years I was a conflicted Punk Rocker, Surfer, Christian Youth Group Goodie Two Shoes, and Marching Band Geek.

Yea, I told you I was conflicted… I did not know much about who I was back then, but I tried to fit in with a lot of different groups and “cliques” as they were called back then and it kept me pretty busy and it was all really fun.

So 20 years later… all my old band friends, many of which I have not seen personally in 20 years, but heard from with random emails once every 3 years, all the sudden popped up and it was a great homecoming “virtually”.

The “Add me to your friend list” has been on rapid fire all week!

As a matter of fact a lot of the “Bandos” did a get together this last weekend in Huntington Beach cause all the sudden, they were feeling the love.

But here is why I am telling you all this.

I reconnected with many really cool people who seemed, even though it’s 20 years later, exactly the same, and in some ways, radically different. So as we talked on each other’s “Walls” on facebook, it was like writing to each other in our old High School Yearbook.

Band was a good time for me during High School.

We went to a lot of places in Band… all the football games, (home and away games), Away Basketball Games, Marched at Field Show competitions and every Christmas we did the Christmas Disneyland parade and then there was always one big trip every other year.

We got to go to Expo 86 in Vancouver, BC and then in 88 we got to go to Florida and Disneyworld parks.

Adventures on the bus, getting to destinations were half the fun and just goofing off and hanging out in our “space” on the high school campus with friends was precious. Man, come to think about it, High School was one big clique. Everyone hung out with their “group”.

There were the Cheerleaders, the Nerds, the Jocks, the Surfers, Punk Rockers, preppies, marching bandos and lots of racial groups like Vietnamese kids plus those that did not fit into any group too.

We all tried to make it a melting pot, but overall, I think societies have still formed out cliques and social groups to keep people connected and there is nothing wrong with that, as long as they are never exclusive.

So, why am I telling you this again?

Cause, friends matter. And I can get too focused on MARKETING and SELLING and LIST BUILDING and completely forget about FRIENDSHIP BUILDING. You need REAL friends.

It can be 1 week, 1 year or 20 years ago that you connected with people but connecting with them again online is fun, and rekindles lots of great memories (as well as some scary ones too).

How are you doing in the “Social Equity” Space?

Social Equity is the place you arrive at ONLINE where your twitter accts are tweeting, your linkedin accts are linkin and your Facebook friend requests are poppin, and you are making real friend to friend connections.

You can CONNECT on a deeper level with real humans, instead of interacting with “technology” all the time and “artificial worlds” that the internet provides for us. You need real people in your life who care about you!

And don’t blow it by turning in your new social equity status into a “Hey look at me, I got a great biz opp you need to join since you are poor and don’t have any money!”

That’s sure to put you on the outs with your old or new buddies. There is a proper way to introduce business and I’ll have more to say about that below.

Just hook up… join in, share photos, write on walls, send fun applications that are nothing but pointless and do nothing but steal people’s time. (you need to have fun every once in a while for the purpose of just having fun!)

Speaking of fun… in case you wanna see some old skool pix from me in High School, looking all 80′s and stuff, totally surf punked out… then dare I say… click on my profile link!

Jeff Mills Facebook Profile (add me as a friend)

If you are not too familiar with how Facebook works or what it is, check these stats out….

Statistics General Growth * More than 110 million active users * Facebook is the 15th most-trafficked website in the world (Compete – October 19, 2008) * Facebook is the most-trafficked social media site in the world (comScore)

User Demographics * Over 55,000 regional, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks * More than half of Facebook users are outside of college * The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older * Maintain 85 percent market share of 4-year U.S. universities

Applications * No. 1 photo sharing application on the Web (comScore) * More than 30 million photos uploaded daily * More than 6 million active user groups on the site

International Growth * Their Translation Application is first step for them in helping users all over the world connect and share information with those that matter the most to them – wherever they live and in whatever language they choose * In a little over five months, they have released the site in more than 20 languages, including Spanish, French, German, Russian and Korean. Their goal is to offer Facebook in as many languages as possible, as quickly as possible.

Platform * More than 400,000 developers and entrepreneurs * Over 24,000 applications have been built on Facebook Platform * 140 new applications added per day * More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platform

About Facebook Founded in February 2004, Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people’s real-world social connections. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment.

Product Facebook’s simplified navigation gives users easy access to core site functions and applications. Profile, Friends, Networks and Inbox – pages core to the user experience on Facebook – have a prominent place at the top of the user’s profile page. Facebook applications – Photos, Notes, Groups, Events and Posted items – are displayed on the left side bar, along with any third-party applications a user has added to their account.

Technology Facebook is the second most-trafficked PHP site in the world, and one of the largest MySQL installations anywhere, running thousands of databases. Facebook has built a lightweight but powerful multi-language RPC framework that allows the company to seamlessly and easily tie together subsystems written in any language, running on any platform. The company is the largest user in the world of memcached, an open-source caching system, and has created a custom-built search engine serving millions of queries a day, completely distributed and entirely in-memory, with real-time updates.

Platform Facebook Platform is a development platform that enables companies and engineers to deeply integrate with the Facebook website and gain access to millions of users through the social graph. Facebook is a part of millions of people’s lives all around the world providing unparalleled distribution potential for applications and the opportunity to build a business that is highly relevant to people’s lives.

Privacy Facebook has led the industry in giving people tools to control the information they share and with whom they choose to share it. User privacy has always been a top priority for the company, which has worked with such organizations as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and WiredSafety. Facebook is TrustE certified. Users also have the ability to share and restrict information based on specific friends or friend lists.

Funding Round one: $500,000 from Peter Thiel, Summer 2004; Round two: $12.7 million from Accel Partners, April 2005; Round three: $27.5 million from Greylock Partners leading the round, Meritech Capital Partners participating, and Accel Partners and Peter Thiel increasing their investment in the company.

Board Members: Mark Zuckerberg, Jim Breyer, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen; Observer: David Sze; Observer: Paul Madera

Employees 600+

Users 110 million active (users who have returned to the site in the last 30 days)

Offices Palo Alto, Calif. (headquarters); New York; London

Now that you have a “techincal” background to facebook, there is still alot more to talk about.

Since I am a marketer, there is a lot of real world marketing applications that one can use from facebook that can help you sell products and services, rather than just being a playing field for old high school band mates to hang out.

I don’t want to spoil the heart of this article by just trying to turn the cool thing happening in my facebook profile right now by saying “market the hell outa facebook, here’s how” cause that would not see right.

But I will say this, I do have a very simple and very good introduction to Facebook report that you can download right now which will take one deeper down the rabbit hole showing people more details about proper facebook useages for marketing and keeping things social.

I know many people who have built huge responsive lists and made 6 figures just using facebook to make connections and “generate leads”.

If you are not sure how that works, then this might be an excellent starting point for people.

I am actually discounting this product quite a lot for you so you can get it, and make it a no brainer for anyone to afford, normally, this 89 page report goes for $47, but I am going let you take home a copy for only $4.70!

      

If you order right now, I’ll also sweeten the pot too.. How about getting these 3 products for free?

• Private Label Rights Tips worth $97
• Reply Email Automator worth $197
• Niche Marketing Bonus Report worth $37

Download Facebook For Cash now, and learn how to expand your social equity and rekindle some of those crazy days of your youth when you were a mixed up high school or college socialite like I was and let the good times and memories flood over you. It’s theraputic and good for your soul.

My good friend of mine and like-minded fellow Christian Marketer, Alejandro Reyes, (Successfool.com) has put together a killer line up of excellent speakers who will be speaking at the FIRST EVER Christian Internet Marketing Conference.

Here is the line up of who is speaking, and if you want to see the topics in detail, then go to:
>> Illuminate 2008 …and you can get the full details.

Speaking this year will be:

Joel Comm, Jermaine Griggs, Gary Zelesky, (me) Jeff Mills, Paul Counts, Dr. Mike Woo Ming, Ruddy Ortiz, Wade Tonkin, Jason Stanley Marshall, Monikah Ogando, Eric Farewell, Stephen Beck.

With this type of line up, one is sure to get a great cross mix of marketing strategies and tools for growing their marketing efforts while learning how to build a profitable purpose-driven business.

Attendees will learn about SEO, Outsourcing, Product Launches, Financial Strategies, Traffic Strategies, Affiliate marketing, How to Discover their Passion, Advanced Personalization Strategies & much much more.

Whether you’re a novice or a pro, promoting a network marketing company or your own products or service…the Illuminate Conference promises a 100% satisfaction guaranteed policy where, if after 3 days you don’t feel like you got any value, then you can ask for 100% of your money back!

For a limited time only, Alejandro has reduced the ticket price to $197 as he doesn’t want their to be ANY excuse for anyone not to be at this event to take their life and business to the next level.

I highly recommend you attend Alejandro’s Illuminate Conference and get new skills, solutions and systems to help you take your business to the next level.

Go here to get their complete story, go here: Illuminate 2008

My event, the Midwest Super Conference was a big hit for all the attendees in many ways and I wanted to share some reflections from the feedback and speak some future happenings into existence.

First of all… All our speakers were excellent and over delivered, plus… stayed and networked with our attendees. While a few had to bail out for other commitments, what we love is hooking people up so they can make those solid business joint ventures happen and the faculty this year gave great value back to all.

The hotel we used, was just ok. While it did service our needs ok, I think next time, I’ll opt for a little bit more formal and a touch of better service. Our biggest complaint was, we are an internet marketing conference, and the internet feed from the hotel was a shared feed… not a dedicated one, so it was hard to get a solid push up to do the live streaming we offered this year. We shared a T1 line with the entire hotel, offices, guest rooms, and banquet rooms!

But, regardless of the streaming hurdles, those that did get a chance to come on the live stream really did enjoy it, I got a ton of great feedback and emails from people who were stoked to get access for such a low price.

Speaking of the Live Stream Enhanced experience, we are letting people log in now until October 4, to view our streams as they were recorded. You’ll also see the low priced continuing education offers that our speakers made at the event, and you’ll even be able to tap into those special offers if you act before October 4, or you’ll pay full price getting them all later.

I remember Armand Morin talking about how it took him 3 seminars to get himself into the “right” profit zone he wanted, after doing two seminars. I guess I am following in my mentor’s footsteps as I have done the same thing. While Seminar 1 was not profitable, seminar 2 broke even barely and seminar 3 was a great boost.

It came by cutting expenses and not overspending on stuff that I thought I needed. For example, last year, I did lunches AND dinners. This year, I just did Dinners.

What I’ll change next year is I’ll just do 3 lunches and I’ll do an evening networking party the first night to get people hanging out and networking.

I’ll also do a live stream next year, but I usually won’t announce this officially until the last week of the conference. The reason is, I want people there live, as that is where the biggest benefits are for people. But I also know the people who could not make it really enjoyed the content and the chat room, just chillin with people there.

So, what gonna happen in 2009?

I am planning on doing another Midwest Super Conference in the Fall of 2009 and then in 2010, I want to do the big daddy of them all… The Internet Marketers United Charity Seminar, where it’s like a week long gala event/expo with a ton of people coming together for exposition, many internet marketing industries, fundraising golf tournament, and 4 days of speakers with about 16 speakers total. But that’s a hard one to put together as, I need a seminar event planner to handle this one, it’s gonna be a major deal to pull off and needs major support by all the IM marketers to come and just make it a big party.

The goal of internet marketers united is to bring the whole industry together for a charitable cause. I have a dream of building a $10 million dollar lakefront retreat center on a beautiful lake front in Minnesota for High School kids to come to a super entrepreneur’s camp for 2 weeks of their summer.  We’d do 6 sessions total, in the summer, and bring in the top internet marketers from all over the world to teach educated and excelled high school kids to become wealthy young internet entrepreneurs. Imagine how valuable these kids will be to corporations or for the future of how the internet works and how people come together and use the internet in the future!

This will become the premier learning center for these kids to balance classroom learning and then take the knowledge and develop team building activites to implement the lessons learned and be making money before their two weeks are over. Then end the 2 week event with a Gala dinner where the kids show off their warez to their parnents and supporters on what they learned.

Cool idea eh? I need the Entire Internet Marketing community supporting this endeavor, as I want to make it a reality by 2012 and running by then.

After the summer sessions, we’d open the retreat facility up to corporations, churches and Scrapbookers to use for meetings and events throughout the year.

So, what’s next for me in the seminar marketing circuit?

I’ll be speaking at Alejandro Reye’s Illuminate Conference in San Francisco in a few weeks. Alejandro’s a social marketing rock star and is doing one of the first Christian internet marketing conferences around. Maybe you’ll come out to meet me and hear all the speakers there? It’s October 10-12. I hope you can make it.

I’m hosting the 3rd Outsource Workshop here in Minneapolis, November 7-9, and it is sure to be the best seminar yet. We’ll be bringing in some new speakers this year and I look forward to some great content, and hands on learning by the students. This event is purposefully meant to be a SMALL gathering of about 25 people total. The cost is $1997, but if you get my Outsource Secrets Revealed package, you get to come free!

Looking forward into the Spring of 2009…. I have partnered with Rob Toth, a great internet marketer from Vancouver, BC, and we’ll be doing a Canadian Internet Marketing Conference in Calgary, the last weekend in March. We hope to service our Canadian friends with their own internet marketing event, that caters not just to Canadians, but people all over the world. It’s gonna feel siminar to a Midwest Super Conference, but it will be much bigger and I am sure will sell out with in a few weeks of launch. Canadians are so hungry to have a conference in their own hood! And Rob and I are going to deliver that to them and fill that need.

So, that’s what’s coming up, stay tuned for more updates as they come!