(Dr.) Frank Palmer Purcell

I guess I have always been a teacher.  In my professional debut as apprentice to the great Robbie McClintock at Columbia, our students included a Marine Corps colonel preparing for a second career as a college president.  In the course of a long career, I taught  --  successfully  --  nearly every subject to every age, from kindergarten to senior citizens at a Lower East Side settlement house.

Internaut and Mentor

I built my first computer before most of you were born.  This isn't as impressive as it might sound, since the wretched thing didn't do anything worth doing.  I suppose it was waiting for somebody to invent the integrated circuit.  My next computer was from Timex Sinclair.  It couldn't get on line, but it could run Forth programs from a cassette player.  (Why Forth?  Because I couldn't get my hands on APL, that's why!)

I first accessed the Internet from an Atari 400 game machine which my bank had sold me to manage my account, with wires going to the telephone and an old black and white TV.  The online banking programs came in a game cartrige.  This was before the WorldWide Web made it to the Net.  (Of course we were all on the Web already, we just didn't have a word for the apparatus of books, periodicals, card catalogues, footnote and bibliographies we no longer have to pay too much attention to.)

When HTML came of age  --  I know his daddy, SGML, though not very well  --  I got my own domain and started building websites for myself, my students at the Board of Education and the City University of New York, and some groups in my community.  I was deeply involved in social networking from the very beginning  --  Delphi Forums, Friendster, Ryze, Tribe, MySpace, Facebook, Ning, and probably some I don't even remember.

Then a Wall Street Bank (it no longer exists) lured me away from the classroom to work on its Internet technology.  Then somebody crashed a plane across the street.  Then another one.  It even made the papers.  Eventually my job had a hissy fit and moved to India.

Today, I am pleased to represent SiteSell, a company you haven't heard of because it doesn't advertise. SiteSell offers a systematic approach to web design and hosting with which I am in hearty agreement.  I am particularly happy to offer their exellent series of Masters Courses to my visitors here, at no cost to you.  They are only a click away.

Financial Educator

Not every philosopher gets paid to philosophize.  My first job after graduate school was in the criminal justice system, negotiating between counselors and an old DEC PDP-1135 running ADMINS-11.    Suffice it to say that the programs were case sensitive but the CRT displays weren't!

My second job was with Equitable Life, back in the days when once a year the President and the Chairman of the Board would mount a small platform in the lobby of corporate headquarters and entertain employees, agents, messengers, and visitors with trombone duets.  I seem to remember an arraingement of Ketelby's In a Chinese Garden.  I shared an office with an agent from Sri Lanka who was the permanent guest conductor of a symphony orchestra in Mexico, which evidently didn't pay him that much more than philosophy paid me.

I was an "equity qualified" (NASD Series 6) agent  I specialized in a form of financial planning which minimized taxes by basing a life insurance policy on a mutual fund of common stocks.  Premium payments were (in many cases) tax decuctable, and proceeds, tax free  --  until the reform of the tax code!

I stayed out of high finance for a while.  I didn't even pay as much attention to economic policy as I should have, until Ron Paul came along.  Ron proved that some people at least (and at last) were willing to listen to common sense  Then the crash of '08 - '09 made many Americans wish that more of us had listened. 

Late in '08 I learned of some fortunate people who had managed to protect themselves much better than the rest of us.  They had been guided by a series of financial education programs about which few knew.  I decided to help get the word out through a company called Carbon Copy PRO.  I can't go into the details here.  Just click on the link and leave your contact information to learn more.  The page to which I linked is full of a youthful exuberance I find delightful, especially as it is justified in the result.  Don't dismiss it as hype.  It isn't.

Making Money On Line

I could tell you a million ways to lose money in an online business, some of them from personal experience.  Many of them are based on the same business model, and it sucks.  You sign up in somebody's affiliate program, pour money into Google ads, spend more money on keyword research, or hours, months, years learning how to do it yourself.  Then you wait for somebody to click on your ad, reach your affiliate page on the company website, and click on the button that asks for his credit card.  Or hers.  Some of us are still waiting.  You get the idea.  Of course thousands of people are attempting to drive traffic to the same sales page, but with their own affiliate codes, and are bidding up the price of the same keywords.  And some of them have deep pockets.  Very deep.  If you don't know what I'm talking about, thank God and move on to the next paragraph.

Dr. Ken Evoy had a better idea.  He is not only one of the three percent who make a real profit, but he has mentored a goodly number of the rest of the three percent.  His formula for success is CTPM  --  content drives traffic to your site, where you must presell before you make money.  But where do you get that all-important content?  Here's the beautiful thing  --  it can be about anything you care enough to know something about.  No, I mean it!  The more eccentric the better  --  because you will have so much less competition, and more than enough business  --  if your fellow eccentrics can find you.  And on today's Internet they can.  They will.  Without your spending a red cent on advertising.  They even have a name for this now  --  "the long tail"  --  and a couple of years back there was even a best-seller on the subject, well worth looking for.

The good doctor practices what he preaches.  As you know if you clicked the links, he is giving away a lot of valuable information, in the hopes you will buy his product  --  and you are probably thinking that I am sharing it for the same reason.  Well, I am!  But the principles work, whether your site is hosted on his servers or not.  The main value he adds is a website development system based on the CTPM model.  If it make sense to you, it would make sense to use his system when you want to build a website.

And if you don't want a new website, but know other people who do, people who don't have the time or expertise to do it themselves or the money to hire a developer, you can enroll as an affiliate, and make a few dollars by sending business their way.  It's free, you don't even need your own site, and the training and support materials they provide are, well, enormous, and of far better quality than other affiliate programs charge a great deal of money for.

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