Notes for New Ryze Members

Building Your Future on Ryze

Some simple Ryze rules that hardly anyone knows.

The 42 people below come from my hometown, Christchurch, New Zealand. They are not any different from Ryze members anywhere else. They join not knowing quite what to do. So they sit an do NOTHING. In particular they don't join any networks, so they might as well never have come to Ryze. They can't communicate with anyone and people can't communicate with them. There's no point in being a "private member" of a social network.

There are 42 Christchurch members of Ryze. The secret of success on Ryze is to join many networks. As a free member you can join up to 60. Network membership allows free members to connect to every other member of that network. By joining 30 or 40 networks you can probably contact over 100,000 people. You can also contact "friends" and "friends of friends" but the effect of that is small. Joining MANY networks is the key.

Of the 42 people, 33 have joined fewer than 5 networks. 29 had fewer than 5 friends. If each network has 300 members, and each friend has 5 friends, a person who is in 5 networks with 5 friends can contact about 1500 via networks and 95 people via friends. Ryze has over 300,000 members and this person can contact and be contacted by only 1595.

If you are in no networks and have no friends, you can't contact anyone. Look at the table below. People can't possibly succeed, not because Ryze doesn't work. People fail on Ryze because hardly anyone understands that you MUST join networks to succeed.

Here is evidence of our failure to use Ryze effectively

21 Christchurch Ryze Members in
Joining Order - before 31/05/04
Date Joined	Page Visits	Networks Joined	Friends
7/02	89	0	0
10/02	80	0	0
1/03	125	1	8
2/03	1752	25	65
4/03	183	4	9
8/03	312	10	18
8/03	114	0	5
10/03	174	0	7
10/03	5483	90	200
10/03	139	1	7
10/03	1185	60	80
12/03	24	0	1
1/04	182	0	0
1/04	58	0	1
2/04	61	0	0
2/04	450	4	20
2/04	18	0	1
3/04	712	75	50
3/04	15	0	0
5/04	111	8	9
5/04	30	0	0

21 Christchurch Ryze Members in
Joining Order - after 31/05/04
Date Joined	Page Visits	Networks Joined	Friends
6/04	450	1	0
6/04	121	5	4
7/04	11	1	0
8/04	9	0	0
9/04	540	16	4
6/05	57	3	4
7/05	45	0	1
8/05	34	0	1
11/05	27	0	1
10/05	41	0	4
11/05	20	0	0
11/05	42	0	2
1/06	103	7	6
1/06	77	1	5
2/06	13	0	1
3/06	26	0	0
4/06	4	0	0
5/06	20	0	0
7/06	42	3	1
8/06	20	0	0
11/06	7	0	0

There are issues with Ryze. (Management doesn't explain the network contact rule very well.) But the key issue is that in our community the joining behaviour needed to be successful isn't well developed. Of 42 who joined, FOUR were successful. The reason for failure is simple and can be easily fixed.

The four successful people are not special. They just understood what to do. Join many networks, participate, develop a list of friends. Simple basic stuff that too often is not done.

Some suggested rules of thumb for Ryze. Join lots of networks, and read the posts. Visit the pages of two people who post something interesting every day. Leave a message in their guestbooks. If that's all you do, you'll get about one page visit every day, 400 a year. Anyone could do that. So few people do.

In the group of 42 people above 31 have been members for more than a year. Only 7 people have more than 400 homepage hits. Just as importantly of the 11 people who have joined in the last 12 months, not a single one is being successful. The best one has 103 hits in 5 months (20 a month), has joined 7 networks and has 6 friends. If he joined 40 networks and visted a couple of people a day, so much would change. Easy to do once you understand the principle.

Another secret is to post to the networks yourself occasionally, but that's something you'll learn to do.

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