From Zero To One Million Dollars A Year In Sales

“Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language”. – How To Win Friends and Influence Them by Dale Carnegie

How to win friends and influence them is one of the greatest books of all times, it is probably the greatest piece of literature ever written about mastering the art of communicating with other people. It has sold of 15 million copies globally and it has been on the NY Times Best Seller List for over 10 years. If you have not read this book you are cheating yourself from being enlightened with possible some of the greatest insights on human relationships and communication skills you will ever come across in your entire life. We are going to explore one of the ideas in this book and how we apply it to our business.

One of the principals in the book talks about how powerful it is to use another persons’ name during communication. Don’t you feel a great sense of importance when someone 2 years ago remembers your name personally? It is extremely powerful when someone remembers your name and you will notice it.

You know the people who always say, “I’m bad at remembering names.” What they are really saying is, “I don’t pay enough attention and I don’t put enough effort to try to remember your name.” Start getting good at remembering names; let us not be like the average joe who can’t even remember a name, and even worse, brags about it! The ability to remember names can pay you huge dividends in the future.

Michael Gerber, the author of the E-Myth, another incredible book to have in your library, talks about an experience he has going to the local 24-hour fitness. Take a note at the simple, yet extremely powerful automated system 24-hour fitness has created to achieve a very high level of client fulfillment and membership retention.

“Here’s another example I love. When I check into my exercise club, 24-hour Fitness, I swipe my membership card into a similar system, and each time I do, the person at the counter hands me back my card and says, and this happens every single time, ’Have a good exercise, Michael.’ Have a good exercise, Michael. Can you believe it? Every time that happens, Sarah, I feel seen! They know me, even though they don’t. Just like me, your client wants to feel seen, and using their name is one of simplest ways to satisfy their need.”

an excerpt from Michael Gerber’s E-Myth Mastery, page 311.

What an incredible little system 24-hour has there, swipe your card and they’ll say have a great workout Wes. Incredible? I thought so when I first heard it, driving down to San Francisco in my car during my move listening to my audio books. It just made me say WOW. You know when you say WOW when an athlete, say, an NBA player makes a huge dunk or does something incredible. Well I say WOW when I hear about entrepreneurs implementing incredible systems and processes. I mean when I walk into a McDonalds, I say WOW, seriously. What an incredible attention to detail the entrepreneurs have put in place here to create a multi-million business that a HS student can operate after reading the Operations Manual, or simply the How To Run a McDonalds manual. That is world-class entrepreneurship at work, that excites me! Wow some of the innovations and systems that entrepreneurs have put in place amazes me.

But lets get back on track instead of learning about how Wes says WOW every time he sees cool business systems at work shall we?

When we can see a great simple concept at work, like the one they put together at the 24-hour fitness, we could easily implement this ourselves too. So here is a little trick that I’ve been using for the last couple months when talking to customers through AOL Instant Messenger.

Anytime someone new, whom I’ve never talked to before messages me on AIM, they’ll ask their question and I’ll of course help them out. But while were talking I will always end up asking for their name. Why? So when the next conversation comes around, I check my message history with meebo (which stores my message history so I can go back in the history and lookup their name, and is also web-based, so I can access it from any computer). So with meebo I can look back in my message history and find their name, of course this only works if you asked them for their name in the last conversation which I always do. Then I can respond back to the 2nd time we talk with a completely customized and personalized reply. Now instead of “sure what can I do for you,” it turns into “Sure absolutely what can I do for you John!”

And they will notice that you remember. And they will think to themselves, “they remembered my name? Cool.”

It is even best, and this does happen quite a bit when someone messages and says, “Hey wes, we talked earlier, you might not have remembered me but, I was wondering if I could get help on …..”

My response?

“Hey Joe, of course I remember ya! Sure lets go ahead and fix this issue for you.”

Now that’s what I call exceeding customer expectation! Do this with 1,000 customers, and guess what. You just exceeded 1,000 customer expectations. Can I get a wow, that’s pretty cool?

You can apply this simple concept too now. Just remember the principal that peoples’ names are important to them. And just make sure you catch their name on the first conversation so on the next one you’ll know their name!

So remember names, never let yourself be caught saying, “I’m bad at remembering names.” Those are the lazy people who can’t remember names because they simply don’t understand how important names are and they don’t put any effort into trying to remember names. But you will. So now you can say, “I’m good at remembering names.” How many times do you hear that?

So till next time! We have the bay area meetup202 event on the 31st this month. There were 16 people there last time, and out of 16 brand new faces, I have spent the time to remember each and everyone of them. They were: Matt, Jeff, another Matt, Pete, Claudia, Luba, Jimmy, Christian, Nana, Michael, Giovanna, Silver, Justin, Lana, Alexander and Amy. Oh also, the Café owners are Amy and Andrew.

I hope you received some value from reading this post today. Take charge, and take care. Start the process of becoming a skilled communicator, and the world is yours.

I’m pleased to introduce you to WorldProxy202, a proxy designed for International affiliate marketers. WorldProxy202 is an incredibly simple, yet powerful tool which provides international affiliate marketers with the ability to quickly view offers from different countries through the use of our proxy servers located around the globe.  When previously their IP address may have been blocked from viewing international campaigns, they can now easily view them by using WorldProxy202.

If your viewing a site through our US proxy, you can with a click of the mouse change the website to see it as if you were in Canada through the use our of Canadian Proxy site.  When you check it out for yourself you’ll see how easy it is to move around from country to country.  And of course we wanted to make it look good, proxy sites are normally hideously ugly.  But we have created a nice clean user interface, the kind you’ve come to expect from us.  

But wait, there’s more! We also have a downloadable Firefox WorldProxy202 toolbar. Just download the .xpi file, and open it with firefox to install it.  With this bad boy installed, anywhere, anytime you need to view a site from a proxy, simply load up the toolbar, select what country you’d like to view it from, type in your url address and go!  You must have firefox to use our toolbar, and you can download the toolbar here.  Our toolbar gives you access to proxies from around the world at your fingertips.  I hope you enjoy it.

What about my privacy? 

Well like all of the products we have created, there is always a huge concern about privacy. Our proxy sites monitor traffic like any other regular website using traffic analytics software. Although we do not intend to look at anyone’s surfing habits, as we like to keep our users information private, if there is however, any illegal or suspicious activity we will examine the logs to see what is going on. 

What about the toolbar privacy?

The toolbar does not track your browsing usage in any way shape or form.  The toolbar does not send us data every-time you visit a web-page.  We have no knowledge of what your doing on the internet by simply having our toolbar installed.  The toolbar doesn’t even ping out to check for updates currently, when we do add in the update alert feature it we will have it ping the official firefox server for updates so we remain as far away as possible from your browsing activity.

The only function our toolbar provides, is the ability to quickly select your country, type in your url address and load up the appropriate WorldProxy202 domain for you.  But we do not have any knowledge of any of your surfing activity whatsoever besides when your actually on our websites.  

Until next time.

Take a look at WorldProxy202, download our firefox toolbar, because if marketing campaigns on the web, this will come in handy.  Make sure to follow the official Prosper202 company blog to know about new toolbar releases, they won’t be posted on my personal blog most likely.  Well thats about it for now!  I look forward to hearing your comments, thanks everyone.  

We just launched a new Seattle Affiliate Marketing Meetup group. If you live in the area feel free to meet with us and other affiliate marketers in the Seattle, Washington area.  These are casual meet ups. The goal is to gather a group of like minded individuals together to collaborate, network, and essentially have a fun time.

If your wondering why we have a meetup in Seattle when I don’t live Seattle, it is because, Steven whom I work with on Prosper202 lives there. Steven is active in the affiliate marketing industry and knows his stuff, I wouldn’t be working with him if he didn’t! If the Seattle group can grow at the same rate of as our Bay Area Meetup group did, I will be flying out to Seattle to go to the May Meetup event and SMX Seattle.

Distractions are the killers of dreams.  

Why is it that there are so many tasks that we want to do, that we could honestly accomplish a lot quicker than we are trying?  If we look back on a lot of our personal accomplishments, there are many examples of ourselves succeeding at big tasks in sometime extremely short periods of time.  Although maybe not all successes happened quickly, but many of the big successes we we have I’m sure many were accomplished in short periods of time. 

If we look around us, it is quite clear that many of us are in pursuit to do something, but for many reasons we aren’t doing it fast enough, or not at all.    There are many things that we, myself included, are trying to do but we sometimes just do them so slow.  Why is this? Why do we move like snails sometimes, when we could be moving like cheetahs? Is there a good reason for not being able to finish what we want to do in half the time? It better be a good one if so.  Or is it that we just are to lazy sometimes, and that we could really accomplish more quicker if we tried?

Being slow to accomplish tasks that we really want to do is the killer of our dreams.    There are many projects that we wanted to do which we could have done already.  Products that we thought of years ago, and only now started working on which could have been done earlier had we just made a consequence effort to get it done faster.   Goals we wanted to hit, but haven’t yet, but we could have if we really looked back upon our efforts and did more to make our goal happen.  People we wanted to meet, but for whatever excuse we haven’t done it yet?  What’s taking us so long sometime? 

What is the answer?  You can only answer that yourself.  You have to be the one who tasks responsibility of your life.  And look into yourself and find the areas that you could improve, which will help you accomplish your dreams faster.  

The reason I’m posting this is to serve as a reminder to us all, myself included, that what we really want to do, we can really make it happen alot quicker than we ever imagined. And that if we focus on a solution to our challenges and do the work that needs to be done quickly, we could living the life of our dreams sooner than we ever imagined.  

I’m running into people all the time who have wanted to do something for a long time, and now are just getting to it.  What took so long?  Why do we move at snail speeds sometimes?  I mean how is it that we entered in the field of software products and there was already several competitors before even begun starting developing our products and we passed them by developing 2 products, then making it self-hosted, while they haven’t done anything else this whole time?  Is it skill?  Are special or something? No not really.  We are just focused on getting more things done in half the time it normally takes most people to get done.   

I mean, I even ask myself sometimes, why do we only have two products, I could have made four by now?  I need to pickup my personal effort too, and make things happen quicker than they are happening now.   Again this post is to serve as a reminder to us all, myself included, that some of the projects we are working on could be completed faster if we figured out how to make it happen quicker.  My boss once said, “it’s not how hard you work, it’s how smart you work.”  

Let us get 200% more work done, in half the time.  Heres my personal push; I’m pushing myself to launch another product before this upcoming Monday, May 12th.  

Is it possible to go from $0, to earn over $100,000 in three months? Yes it is.

Is it possible to take someone earning $100,000 a month to reach $1,000,000 a month within 30 days?  Is it possible, of course it is.  Is it hard, heck yeah it is.  And that is why most people won’t do the  disciplined effort to make it happen. But you will. 

Why is it that I know someone who just went from $50/day to over $3,000/day in affiliate marketing within 30 days?  When 50 other people I’ve seen stay at roughly the same level in the past 30 days? Is it skill? Is it luck?  No not really, the people doing huge things, in short periods of time, have made a consisence decsion to make it happen, and they did just that, they made it happen. And you could do the same thing..

It is possible to dramatically increase our productivity level if we just put our mind to it: plan it out what you intend to do, break down the goals into smaller steps, focus on doing each step, one by one, limit your distractions, gain momentum after completing each task, and accomplish everything you want to in life, quicker than you ever imagined possible.  

Let us continue on our journey of exploring the language that accredited investors use to build wealth quicker by using Fast Words. We are now on Fast Word number two.

Phantom Cash Flow

This is an interesting term, have you heard it before? Phantom Cash Flow is something you might overhear a sophisticated investor using. Phantom Cash Flow is basically referring to income or cash flow your making, but you won’t actually see the cash itself, because it is kind of Phantomish.   Let me explain using real estate as a teaching example.

If you own a piece of real estate as an investment, that real estate is like a mini-business, it has income and expenses.  And at the end of the year you have to file a profit/loss also called a ( P & L) at the end of the year.  You got to file taxes.

One of the great tax deductions that real estate offers is called Depreciation.  Depreciation allows you to write off a percentage of the value of your building each year over a certain amount of time.  Basically if you own a building Depreciation is a nice write-off that you can declare as an expense and reduce your net taxable income for a long time.  See the government made this tax rule that if you own a building, they recognize that your building is sorta falling apart over time and is depreciating in some what, so they let you incur this as an expense that you can write off, which will reduce your net taxable income.  If you reduce your net taxable income, you of course pay less in taxes. 

Let us say that an apartment building you own brought in $200,000 in revenue this year.  And that your building depreciated about $20,000.  So now on your taxes you can put an extra $20,000 of depreciation on your apartment expenses.  This is basically an expense that you can write off.  So what happens is your net taxable income was originally $200,000 is now $180,000 because you just wrote off $20,000 worth of depreciation expense.  See the deductions again; lower your net taxable income.  This in return will make you pay less tax at the end of the year. 

See, this is an example of Phantom Cash Flow.   You were able to decrease your net taxable income by $20,000 by using depreciation as an expense. This reduce in net taxable income means you essentially make more money at the end of the year because your paying less in taxes.  So this is extra money in your pocket that you are going to receive, more as a savings because you are paying less int axes.  But it is still money extra your earnings/saving, this is why its called Phantom Cash Flow. 

If we can reduce you from paying $50,000 in taxes to only having to pay $30,000 in taxes.  You basically just gained an extra $20,000 in cash flow because that was extra money you saved!   You kept an additional $20,000 in wealth, but you diddn’t really get the cold hard cash to say, but it is extra income because you just saved a bunch of money on taxes.  Money you earned but your not really seeing.  This is why it is called Phantom Cash Flow.  Cash Flow that is being earned, but you don’t see it, thats why it’s sorta Phantomish as I like to say.

Now you know what Phantom Cash Flow is.  If you were with us last time you learned what an accredited investor was.  Till next time, let us keep using fast words.  If you change the way you think and talk, you will change your life.   Is this the first time you’ve heard the term Phantom Cash Flow?

Yesterday we had our first Meetup202 event in downtown San Francisco.  It was a huge success, there were almost 20 people there.  Some were first time affiliate marketers, PPC users, to more experienced affiliate marketers that did it full time and some SEO gurus.  Giovanna from SEOBook was also there, was great to network with everyone there.  We look forward to the next event on May 31st, you can find details at Meetup202.com.  If you were in the bay area and diddn’t go for whatever reason you missed out is all I can say.  I learned a lot there.  I ended up talking with people for 7 hours during the event and had dinner with a few too.  Here are some of the people who joined us. And pictures below.

Matt (sk1tech), Amy, Jeff, Matt (Kwandom), Pete, Claudia, Luba, Christian, NanaBaffoe, Michael, Giovanna (SEOBOOK), Silver, Justin, Jimmy and Lana

Prosper202 is what everyone has been waiting for.

Prosper202 is a self-hosted PPC tracking solution, it is the same code used on Tracking202.It also comes with Export202 which allows you to duplicate PPC campaigns from network to network.This software is powerful, self-hosted and fast. All you need to do it get started is simply download the files, upload them to a dedicated domain name and run the 5 minute installation script. It’s that simple.

We originally launched T202 with the idea that we would never give away the software as a self-hosted application. But we received lots of feedback from users requesting we make a self-hosted version. So you know what, we listened, and now we are going to give the users what they wanted. Self-hosted software. I like to call this, success through customer feedback.

So how much is Prosper202? We are giving it all away for free.We have decided to make Prosper202 free for the same reason we made Tracking202 free. We are excited for the opportunity to help thousands of affiliates earn more money and make an impact on someones future. What gets me most excited is when we receive emails from users telling us how much our software has helped them make more money. It is a great feeling knowing that you have been able to help someone out, the best feeling.

PPC Affiliate Marketing will never be the same!

Check out the Prosper202 website, download your application and start installing it on your server! Join our newsletter so you can receive email alerts when we release new updates. Discuss with other Prosper202 users on our affiliate marketing forum. If you like RSS follow our new official Prosper202 company blog to stay up to date with what we are doing. And finally if your in the Bay Area, come to our Meetup202 affiliate marketing event to meet other local affiliate marketers.

I want to say thank you to Scott Weaver over at Affiliate Toolbox who helped refine some queries to make Propser202 compatible with MySQL 4. I want to also thank all of our users who have provided feedback on our applications and ultimately helped us get to where we are now. And thank you, for your interest in our services. I appreciate the opportunity you have given me to work with you, I look forward to making our relationship a profitable one. Thank You.

Oh boy, I’m excited. Something is in the air, and no it’s not a macbook.In 12 hours Tracking202 and Export202 self-hosted are going to launch. Also this Saturday we have our Meetup202 group getting together, we already have 39 members and growing! At this rate our meetup group will have over 365 members within a year, all learning, associating and growing together. Should be a blast.You’re going to like what you see in 12 hours. It’s time to see the all the seeds our team has planted now grow into trees. It’s been 8 months of long development to get to this stage, this should be good. We’re going to announce something crazy with this release, you probably won’t believe it when we tell you what it is.

Everyone needs a hacker!

We just we just started working with someone who tests the cyber-security state of a financial institution for a living. I was fortunate enough to meet them at ad:tech. (again another reason why going to the events is priceless)

I won’t disclose their name because I assume they want to remain anonymous. They are testing the security of our self hosted applications to make sure everything is secure before releasing it to you! So far everything has been secure on our applications and the code I’ve wrote, which is awesome.

How much does a hacker cost if your curious? Well I’m sure prices vary, but if your curious, our guys are about $150/hour and they’ll test whatever you need tested. It’s a great feeling to know already that most of it is secure already and no loop holes have been found yet. In 2006 I was concerned about security and began studying it, so security has always been a huge concern for me as a developer. And it should be for you too if you want to develop something big that lots of people use.

Thanks for everyones’ interest in beta testing our self-hosted applications which will be released this week. We will be shipping you a secure application that you can feel safe using. So stay tunned.

And for any programmers out there, before you release your product into the wild I’d recommend having a penetration tester run through all of your code to make sure it is secure too. Most people don’t think about security, but you will.

The real education isn’t the information you will find on the public blogosphere, or even my blog. The real gold mine of information, I mean the really valuable information, the few tips and tricks that could earn you tens of thousands extra each month are found when talking person to person, face to face. Although you can make alot of money personally by focusing online all day, if you were to also attend more events you would find yourself even further ahead and networked than if you did not. My personal opinion.

There are people in your life that you will meet, that will have dramatic difference in your life. Whether it is learning some good ideas from them or you end up partnering with them for instance, there are some key people that can and will make a major difference in your personal and business life. And the events are important because it will put you in a better position to meet the people who can really help you and give you insightful information that can accelerate your learning curve by several years. It is all about being at the right place, all of the time, and going to the events can place you in the best position for growth at that specific time.

Ad:Tech for me started 2 days prior to the event. What I mean is I had meetings before official ad:tech event started, and then would have meetings during the 3 day ad:tech spree, and then 2 days after ad:tech as well. For me, ad:tech was a 7 day event of face to face contact with all of the people I’ve been talking to online, and even meeting some other powerful people in the network personally. It has been great, and have made great new connections, and strengthened existing connections.

Although I can’t blog about every meeting I had of course, I did get a chance to goto the ad:tech blogger dinner, who I believe Ms Danielle put on. This was a lot of fun getting a chance to meet other bloggers in person, and really build a relationship.

[left to right] Greg Morgan, Garret Gee, me, Ian Lee, Gloria, Bob Buskirk, Ms Danielle, Ian Fernando.

The best part the event was 5 blocks away from my apartment in san francisco. I believe also the web 2.0 conference is next week just a few blocks away too in downtown san francisco.

The real information isn’t in the public blogosphere, it is at the events, at the dinners and at the parties. And even though I never went to a single party during college because I was working, I will goto them during the conferences because its business, and I get to exchange ideas with others. I was able to meet other local web 2.0 startups and even 2 people from a venture capital firm.

The next events I will be going to will be to our event, the meetup202 event. The media breakaway conference and affiliate summit east which we both already have passes for. If your at all serious about the affiliate marketing industry be there. To get different results you have to do different things. And if you are unsatisfied with your current situtation, not making enough affiliate income, and you are not coming to the events, well?…… You really gotta change what your doing then and start coming to the events if your trying to change your game. If you want to be someone who makes a serious amount of money in this business I will see you at the events, and if your not there, I won’t see you there at the events and I’ll be working with everyone else who did show up.

Sometimes success is so easy, we just have to do it. To many people message me everyday saying there going to do this and this, and then don’t do anything at all. So I no longer listen to what people say, I just watch what people do. If you tell me you want to make some serious money and then you do not go to the events, your not serious about making money. Ok…..

Now some people could be the exception to the rule and they already know most everything and already earn a large amount of money might not need to be at every event, and just need to implement what they already know. Thats fine, because they already have the knowledge, the skill and their network built up already. And I’d argue that those who are already grandmasters at what they do have been to the events before and networked with key people who have helped them, and whom they still work together with today. But the key to remember is, these people already earning a large amount relaxing now have invested their time before and gone to events and networked in the past to help them get to their current stage.

I challenge you to be one of the people who is results oriented instead of talk oriented. Someone who actually listens to good ideas and then goes and applies them and then says next, I’ve accomplished this, now what do I need to do, and then does it all over again. I say goto the events, and then people don’t go and then they ask me if there is something else they can do to build their business. Don’t they get it, I already gave the tip to goto the event, and if they want to get to the next level of knowledge they first had to implement the first tip, which was having them goto the event. If they don’t goto the event, and then ask for more tips, they didn’t implement the first tip, and I can’t help them get to the next level. What am I suppose to say to them? They already know what to do, they just have to do it. I can’t share tip number two, if they’re unwilling to implement tip number one, why waste mine, and everyone elses’ time?

What I’m saying is, if you want to take your skill to the next level, be at the right place all of the time. And you can do this by being at the events that are in your specific industry and put effort into making the most out of each event. Invest the time to search, and find the key people that will be able to help you out. I challenge you to come to theses events with the few who make it. If you are serious about affiliate marketing, let’s see it, so lets meet at next event ok? I look forward to meeting you there, take care, take charge and take none of this as an insult, but as a challenge to push ourselves and really make it to the events, and meet some key people who can increase your learning curve by several years. Make it happen!