From Zero To One Million Dollars A Year In Sales

So I always use to think, up until now, that doing a lot of favors for others builds the relationship with the other person, and try to ask for as-little back was the way to build a great report with someone.  But I can see the opposite side now, on why it is good to also ask for favors in return as-well, because it can relive the pressure of someone feeling like they owe something to you. If you keep giving and ask for nothing, they will be less likely to ask for more favors, and in doing so you will be less likely to receive help from the relationship if you ask nothing in return, and give give and give.

But if your only giving and don’t allow yourself to receive the relationship is not as good as it could be: because we have stopped the giving AND receiving of favors to one’s self. I just read this and I’d like to share it with you here, the last part is what made me re-think a significant part of how I try to do as many favors as possible for people, but I can see why it wasn’t always the best way to just keep giving, and try to ask as little as possible in return.

“GIVE FAVORS: There’s a karmic scoreboard in the sky.  This scoreboard tracks what you do for people. If you want to be a world-class schoomzer, ensure that you’re hugely positive on the scoreboard. You accomplish this by helping people-especially folks who seemingly can’t do anything for you.  And do this without expectation of return. Eventually, the scoreboard will take care of you.

 

RETURN FAVORS: Since I believe in doing favors, I surely advocate returning favors.  When something is done for oyu, you have accepted a moral obligation to pay it back.  Great schoomzers return favors and do so with joy.  This not only moves the scoreboard a little in the positive direction but enables you to ask for more favors.

 

ASK FOR THE REUTRN OF FAVORS: Counterintuitive as this seems, you should ask for the return of favors.  Doing so reduces or removes the pressure from a person who feels he owes you somethign.  Thus, it provides an opportunity to clear the deck.  Then the other party can ask for new favors.”

 

The Art of Start - Guy Kawasaki,

Bryan Sims is someone whom I highly respect as entrepreneur; not only in his ability to generate a highly profitable company, but more so in the way that he does it, by educating the younger generation how to become financially free through his company Brass Media has asked me to show everyone BrassTV.  I was fortunate enough to know Bryan sims personally, he went to the same college as me, Oregon State University, and like all of the now succesful entrepreneurs I know dropped out of college to build a company.

Bryan has recently joined Ben Casnocha, and Ryan Allis in becoming one of the new top 25 young entrepreneurs by the Entrepreneur Magazine.  I wrote about Bryan Sims awhile ago here.  The reason I like Brass so much because their whole business is essentially empowering the younger generations by teaching entrerpereship, investing and showing examples of young entrepreneurs making their dreams come true.  He has done something that I respect him very highly for in offering free seminars to students, this is something I wanted years ago, and I was happy to see that he is actually doing it.  

BrassTV, which is seen on ShareBrass.com, is a new division of BrassMedia.  BrassTV will be a TV show that features young entrepreneurs making things happen and educating people on how to become financially independent.  

During the 18th century two brothers walked out to the forrest, both had axes in their hand.  They planed on cutting down as many trees as they possibly could within six hours.  The two brothers, Abe and John are about the same age and have the same physical build, they are equally strong.  It is a bright early morning, and they figure there is about six more hours of sunlight, so they will see how many trees they can cut down within the six hour time period.  

As they walk to the cutting area John decides to challenge his brother Abe to a competition,  ”Brother Abe, I bet you that I can cut down more trees within 6 hours than you can.”  Abe replies, “Oh really? We’ll just have to see about that.” The two brothers agree to see who between them can cut down the most trees within the six hours.

At noon they arrive to the area where they are supposed to start axing.  John starts right away and beings axing immediately.  After about an hour he cuts down his first tree and looks over his shoulder to see that his brother Abe has not cut down any trees at all.  In fact, he notices Abe isn’t cutting at all, instead he is just sharpening his axe.  John shrugs in disbelief that his brother is sharpening his axe, so he continues to axe himself and after another hour he cuts down a second tree.  After he cuts down the second tree he looks over to his brother Abe again whom he finds is still sharpening his axe!  

“What are you doing Abe? I’ve already cut down my first two trees in two hours! I’m going to beat you,” yells John laughing at Abe. Giving no attention, Abe continues to sharpen his axe. In disbelief John turns around to the trees and begins cutting down his third tree.  After another hour John has cut down his third tree, he is cutting about one tree down per hour.  John feels confident that he will win, because he has already cut down three trees so far, and his brother Abe has not even begun axing yet.  

As John starts to start cutting down his 4th tree, he sees his brother get up and start axing.   Within 20 minutes of cutting John hears a big thud, he turns around to see a tree was just cut down by his brother Abe.  Abe had cut down his first tree within his first 20 minutes!  

“He must of just got lucky,” John thinks to himself.  But then another 20 minutes passes and Abe cuts down another three, while John is still working on his tree. The next 20 minutes Abe cuts down a third minute, he has now just cut down three trees within an hour.  John finally cuts down his forth tree.   So on the the fourth hour, John has cut down four trees already, and his brother abe has cut down three! 

It appears that John is cutting down a tree every hour, but his brother Abe with the sharper axe is cutting down 3 trees an hour!  Six hours finally comes out, and John’s total is six trees cut down, and his brother Abe who spent the first three hours sharpening his axe, cut down nine trees in the last three hours.  

Who cut down the most trees? Abe did.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “If I had six hours to cut down trees, I’d spend the first three hours sharpening my axe, and the last three cutting down the trees.” Lincoln was a smart man.

Even though John spent the whole six hours cutting down trees, his axe was so dull that he was only able to cut down one tree every hour.  While on the other hand Abe invested the time sharpening his axe and was able to cut down three trees per hour.   So what’s the point of this whole story?

The point of the story is to cleary show that someone who invests the time to develop their own personal skills has a great advantage over someone who doesn’t take the time to invest in-themselves.  The person who avoids studying and becoming a better entrepreneur fails to someone who has taken the time to invest in themselves and become a better entrepreneur.  

It shows the dramatic difference between entrepreneurs, that for example, in ten years two people starting out at the same spot can have completely different levels of success because one person took the time and invested in himself, learning how to be a great entrepreneur from people have already done it, when the other simply just put hard work into his business but never learned the best possible way to build his business. 

Now the actual story that I told you was a fake one, I made it up.  Although the quote by Abraham Lincoln is a real.  Then why the story?  Using stories is a great way to teach a piece of philosophy.  Philosophy by itself is somewhat boring and engaging, but throwing it into a story makes it fun!  Rich Dad Poor Dad the book is basically about two things, number one, we should increase our financial intelligence, and number two, buy assets and not liabilities.  But it was his story he told that you remember, and the story that taught the lessons which made it a new york time’s best seller.  So that is why I embed the lesson with a story, you’re more likely to remember the story.

How do we sharpen our axe?  There is two primary ways of learning new things, and becoming better, stronger and wiser.  Simply broken down they are: Learned Knowledge and Activity Knowledge.

Learned Knowledge is more passive knowledge that you gather from reading books, going to seminars, listening to audio books, reading quotes and learning from other people.  The other, Activity Knowledge is knowledge you acquire by doing and learning things sometimes the hard way.  

We need both types of knowledge to really excel.  If you just try activity knowledge all day you are learning the hard way, you don’t have to read any more.  You’ll figure out what works by trial and error, and you’ll learn new things.  And if you just read all day, what good would that do?

The sharpest and brightest people in life, in my personal opinion are those who are constant learners of good information, but then apply the knowledge immediately.  They switch off between learned knowledge and activity knowledge daily, and do both, and excel at what they do.  Each day they do what they do better.

I personally know older entrepreneurs that have small businesses that they have grown to 1-5 employees.  They have been working for 10+ years in their business, their business now looks about the same it did years ago.  The reason the business is about the same is because as of today entrepreneur of the business is the same as they were years ago.  In other words, the entrepreneurs businesses haven’t experienced any growth because the owner hasn’t changed himself.  They have the same old ideas and tricks they had years ago and use, and doing the same things they did before are getting them the same results.  In other words even though they are working hard at their business, they aren’t getting any better at it, so they find themselves after 10 years at roughly the same income level as before and frustrated.  They think they know everything there is about their business and refuse to accept the idea that there is anything else they can do, so they fall into the trap.  They fall into the trap that there business won’t grow any further because they won’t grow personally.  They are so busy chopping away with a dull axe, they completely forgotten to sharpen their axe, and if you give them a book, they say their to busy.

Here is a key note to remember: “Your income seldomly exceeds your level of personal development,” Jim Rohn.   To receive more in life, we have to become more.  

So let us together, not become someone who works all day with a dull axe.  Let’s put in the time axing away at our business, but lets spend time also sharpening our axe.  So that each day we become better than the next and really grow.  

I myself have been failing in some aspect on sharpening my axe lately.  Studying personal development has become like a roller-coaster, one month I will read 3 books, and then the next month none.  I tried once to read a book every week but I failed, miserably.  

Although I just received my Kindle in the mail today, probably one of the best devices for learning I have ever come across of.  I liked it so much I bought one for my dad the same day. Now I have access to all the best business books and books on philosophy in a second, I can download through the air instantly and read them immediately.  All my library is now on a single device which is must easier to read than a single book, I strongly believe now with this tool I can really read one book a week.  I’m going to give it all to start this up, if I can read one book a week that is over 56 great books on entrepreneurship in a year.

I plan on sharing as many ideas from the book with you as I possibly can, it’s good for you and me.

I would also like to extend an open invitation to anyone who is serious about entrepreneurship to join me a new mastermind personal development group.  I thought about putting together one over a year ago, and now were going to do it.  If anyone here is interested in reading one great book a week and discussing them each week please comment here and we’ll get together a group of 10-20 serious people who are interested in seriously sharpening their skills.  

In order to read a book each week you will be probably have to dedicated an hour to two hours per day in order to accomplish this, it is a lot of work, and it is not for the light-hearted, reading one book a week is extremely hard, yet I believe, it will be extremely rewarding if we can get it down.  I need your help,  sometimes the best way to get big things done is to get work-out partners who help each other get through.  If I find you slacking on reading I’m going to get on you, and I’d expect you to get on me.  So if your interested in joining me in a new reading mastermind mind group, please let me know and we’ll do this.  I might require everyone to have a kindle, as a serious requirement, its $359, but the best money you can spend is money invested into self-development.  Don’t short-change yourself when it comes to your own education.  I’m not asking anyone to buy a piece of junk, I’m asking you to invest in something that if used, will earn you literally millions maybe billions if you are really sharp, in the near future.  

I hope you again found some value in this post.  Remember the story and the quote by Abraham Lincoln, “If I had six hours to cut down trees, I’d spend the first three hours sharpening my axe, and the last three cutting down the trees.”  How many hours this week did you spend sharpening your axe?

Hey everyone, I will be in seattle from the 2nd of June, to the 8th, and Portland from the 8th to the 15th.  If you live around here and want to meet-up, please give me a message here on my blog.  Looking forward to attending SMX Seattle, Meetup202 Seattle, meeting up with Steven Truong, Noah Merrit and Sean from GetClicky, my old partners at Prolegic Enterprises, and of course my parents.  If your around and want together shoot me a message, would love to meet other serious entrpreneurs and affiliates if your around.

“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.

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?

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.