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.

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.

Opps, I was thinking the corporation tax returns were due also in April. However, I forgot Corporations have to file in March, although luckily you can file extensions with the IRS. Have a corporation and haven’t filed the taxes yet? Make sure to send in your extension tonight!

Being able to read, learn and study from books that teach us how to be stronger, wiser, and better are so valuable. Lately I have failed to get a lot of reading done, it has been a lot of focusing on programing applications instead. But I can still find a way to get knowledge in, and one of the ways I have enjoyed to gain new knowledge is simplify by reading a few very meaningful and insightful quotes from the most successful people in the world. A lot of chapters in books are normally to summarize a point, and sometimes the longer chapter does help up the lesson being taught. Although I still believe books are a great source of information, sometimes some of the most profound learning can be read in 2-3 seconds. Let me share some simply powerful information to you, and I think you’ll agree, the information is valuable, compact, powerful information in a sentence or two. Enjoy, here are some of the best ones I’ve found.

• “The real money’s in the shovels, not the gold.” - Samuel Brannan (1819-1889)
• The first publicist of the California Gold Rush bought every shovel in
  San Francisco before he ran through the street shouting, “Gold! Gold!
  Gold from the American River!” Cisco Systems has become a $32B company
  using a similar strategy, selling the routers and switches that form
  the backbone of the Internet.

• “Cut out the middleman.” - Aaron Montgomery Ward (1844-1913)
• Ward founded the world’s first mail-order business, Montgomery Ward
  Co., in 1872. Countless other catalog-based companies have followed in
  his footsteps, including information-age retailers like Amazon.com.

• “Sell the razors cheap and the blades dear.” - King Camp Gillette (1855-1932)
• Gillette’s loss leader strategy has been replicated by countless
  companies, Hewlett-Packard makes billions by peddling $30 ink
  cartridges for its $100 printers. And while Sony loses money on its
  PlayStations, it cleans up on the games.

• “Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton
  gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir
  Isaac’s talents didn’t extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble,
  explaining later, ‘I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not
  the madness of men.’ If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir
  Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion:
  For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.” - Warrent Buffet
  

• “As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do” - Andrew Carnegie

• “I would rather earn 1% off a 100 people’s efforts than 100% of my own efforts.” - John D. Rockefeller

• “The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets” - John D. Rockefeller

• “The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a
  complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have
  to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an
  incredible degree.” - Bill Gates
  

• I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If
  today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about
  to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days
  in a row, I know I need to change something. - Steve Jobs

• “Tis better to be alone than in bad company” - George Washington

• “High expectations are the key to everything.” - Sam Walton

• “There is only one boss, and that is the Customer, and he can fire
  everybody from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money
  somewhere else.” - Sam Walton

• “Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.“ - Jim Rohn

• “One of the highest forms of human maturity is accepting full responsibility for our lives” - Jim Rohn

• “You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” - Zig Ziglar

• “If I could live all over again, I would buy every square inch of Manhattan. “ - John Jacob Astor (First Millionaire in the United States)

• “The first hundred thousand — that was hard to get, but afterwards it was easy to make more.” - John Jacob Astor

• ““The two most important requirements for major success are: first,
  being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something
  about it.”” - Ray Kroc - McDonalds

• “Money equals business which equals power, all of which come from character and trust.” - J.P. Morgan

• “When you expect things to happen - strangely enough - they do happen.” - J.P. Morgan

• “The major reason for setting a goal is for what it
  makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the
  far greater value than what you get.
  “ - Jim Rohn

• “Why is it with all the information available today on how to be successful in small business, so few people really are?” - Michael Gerber - E-Myth

• “If You Shall Search, You Shall Find.” - The Bible

Enjoy? Find More all over the place, I’m going to try what Steve Jobs does everyday from here on out. WikiQuotes.

Remember: Knowledge isn’t power, knowledge applied is power.

It’s all about applying the good ideas, if you found one good one here today that you like, use it, if you just use ONE idea from here, and actually implement it, you are going to do great. The rate at which we implement new ideas that are good, will be a major determining factor on how well we do in life.

Speed of implementation, not just implementation, but how fast we gather new ideas and implement them. Key.

Mike Semira is my personal affiliate manager at CXDigital, I was very impressed with their presence at the Affiliate Summit West convention last month. They had a great booth location, and everyone in the company was great to talk to, we also had a lot of fun at the gathering they put together during the event. Enjoy the video interview, Mike Semira with CXDigital, check it out!

This is an interview with Adam Dufresne from MaxBounty, unfortunately this is the interview that had the most audio interference out of all the ones we did. However, Adam emphasis communication is extremely important in getting the most of your relationship with your affiliate manager. He also emphasis continuing education by reading blogs, and taking action by putting what you learn to use.

Adam was one of the first affiliate managers to actually beta test the product themselves, Adam has been a great help and is a great person to talk to online and offline, make sure you talk to Adam when you get started with MaxBounty. I have loved working with MaxBounty so far, and I highly recommend them to anyone. There interface may look outdated, but their tracking works wonderful and they pay on-time, every-time.

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