Master Class: How to create your profitable information product
(even if you’re not a guru)
Taught by Greg Rollett

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Master Class:
Info Product Creation


About the course leader

The course is led by Greg Rollett of The Product Pros. They create info products for people like you.

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Kajabi

Info Product Pro

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Transcript

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Andrew: You’re about to learn how to create your first information product. The course is led by Greg Rollett of The Product Pros. They create info products for people like you. They’ve marketed and sold over $1 billion in products and services for others and for themselves. I’ll help facilitate. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of mixergy.com. Greg, where were you before you learned how to create the kind of products you’re about to teach people?Greg: Definitely, definitely. Well, I come from a musician background. I was actually a rapper in a rock band. We were kind of like 3-11 or Linkin Park or Gym Class Heroes. That is us on the left. That was actually at Earth Day Birthday, which was a really big concert here in Orlando. We opened up for Sevendust and Papa Roach and Buck Cherry and some really cool bands and we were doing some really cool things.We were touring. I played Madison Square Garden in New York City. I played the Knitting Factory in LA. We were touring up and down the East Coast and I’d just booked a 15-city tour and we were going to be opening up for this band called, “The Crazy Anglos” who were in our kind of niche market and they were selling out 300-400 person venues all up and down the East Coast and to show our appreciation to them, we actually booked the whole tour. It was the first real big tour.

We had merch. We had t-shirts. We had hats. We had our CD’s, buttons, stickers, everything ready to go and put all our contacts on-line, all of my money on the line. I had just gotten married and this is like the last thing my wife wanted me to do is leave for 20 days to go play dive bars and go rap around the country. It’s the day before we’re supposed to leave. I had just bought the trailer, just got new tires on it. Things couldn’t have been better and I get a call from the guitar player and he says, “Hey, me and the bassist aren’t coming.” I was just like, “Oh, all right, well what do you mean you’re not coming? You’re going to miss a show or two?” And they’re just like, “No. We’re out. We’re not in this.” This is the equivalent in our group, you know, I was the rapper but the guitar player, guitars led the whole band and he was also the singer, kind of like Linkin Park without Chester belting his choruses.

So that was it, like, total devastation and like, game over. Just didn’t know what to do. Really felt like a divorce hit me. I had dropped out of school to do this. Like I said, I had just gotten married and now I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t have a job. My full-time job was finding gigs. My wife’s parents got this flyer in the mail and they were like, “Why don’t you come to this all-day Internet marketing seminar?” I was like a 22, 23 year old kid and I don’t remember how old I was, but that was the last thing that you want to do on a Saturday is wake up at 6:00 a.m., drive an hour and a half over to Daytona and sit in a hotel room for like 8, 9 hours and get like hotel lunch. It was the last thing I wanted to do.

Long story short, I ended up spending my entire life savings that day on Internet marketing products, on like e-commerce stores and random things that I’m sure we’ll talk about later as we go on. I ended up spending like $6,000 that day on just all kinds of stuff and then it really did change my life and it led into everything that we’re going to talk about today. It really was from that place of, “I have nothing left to do,” and it was just a door that opened and I ran into it.

Andrew: Do we have this? I think we do. This is your first product?

Greg: Yes, yes. This is actually the first product that we created. So what we did is, after I went to this Internet marketing conference and I started learning stuff, I started putting up all these random sites. I was selling bird feeders. I had a site called backyardhammocks.com. I was selling softball bats, all this stuff, and when you’re selling other people’s goods and services, the margins don’t scale as well.

Once you’re in the music industry, you always get pulled back. Just like an athlete, someone says, “Hey, you want to go play a pick-up game of basketball?” and you played basketball in high school, you jump at the opportunity. So I always wanted to get back into the music industry and so my way was, “Why don’t I teach these musicians some Internet marketing skills?” So we started off starting a consultancy where we would coach and be marketers for bands but, as a musician, what indie musician’s going to pay you $500, $1,000, $2,000 a month as a retainer? They’re lucky if they’ve got $50 to go pay their bar tab at the end of the night. So it just wasn’t a good idea.

So I got into this information product world and I was like, “Well, why don’t I create a course for these musicians that instead of paying me $500, they could pay me like $30, $40, $50 and I can teach a whole lot more of them?” So that’s what we did and this is the new music economy and we built a site called genyrockstars.com. It was for the next generation of rock stars who are using the Internet to grow and build their indie band and about a year went by and we built up a mailing list of about 3,000 musicians. We were doing all kinds of free PDFs and blogging and all kinds of cool stuff and when this product came out, I was like, “Let’s do a webinar. Webinars are just a cool way to sell things. It’s kind of like the live event environment.” As a former rapper in a rock band, I’m like, “I’m the front man. Let’s just get out in front of the crowd and sell this thing.”

So we do this webinar. I got something like 150 musicians signed up for the webinar. It was 7:00 at night, I really vividly remember the night. So we’re selling this product. I’m going to sell it for $47 but as a webinar special, I’m doing it for $37. It’s about a 45-minute webinar. About 30 minutes in, I start making the pitch. I gave them some really cool content and now I’m like, “All right. It’s $47. Here’s the deal with it,” and I get to the pitch and I tell them how much and no sales.

And I’ve got two monitors going, so I’ve got one monitor I’m doing the live webinar and on the other screen I’ve got my gmail open and my PayPal account open so you can see the money and the sales coming in. So I’m giving the live webinar and I’m looking at (?) at the same time and time kept going on and no sales, no sales, nothing and now I’m like pleading with these guys to invest into the program and I see the first sale come in.

I see it come in and I’m like, “Holy crap! I got a sale!” and I got up and I sprinted into, I’m living in a town home, and I’m upstairs and I sprinted to where my wife was doing laundry and in the other room and I was like, “Baby, baby, baby, we made a sale! We made a sale!” Mind you, I’m leading a live webinar right now and I just ran into the other room, so I come back, I saw five or six more sales. I ran back, told my wife, leaving the live webinar, so I have a couple more sales and we ended up selling enough products that night that it basically paid for three months salary at the job I was at.

Since that day, things have really never been the same. We’ve been creating and selling information products ever since and it really, truly is the greatest job in the entire world because you’re helping people get what they want and in return they’re paying you for that and you get to do what you want to do every day of the week. It was a good time, man.

Andrew: That’s inspiring and that’s just the beginning. You guys have just grown and grown and grown and you’re going to teach the audience how they could do it too. We have the big tactics up here on the board. These are the tactics that we’re going to go through as we teach people how they can do it themselves. Why don’t we start off with the first one, “which is know your audience and their magic bullet”.

Greg: Yeah, definitely, so the first thing when people create their product is you really need to know who you’re selling it to and I know that everyone says that whenever you’re doing anything, whether you’re building a niche marketing site or you’re building a product, you need to know your people because you need to know deep down what their needs are. So when we created this first music product, I had the perception from being in the music industry that every musician wanted a record deal, they all wanted to be on MTV, they all wanted to get a licensing deal to be on One Tree Hill or Smallville or whatever and get paid for the licensing fees.

I couldn’t have been further from what they actually wanted. They don’t want the record deal. They don’t want to be on MTV. I mean, some of them sure do but really what they wanted is, we had one musician, a DJ from Nashville who wrote in to me after I put up the sales letter and stuff and he’s like, “Greg, I’m a DJ from Nashville. I just got laid off from Sears. I make $7 an hour. I want to be able to play a show on a Friday night that pays me $100 so I can buy food for the week.” That’s what he wanted. He didn’t care at all about MTV or record deals or getting signed by Def Jam or whatever it is. He cared about, “How do I pay my bills?”. So that completely changed how we created our products.

Andrew: So you’ve got questions that people can ask to help them figure out what their market is, right?

Greg: Yeah, definitely. So let’s jump right into these questions. The first thing that I always do when looking at your market is answer the question, “What do they look like?” Start to profile them and a quick exercise I do to do this is I ask people who their favorite TV character is and for me it’s Homer Simpson. So I ask them to name four or five characters, they say their favorite TV character. So Homer, he works at the power plant. His boss is Mr. Burns. He likes Duff beer. He hangs out with Barney. He goes to Apu at the Quickie Mart. He’s got three kids. I can rattle off all this stuff about Homer Simpson all day long.

You probably could about your favorite TV character, movie star, whatever it is and then I ask you, “Well, what does your customer look like?” Then they’re just like, “I don’t know. He’s someone that buys my product.” I’m like, “No. That’s not who it is.” In the music world, for us, it was a college kid. He wears a backwards hat. He’s got on khaki shorts. He’s wearing a t-shirt with a stupid slogan on it. He just got out of school. He’s got big debt. He’s playing dive bars. He’s hoping he can pay rent at the end of the month. I mean, I can tell you to a tee who it was. I could walk around the mall and I could be like, “That guy would buy my product. That guy would buy my product,” and that’s what you really need to do. So what do they look like? What do they dress like? What are their characteristics? That’s the first thing.

Andrew: How do you know that? How do you know the answers to those questions? How do you know what they look like? How do you know what they love? How do you know how they want to dress? And when you do that, don’t you limit yourself?

Greg: But you still have to have that vision of who that person is because I want to talk to an individual one on one. I want to be able to be, like, “John, here is exactly your problem and here is how I can help it.” Especially when you are first getting started. And so how we found this information out, one, we were lucky. We had a 3,000-person mailing list and we sent out surveys. The second thing you can do, which is really cool about social media now, is if you have like a Facebook fan page or something and you have 100 fans, I mean sit there and just click on each of those 100 fans and see where they live. See how old they are. See what some of their interests are. I mean that’s one of the coolest things about social media right now, is you can find out all this information. People have done all the work for you.

So build a little tribe, see who these people are. I mean go to networking events. I mean obviously from the music industry, I can go to a show and see who the bands are that I want to connect with. But if you are in the marketing industry and you are selling to insurance agents, go to an insurance association conference. Go to a local meet-up. See who these people are. Go out and meet people. It’s a people business.

Andrew: I remember hearing Frank Kern say this, that you need to even know what gender they are, and I was thinking, boy, if I do that, maybe 30 percent of my audience are women, that means that I’ll basically be cutting off 30 percent of my audience because I want to target in on the men because that’s where the richest portion of my audience is? Is that what you’re suggesting too?

Greg: Not entirely. So back to our … I kind of gave you the profile of our ideal musician, right? A guy wearing a cheesy T-shirt with khaki shorts, backwards hat. But his problems, like the DJ from Nashville who does electronic music, he can still relate to what John does. I just had, I really had to profile John because I needed to know the next couple of questions. So what keeps John up at night? It’s rent. It’s putting food on the table. It’s “Dear God, I hope I don’t have to go back to McDonald’s on Monday because making seven bucks an hour flipping burgers is the worst.”

So, what keeps these people up at night? And when you profile them, it’s really easy to start thinking what their problems are. Those problems are going to be the same problems that other people in your market or in your niche have. So what are they mad about? What are their frustrations? And then kind of that closet question, what do they secretly desire?

So, I said that on the surface, a lot of them didn’t want the record deal. But in hindsight, they were, like, “Man, if I had a magic bullet or if I could just get my music here, everything could change for me. If I just met that one person, that A&R, whoever it is.” So they do have secret desires for that, but you have to do it in a way that makes sense to them because on the forefront, they are, like, “Man, I just need something to pay my bills at the end of the week.”

Andrew: How do I find out what my audience’s secret desire is? In fact, what happened to your shot here? Oh, did you just change your camera somehow?

Greg: I hope not.

Andrew: Let’s see. I’ll adjust it while you answer that question. How do I know what their secret desires are?

Greg: So we ask, right? So we do a lot of surveys. We look at a lot of blog questions. We test a lot. So we’ll send an e-mail out to our list and we’ll say, “Here is how Joe Smith got signed to a record deal.” And we’ll see the open rates and if there is, sometimes, we have 3,000 people on the list. If a thousand people opened it, that would be really cool. It means that a thousand people were kind of interested in getting a record deal. But if only, like, 100 people opened it, then, like, well, I guess “record deal” isn’t the magic bullet keyword, right?

With some, we’d send out a post like “Five Tips to Play a Gig by Friday that’s Going to Pay your Bar Tab,” and that would get like 2,000 opens and you’d be like, “All right, that struck a nerve with these people.” And so those are some real big things we did. And like I said, we built that list and that was one of the first important things that we did, is we built an audience. We cultivated it. And we just started asking them stuff and we started putting stuff out there. We created a lot of content. They really got us the answers. So this isn’t like an overnight solution. It was something that did take time for us to put together.

Andrew: That makes sense. I remember even after a past course on Facebook marketing, I tossed up, as I was taught to do, questions on my Facebook fan page, questions like “Bootstrap or Funded?” or I guess even that is a great one. And I could see what people responded. Are they more likely to say bootstrap or are they more likely to say funded? And the people who were …

Greg: Right.

Andrew: That gives me a sense of who the audience is. So that’s what we’re trying to do. We are trying to figure out who they are and what their secret desires are. And I like that you are showing me different ways to do that because a secret is not easy to get.

Greg: I love it. I love it. Actually, if you head on to the next slide, I have some really cool resources that we use, and we are doing a research for our products. And one that’s really overlooked is Amazon.com. I mean this is the largest retailer on the planet right now. And the cool thing about Amazon is people leave reviews. So if you’re in the water polo niche and you are teaching people how to play water polo, go to Amazon.com, look at all the books, look at all the DVDS, look at all the products in the water polo niche, and look at the reviews. And your goal is not to go to the five-star reviews. Your goal is to go to the one and two-star reviews because they are going to be, like, “Joe Smith’s book was terrible because XYZ.” Well, XYZ are the pain points. XYZ is what they really want to know. XYZ are the things that you can put into your product to make your product better than Joe Smith’s, who these people are saying is terrible. So obviously, look at the five-star reviews and four and see what they liked, but look at the one and two because they are going to tell you exactly what they didn’t like, and when they are doing that, they are telling you what they want. So that’s a great place to start, is on Amazon.com, and other review sites. If you have review sites in your niche, that’s a great, great place to start.

I’m a huge fan of alltop.com. This is probably my favorite research site on the planet. It’s a Guy Kawasaki site and essentially, if you haven’t heard of it, it’s all the top websites and they’re all broken down by category. So what you could do is if you’re in the water polo niche, go to alltop.com, look up “water polo,” and it’s going to pull up all the top water polo sites. And it’s going to be all the blogs, all the news sites, all the commenters, the podcasters, everything to do with that.

And just start opening them, opening them all. See what they are talking about. See what people are leaving comments on. Follow these people on Facebook, Twitter. You’re going to find out who all the influential people are. See what they are selling. See what they are talking about. See what their commenters are doing. See who is retweeting their stuff and what stuff that they are retweeting. But it’s a great way to find the influential people in that niche.

Andrew: I see.

Greg: All right. So really cool there. Next, join all the mailing lists. Join all the newsletters. I know everybody hates getting more stuff in their inbox. But every time you are subscribing to these mailing lists, do it with a purpose. See which subject lines get your attention. See how they are talking to their audience. What’s their tone like? What products are they pitching? How are they presenting it? Is it just an HTML newsletter with all kinds of graphics and stuff, or is it just plain text? See how they present themselves or do they position themselves as like a guru, if they have a pen name. Look at all that stuff because that’s going to tell you a lot about how their market responds to that stuff, all right?

And then if you are in the offline world, which a lot of people are and I’ve explored a lot in the last year, is doing direct mail, there is the SRDS. You can do it online or you can go to the library and get a huge catalog from the SRDS, and it’s going to show you all the people that have subscribed to direct mail, to catalogs, to magazines. And this is where you can really segment and find buyers because you can say, in the music niche, we went and said Sam Ash is a musician super store. They sell guitars and drums and all that kind of stuff.

We can go to the SRDS and we can find out how many people get the Sam Ash catalog and have bought a guitar in the last six months. So those are people that have gotten a catalog and have looked through it and bought something through that catalog. And then you can send some direct mail pieces to them, send surveys to them, do all kinds of cool stuff because those are the buyers in that marketplace.

So those are four really cool resources that are going to help you paint that picture of who your ideal audience is.

Andrew: All right. I see what you mean. All right. Let’s go on then to the next big point, which is create a framework. And boy, actually, you have better slides. I usually use the big board. But I like what you’ve got here. You actually have a nice looking slide for each of these big points. What do you mean by “create your framework?”

Greg: All right. So when most people go to create a product, they are just, like, “I know stuff. Let me just throw this stuff together and I’m going to slap it together, call it a product, and charge people some money for it ,and hope that people like it.” So once you figure out who this ideal person is, you know that they are struggling in business or they are struggling in their personal relationship or they can’t find a date or whatever it is, figure out where they are and where they want to go, and then your only job as someone who creates products is to take them from that place where they are to where they want to go. And you want to do it logically. So what is the first step that someone needs to take? What is the second step? After I accomplish this, what do I do next?

And that’s really what the framework is. It’s how you deliver that information. Because there are a lot of people who just throw out a product, like, “Here are my top 20 blog posts that I ever did and I’m slapping it together and calling it a product.” That’s cool if you have a loyal audience who loves your blog posts. But did that series, did that product give your person a result that they wanted?

So, if you want to lose 20 pounds in 30 days because you’re going on a cruise, I want to know step by step what I need to do every single day to lose that weight. And if you just say, “Well, do these kinds of workouts and this nutrition stuff and then go see this guy and get these supplements,” and there is no order to anything, there is just madness, and the person is just going to be, like, “I don’t know what to do with any of these stuff.”

So, the framework helps you say, “Step 1, go to your fridge. Take out all your soda and your cookies. Throw them in the trash. Step 2, walk outside and walk around the block three times. Step 3, next time you’re in public, get these supplements. Step 4 …. And each step along the way, you are losing one pound, two pounds, three pounds. And at the end of 30 days, if you follow this framework, you would have lost the weight and you’re happy.” And that’s what you want as a product creator, is someone who is happy for going through your product, right?

Andrew: Step by step, specific tactics to go from where they are now to where they want to be, to where you are promising them that they’ll be.

Greg: Exactly.

Andrew: OK. How do you that, by the way? How do you know what those steps are?

Greg: Well, hopefully, you’re some kind of an expert in what you are teaching, right? So I’ve given this water polo example because it was the first crazy thing that came to my head. I know nothing about water polo so I should not create a product about water polo. So I teach. I started in the music industry and I taught people how to go from where they are now struggling as a musician to getting a gig on Friday night where they can make 500 bucks, right? So the first logical step is they had to start doing some research on what venues to play, right? The second step is they had to go out and contact the venues so we gave them exact scripts that they need to do. Step three is the promotion and marketing. Setting up e-mail lists and all the marketing stuff. Step four is at the gig they had to capitalize on certain things and then have merchants and so on and so forth.

Andrew: I see.

Greg: At the end if they did all of those steps, I mean, I knew that because I’d been playing shows, I knew the gigs, I knew the experience. So you have to have chops. You’ve got to know your stuff in order to do that. And sometimes it does take some thinking, so, on the next slide there’s a chart that everyone going through this, and every time I do live stuff this is something that I want you guys to draw. And it’s a framework chart. And essentially what we do is we love breaking things up into nice easy to use pieces, right.

So, what you have on the left side is you have an A. Right. And that’s where your prospect is right now. That’s where they’re struggling at, what losses they have, the whatever they want to do in their life that they don’t have. Something’s missing and that’s where they are at A. All the way on the right side you have B, and that’s the promised land, right? Then what 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are those five steps. So how we break it down is Step 1, the absolute first thing that you need to do, right. So in that weight loss example, the absolute first thing to do is walk to your fridge throw out all the crap right. You know that nutrition’s the number one thing to losing weight. So that is step 1.

Now, here’s something that we do in the marketing of the product is we give step one away for free. Right. Frank Curran calls it results in advance. You can call it moving the free line, you can call it whatever you want. But you really want someone to get some cool stuff from you, to build trust in you, that you know what you’re talking about, that you’re going to give results. So Step 1 the absolute first thing you need to do, give it away for free. Give me your name and e-mail address and I’ll give you the absolute first thing you need to do to lose one pound. When you wake up tomorrow the scale’s going to be one pound lighter, right? So that’s number one.

Number 2, 3, 4 and 5, are just the next logical steps. I love things in steps of four, right. So you see some courses that are out there they’re like the 12 modules, right. And it’s over 12 weeks. Well I don’t know what I’m doing 90 days from now. Andrew I’m sure you have no idea what you’re doing 90 days from now. I cannot see myself watching a video once a week for 12 weeks. It’s too long, right. I love fours. I can, four things that I can remember. If I teach you four individual things you’d probably remember those four things. Four is also four weeks. I can see myself going through something in a month’s time. So that’s how we break down a framework.

So what I want everyone that’s going through this program right now to do. Write down their A, write down their B, and then think of the absolute first thing to do. And keep breaking it down if you have to. You know, I had a realtor we were teaching. He was teaching other realtors how to get more sales of houses. And I was like, alright right now they’re struggling, they don’t have enough sales of home. And B is they want to be a top earning real estate agent. So what’s the absolute first thing they need to do? And he was like, well they need to get more listings. So I was like, well alright, we’ll what’s the first thing they need to do in order to get more listings. And he was like, well you need to, you know, set 15 appointments. And I was like, alright well what’s the first thing you need to do in order to set 15 appointments. He’s like, you have to go out and network. Alright, so what’s the first thing you need to do to network. You know, and we really broke it down. And he had the absolute first thing, day one if this guy does this he’s going to get a couple more listings. And guess what you’re the hero now because you just got more listings, if you get more listings there’s a chance that someone’s going to buy a house and you’re going to make a sale.

So think about that. Put the rest of the steps together and that’s really how you create your frame work.

Andrew: All right, let’s take a look then at the next big idea which is to record using these tools. And by the way, I’m looking forward to finding out about the tools because I don’t know if you noticed but there’s something weird going on here which is why your camera is adjusting on my side a little bit differently. But I’ll just keep moving your camera as I need to.

Greg: Sorry about that man, that’s always super fun.

Andrew: There it is. It’s a Skype issue. I don’t know what it is with Skype some days. Alright, so let’s go on to the next one which is record using these tools. What are the tools that we need to use to record?

Greg: All right, so before we dig into the tools, the big concept that I want people to know is the most important part of your recording is the ability for the person who’s going through it to understand what you’re saying and then use the information, right? You can go out and get a Canon5D which is like your 3,000 top of the line camera, right. And you don’t have a microphone and you can’t hear what I’m saying. Then it does you absolutely no good, right. So the most important concept to remember is that people need to see, consume and understand your information. You need to give it in a way to where they can then use the information.

So, that’s the first thing to always think about. So when you’re doing that audio is key. Audio is beyond crucial. And I really recommend that if people are getting started record an audio product before you do a video product. It’s easier, there’s so many more opportunities for people to listen to audio. It can be listened to more passively. I mean, I love the video courses, don’t get me wrong. I buy every course out there. But I don’t have 60 minutes in my day to watch a 60-90 minute video. And there’s ten of them, I just don’t have the time to do that.

But if there is an audio version of it, I can listen to 30 minutes on my way to the office, 30 minutes on my way home, 30 minutes at the gym, if you are on the subway, people taking trains, planes, automobiles, whatever it is. So really think about that. And the audio quality has to be stellar. Spend more money on your microphone than you do on your camera. Because if they can’t understand you and hear the words coming out of your mouth, the rest is useless.

So with technology for me, it’s a love and hate situation. Just like what’s going on now with Skype, you could do everything in your power to make sure that the recording is going good, that the audio is going good, and things just happen. Files don’t get compressed correctly. When you’re going from like an online format, like a .mov or a Flash file and you are trying to put it on a DVD, it doesn’t burn correctly or the frame rates are all different, and these are all things that even me, I’m creating like hundreds of products, I still don’t know that crap and it’s still makes you go crazy.

So with tools, it’s about comfort and ease of use. So what are you comfortable using? So some of our favorite product creation tools, honestly, are either free or virtually just super inexpensive. So the first program that we use is called Audacity and it’s a free audio recording software for PC and Mac. You just download it to your computer. And if you have a microphone, you plug it into your computer and Audacity has this big red Record button. You hit it and you talk into your computer.

Or if you talk into your microphone, you’re, like, “Hey, what’s going on? This is Greg Rollett and welcome to Module 1 in The ProductPro system. In this module, I’m going to be talking …” and you just go right into your spiel. You hit Stop. It’s got built-in effects, like compression and EQ that you don’t even need to use if you have a good microphone, but it has all that built in. You hit Export and boom, you have a .wav file that you can then put on a CD. You can convert it to an mp3, do whatever you want to.

Andrew: That’s the first tool I use at Mixergy. It’s so helpful and it’s free and it allows you to, even if you screw up or if there are random sounds, you can just quickly edit them out. I love Audacity.

Greg: Love it. Love it. It’s honestly the best way to go. So second tool, if you’re doing video, I love iMovie, and if you are on a PC, Windows Movie Maker. And these are free tools. And I can’t spell Windows, obviously. These are…

Andrew: Hey, by the way, how do you feel about having mistakes in a program? Here we are, the audience creates a product, they sell it, and then as they roll it out, they realize, “Ooh, I misspelled ‘Window’.”

Greg: I do that all the time, just honestly, like I do it all the time. We actually had a product that was on AppSumo yesterday and the first video that they got on the sales, we had, like, 20 e-mails on. It was, like, “Greg, you misspelled this word.” And I was, like, “Oh, crap.” But at the end of the day, for me, that’s a good chance for me to just now have a conversation with that person who said we have them. Like, “Hey man, sorry about that. We’ll work towards getting it fixed. How else did you enjoy the program? Is there anything else we can do for you? Did you see Video 2 where we talked about this and that?”

For me, it’s a chance to have a conversation with someone, have a good laugh, have a beer with it with my partner on the weekend. So I don’t spend a whole lot of time on the mistakes. Obviously, get someone to edit your stuff. Review it if you need to. But again, for me, I mean you guys know what I’m saying when I say Windows Movie Maker, right? It’s not like you’re just, like, “Ah. This program is crap. Greg can’t spell Windows. It’s not a good tool.” So again, it’s about the information and how you use the information, so…

Andrew: I used to go and study how salespeople sell and I watch these women who are selling Mary Kay. And one of the tactics that they had was to wear the Mary Kay pin upside down. And I said, “Why upside down? Aren’t you trying to sell beauty? Aren’t you trying to get people to feel like you know what you’re doing when it comes to looks?” and they said, “Yes. So when a woman who cares about beauty and design walks up to us and sees that the button is upside down, she’ll tell us and we’ll correct it and thank her, and we’ll know she is one of us and it starts the conversation that often leads to sale with them.” And I could see how it would with you too.

Greg: Yes. So I love that. It’s a conversation starter.

Andrew: Right. I don’t want to move, I don’t want to go too slow here. I know you want to power through all these different ideas because you have so many tactics.

Greg: No, it’s all good.

Andrew: What’s the next one?

Greg: iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, both free video editing software. Something that we do a lot is we record audio in Audacity or the next one using freeconferencecall.com if you are interviewing someone or having a special guest or something. And then what we’ll do is we’ll create PowerPoint or Keynote slides. And we’ll use iMovie and Windows Movie Maker to then put the slides on top of the audio to create like a slideshow kind of a video, and that’s for people that don’t want to use some of the screen casting software, so that’s just a cool little tip.

The next one we use is freeconferencecall.com. This thing is free and all you have to do is get on your phone. They give you like a 1-800 number and a PIN. You call it. You hit the Record button and you’re recording a phone conversation. The cool thing is it could just be your phone conversation. So this is something I tell people on the way home, you’re leaving the office and you got 30 minutes, knock out a 20-minute module. Call the number, punch in the things when you’re sitting in the parking lot and then pull out and it hit’s record, and you go, Hey, this is Greg and welcome to module one the product (?) system and this module and you’re recording as you’re driving home.

And by the time you get home you hit stop, you’re done with the module free conference call sends you an email and says here’s where you can download the call you just did. You can use Audacity to edit it, it’s such an effective way to record audio. It can also do teleconferences so if you want to interview someone or you want to have a special guest or you have a partner, things like that it’s great for that as well. (?) It’s a really, really cool way to record audio.

Now a lot of these audio programs, they might give you a .wav file, or an .mp4, or all kinds of things. You need to get it into an mp3 or you need to get it into a .wav to put it onto a CD, switch is a free audio converter that does all of that cool stuff for you. Same thing with video, if you’re trying to get mobile ready videos and things like that.

Handbrake is another free alternative to get your videos in whatever format that you need it. So there are two more really good tools you can use. Everything I just told you about on this first slide is free. And you can create a full, nice looking great product with all these tools and not spend a dime. Get on your phone, record for five days for 30 minutes, now you have a 2 and a half hour product and you’re good to go. Those are some really quick cool free cheap ways to record the product.

Andrew: And you’ve got some others that are not free.

Greg: Yes, I have some others that are not free. On the next slide more cool product creation tools, the first two are cameras. The first product I ever created the New Music Economy showed you I about. I actually recorded it on a flip camera, in my bedroom. And I went to Home Depot and I bought, they had these huge, giant white board things that their like 15 feet long and like 6 feet tall. I had them cut them into a bunch of slices, they were really thing, and I got some nails and I nailed them on to my wall.

And I had the flip camera and I set it up on a chair and then I put a book on top of the chair to make it high enough. I didn’t even have a camera stand, and I hit record on the flip camera and I recorded 4, 30 minute videos, and that was the first product I ever created, and it’s still selling to this day. So again, don’t think it’s about the tools, it’s about the message that you deliver with those tools.

With that said, the flip camera has evolved. I do recommend that if you’re going to use a camera like that, go for the Kodak play touch, or if you can find the old version of that which is the Kodak ZI8, they’re really cool, they shoot in HD and the cool thing is they have an audio input, and if you go to Amazon.com and look for the AudioTechnica Lavalier mic, they have a $20.00 microphone that plugs into it that gives you great sound that you can clip on to your t-shirt or whatever it is to give you a microphone on one of those cameras.

If you are looking to do professional video, the video now that we shoot for our own stuff is shot with a Canon 7D, or a Canon 5D. These range in price anywhere from $2000 to $4000. They are what we shoot all of our TV shows with, that we get aired on ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX. So they’re professional grade cameras and we use lavalier microphones with that. The lavalier microphones are wireless that we use, and they’re anywhere between $300 and $400 per microphone it just depends on where you get it online. So that’s kind of the high level. So Kodak Playtouch, low level, Canon 7D, 5D professional level. Next, obviously Camtasia screen flow, to record your screens, similar to Andrew, what you’re doing now. Someone just had a PowerPoint presentation and they wanted to record their voice on it. Camtasia screen flow is great for that.

Also, if you’re showing people how to do internet marketing tactics or how to use pieces of software, screen recording software is great. Those programs, I think screen flows a 100 bucks, Camtasia is like 2 or 300, I don’t know off the top of my head. Instant Teleseminars is another one that we use to record teleseminar phone calls. The quality’s a little higher than free conference call. I think it’s like 50 bucks or 100 bucks a month depending on how many calls you make, again, it’s just the paid version of free conference call which is on the last slide.

Then you have Go to Webinar software if you want to do webinars and turn that into a product. Then as far as microphones go, you can go into any Apple store right now and get the Blue Snowflake. I think they’re like 100 bucks, they’re amazing microphones. Right now I’m using the CAD-U37. I got this at Guitar Center, it was around $40 and you guys are listening to the sound quality right now, I’ll (?) it up. It’s a $40 microphone, it’s USB and plugs right into your computer. So that was a long winded way of sharing a ton of tools there.

Andrew: That’s a lot of details there. I’m actually seeing how fast you talk and I’m both impressed and a little concerned. How are you doing with time? Do you have enough time to continue?

Greg: Man, we’re rocking and rolling.

Andrew: This is your normal pace? I don’t know you keep up with this pace. I’m sitting here with my jaw open going wow. I must be talking really slowly, but it’s working for me.

Greg: Well luckily people can rewind this and they can download it.

Andrew: And we’re going to give them the transcript as well too.

Greg: Yes, say they can take notes, exactly. So they’re good to go.

Andrew: And I’ll say that I’m using the Road Podcaster software microphone, to do all this kind of movement which is sometimes work and sometimes not. I’m using Camtwist. Alright, so the next big idea is to deliver and you’ve got the specific formats in a specific way that you think people should deliver the products that they’re creating.

Greg: Yup, so we just talked about. So we started with creating, knowing who your audience is and then creating the framework which is the step by step. And the last kind of section who talked about how to record it. So once you have those steps go and record it, whether it’s audio, whether it’s video or whatever it is. But what I want to talk about now is that most product creators don’t realize that adults learn and behave in the same way that kids do. Right? So what I mean by that is, if you have children you know that some are really good at book reports, some are really good at dissecting the frog and ripping it apart.

Others are good at you know studying, some are good at study groups, some are good at reading the textbook. They’re all different. But adults we’re the exact same way. I mean just in our office alone I mean, I watch videos, my partner Nick listens to audio at the gym and my other partner, Jack, loves printing stuff and highlighting it and doing all the old school stuff. So I was learning this all about learning styles. And if you go to Wikipedia and search for learning styles you’ll learn all about this stuff. And you can actually alienate a third to a quarter of your market for every learning style that you don’t incorporate. So what I mean by that is, if you only have audio you might be missing 75% of the market. If you have audio and transcripts you might still be alienating 50% of the market. If you have video, audio and some kind of a transcript, you know, you still might be missing part of the market.

So the four parts of it are audio, video, something to read and then something to do. And the do part is something that people a lot of times miss. And so as we dig into this you want to create products that appeal to all those learning styles. The easiest way to do that is to multi-purpose content. So, Andrew, exactly what you do here with Mixergy is we’re recording this in video, you’re going to give them the option to watch the video. But they can also listen to the audio if they just want the audio.

Then you’re going to get it transcribed so that people can read it, right? So that’s 75% of the audience. The other 25% that you want to hit is you want to have them do something. And you do that by allowing people to leave comments and then people can go back and forth in the comments section. Other people maybe have private Facebook groups just for the members of their product where you can have live discussions. That’s something to do. They can get feedback. Other things to do maybe having live Q&A calls. Some people have group homework assignments that they can turn in and you give them feedback or you grade it. You know, some people have live events tied to their products, right? So buy the product and, you know, a couple of months later we’ll have a live event. We’ll all get together and talk about the product.

So that’s the fourth element is the do, right? So the two easiest ways to do that, start with video. Strip the audio out using a program like Switch that I told you about earlier. Then get it transcribed and then create an action guide or a workbook. That’s kind of the easiest way to do it. So out of the video, out of the video that I’m creating now I’m sure we can easily create a workbook with, you know, what are the three ways you can record an audio product without spending any money. You know, and just do fill in the blanks. Well I could use audacity or I could use free conference call, or you know, so on so forth. So just kind of create fill in the blank questions. And that’s a great way to create an action guide.

Right, so the other way to do it is to start with audio, record the phone call on the way home from work. Add slides, so jump into PowerPoint and listen, while you’re listening to the audio you know pull out the key points, make some bullet points, like the slides I’m making for this. And then use Windows Moviemaker iMovie to then sink the slides to the audio. And that sounds a lot more difficult then it really is. But you just export your PowerPoint or keynote as images. You get individual images and you just drag them as long as you want them to be in the video. And boom, now you have audio and you have video. Again, get it transcribed and then create the action guide.

Those are two great ways to hit all four learning styles. And when you hit all four learning styles you encompass the whole audience. Because when you’re selling your product and you’re like, I got this great video course, it’s four hours long, you know I can’t wait to share it with you guys. Well the guys like, I don’t want to listen to, watch videos, right? So a cool story, well a bad story that we had is that when we released a new music economy it was just videos. Four 30 minute videos. And I have actually a lot of overseas musicians buy the course. And what happened is they would get the course and they’d be in some crazy country and they’d be like, Greg, if by the time my bandwidth gets the video and renders it and loads it, you know, it’s going to take me a week to watch a 30 minute video. But he’s like if you gave me the transcriptions I could read it right now, do the homework and be done with it. So you’re alienating your audience. So think about their technological restrictions, think about their preferences. You know if you’re selling to an older crowd think about maybe doing physical products versus digital products and get something in the mail. They might like CD’s right? They’re not as cool as us kids who like MP3’s and put stuff on the iPad. You know, they’re driving to work and they’ve got a CD player.

So think about all those different things when you’re putting your product together. Yeah man.

Andrew: I’ve actually heard that. One of the companies that you’ve got here on the slide, Kunaki, they convert digital into physical products. Right?

Greg: Yes. So yeah, so really as there’s no reason that you can’t offer both digital and physical products. A lot of people when they think of physical, and I’ll use the music industry example is, when I got my CD’s created with my band you know we went to Discmakers and we ordered like 5,000 of them. Well I’ve got 4,000 of them sitting in my Dad’s, you know, closet still. Right. And as entrepreneurs, small business owners, I don’t want 500 of my products taking up space and I don’t want to have to pay for that, right?

So, if each product costs 15 bucks to product, if you’ve got a big CD/DVD product, you know, you don’t want to shell out that money. So companies like Kunaki and another one called Vervante, will print your products on demand. Which is really cool. And what that means is, if you’re selling a CD, right, and the CD is the four steps to lose weight in 30 days, as soon as someone buys it from your site you forward the receipt to Kunaki, they print your CD, they do all the shrink wrapping and all the covers and burn it and all that stuff. And then they drop ship it right to you client. You never have to see it at all and then you just make the difference. Kunaki right now charges about 5 dollars for a CD and 5 dollars for a DVD.

So, if you’re selling this thing for 27 bucks, your cost is 5, you know you’ve made 22 dollar profit, which I think is what we all want to see. Vervante takes it a step further in the fact that they do binders and booklets and newsletters and all kinds of books and things like that. Right. So if you wanted to do, we just got done doing a six CD, six DVD set with six action guides and six workbooks. Vervante prints those on demand. So I get an order in, I forward the receipt to Vervante, it takes them like a day or two, they ship it out to my client, my client’s happy and it’s really a win-win situation.

So really think about that. Because using services like that there’s no reason not to offer both physical and digital. You can charge more for physical. There’s that like thump factor that when you get the box and boom it’s in front of you. You know you get cool stuff. So definitely think about creating both physical and digital products.

Andrew: Before I move onto the next big idea, can you just explain the concept of a stick letter? Since you’re saying that we need to pay attention to physical, to the design of the product, how it’s packaged, and the stick letter. What is the stick letter?

Greg: So the stick letter, alright. So what I like to, how I like to phrase frame this is P90X. Right. I think a lot of us are familiar with this, the crazy workout system called P90X. And what happens is when you first get P90X the first DVD that you ever put in is the hardest workout of your life. And you are like throwing up and your sweating in your living room and you got your AC cranked down to like 40, and you’re puking. It’s disastrous. And you’re like, this was DVD 1, what’s DVD 2 going to be like? Right. So you always want to make something at the beginning of your product kind of give them an introduction to what’s going to happen, what they can expect. Give them a small action item, right?

So, the stick letter on an online product course is usually just a quick video. So I always do a quick video where I’m like, hey this is Greg, thanks for joining this product. Here’s what you can expect. The first module’s here. You can see some fun stuff up here that you can click on and here’s a quick exercise I want to do to get you guys started. And I do a really quick exercise, it takes them like two minutes and they’re like, wow, this was fun. I’m glad I got this. They’re thanking me, Greg’s a real person. And it’s just a great thing to do.

Now with a physical product, they call it a stick letter because it’s the letter that’s on top of all the CD’s and DVD’s and it says, before you rip all this stuff open do this. And it kind of tells you this is the order you should do, this is what you should open now, this is what you should save for later. It tells you, you know, here’s who you can contact for customer support, all that good stuff. And it really just tells them what to do now that they’ve got all this stuff. Because it can’t be overwhelming. I mean if you get a box with ten DVD’s in it you’re like, oh what do I do, right? So the stick letter helps them do that and it helps to create better retention of how people use your product.

Andrew: I see, all right. Onto the next one which is build your sales page, your access page, and start collecting the revenue.

Greg: Yeah man, that’s the fun part, right? So now you’ve created your product and now you want to share it the world and you want to get paid for it, right? You want to make three months salary in one night like I did the first time we sold our product. So what you need to do is, the absolute worst think that you can do is to take someone’s money and hope that the technology does what it was supposed to do. Right, so the first product that we, after we did the webinar we released this product just as a regular product you can buy on the site.

We were just using PayPal. We didn’t know anything about fancy shopping carts, we didn’t you know to use all these cool tools. I mean, we literally had PayPal. And you know, you would click on the add to cart button, you’d go to PayPal, give the money. And then PayPal was just supposed to magically give them the product. Right? Well about 50 to 60% of the time PayPal never redirected the people. Or the people didn’t click on the click here to get your product step in PayPal.

And so, we’d get all these e-mails from people just being like, Dude are you like a scammer, like I just gave you 50 bucks and i don’t have a product. Like, or are you sending it in the mail or like, you know what’s the deal? And that really hurt. It can hurt your reputation really deeply if you’re not delivering what you’re supposed to deliver. So the first thing you need to do is you need to have a sales page. And that’s the page on your website where you’re telling people what you got and how to get it, right? And you know you can make it as complicated or as simple as you want. Some of our sales pages it’s just a quick 5 minute video of me being like, hey what’s up, this is Greg, I just got this really cool product. You know and here’s what it looks like. You know I open it, tell them what it is, and I’m just like here’s what it will do for you and here’s how to get it. Click the add to cart button and you’ll get instant access, whatever it is. Others we have you know, the long form super long sales letters because we’re really trying to convince people, overcome objections, answer your questions through testimonials all the good stuff. That’s really, it really depends on you know your market, right?

But you need a page to do that. And we use two different resources. One is Kajabi.com. And this is a self-hosted platform that will do this for you. And they will create all of your landing pages. If you want like opt in pages where you’re giving away free reports, for a name and e-mail address they’ll do that for you. They’ll do the sales pages. They have cool drag and drop widgets and fun little color schemes and all kinds of cool stuff. And they’ll actually also host all of your membership content. So all your videos and downloads and stuff like that. They’re self-hosted so you’re going to pay them monthly to host all of your content.

The other one that we use is for all you WordPress users out there is Optimize press. And this is the one that I use and I use it daily every single day of the week I’m in Optimize press. Again it’s an all in one WordPress theme. And we use it for our landing pages, our sales pages and our membership site.

Andrew: This is just a design of the membership site, right? They don’t manage members, do they?

Greg: No, so Optimize press is just kind of the, yeah, it’s the layout, it’s the template. Right. So what we use for actual membership kind of software is, we use Wishlist member. And there’s a ton of them out there. I’m not here to say one’s better than the other. We use wishlist member. It works great for us. And this is where when someone buys, now, they get the page that’s generated by Wishlist member that says, create your account, you know. What’s your name, what’s your e-mail, what’s your user name, what’s your password? And then Wishlist handles all of that stuff. It sends them an e-mail saying, hey thanks for being a member. Here’s your user name, password, (inaudible) and all that good stuff. So Wishlist, super cool resource.

Now to take money from people we no longer just use PayPal’s interface. We use a bunch of different options depending on the product but the one that we really use on a day to day basis is One Shopping Cart. And One Shopping Cart is a shopping cart, it can hook up to your merchant account that you can get with like authorize.net or powerpay or bankofamerica or wachovia, or whoever you’re using for your bank. They’ve give you the merchant account that actually processes the credit cards. What One Shopping Cart does is it makes that look pretty, right? Because banks have no idea how to do any of that stuff.

So, One Shopping Cart is the interface for that. And through One Shopping cart you can set up all your products. You can say how much your products are. If there’s you know payment plans, all kinds of good stuff like that. It will also handle your e-mail management so when someone becomes a customer versus a prospect. And it can also handle your affiliates which is really cool. So an affiliate is essentially someone you are going to pay commission to, they will refer the sale to you. Which is really cool especially when you’re selling information products, a digital download. You know if you’re selling a 50 dollar e-book or video course your cost is virtually nothing. So you can afford to give an affiliate 10 bucks, 20 bucks, (inaudible) 40 bucks for the sale, and you still get a really cool profit margin. So One Shopping Cart handles all that stuff.

The other one that we use, if you’re selling a digital only product. That means no physical, you’re not shipping them anything in the mail, is we use Click Bank. It’s really cool because they handle all the payments, they handle the refunds, they handle the transactions. They do everything. And they handle the affiliate management and every two weeks they send you a check in the mail. So they take care of all the fees and everything and you get a check every two weeks for your product. I don’t think there’s an easier way to get started. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about affiliates in a couple of minutes.

Andrew: Do they intregrate, does Click Bank integrate with One Shopping Cart and Wish list or do you need to sell through them separately?

Greg: So Click Bank integrates with Wish List. Yes. Click Bank replaces the need for One Shopping Cart. So Click Bank will act as your shopping cart, as your payment processing solution, as your affiliate management. They take care of all that. And they take their fees and stuff and they just cut you a check. Where as One Shopping Cart is yours, right. So you’re actually taking the payments, you’re processing everything through your own software. So those are the two kind of resources. I really recommend for someone just getting started, if you’re starting a digital only product, try Click Bank. It’s a 50 dollar one time set up fee, and then they just send you a check every two weeks. You don’t have accounting, you don’t have to worry about charge backs or refunds. They do all of that for you. It makes your life really easy when you’re getting started.

Andrew: All right. And finally, AWeber for email list management. We use it here at Mixergy and it ties in really well with Wish List. So if you’re using Wish List, as soon as somebody registers, you can have them automatically get added AWeber really easily.

Greg: I love it, I love it. We do have couple quick screen shots to show you guys kind of the process of sales pages.

Andrew: OK.

Greg: So, the first one that we have is the sales page for the new music economy, and this was made using OptimizePress, the WordPress theme that I shared with you. And you can see that there’s a header graphic at the top for Gen-Y Rock Stars, New Music Economy. And then, here’s our headline: How you can build an army of fans that are begging to buy your music, helping you quit the rat race, to share your music with the world. So, again, that goes back earlier when I was telling you who my customer was; it’s that person who really just wants to quit their job at McDonald’s and make a couple bucks, get a couple fans and share their music. Right?

So we get the headline and then we have a quick 9-minute video that explains the product right under that video is actually the, just the add to cart button. It says, hey, you ready to sign up? Add to cart. And that’s all there is there. So, really simple, guys. We didn’t try to make anything over-the-top or crazy. It really just is headline, a little bit of information, and a video saying here’s what we got, here’s what it’ll do for ya, and here’s how to get it. So, that’s The New Music Economy.

So after they buy, the next one that we have is, this is a Wish List member kind of registration form. And it’s for our ProductPro system. And you can see after they buy they’re redirected to this page where it says choose a username, what’s your first name, your last name, your email and choose a password and it tells you how long your password needs to be and all that. As soon as you hit the sign-up button there, then you can go to the next slide and then you get a membership site.

And this is the membership site that we have for The New Music Economy. This is actually our New Music Economy blueprint, which is a 12-module course. And again, this is using OptimizePress as well. And you can see, you have all your lessons and modules there, and we have resources and Q and A calls, all kinds of cool stuff. So you can see that just using OptimizePress we built our sales page, we then redirected them using Wish List to build their membership, and then once they become a member here’s how we deliver the information.

Andrew: Got it. Really easy tools, pretty inexpensive, easy to use, and they’ll work with WordPress, which makes things really easy for people.

Greg: Yes, yes. I love WordPress because it’s that all-in-one solution. You’re already using it, so why don’t you add on tools to just make it more effective.

Andrew: All right. I’ve got to say that we use Premium Web Cart instead of 1Shoppingcart. And the reason we use it is that it automatically takes the person’s first name, last name, email address, puts it into a Wish List, automatically generates a password for them, so they don’t even have to see Wish List until they’re ready to log in. And I hope that’s working for people.

Greg: I like that. That’s a great resource.

Andrew: All right. Premium Web Cart and let’s go on to the next big idea, which is to get some help. Specifically, outsourcing.

Greg: Yeah, so outsourcing. So, one of the first products that I created outside of the music niche was a product called the Seven Job Seeker Secrets. I had a background working a day job for job board and I knew a lot of stuff and when I left, I was, like, well, I still have all this knowledge, I might as well help some job seekers out. So I went to go create the product and… I am the world’s worst designer. Like, I just have no skills. You guys can see from my slides.

Andrew: Actually, I disagree. Check out this slide. Look at how nice this looks. You did these slides? I mean everything just looks really hot.

Greg: Well, I appreciate that, but I mean, really, like, design – nothing. Like, I literally, I, like, steal Flickr photos all day, and that’s the extent of my design. So what we did is I went to …I was, like, well, I need someone else to design my Ebook cover. So we went, and we looked at all kinds of different options. And there are tons of outsourcing sites out there — everything from 99 Designs to Elance to ScriptLance. The one I ended up choosing, for no particular reason, was ScriptLance and I was … I found a guy on there and he was super cheap. I went for cheap instead of quality. And this guy said for, like, 20 bucks, he’ll build me all this stuff. And was, like, all right, that’s awesome. I can’t wait for, you know, 20 bucks, I got an Ebook cover.

What they don’t tell you when you’re first getting started outsourcing is that they’re only as good as the directions that you give them. And I gave them awful directions. I assumed that he was going to use his own, you know, design skills and, you know, design ninja-ness and give me an awesome cover. And I have a picture of that DVD cover there and it is God-awful compared to what we’re doing now. I mean, literally, he just found some clip art and threw it on there and you can actually see the new one, the new design. This is one of the ones that we just did for a doctor called Weight Management University. And you can just see the level of just the difference in what we are able to do.

So, when you’re outsourcing, what I want you to do is your people are really only as good as the directions that you give them. So let’s start with the things that you can outsource. The first thing is transcriptions. So this call, it’s a little over an hour now, and I’m sure right around an hour, and I’m sure we’re going to talk for a few more minutes. I don’t want to sit there and listen to this call and transcribe it word for word myself. Andrew, you have better use of your time. There are more high leverage things you can do. So transcriptions, great thing to outsource.

Where we found all of our transcribers is we use a site called fiverr.com, and this is a site where people do random stuff for five bucks and they do really silly and stupid things, like, “I’ll be your Facebook friend for five bucks” or, “I’ll break up with your girlfriend over e-mail for you for five bucks.” But there’s also some really cool business things that people will do. And what we found is someone will transcribe 15 minutes of audio for $5. So if we had an hour long call, I know I could pay 20 bucks and get the hour-long call transcribed. And so what we do is we hire three people to do the same job and we see who does the best job. And what we do is then we contact that person off of Fiverr and we offer them kind of like a W-9 contractor job for all of our transcriptions. That’s exactly how we found our two transcribers that we have in-house right now.

Andrew: That’s great

Greg: So I went to fiverr.com. We paid five bucks, had them do 15 minutes. You get two that were subpar, one that stood out, and we’re, like, “All right, let’s contact you off.” We pay him a little more than they would get on Fiverr so they pick our projects over the Fiverr projects first. Great way to find transcriptions.

For design, there are so many cool resources for design now. What we do, we have two full-time designers on staff now. Both of them are in Eastern Europe and we found them on odesk.com. We’ve also used crowdSPRING to do covers, and we’ve done some really cool contests for our book publishing side of our company where we do books called “Celebrity Press.” We actually use crowdSPRING for all of our book covers. And then we’ve used 99designs. I mean there are so many cool design resources. And I’ll give you some tips to hiring designers in the next slide.

Printing, I already told you guys Vervante and Kunaki are two really cool sites to use. Mediatechplus.com is who we use for everything else. And that means if you are ordering bulk, if you are trying to do any kind of crazy things, like some of our products that we do for some of our clients, they include like a T-shirt or they include like mp3 players with all their content already loaded on, and we use Media Tech Plus for all kinds of cool printing stuff.

Other things that you could, you can outsource your PowerPoint slide creation. I outsource a lot of my PowerPoint slide creation. Video editing, audio editing, putting together e-books, all that kind of stuff are cool things to outsource.

So really, what we try to get across is that record the product with your information because you are the expert. You are the person that wants to share this thing with the world to help this person get from point A to point B. As soon as you’re done recording, hand it off.

Andrew: I see.

Greg: Right?

Andrew: Yes.

Greg: Use your time to high leverage, building the sales pages if you’re writing the sales copy, finding partners, finding ways to sell the product while someone else is making the product. Again, use high leverage things there.

Andrew: All right.

Greg: Cool?

Andrew: Yes, absolutely. And by the way, I do recognize the Apple design here. You’re using Keynote for design which helps a lot.

Greg: Yes. It does, yes.

Andrew: You got some tips for outsourcing.

Greg: Yes. So again, the most important thing is the directions that you give them. So I just put a post up on product for a systems blog and it details exactly what I told my designer. I want this size. I want these fonts. I want these colors. I want these logos on and I want this text. I want it to be this big, the font points. And they sent it back the first time and it was 99 percent of the way there. I had two little changes and I got the perfect cover done.

So again, if you are just like, “All right, I’m trying to do a product on water polo. Can you just put a water polo guy on there and say ‘The Secrets to Water Polo?'” you are literally going to get a black cover that says “The Secrets to Water Polo” with a cheesy water polo guy that they got off Clip Art because that’s the actual directions that you gave them.

When you’re looking for designers, interview rigorously. And the other thing there is only interview people whose portfolio directly reflects the look that you want. So if you are looking through someone’s thing and you’re, like, “Yes, that stuff is kind of cool. I bet he can do this style,” well, he can’t. You can’t change someone’s style. You can’t change someone’s, the way they look at the world, especially on designers.

So if you want a certain look and feel, you want the Apple glossy, look for designers that have Apple glossy. If their portfolio has no Apple glossy, you don’t want to be the first person that they test Apple glossy out with. All right?

Andrew: Right.

Greg: Again, we hire typically two to three people, have them do the same job, and the best work wins. I was kind of telling you that with Fiber [SP], and then with outsourcing we pay by the hour now, not the job, and we monitor that through oDesk.com. We can see what they’re doing with their time, and we find that we get a better quality product than if they were just doing by the project. If they know they’re just getting paid by the project they can kind of skimp on things, they can take their time, and if you pay them up front it takes a little longer, but we pay by the hour and for us that seems to work out better. That might not be your case, but I just want to share the things that work really well for us.

Andrew: That’s great advice. I wish I had learned to hire two people for every job early on. It costs just a little bit more, especially when you’re giving them test jobs, but you really get to get a sense of the person when you’re paying for their work and you’re seeing the results.

Greg: Absolutely.

Andrew: Aright, so next is “use paid traffic wisely.” Do you want to talk a little bit about that? We don’t have any specific screenshots for that I don’t think.

Greg: No. Well, first, a misconception is people are [??] the social media stuff and with all the free resources people are like, “I’m just going to put my product on my blog and hope that it sells.” The biggest misconception there is that you really can spend money to buy customers. If you’re buying $1.00 a click and you’re selling a $100.00 product, there is [??] margin there. Now obviously not every person that clicks is going to buy.

Now with that Job Seeker’s Secret product we put out there, we started running Google AdWords, and we were paying about $1.00 a click to bring in people that were interested in fixing their resume or career transitions, things like that, and we ended up spending about $500.00 in like 3 days, and we made 5 sales of a DVD that we were giving away for free, so that cover that you saw was actually a DVD, and we were giving the DVD away for free. They just had to pay for shipping and handling, so it was like $6.00 or $7.00 or something. Essentially it covered our costs at Kunaki and it maybe gave us $1.00.

So, essentially we paid $500.00 and we got 5 people in return that barely covered our costs, so we lost $500.00. On the back-end of that product, which we’re going to talk a little bit more about back-end in a minute, was that we were hoping to sell those people into a monthly membership were we would continually give them job seeking skills and training, and all that stuff. Of the 5 people that bought, no one bought into the monthly, so really that put a really sour taste in my mouth. You spend $500.00 in 3 days and you get 5 customers and none of customers want your back-end. That’s bad. That would be like “I’m never running pay-per-click again.” So a few years pass by and I’m working with my partners Nick and Jack now, and they’re like, “Hey Greg, I bet our customers are on Facebook, and I bet that we can put ads on Facebook and drive some really good traffic,” and the cool thing is that we charge premium prices for some of our products.

A pricing strategy for some of you guys is that you can also charge more for your products than you think you can. So if you think that it’s only a $20.00 product put it out there for $50.00. If you think it’s a $50.00 product put it out there for $100.00 and see how it affects the sales, because if you really have valuable information that helps people get rid of a problem they’ll spend a lot of money on it. Actually there are a couple of slides. There’s one that’s called “Brian Tracy Show Example”…

Andrew: Yup, let’s bring that up right here.

Greg: …somewhere in there. So what we did is we had a product we were selling that was to be on the Brian Tracy Show. Brain Tracy, if you guys don’t know him, he’s kind of a legend in the motivation/leadership/sales training kind of area. He’s trained over 5 million people in over 40-somehting countries and he’s got 45 best-selling books, and he’s just a really, really cool guy, and we were doing a TV show where you could appear on a TV show with Brian Tracy, so our target was then fans of Brian Tracy.

People who, on their Facebook pages, had read one of his books, or they were fans of him, yada, yada, who were over the age of 30, because we wanted to qualify them to where they at least had a little bit of money, and they lived in the U.S., because we were doing the shoot in Orlando, so we didn’t really want someone traveling from Australia because they were going to be a lower qualified prospect. So based on that, in Facebook that gave us 30,440 people to target on Facebook. To put Facebook ads on to buy this product, and we ran these ads for [??] 3 weeks, and if you go to the next slide I’ll show you guys the results from that.

Andrew: I kind of leaked that a moment ago, but there it is.

Greg: Oh, it’s all good. So the results are that we ran it for 3 weeks, and we got 237 new leads, and what I mean by leads is that they gave us a name and e-mail address in exchange for a free call that we did with Brian Tracy, so we just whetted their appetite to get them in the door. From that we asked for a consultation, so we were like, “Hey, if you’re interested in getting this Brian Tracy product, give us your phone number and we’ll set up a consultation.” So of the 237, 84 gave us a phone number that we could call them with.

So, a lot of people think this is just an internet game, but we get on the phone and we talk to people and we’re like, “What’s up with your business,” and we learn from them and we see if the product is a really good fit for them. So just because you’re selling an info product doesn’t mean you can’t jump on the phone and talk to someone. So, 84 phone numbers, now we are calling these people, right? The total costs of running the ads for the three weeks was $979.15, so we spent just under $1,000. The cost to get someone, to get a name and e-mail address was four bucks, $4.13. The cost to get a phone number, $11.66, and our cost per click, 0.81¢. The revenue that we generated from less than $1,000 in cost of the ads was $12,000. We were selling a $3,000 product and we sold four of them.

So again, we were selling a premium price product so this is a little bit different than selling a $50 e-book. But the numbers scale lower than the numbers scale higher. So with 84 people that we have phone numbers for, we sold four of them. We made $12,000. And to me, that’s when I’ll spend a thousand to make $12,000 in my business any day of the week.

But not just that, we now have 237 people that we can re-market to, that we can send them other products and services. We have 84 phone numbers that we can have consultations with, learn about their business, put it in our database, and do all the stuff that I mentioned. Remember when we got started, which is learn about your target market, figure out who they are, what are their needs, what are their concerns, so this is a win-win campaign and that’s how you can effectively buy traffic.

Now I will say that it definitely helps if you had a premium price product. If you’re trying to sell a $47 product or a $100 product, it’s more difficult but not impossible to do this. So pay-per-click, definitely a great way to buy leads, buy customers for your products and services.

Andrew: It worked great for you guys with Brian Tracy.

Greg: It did. It sure did so it’s a really, really cool thing that we did. [??] Yes?

Andrew: So here’s what we’ve got next. Can we talk about all four of these? I just added them to the board out of an ambitious sense of completion. How much of these do you think we can get to?

Greg: Let’s go as quickly as we can. Let’s knock them out because this is fun stuff.

Andrew: All right, go for it. So let’s start off with promote your info product for free. What tools do you say do you think people should use to promote for free?

Greg: So we love other people’s audiences, right? And the cool thing is people have already built an audience and you can leverage that. So just like I am right now, Andrew invited me to be on Mixergy, I’m leveraging your audience to tell people all the cool stuff that I know. And if people like the stuff that I have to say, they might reach out to me later and say, “Hey Greg, let’s do business together.” Well, the cool thing is there are thousands, if not tens of thousands, if not millions of sites out there that you can also do this with.

So one thing that we did is a really, really cool promotion that we wrote a guest post, just a guest blog post for a marketing product we were doing, and the guest post was called “The Diddy Guide to Constant Creativity and Relentless Marketing.” And we wrote on this site called thinktraffic.com. It’s written by Corbett Barr, really super cool guy. The site gets a ton of traffic. And we wrote this guest post.

And after the guest post went live on his site, his readership went nuts, and they started retweeting it and posting it on Facebook, and they kept retweeting it and retweeting it. Well, little be known, about four or five hours after the post went live, we actually got P. Diddy to retweet about the article. And we got a screenshot there that shows the post and the retweet because I mean I still think it’s cool that Diddy is retweeting like a marketing post and …

Andrew: Actually, it doesn’t look like I’ve got that post here, but we can get it from you afterwards.

Greg: Oh man, did I not give you the full one?

Andrew: That’s too bad.

Greg: Oh, that’s terrible news.

Andrew: My list ends at number 32. All right. We can include it afterwards.

Greg: All right. Well, either way, so P. Diddy retweeted us and I mean this post just blew up. I mean we had hundreds of comments, thousands of retweets. It just went nuts. And it sent a ton of traffic back to … so people then went to the post and they read it and they’re like, “Wow, Greg is a pretty smart guy. This is a really cool post.” And at the end, it says, “Hey, Greg’s got a cool new product. Click here to check it out.” And so we made a ton of sales by leveraging the Think Traffic audience. But then we doubled it because we got P. Diddy’s audience and it was really just this trickle-down effect. So leveraging other people’s audience, so, so crucial to building what you got. It’s that Field of Dreams thing. If you build it, they will come. Well, they won’t, but someone else already built it and used their farm. But you got to bring valuable stuff to them.

So to keep going leveraging OPA, I kind of combine two bullet points into one, but …

Andrew: What you’re talking there was about … that’s the story that we were going to tell about, how to use social media and how to use free content to bring in customers, and now, how do you use other people’s audiences. And they do tie in with each other. That’s why I highlighted them like this.

Greg: Yes.

Andrew: So you’re going to talk about Mashable.

Greg: Yes. So Mashable has gotten huge, right? They’re a really big site. We had a conference here in Orlando called IZEAFest put on by izea.com, which is a social media company, and one of the editors from Mashable was there. And we broke for lunch and we went to downtown Orlando, and I was just walking around saying hi to friends, and I see her at the bar by herself. And so I walk up and I’m just, like, “Hey, what’s going on? Can I buy you lunch, buy you a beer?” And she’s, like, “Heck yes. I’m vacationing. I’m in Orlando.” And so we had a beer. We go to talking and she was doing some consulting work for a company that was in the entertainment world. She’s, like, “Can I use you as a quote since you have this general rock star site that talks to musicians?” and yada, yada. And so we built a real relationship.

Now two weeks later, she asked me for that quote. I gave it to her. Two weeks later, she goes, “Hey, why don’t you write something for us at Mashable?” So I didn’t even have to ask them. She actually asked me because of the relationship we developed. And we ended up writing two guest posts for Mashable about four or five months apart. One was to Gen Y startups and how they use social media. And the other one was how musicians are using social media to connect with fans. Both times, blew it up. They were the Post of the Day. This one I’m looking at now has 508 comments, 500-something retweets. It’s just crazy amount of traffic.

And so what ended up happening there is at the end of the article of the music one, we were like, “Hey, Greg just opened this really cool new music program called New Music Economy Blueprint. If you’d like to check it out, click here.” Boom. It ended up getting four sales at $500 a piece. So from that one guest post …

Andrew: You know what? Sorry. First, for some reason, as you’re talking, there is some kind of distortion coming in from your mic. How much was it?

Greg: It was a $500 product.

Andrew: Oh. It looks like, if you unplug and plug it back in, I’ve seen that work for Leo Laporte, maybe that will do it here too.

Greg: Right.

Andrew: Your mic, I mean, if you unplug and plug back in. Let’s see how that works.

Greg: Are we back?

Andrew: Yes, that helps. Oh, but I think we’re now on your computer audio.

Greg: Oh man. No fun. Let me see what I can …

Andrew: What can I do to fix this? I think once you go onto Skype and adjust, it will kill your video. No, now you’re no longer on the mic at all.

Greg: Uh-oh.

Andrew: Oh.

Greg: Hello, hello? Will this work?

Andrew: Yes. You’re using the computer audio but it’s fine.

Greg: Oh man. Well, we’ll knock it out quick so then … so it was a $500 product and we ended up selling four from people that read that article. So $2,000 in sales off of a guest post that we wrote for someone else, all because of a relationship that I had where I bought someone a beer. So relationships matter. The places where you put your content matters. It’s just really, really cool strategy that we use. So how to leverage audience pulsing [SP], do your research, right? We already talked about, again, we use alltop.com. We just build out a top 20 list, top 50 list of all the people that we want to leverage our audience. You can use [??] directories, association lists, whatever it is.

Then we create this killer spreadsheet and we have all these names. We want the name of the person that writes the site, the URL, their e-mail, their Twitter, [??] Facebook. We go and get Alexa numbers, Quantcast numbers. We get how many comments, how many average comments these get, phone number or Skype contact that they have on them [??] killer spreadsheet. And then we build a real relationship with them. We comment on their blog. We send them e-mail. We get them in and we just follow up, follow up, follow up. You build real relationships with real people.

And once you do that, you do something remarkable for them. It could be a guest post. It could be helping them as an affiliate. It could be sending them a pizza when they say on Twitter that they are having a terrible day and they are starving, and you jump on Domino’s and you say, “Hey, send a pizza to Andrew at Mixergy because he is having a bad day and he needs a pizza,” and you get that delivered. But do something remarkable and then get in. And when you get an opportunity, like the one you have today, like today, I mean I hope that I’m delivering content that’s valuable to you guys, right?

Andrew: Was I on one of your spreadsheets?

Greg: You are. You are. So that works, right?

Andrew: You know what? I really am grateful to you for contacting me and doing this. We have two more points. I’m not saying goodbye but I’m really grateful. You have given us so much freaking value here. You’re helping me out. You are dealing with some of the tech issues as we were bouncing back and forth in the beginning. So I can see why at the end of this, somebody would be so freaking grateful they couldn’t wait to help you. I know I feel that way. I can’t wait to reciprocate.

Greg: Exactly. Well, I appreciate it. And then at the end, it’s thank you’s, promotion, and reciprocation. So Andrew, thanks for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. Handwritten thank you notes if you have them. Luckily, I have some books that I have been in, and so I’ll send people signed copies of books. I promote the heck out of people. So if someone else is doing something cool, I’ll promote them. I’ll tweet them. I’ll Facebook. I’ll do whatever I can. And then reciprocation. What can I do to help you? You help me out. What can I do to help you? Really, really helps you to leverage that OPA. And so let’s really quickly, we’ll jump in to the last point because I know we have been on here forever.

Andrew: It really works. I already have buyers. And the last point is build your back-end with continuity and you teased that earlier. What do you mean by that and how do we do it?

Greg: So the back-end, the biggest thing that I like to teach people is you don’t want to be in the $27 and the $47 business. If you are relying on selling a $27 e-book everyday to pay your bills, to pay your mortgage, to feed the kids, you got to sell a heck of a lot of $27 e-books every single day in order to hit those numbers. What you want to be in is in the extension business. So you have cool free content that could be your blog or your newsletter.

Then you have your front-end product, which is anywhere between your $27 and your $100 product that gets people in the door. So obviously, you got a big audience that gets free. You have a smaller audience that’s going to buy something [??] from you, and that starts to get your income in. And all you are trying to do here is you are trying to separate your window shoppers from your buyers. And it’s such a mean thing to say, but when you are in business, that’s really what you’re trying to do.

Now, out of those people that buy your $100 product, if you over-deliver, if you give them everything that they needed to get the solution that they want, some of them are going to be, like, “Hey Andrew, I need more. What else can I get from you?” And that’s where you have coaching programs. That’s where you have group Q&A calls. That’s where you have live events or you have masterminds or one-on-one times where they can come in and fly in to your office. And you really start to create that business because selling a $27 product, if you sell 100 of them, that’s 2,700 bucks. But if you have one person joining your thousand dollar a month coaching program, you only need two of those people to hit the same numbers as selling 100 of the other one. So it really just starts to add up and stack, and that’s really where you can help people. You can add value to them.

And for me, it’s giving people levels of access. So on your blog, you have a certain level of access. They can leave comments and they can kind of see the front-end of the business. When they buy your product, they get a different intimate level of access, right? Now, in a group coaching, they have another level of access. It’s shared access to you but it’s a different level of access. Now, if the purchase one-on-one or if they purchase to go into our mastermind where they get to spend three days with you, it’s a different level of access. And people pay up that extension ladder and that really creates a complete information business model.

Andrew: All right. I don’t even know how you can talk this much, but I’m incredibly grateful to you. You’ve given us everything that we can do on our own. But what’s shocking to me is you are in the business of doing all of this for other people. In fact, here, let’s see if we can bring up your website. What is this site and what is this site? Can you tell us a little bit about your business? And if someone wants to follow up and do even more with you, what can they do?

Greg: Definitely. So essentially, what I did today is I gave you all the tools that you can take to start creating products on your own, selling products on your own. There is absolutely no reason that you can’t do it yourself. But here is the thing: at the end of the day, we’re busy. We’re running a business. We’re starting a company. We’re doing the things that we do on a daily basis. For a real estate agent, he doesn’t want to have to learn how to edit stuff. He doesn’t want to have to learn how to do graphics. He doesn’t want to have to learn any of that stuff. For other entrepreneurs, like you’re busy doing what you do best. And so we come in and we do it for you. So we do done-for-you information products.

So if you come and you are, like, “Hey Greg, I got this idea. I don’t know what to do with it,” and I know it would be really cool, well, you can hire us and we’ll come in and we’ll help you create the framework. We’ll help you create the outline and we’ll teach you how to record it. Most of the time, we’ll record it with you, where there is audio we’re jumping on, a webinar, a teleseminar, whatever it is to record this up. Then we edit everything. We do all the graphics for you. We get it loaded up into a membership site. Whatever you need, we will take it from start to finish and do it for you. And we also have some…

Andrew: You even built a … I’m sorry to interrupt. Remember where you stopped. You even build a membership site for people?

Greg: So we give them what we call like a thank you or access page where we host all their videos for them. We host all the audios, all the PDFs, and we just give them the HTML and they can kind of copy and paste and put on kind of a membership page of their own. And then we also do build out membership sites using OptimizePress and Kajabi to, if they want that next level of intimacy with the membership sites, so yes.

Andrew: Sorry. Because that took me so long to get right and for the first year, we kept having the thing crash because I didn’t set it up right. The software has gotten better and better to the point where now I can manage it on my own. But I would have loved to have had this. I didn’t realize this kind of service existed. All right. Sorry. You were saying something else that you do.

Greg: Yes. So it’s a complete done-for-you solution. And some other people will come to us and they’ll be, like, “Hey Greg, I held a seminar and I got eight hours of footage that we took. Can you do something with it?” And we’ll take it. We’ll edit it and we’ll create a product for you. I mean we run the gamut. We do your physical stuff. We’ll get everything printed for you. We’ll do all your drop shipping for you. Whatever you need, we do that. But we also teach you guys step by step how to do this, and that was that Info ProductPro site that, Andrew, you just had up. And it’s a really cool launch that we’re doing and you can learn a ton.

Right now, if you go to infoproductpro.net and throw in your name and e-mail address, you’ll actually get a video from a conference that we threw called “The Bestseller Summit” where we had 100 bestselling authors and I taught them all how to create info products and it really breaks it down. And there’s all kinds of free content and stuff and then obviously there’s some products we sell at the end but it’s fun, man. I really enjoy what I do. I enjoy working with the people who we work with. We’ve done everything from creating dating products for women. I just recorded a product on Friday that was three and a half hours on menopause, tactics to survive menopause. We’ve worked with contractors, authors, entrepreneurs, marketing, you name it, we’ve created a product on it in the last year.

Andrew: Do you help people break down the process to, so that they can teach what they know well?

Greg: Yeah. So that’s one of the cool things that we do and I was trying to move my computer here, but our entire wall right here is a huge whiteboard wall. So when I’m talking on the phone with someone, I go through that (?) exercise that we went through earlier and I’m just like all right, so you know water polo, right? So what’s the first thing you do? And how did you do that?

And I just drill it down. And I write it. I’ve got this huge wall full of products. I take pictures of it, send it to you, and we break that into an outline so you know exactly what to say in module one, what to say in module one video one, video two, video three. And we break it down really nicely for you and we help you create a really killer product because I really want you to sell a product that people get results from. Because if your customers get results, you get results, you’re going to pay me to do more cool stuff. So that’s kind of how I put it together.

Andrew: All right. And people want to see that. I’m going to go to the webpages. If they need their products created for them, that’s ProductProSystems.com. ProductProSystems.com.

Greg: You got it.

Andrew: And if they go to InfoProductPro.net, they can learn more about how they can do this themselves.

Greg: You got it.

Andrew: All right. Man, thank you so much for doing this session with us. I really appreciate it.

Greg: Thanks man. I appreciate you having me.

Andrew: All right. Thank you all for watching.

Master Class: How to have a profitable launch
(even if you’ve never sold anything online before)
Taught by Sean Malarkey of Inspired Media

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Master Class:
Profitable Launch


About the course leader

It’s led by Sean Malarkey the founder of Inspired Media, the company that does training for proven marketers.

Master Class Toolbox

Traffic and Conversion Summit 2012

ClickBank

Stealth Seminar

Wistia

GetClicky

Product Launch Formula

Video Traffic Academy (pause to watch the page grow)

Transcript

Download the transcript here

Andrew: This program is about how to launch your product profitably. It’s led by Sean Malarkey with the founder inspired media, the company that does training for proven marketers I’m Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com and all help facilitate the session. Sean, you know the audience here, they’re the kind of people that say show me what you’ve done with what you’re about to teach me, They want proof, so what have you done with all of these tactics that were about to go through the course?Sean: Awesome. That’s a great question. First of all, thanks for having me on Andrew.Andrew: Oh, yeah. I’ve been wanting to have you on for a long time. I appreciate it.

Sean: It’s a big honor so first of all in the last year in the last twelve months my business partner and I have done four product launches for products .We are considered experts in social media training so we rolled out some social media training this year and we did a launch format. The very first month he put very little effort into. If you want to hear the full story on this I can get into it, but I think we literally put less than half a day’s work into it and we generated close to $100,000 in revenue so we were pretty impressed with those results.

Andrew: Wait, did you say $100,000?

Sean: Yes.

Andrew: Oh, that’s the first one.

Sean: Yes. So we were really impressed with the results in some of the after effects if you will so we decided to redo that six months later and we relaunch that product. And again we put more effort into it this time and got almost twice the results out of it. So we were really blown away.

Andrew: So that’s $200,000 for the second one.

Sean: Yes. Roughly. Give or take.

Andrew: Give or take. A little bit less, it sounds like but that gives us an understanding of it.

Sean: Yes. So the third one we did a little bit of a different route but we launched using a lot of the same things and we introduced a couple new products that really helped our sales and we also introduced a couple the new elements in product launch that we’ll talk a lot about today in this call. That really, really helped our sales. And that one generated, I forget numbers but it was really good. And this last one we just did in December, November-December, 2011, we generated somewhere around five hundred thousand dollars in revenue and again so all of them are digital products so it’s almost is a very low cost in it if you will.

Andrew: So no shipping costs, no creation costs, all digital half a million dollars in revenue is what you got going and using the ideas that you’re going to go ahead and teach us in this session but quick, before you got this right you had another product where you were suffering you had some of the issues that a lot of people who are watching us are having right now. We went to the website and this is what we saw. Can you tell me a little bit about this product?

Sean: Sure.

Andrew: What was this? The site’s down now, but this is what was on the website. Twix blowed. This is the alert that is on the website. What is Twix blowed?

Sean: This is embarrassing to look at but Twix blowed, I know it’s probably the worst name ever but that was basically training on Twitter. Early on in Twitter I got pretty good with Twitter I was using it for business. I had a real estate business at this time and I saw Twitter as an e-mail list so the bigger the audience you have, you know, a targeted audience, the more traffic you can drive with it. In my first three months in Twitter I think I grew to over seventy thousand followers on there.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Sean: At one point, I cracked into the top 200 and maybe even 100 I don’t even remember. Anyway, I ended up creating training and everybody kept asking “How are you doing what you’re doing and show us how you do it.” So I was telling friends and doing that. In that particular training I thought I was going to be a millionaire from that training. [chuckle]

Andrew: We’re all on twitter you got the magic already so you’re going to teach us how to get the same magic so we can grow our Twitter followers and of course twitter followers can each wall revenue if its done right. So I can see how you would think you would do so well. But the site is down now why?

Sean: It’s mainly down not because it wasn’t a good idea, it generated some revenue, not a huge amount but I guess most people would be happy with that but It’s down now because it is not worth it from a ROI standpoint for me to go back and invest in fixing the products. It’s a very visual product so it incorporated a lot of images from twitter and how Twitter looks and twitter has changed a lot.

And if it’s also some techniques and tactics that I don’t really recommend anymore based on what’s happened to Twitter over the last couple of years and to be honest there are very spammy. They are just not very cool and three years ago there were not many rules and no one seemed to mind at that point. Now, people definitely mind and there’s been kind of some roles established. So I’d have to go back and read about the whole course and it’s just and from time spent on activities it’s not time spent on activities it’s not the most profitable reward.

Andrew: OK. It’s not a huge, uh, not in fact any financial loss, didn’t set the world on fire either and part of the reason was that you didn’t know how to launch it you didn’t know how to do the proper launch. Today you’ve done it multiple times including this last one where and my audience has an understanding of what you’re able to do with it. They don’t care about you or me anymore they care about themselves and they want to know how they can do it, too. Let’s go right into the big board, the big board says the first tactic is to read your customers minds and know how to launch a product that they want, how long secular product that they’re actually looking for right now. So how do we do that?

Sean: Okay this is pretty simple. Everybody listening to this call is probably in one industry niche or another.

Andrew: Uh-huh.

Sean: And there’s probably an expert that knows a lot about that and that’s probably why they’re in that industry. So the end of result at the end of the day you just want to deliver what your customers want. For us that was training on how to use social media to generate more business. for whatever industry or niche we have training is for that so and it’s pretty simple for us with social media and how it changes there may be one network that, for example later this year we’re on the fence we’re contemplating doing a Google plus training.

Andrew: Sorry you’re about to answer my question. How do you figure out what that killer product is and I know were going to spend more time talking about how to promote it, how to get people to sell it at make sure you close sales and make it competitive for people who want to help us to make it even more sales done and they would have on their own ?but finding the killer product is one of the first apps. How do we figure out what it is how do we know what that killer product is going to be?

Sean: Yeah for sure. So, Steve Jobs was pretty good at figuring out what people want before they knew what they wanted and I don’t think I’ve got that kind of crystal ball and I don’t think anybody here really does make it I guess just looking at where your customers are into and what a wine you know there’s a lot a different way than we’ve done a lot of surveys in the past to our audience to figure out what they want and what they’re interested in but a lot of times it’s just intuition. So with this last product launch we did Facebook. there are a lot of different Facebook products on the market there are a lot of experts in that space, but our audience and our affiliates, a lot of them hadn’t exposed their audience to Facebook yet. So we said this is kind of a natural progression for us because we had done a RSS Facebook training and a YouTube training.

Andrew: LinkedIn?

Sean: Yes, LinkedIn.

Andrew: All right so he figured that it’s natural to go next to Facebook is that what this is? Here let me bring this up.

Sean: That was actually in our first products business this is 500 man strong and that was a really high-priced product that we used an evergreen launch forum for. We can talk about that later if you want but that was kind of the member’s area and people really, really loved that product, it’s a good one, but that was the catalyst for creating these low-priced products because we charged a thousand dollars, sometimes two thousand dollars for this training in one form of it or another. And a lot of our customers couldn’t afford that and they said they wanted the hundred dollar training or the stuff that was cheaper so that was kind of the inspiration to do the lower-priced products.

Andrew: Let’s go to the next one. So as an influence this is another product that you’ve been selling?

Sean: Yes, this is kind of a members area it’s a little peek of what that looks like.

Andrew: Yes, this is what people get after they pay you to get access to this. Let’s zoom in on the menus. What else is this?

Sean: Yes with this product, this is really one of our best products, the members area includes all the different modules which is all of the different trainings broken down into chapters if you will, video chapters and in those sections as well they can access transcription they can access the slides for whatever reason some people like the slides. Some people want the slides that were used we give them to them they can use them in their own presentations and for their own note-taking for whatever reason. We also have Cliff notes so we train our support people to go through all the training and that’s where the assessments come from so all their important notes those then become Cliff notes.

Andrew: I see.

Sean: It’s great. Our customers rend to love that they have access to that, they can download the audio.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Sean: We don’t let them download the video because I guess it makes fire is the one step harder piracy is a big issue for us. Every single day someone has ripped off for a product to sell it so we don’t do a video download. But they get that it may get access to a bunch of resources, a lot of really cool stuff. We create [?] for all of our products and let people that buy that product interact and help each other, and then we pop in and help out from time to time as well.

Andrew: OK, and one of the key elements of your sales process is to do this, to get that army of affiliates that’s going to help you sell.

Sean: Right.

Andrew: Tell me a little bit about how you do that, and I want to also look at the process that you use to do it. First of all, how do you even find your affiliates? How do you know who the right affiliates are?

Sean: This is kind of a good time for that question. I have a good friend that’s coming out with a product and he was asking the same question today. I’ll be honest here, this isn’t something that can happen overnight for most people, and this does take work and takes time, but in the long run it pays off and I don’t know what your definition is, but a lot of people want things now, but it took my business partner, Lewis, and I, a couple of years to get to where we are now, which I don’t think is that long. It didn’t take us a couple of years to start making money. It took us a couple of years just to get to the level we are now, so to get back to your question, to get the [?] affiliates, there are a bunch of industry events that people in our industry hang out at, and they go.

In fact, tomorrow I’m leaving to go to one in Austin where I will be networking and hanging out with people that are our current affiliate partners and our potential new affiliate partners. Most people in business like to help and promote people that they know and like and trust, and it’s hard to develop those relationships on-line, not impossible, but it’s hard, so what we do, and it’s pretty systematic really. At the end of the day, when you stop and look at it, in order to do this, we usually start on-line, so we know who the key players are in our space and our industry and I imagine anybody who is on this call knows the same. They know who is important, who is an influencer, who has a large audience, who may have a large email list, who has a blog that gets tons of traction, and then we start from there. So we figure out who those people are.

A great tool to kind of start using to pay attention to these folks or get in front of them is Toot Suite, and with Toot Suite, my partner and I both create lists of influential people who we want to use in the future as affiliate partners to work with. We’ll go through and you create a list of these people and it gives you the ability to briefly interact, to kind of know who they are, what they like, learn a lot more about them, and then also go from there over to Facebook and form a relationship over there as well. Once you retweet somebody’s content [?] and you respond to the tweets they’re putting out, you “Like” their post on Facebook, you comment on there, it does a couple of things. It opens up the door for reciprocity, so if you support someone over and over and over again, their natural instinct is going to be ‘how can I support you?’ In their mind, it may be retweeting some of your content or commenting on it, or it may be promoting your next product.

Andrew: Let me get a little bit more than this because I think most people know about how to comment and chat on Facebook and Twitter and everything else in [?] connections, but I need something that’s a little bit beyond what they know. Why don’t we go to this story about the person who sent us a certain kind of bag out [SP]? Can you tell me about that guy, and then I’m going to dig in and find out how we know who he sent the bag to?

Sean: Yeah, so there is someone in the real estate space who has real estate information and sold products. This was about a year ago or two years ago. He was coming out with a big product launch and he knew the majority of people on his list, but several he didn’t. He ended up [?] about 30 of the key players in his industry and he sent them a bag, and this is really ballsy, but you know what, in a lot of these situations, in order to get noticed and get peoples’ attention, you’ve got to be different. So he literally overnighted a FedEx box, the boxes that are the square ones…

Andrew: Yes.

Sean: …and inside the box was a little canvas bag, the old school money symbol on it, so it looked like the kind in the western movies when they rob a bank, they run out with a little canvas bag, so literally inside that canvas bag was a thousand dollars in cash, in hundreds, twenties, fifties, tens, and ones, probably a couple hundred different bills, but the total of it was a thousand bucks, and a note, and it said on the note ‘hey, this is a thousand dollars cash and it is a bribe. I’m hoping that with this bribe, I can your attention and get you to help me promote my next product, and if you want more information, go here.’ So he had an unlisted link to a site and page of his, and when you went there, there was a video that just says ‘hey, the thousand dollars is yours to keep. I hope you enjoy it. I do consider it a bribe. I’m trying to be funny, but I would love your support on this product launch.’ I think out of every single person sent to, I don’t think there was one who didn’t [??], I think every single one did.

Andrew: All right. That’s really powerful, and one of the reasons why it’s powerful, of course, is that he was creative and gutsy. The other reason is, and I wrote this down as you were talking, he had 30 key players that he sent that box to. He didn’t just send it out to anyone out there with a website, or anyone out there with an affiliate program, or who’d join affiliate programs. Give us a little insight into how to find the right affiliates.

Sean: OK. So, in every industry, like I said, there are key events in every industry that I think you should be attending. You know, we have three to four big ones that I mark off every year. The one I’m going to tomorrow, it should be about 250 players out of our industry, and I haven’t worked with probably 240 of them. So . . .

Andrew: What is the event?

Sean: It’s a Ryan Deiss Traffic and Conversion Event, down in Austin.

Andrew: OK. Beyond Ryan Deiss’ event, what other events are there that we should be considering going to?

Sean: South by Southwest is probably the biggest one.

Andrew: OK.

Sean: Or, one of the biggest ones. And Affiliate Summit is a great one . . .

Andrew: OK.

Sean: . . . as well. And then, you know, depending on what your industry or your niche is, you’re going to know the key events in your space that you need to attend, where the key players are going to be there.

Andrew: You mean the key events, not necessarily for affiliates, but the key events in general, and what you’re doing there is getting to know people who could potentially become your affiliates.

Sean: Yeah, anybody who has a large database of listeners, or an audience that, you know, would be able to send traffic to your [??].

Andrew: In other words, even though I am in the startup space, and I happen not to be an affiliate of any program right now, because I have a big audience, I’m the kind of person that they should be talking to and saying, ‘Hey, you should consider running my offer. I’ll make sure you get paid well and build a relationship with me.’

Sean: Exactly.

Andrew: What about this . . .

Sean: And the other thing too, I mean, you mentioned startup space. For you, for example, I mean, it may be beneficial for you to spend a lot of time and become an authority on Hacker News, or any kind of online forum or website where people will remember you, know who you are, and see you as a leader in that space.

Andrew: OK.

Sean: So we’ve done that a lot too.

Andrew: I see. Where else can we go and figure out who the top affiliates in general are, or where do they go and talk [thump]? There’s got to be some message board . . . did you just drop your cup of water?

Sean: I did!

Andrew: You did!

Sean: Hold on.

Andrew: All right! I was wondering if I should acknowledge it or not.

Sean: Yeah, yeah, because now it gives me an opportunity to put a towel on it, thank you.

Andrew: No, that’s all right. Yeah, good, I’m glad that you did that, and, look, is it all mopped up? I want to make sure everything’s good there.

Sean: We’re good.

Andrew: All right. So tell me about some websites, some blogs, where we can go and talk to super affiliates.

Sean: That’s a good question. You know what, in Mindstream and my niche, it’s kind of like an old boy’s club, if you will.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Sean: Here’s what’s happened, and I’ll just be frank. Early on, Lois and I participated in a couple big product launches, and we did so in a really strategic fashion. We wanted to place kind of in the top ten. And we knew that by getting in the top ten, or the top five, or the top three, or winning the launches, other affiliates would look at us and say, ‘OK. These guys are important, and they’re key players.’ And, as a result, now we are members of a bunch of, not a bunch, but several different Facebook groups, where they hang out, and these are private, closed Facebook groups, and they communicate that way. And there’s also email lists, or, like, a Google Group that we’re included in on, and that’s the biggest thing. So, between those three things, between the live events, and, really, the work for the live events and getting to know the key players starts online months or years before the live events. So if I know that you’re going to be at CES, or at the, I don’t know if Hacker News does a conference, but, I would start with befriending you on Twitter, and trying to friend you on Facebook and liking your fan page. And then interacting as much as I can with the content that you put out and trying to get your attention that way. And we may form a friendship. Oftentimes we do, because you might say, ‘Oh, there’s Sean, and he knows so-and-so,’ and then we communicate on Facebook, and now we meet in person. It’s like, OK. You know, that wall, I guess, or that barrier between the two of us meeting is gone.

Andrew: I’m sorry, but going back to the, finding the affiliates, part, about discovering where they are, you said, ‘We became top affiliates,’ so you were selling other people’s products, right?

Sean: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: And by rising up on those charts there, you got credibility, and you got to meet the other people who were rising up on the charts. OK. All right. I’m going to come back to this point. I didn’t mean to drill too much on this one point but, if everything else is based on building the affiliates, if what’s happening in this space is that affiliates are the ones who are sending the most traffic, and the most consistent traffic, and the most profitable traffic, then I want to know how to find them. I’m going to come back to that point that you made about being a top affiliate, because that kind of wraps into a visual that we have here, that we’re going to show people later on, that will explain how the person who’s watching us can find out who . . .

Sean: OK.

Andrew: . . . top affiliates are. All right. But let’s move on, if you don’t mind, now, to . . .

Sean: Sure.

Andrew: . . . the next big point on the board, which is, you want to get feedback from your secret Beta group.

Sean: Yes.

Andrew: What is the secret Beta group and tell me when I should reveal the visual we have for that one?

Sean: You can reveal it right away.

Andrew: It’s not that big a mystery but let’s bring it up here. What’s this?

Sean: So with all of our products we’re getting ready to go long before the public sees them. And with this last one that we did, I said you know what, I want to drum up some attention with our customers and then I also want to get some feedback on it and see if there’s anything we can do to improve the product or whatever.

So we put the whole product together and then I reached out and we have a couple different Facebook groups for our other products and email lists. And we reached out and we said hey, if you’re interested in being a beta tester for a new product that we have coming out, hit reply, like this, or leave a comment, whatever, and what’s expected of you to go through the course and report any broken links or any errors or misspellings or any mistakes that you see, any technical issues. But you’ll get free access to the course and we value your feedback and that’s all we really wanted in return is your feedback.

Andrew: I see, OK. So before you even launch, you do the soft launch to a small group of people. You get their feedback, you get their broken links. I imagine you also get some testimonials from them and the screenshot that I showed up here, this is a Facebook group. Is this what you used to stay in touch with the people who are beta testing?

Sean: So this group of beta testers, this was unbelievable. We put this together. I went through the entire course and clicked everything. I was like man, this is money. They’re not going to be able to find a thing wrong with it. It’s good to go. And right away, as soon as we gave them access, within a half hour, people started. And we created this Facebook private group. It’s a secret group and what that means is it can’t be found when people are searching the directory. We didn’t want random people adding. So we added four of our best customers or 20 of them. There’s four moderators and everything. Twenty of our best customers and just gave it to them. This was a way to thank them, also to get their feedback and learn about the product.

So right away, we started getting comments of things that were going on and the first one that was so funny way, when you land on the member’s area of all of our courses, we have a welcome video. And what that welcome video is, it’s a face to camera video. So you can see the instructor of the course talking to you directly, direct to camera I think it’s called, and then it goes into a little visual tour of the member’s area, where to find different things and where to start and what to expect.

Andrew: (?).

Sean: Yes, exactly.

Andrew: Yep.

Sean: So if you hit play on that, it would just be Amy going hey, welcome to Facebook (?) influence, blah, blah, blah. And so it’s just basically like when you go to somebody’s house, if the door just opened and there was nobody there, it’d be odd. We want to be able to greet you there. We want to say thank you for picking a wise investment and give you a little tour of the site.

So anyway, the first thing we started getting was, everybody in our staff uses Chrome and for whatever reason, in Explorer and one version of Firefox, the most common version of Firefox, that video would play but there was no visual. It was just a blank white space. You could hear the audio and so if you could imagine, we usually in the first few days of a product launch, I think on this one we did close to 1,000 sales. We would have had 1,000 people getting in there and probably a third of them would have landed and visually, it looked odd because there was nothing in this giant white space where there should have been something. And someone’s talking. You’re like where is that noise coming from? That’s not a good first impression. Not what you want in the first couple days.

Andrew: But Sean, why do you use this? Why are you guys recommending that the person listening to us use Facebook?

Sean: Well, Facebook’s amazing. I mean, we all know that. But for us, it was a place where people are every day. I mean, how many days go by that you don’t log into Facebook? Probably none. Probably most people on here log on just about every day.

Andrew: Right.

Sean: So, we could have used a group. We could have used a forum somewhere or whatever, but we just thought, you know what? This takes me 30 seconds to set up a group and I can go through there, find them on Facebook and add them, and this is a place where everybody is. And the beauty of Facebook groups is that when you’re a member of the group, unless you change your settings, you usually get notifications any time there’s an update or a comment in the group.

So we just wanted to make this as simple for our customers as possible to give us their feedback and we felt like Facebook, and for us as well. I’m a firm believer in simplicity. So this was one of the easiest ways to roll it out fast and make it convenient for everybody. And everybody was familiar with the platform.

Andrew: Right. I see. OK. So now every time that someone in the group engages, it’s another opportunity for everyone else in the group to re-engage, because they get messages about it. It’s a place where they’re already coming in, where they’re happy to be in, unlike their inbox where they might not be so happy to be in every day. And you’re just collecting feedback, collecting testimonials and building up to the launch.

Sean: Yeah. I can’t tell you, Andrew. There were so many things wrong with our product that I had no clue and things that I wouldn’t have realized. For example, one of the.. . . two points variance in that line and what was interesting in this one, I think, is that the top one started really high. Can you scroll back over to the right so I could see that? And it ended up becoming the worst place. OK. We may have… If you look, each one of those… There’s basically two points…

Andrew: I see. So, you’ve got more here.

Sean: Yeah. And if you scroll all the way back to the right, was there a specific… Yeah. On the one you were just showing, I think there was about a twenty percent improvement, which, that’s pretty massive when you have one hundred, two, three, four hundred thousand views to a web page. Twenty percent can make a big difference.

Andrew: OK.

Sean: And on this one… you can see on this one there was a big difference between a winner and a loser on this one. Yeah. I don’t know. So, this was a good one as well. But the reality of split testing is that you always want to test it, and if you have something that works on one product … Or if somebody has told you, “hey, this looks great”, you know, you always want to test up because that particular dissolve plug-in on one of our products literally doubled sales. Or almost doubled, there’s like an eighty percent [??] eighty-five percent , and on another, it cut them in half. So, without that in place, sales were better.

Andrew: I see. All right, this might be an even better one then to show … Ok, so we obviously don’t have all the stats here that we can show publicly. But what we’re looking at here is with a dissolve you’ve got about five and a half percent, five and a quarter percent … Without the dissolve removed, you’re at… Let’s see what that number is… four and a half.

Sean: OK. So this is when we did testing. If you look at the top… stop right there. There’s the original, notice that it’s all in dissolve and above.

Andrew Yep. Andrew: So, we’ve decided let’s leave a headline above a video in this one. I’m sorry, it was a video and then a headline right below and then the dissolve; the headline was right above the cutoff point, if you will. And having a headline in there, you can see what a difference it made in sales. So, I think, I don’t know, I’m not going to get into what the customer thinks and… because honestly, there is no way to know. But through testing we learn that ok, we don’t want that headline in there. And then you can see the original in that one, and then having that dissolve in there…

If you go back real quick. I think the original without the dissolve in that particular product was the highest performing. So, that was the situation where I was blown away because it literally doubled sales. Ok, great. Let’s try it on this product over here. And boom. And the variants in the… in some of them you see them go up and in some of them you see them go down. And like that slanted line there, that’s probably dependent upon the traffic source. So we have some affiliates that send a couple of thousands of hits and they might have two [??] and we have others that send in a couple of thousands of hits that might get twenty or a hundred.

Andrew: All right, so it looks like for this test you bought about three thousands hits to see what worked best.

Sean: Yep.

Andrew: So we don’t even have to do big elaborate tests. How many hits would you buy before you started offering the program out to affiliates?

Sean: Probably, I mean, it just depends on what we want to test. Its. But probably anywhere between five and ten thousand hits.

Andrew: So that’s still not huge but it’s a good amount of… It’s a good span, but it’s not a huge one.

Sean: Right.

Andrew: And actually that, what you just explained to me now, helps me understand why when I went to your site in preparation for this course to grab some screen shots, all I saw was a video. And then, I guess, if I paused the video, then the text would have come on. But I saw for a second there’s text there but it disappeared. And all I saw was video. And I thought that won’t play very well with you in this session so I won’t show it.

So now I see what you’re doing. You load up the text so that it’s ready to go whenever people hit pause on the video but until they pause the video and maybe if they don’t, unless they pause the video, they don’t see the text. They’re just focused on that cool video with, I think it was Luis, out on a beach somewhere and the conversation on the bench. It was really well shot. Kevin kept moving, moving, moving and I could understand why you would want people to keep focused on that. To show the professionalism and the quality behind your work. Unlike mine, where all I’ve got is this, this , this. [??] cool tools.

All right, I see what you’re saying. I also see why you wouldn’t want to run this out to affiliates. I would be the kind of person who would first hear, well, affiliate programs would work for guys like Sean and Luis, so what I’m going to do is go out to affiliates with my product and bomb. I wasted a relationship. Instead, you’re saying, “no, go buy traffic. Test it there. Once you know that you’ve got something that works, then go out to people who are basically going to be risking their traffic, risking their revenue by running your affiliate program.”

Sean: Exactly.

Andrew: OK. All right. Next big tactic. Let’s go back to this big board. Next big tactic is to have two and a half week launch time and have customer service ready. Why two and a half weeks specifically? And let me bring up the calendarâ?¦ What was interesting in this one was that the top one started really high. Can you scroll back over to the right so they can see that? It ended up becoming the worst place.

Andrew: I see, you’ve got more here.

Sean: If you scroll all the way back to the right. On the one you were just showing, I think it was about a 20% improvement. That’s pretty massive when you 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 views to a web page. 20% can make a big difference. On this one, you can see there was a big difference between the winner and the loser. This was a good one as well. The reality of split testing is that you always want to test it. If you have something that works on one product, or a test that works, or somebody told you, ‘Hey, this works great.’ You always want to test stuff because that particular dissolve plugin, on one of our products, it literally doubled sales. Well, almost doubled, it was like 80% or 85%. On another, it cut them in half. So, without that in place, sales were better.

Andrew: This one might be an even better one to show. We obviously don’t have all the stats here that we can show publicly. What we’re looking at here, with the dissolve, you’ve got about 5.5%. With the dissolve removed, you’re at 4.5%.

Sean: This was one we did testing. If you look at the top right. The original note is all dissolve headline and above. We decided, let’s leave the headline above the video in this one. No, I’m sorry, it was the video, and the headline. The headline was above the cutoff line if you will. Having that headline in there, you can see what a difference it made in sales. I’m not going to get into what the customer things, because there’s no way to know. Through testing we learned that we don’t want that headline in there. Then, you can see the original, and then having that dissolve in there. The original without the dissolve in that particular product was the highest performing.

That was the situation where I was blown away because it literally doubled sales. So I said, ‘Great. Let’s try it on this product over here.’ And, then, boom. The variance in them, some of them you see go up, and some of them you see go down, like that slanted line there. That’s probably dependent on the traffic source. We have some affiliates that send a couple thousand hits. You might get two sales. You have others who might send a couple thousand hits, and they might get 20 or 100.

Andrew: It looks like overall for this test you bought about 3,000 hits in order to see what worked best. So, we don’t have to do big elaborate tests. How many hits would you buy before you started offering the program out to affiliates.

Sean: It depends on what we want to test. Probably anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 hits, depending on the different elements.

Andrew: So, that’s still not huge, but it’s a good amount. It’s a good spend, but it’s not a huge one. Actually, what you just explained to me now, helps me understand why when I went to your site in preparation for this course to grab some screen shots, all I saw was a video. Then, if I paused the video, then the text would have come up. I saw for a second there was text, but it disappeared. All I saw was video, and I thought, ‘That’s not going to play really well here in the sessions, so I won’t show it.’ Now, I see what you’re doing. You load up the text so that it’s ready to go whenever people hit pause on the video, but until they pause the video, and unless they pause the video, they don’t see the text. They’re just focused in on that cool video with Louis[SP] out on the beach somewhere, and then a conversation on a bench. It was really well shot. It kept moving, moving, moving.

I could understand why you wanted to focus people on that. To show the professionalism and production quality behind your work. Unlike mine, where all I’ve got is this, this, this, and other cool tools. I see what you’re saying. I see why also you don’t want to run this out to affiliates. I would be the kind of person who first would hear, affiliate programs are what would work for guys like Shawn and Louis, so what I’m going to do is go out to affiliates with my product. They bomb, and now I’ve wasted a relationship. Instead, you’re saying no. Go by traffic. Test there. Once you know you have something that works, then go out to people who are going to basically be risking their traffic, risking their revenue by running their affiliate programs.

Sean: Exactly.

Andrew: OK. Next big tactic. Let’s go back up to this big board. Next big tactic is to have two and a half week launch time. Have customer service ready. Why two and a half weeks specifically, and let me bring up the calendar that you use internally while you explain. Why two and a half weeks?

Sean: I’ll be honest. There’s no right or wrong with this. This is what we’ve always used, and it works fairly well for us. Sometimes we go three weeks, sometimes we go two weeks, but mainly two and a half weeks is our average. We started this last one, as you can see there, on a Monday. People told us we were crazy. You never launch on a Monday. You should do Tuesday. You should do Wednesday. You should do Thursday. I don’t really care what people say. The reality is there’s no right or wrong, you just need to do it.

For us, we’ve gotten great results every single time. Most of the time it goes against what people in the industry say is right or wrong to do. Take everything you hear with a grain of salt, including everything I’m telling you. Take what you’re hearing from me that makes sense and apply it. So, the two and a half weeks works really well because it gives us the ability to do multiple contests, which a lot of our affiliates are contest driven. They like to be number one. They like to make it into the top ten out of thousands of affiliates. That contest environment can really inspire them and motivate the. It gets results that without that we wouldn’t get. Remind me to tell you Cuba example in a minute.

Andrew: The Cuba example. All right, I’m writing it down right here.

Sean: This is really a basic look at our launch schedule, too. This was actually the calendar prior to having a bunch of things added. We designed this calendar ahead of time. We don’t email our affiliates every single day of the launch, because if we did, that would probably irritate them. We do 80% of the days. We go in here and mark every single day that we’re going to send them email. The person who’s in charge of tracking that email and getting it out knows what days they need to work and put effort into that. Also, the cooler thing about this longer format is we do several different contests in here. It gives us the ability to do multiple ones that last over several days. Then we can so-and-so is leading today. Here are the top ten for today. Doing this over and over again, the affiliates love the recognition. By doing this they’ll get motivated and promote where they may not have without this.

Andrew: We’ll get into the contests in a moment. For now, let me see if I understand what’s going on here. First of all, when you say two and a half weeks, it looks like I’m taking it too literally. It doesn’t necessarily have to be two and a half weeks. According to this it’s not even two and a half weeks consecutively.

Sean: You’re correct.

Andrew: What happens is on day one you launch a contest for your affiliates. They won, meaning Monday the 21st. That’s when you start selling the product that you’ve created, right?

Sean: Yes.

Andrew: So this is when you want people to start selling it. You kick of the sale with a webinar, and we’ll talk in a bit about that. Then it’s officially opened on the 22nd.

Sean: Yes. The night before we do a kickoff webinar.

Andrew: Got it. A kickoff webinar the night before, officially open the 22nd in this case. You have a contest that ends a week after the kickoff. Then you have another contest. We’re going to get into those contests. I want to dig into both of them and look at examples. Then, somewhere in the middle you have something called a small guy. What does a small guy mean?

Sean: The concept behind the small guy is we have a lot of affiliates that will never win contests, like our top 10 or top 20 contests. So, we like to recognize all of them and do a prize where if you get 10 sales on this day, we’ll give you an iPad. If you get five sales we’ll give you a Kindle Fire. It gives us the ability to incentivize the small guys, which for us very important. About 70% through launch come from our top 20.

Andrew: How many?

Sean: About 70% of our sales. That’s not the exact number, but thinking roughly about the numbers is should be about 70% come from our top 20. Really 50% to 60% come from our top 10. We use a website called ClickBank. ClickBank is basically our shopping cart. It’s our affiliate program. It’s our accountant. It does a lot of things. They have a lot of other people that promote products already built into their network. One of the things that drives up your score at ClickBank is how many different affiliates are making sales.

So, if we say, ‘Hey, make just one or two sales, and we’ll give you this cool prize.’ Which, usually for us, that level is a break even. If I say two sales, our profit is only a $100, I’m going to offer you a hundred dollar prize for doing that. The reason behind that is the more affiliates that make sales, the higher our what’s called a gravity score on ClickBank is. It shoots up [??] and that gives us the ability to attract all these guys that we have no clue who they are, that end up generating a lot of sales for us in the long term.

Andrew: I see, so basically all the sales that you make on the day that you’re calling, Small Guy Day, you’re breaking even on. The only reason you’re doing it is to encourage guys to participate, even though they’re not going to win the big prizes. And also drive up the ClickBank revenue on that day.

Sean: Exactly, and you never know what’s going to come for that. A lot of the small guys may promote your offer and somebody who’s a medium sized guy, or even a large guy might see them promoting it and then get interested in it. For us it gives us the ability to drive up our gravity on ClickBank, so that we track a lot of new affiliates. Also a lot of these small guys a year from now are going to be big guys. So it gives us the ability to recognize them, and thank them as well. We do a video email or list out all the winners on our affiliate page if they won a contest. So even our [??] only get four, five, or six sales or whatever, they’d love to see their name in lights too, and it’s inspiring for them, and a year from now they can be a big affiliate.

Andrew: All right, I’m going to dig in to that in a moment too, and I want to understand contest since that works so well for you. I want to know why it works, I want to know what you’re doing to bring people in. I want to know what you’re doing to get people to be more involved in the contest, but let’s make sure I’m thorough here before I get into that.

The next big thing you’re saying is you want to create an evergreen webinar. I’m guessing you do because what you want to do is bring more people in to the affiliate program. You want to get them involved more. See how I did that, that time I saw that you stepped away and I didn’t bring the camera on you. I brought attention to you but I didn’t bring the camera on you.

Sean: I’m trying to get rid of this damn line, I’ve got a light behind my computer here. I don’t know if you can see, I hope I got rid of it.

Andrew: I see what you mean. So, tell me about the webinar if you don’t mind.

Sean: Yes, for us [??] the sales page that we drive traffic to gets [??] conversions. This is really important for a lot of you guys if you have software or a product that people can [??]. For all of our products, the webinar always convert better. Per click we generate the most revenue through webinar.

What I mean by that is we send a hundred visitors to our sales page and five buy. We make, what’s that work out to, it’s $500 in revenue, $5 a click, that would be the earnings per click. If we send a hundred visitors to a webinar registration page, we will end up typically earning $10 to $15 per visitor. And those numbers aren’t scientific, that’s a good example of how they work. It’s usually two, or three times of revenue.

So we prefer to sale our product via webinar, and what we do in these webinars. We make them extremely educational so you as the promoter Andrew, if you were to send your audience to one of our Facebook trainings. You look like a champion because you’re sending people to a training, it’s a free training, and it’s going to cover all these great things. And on the surface nobody realizes that you’re trying to sell them something, so you don’t look like the bad guy for sending them to an offer, which a lot of people have an issue with.

Then what happens is, a lot of people register, attend the webinar, and our goal with all of our webinars, and it’s always been this way. Is to deliver as much value as we can. And we feel like instead of trying to do all this, NLP, and crazy sales tactics, and sneaking stuff. We just feel like if we give good content and demonstrate a good case for why this product is important people will buy from us. We don’t need to do all this backhanded sneaking sales tactics.

So what ends up happening is 20% of the people on the webinar buy, there’s 80% that don’t. And we care about 80% as well. Especially since they’re not our 80%. They came from you as the traffic provider, or as the affiliate. It’s important to us that there full of high content, so that 80% lead is going, man that was a great webinar, I’m so glad I attended, and the other 20 that buy, says, that was a great webinar I’m so glad I attended, I’m so happy I bought this product.

During one of launches, our second launch the second launch we decided to do a lot of webinars. It was a LinkedIn product, so Lewis was the face of that one. He was doing three webinars a day for two and a half weeks. I don’t know if you’ve ever done it but it’s just like this, you’re just warn out by the time it’s over. And I imagine doing three of these a day, it’s a lot of work.

Andrew: You know what, it is a lot of energy. Like if I lean back like this. You do this during the day when you’re working, you lean back, but you’ve completely lost the audience, and it looks like you’re not participating, so you have to sit up straight. And, that’s just one element. So, you guys realize it’s too much. You’re going to lose Louis, your business partner. You can’t clone him so you have to find a solution, and the solution is?

Sean: The other thing is that a lot of our affiliates were saying, ‘I want a webinar.’ You want to say, ‘Hey, we’d love to, but you can only get 30 people on a webinar. It’s just not worth the two hours of time.’

Andrew: Right. A small affiliate, if all he can do is send you 30 people, then you don’t want to bother creating a whole webinar and merely killing Louis that day.

Sean: To make a couple hundred bucks. It’s just not worth it. So, what we did, we decided to go with Evergreen, an automated webinar system. There are a bunch out there that I want to recommend. It’s called Stealth. I went through. I spent 14 hours over a two day period exploring Stealth.

Andrew: Stealth Seminar.

Sean: Yes.

Andrew: OK. I’m going to bring up the ScreenShot, but let me make sure we’re all caught up up until here. What you realize is, you send people over to a standard landing page you get some sales. If you send people to a webinar you make more sales. So what you wanted to do is say to your affiliates, ‘Don’t send people to a landing page like any old software site might have. When you’re running an affiliate program, send them to this webinar. We will close in that webinar, and you will get a commission on every sale that happens as a result of the people you are sending to the webinars.’ That’s the way you were running things. It was exhausting you. You said you came up with this tool, which I’m going to show up on the screen right now.

Sean: Yes. This is Stealth Seminar. What you’re looking at is a peek in the member’s area on the inside. This shows a lot of different events. What we did in using this, we record one presentation. In the presentation we don’t make any mention of dates, time, good morning, or thanks for joining us this afternoon. There’s none of that. It’s what we call Evergreen. There’s no mention of time or date. No current events are talked about. We’re not talking about the Super Bowl. If you’re talking about facts, you try and keep your facts as evergreen as possible. If you’re saying, ‘Facebook has 800 million users.’ That’s a fact that we don’t want to use, because 3 months from now it’s going to have 900 million users.

Andrew: You want it to feel to everyone who’s in there that they’re watching a live presentation that’s happening the minute they’re listening. That’s what you’re using Stealth Webinar for. Those are the details that you’re paying attention to. Here’s another screen shot from Stealth Webinar. What is this?

Sean: This is a peek inside the control panel. You give it title, a start date, start time, multiple times on different days. It does so many cool things. If you want a webinar to run on the week ends. You don’t want them to start at noon. You want them to start at 2 p.m. You want to have the ability to change all that. You can do multiple times in a day. There’s a lot of really cool stuff if you go around there.

Andrew: Why wouldn’t I just say, ‘I’ll record a webinar. I’ll use maybe whatever my hosting company is. Something like Wistia. Something other than YouTube, so it doesn’t look like people are watching a YouTube video. I’ll say it starts at Monday at 8:00. When you go to the site at 9:00 or 8:01 or 8:02, just hit play and it will work.’ Why is this different? I know that it’s doing something different. What’s it doing different?

Sean: Here’s the deal with webinars. Webinars work really well because it’s a live event. So in your scenario where you said that you can watch this video at 8:00 on Monday. If I get there at 8:00, and at 8:10 my phone rings, I’m probably going to hit pause and talk on the phone. Or, if my doorbell rings, and my neighbor comes over, I’ll go up and talk to them. I know that I can come back and start playing again. With webinars there’s a whole psychological cycle. They’re designed in a certain way. They work well because it’s a live event. Think about interviews, Andrew, you come to and you hit play. Then you say, I’m going to watch this later, and you bookmark it.

Andrew: And you don’t because you know that you can come back anytime. So you don’t ever come back.

Sean: Right. With a webinar, how many foot ball or soccer games have you watched, with four minutes to go, and it’s really close. Even though you could pause it and come back and watch it later, you want to watch it because it’s a live event. Webinars work the exact same life. If people are excited about the information, they’re getting good information, and they’re getting value out of it, they don’t want to leave because they’re not going to get the information any other place or any other time.

Andrew: I see. Also because there’s a limited capacity, they feel that they have to register quickly. You wouldn’t register to watch something that’s recorded. So, what you want from Stealth Webinar is to keep that impression going.

Sean: We never say, ‘Join us for a live event.’ We don’t recommend it, because it’s not a live event.

Andrew: You call it a webinar.

Sean: It’s a useful webinar. It is what it is. It’s a web seminar. It’s the only time they’ll be able to catch that information.

Andrew: Let’s look at another screen shot. What’s this?

Sean: This is just an example of the members area. And this, we used a white video or a white presentation of this, so you can’t really see the border of the actual video on this particular screen grab. On some of the other slides is this webinar, where you . . .

Andrew: Oh, so this is the webinar as people would see it.

Sean: Exactly.

Andrew: Got it.

Sean: And it’s actually changing right now, they’re rolling out a version three. Instead of having this, a question box, where you put your name and email, hit submit, and it goes to an email, and then you can respond via email if you want, the new one, you’ll be able to respond live.

Andrew: Is that within the session that they can ask questions?

Sean: Yeah.

Andrew: Oh, wow. This is a great tool. So, stealth webinar, I’m going to bring it up on the screen. So when they use stealth webinar, people are feeling like they’re watching something that’s happening right now, and they can even ask questions in a box that doesn’t get rid of what they’re watching on their screen.

Sean: Yep.

Andrew: I see. OK. Here it is. All right. And then, this is, what is this? Tell me a little bit about this. This is . . .

Sean: Oh, I just wanted to grab this little screen grab. So, as you can see down there, the numbers at the bottom, the 1 through 33, we had, on our last product launch, I think we had over 300 affiliates request webinars.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Sean: And, for us, the beauty with stealth seminar is, once you have one webinar set up, it takes all of about five minutes, at most, to clone and create a webinar for another affiliate. So we had over 300 webinars running during that last promotion. And literally on a daily basis we’re running, well, probably 300 or more every day. Because our webinar is recycled every day, so if we had two times a day on Wednesday, by Thursday they would be playing again, the next day.

Andrew: Oh, that’s cool. All right. So, if I’m an affiliate of yours, not only can I send people to a landing page, but I could send them to one that would let them sign up for a webinar. And then you guys take it from there, and make sure that the person’s treated well. And that’s how you do it for everyone.

Sean: Yeah. And this was huge for us, because a lot of our affiliates, you know, even the guy that only gets five sales?

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Sean: Through giving him a webinar, he now gets 10 to 15. So you multiply that times 20, 30, 40, 50 affiliates, now not only are you making more money, but they’re making more money, which is the most important thing. And then there’s also the value outside of that. Whoever is presenting that webinar, you know, through an hour of listening to somebody you can really feel a good connection, and their personal brand of stock went way the heck up. So there’s a lot of different benefits that come from doing that.

Andrew: . . . [??] . . .

Sean: But webinar is definitely the best format to present a product and sell it.

Andrew: I see. Good. When I want to hear the behind the scenes stuff, when I ask you to to give me stuff that that the average user wouldn’t see, that if the person who’s listening to us were checking out your website and trying to figure out what you’re doing, I want the stuff that they wouldn’t see. And I appreciate that you’re sharing that.

Sean: Yeah. I just have . . . [laughs]

Andrew: It doesn’t feel sales all of the sudden.

Sean: Yeah, exactly. No, I think people understand and appreciate, we’re all about efficiency and simplicity. And there’s no easier way for us to do 300 webinars a day, or 600 webinars a day. We’re doing, you know, that a day, that’s just not even possible. So this gives us the ability to reach massive amounts of people that we wouldn’t otherwise.

Andrew: All right. So I said, ‘Really fire up sales with,’ on the big board, and I left it hanging, and that’s because we have even more than this to talk about. Starting with, give your affiliates a toolbox, so that they could pump up their sales. Let me bring up that we have, actually, a screenshot of what’s in your affiliate toolbox. If I could . . . oh, actually, you know what? Let’s say, let’s show this. What is this? That’s a blank screen.

Sean: That’s a chalkboard.

Andrew: What is this?

Sean: OK. This is a squeeze page for our affiliates. And let me just look. OK. Yeah, so, what this is, at the bottom of any of our products there is a link, next to the terms of service and the privacy and all that. It says, ‘Affiliates.’ When you click it, you come to this page. I need to change some of the data on there. Our refund rate is now about 6%, we’re now over 4,000 units, and we have probably close to 400 [??]. But, anyway, this is a squeeze page for affiliates. So, about 80% of people, 70% to 80% of people, that land on this page enter their information. And then, once they do that, they’re directed to the members area for affiliates, which has all of the content they need. It has a video, if we’re doing a launch [??] there’s video updates every day for what’s going on with the launch, there’s a contest board, there’s affiliate graphics. So if they want to put graphics on their website, if they’re going to do a review or mention it in a blog post that they’re writing . . .

Andrew: . . . [??] . . .

Sean: . . . they can use some of our graphics.

Andrew: So you give them all the stuff that they would use to sell. What we have here is just the basics. This is, you’re giving them banner ads, essentially, to sell your stuff for you.

Sean: Yeah, email to copying, everything. I’ve seen other affiliates do a list of SEO keywords to put on there if you’re going to do something for SEO purposes, which a lot of these guys do.

Andrew: You just want to give them as much as possible so that they can sell. You don’t want them figuring out what email to write. If you’re a better copy writer than them, you want to do that writing for them. If you’re a better designer than they are, then you want to do that. Whatever it is, you want to give them as many tools as possible. That’s what you’re doing with new affiliates.

Sean: Give them the tools they need to help make you money.

Andrew: Right.

Sean: There’s a lot to be said for that. The simpler you can make things for your affiliates, the better off you are.

Andrew: Swipe files, all the data.

Sean: To give you an example, the webinars were so great for us. We said, ‘Just hit reply if you want a webinar.’ We got tired of forwarding emails to the person. So we said, ‘Let’s just create simple form on the affiliate page where they can put their name in, the day they want the webinar and hit send. Take us out of the equation.’ So, we did that and we saw that 10% of the people. In the next video update that we sent out in email, we said, ‘We made it so easy. You just go to the thing here, fill out the three fields and hit go.’ Literally 10% to 15% of the response of what we would normally get. So, we killed that and said, ‘Just hit reply on the email.’ For what ever reason, that was the simplest thing for our affiliates.

Andrew: Every little picture. An affiliate who wants one can have a webinar where you are teaching his people. He can tell his people that you’re going to be teaching them. At the end, as you close, he gets commission for it.

Sean: Exactly.

Andrew: Awesome. Let’s take a picture and the next big idea on the big board. Use contests. I’ve been talking about contests for a long time. You’ve been talking about contests for a long time. You know what? Let’s bring up this. This is a list of the people who’ve participated in your contests and won them. Earlier when you said that you wanted to make a name for yourself, this is the kind of leader board that you wanted to be on.

Sean: Exactly.

Andrew: In this case, it’s Carl White and Dan Kennedy and Darren Rouse. This is, by the way, your top sales people. These are the gifts that they got. Carl White got a bottle of Dom and an iMac. Dan Kennedy got a Mac Book Air and Apple TV and so on. What’s important is everyone else in here gets to see who the winners are. This is why you wanted to be on some other program’s lists so all the other affiliates get to know you and say, ‘Boy, this guy Sean[SP] is huge. We should invite him in. We should have conversations with him.’

Sean: Yes. It gets your name out there in front of the important people. Let’s face it, they’ve got every single person on this list of top 20 was looking at this leader board. There were several new people and they were saying, ‘Who is Joe Johnson?’ or ‘Who is Jim Jackson?’ It gets your name out and starts getting you recognized. Then next time if Joe Johnson or Jim Jackson went to a live event, one of these guys might say, ‘Oh, I know him. He was on that leader board.’ All of sudden there’s a level of credibility that’s established because you can make it to that level.

Andrew: I see. Alright, so tell me about beyond that. First of all, that’s a real reason for someone to joining. But Dan Kennedy, people already know him. Carl White, the top affiliates, people already know them. They’re not doing this to work the system. Why else are contests so effective with affiliates who should just be looking at this as a business transaction? I send you traffic. If that traffic converts properly, you send me money. I don’t need contests. I don’t need Dom. I can go to the store and by Dom for myself. That’s the way I would think they would think. You’re telling me, no, that’s not the way they work.

Sean: It’s so funny. You’re spot on. A lot of our counterparts do these promotions where they have cars at first place. I’ve even seen Ferrari’s and pretty elaborate six figure prizes for first place. Most of those product launches are $1000 to $2000 products. Their numbers are more relative. Even some of the guys who do smaller product launches will do that as well. They may not make as much money. Their goals are to build a list or do whatever.

We’ve always taken the approach that these guys aren’t doing it for the prizes. It’s really true. They’re doing it for the recognition. A lot of them are ego-driven, and so they want to see their name in the top spot or the top 5 or the top 10. They have other reasons. They want that recognition for that. Someone who was on that list in the top 5, clearly had his spot locked down, and he knew that.

With 12 hours to go before we finished that contest, he texted me and he says, ‘How am I doing? Am I still in X spot?’ I responded back, ‘Yes. You’re fine. You’ve got it all locked down. You’re not going anywhere.’ I think I said where are you or whatever and he replied back, I’m actually on a boat 40 miles off the coast, on my way to Cuba. Just to give you an idea. This guy is getting ready to go on a vacation or in the middle of a trip and all he is concerned about is what place he’s in and where he’s at.

And in that top 10, if you go back to that graphic, we do masterminds, where we bring in all of our top affiliates with each product launch. And we got this actually, Ryan Dice did this and invited us to one of his masterminds for one of his product launches and it was big for our business, so we said let’s do that. We like that idea, let’s do it as well. And with this one, we rented out a big mansion in Palm Springs.

So we said those that make it in the top 10 get invited and as a result, our number seven through about 15, about six to eight of those affiliates were really driven to get into that top 10 because they wanted to be there to hang out with all of the other guys and be seen in that light and get in the value added on that mastermind. So that one really helped.

Andrew: In this case, you’re only allowing the top 10 people to come?

Sean: Right.

Andrew: Carl White, Dan Kennedy, Darren Rouse, they don’t show up for something like that, right?

Sean: Yeah, they will.

Andrew: Oh they will?

Sean: Yeah. Dan won’t but he’ll send someone from his company.

Andrew: OK.

Sean: Which is crucial because that’s the person who’s making the decision as (?) anyway. Dan’s not as active as he used to be. And Darren, I don’t know if he’s going to make it or not. He’s in Australia, so he may or may not make it but I think he might. Carl will definitely be there and a lot of the other guys on there, all of them will be there, yeah. And we do it pretty big and pretty good that most of our affiliates know that they want to be at these.

Andrew: I see. All right. You know what? I’m learning something all the time. I didn’t realize the power of this.

Sean: The contests are, it’s so funny. It always blows me away. I will get, the last few days of our contests, I will get more phone calls and text messages from our affiliates who are concerned about their place and where they’re at and who’s ahead of them and who’s behind them and how many sales or how much revenue. And it’s amazing. Literally, a lot of money is made as a result from people just trying to secure their spots.

Andrew: And you’re tallying this, by the way, by yourself, right? There’s no automation for this. It’s just you saying, oh, no, you and ClickBank.

Sean: Correct. We export reports on a daily basis and we have a little sale formula that calculates, but we just export a CSV file and plug it in and it gives us the numbers.

Andrew: OK. By the way, if I were starting out and were in a similar business as you, couldn’t I just come to this Mixergy program, do a quick screenshot of this. I don’t know, I might even give this to members, and say let’s see who these guys are getting. Who are the top affiliates? I see your smiling here. I’m watching you as I’m watching this. Let me see, who is this guy? Victoria Gibson, we’re got to reach out to her and we’ve got to reach out to Eric Brown. We’ve got to reach out to Jeff Herring and all those people. Is that an issue for you?

Sean: You know, I come from an abundance mentality, so I don’t really worry about those things. All of this people on that list I have a personal relationship with (?). That’s the reason why they . . .

Andrew: What if it’s not behind your back? What if they tell you, you know what, I’ve got a similar business. I’m not really competing with Sean. I’m looking for new affiliates. Clearly, this is a list of affiliates. I’m going to start off with these guys and just get to know them.

Sean: Yeah, that’s fine. And I get, if it’s somebody I like and I know and they’re asking me hey, will you do an introduction? I do that all the time. I introduce people all the time and for me, there’s a lot of value in helping others help each other. So I don’t have any problem with that and I’m not worried about someone coming in saying OK, these are the best guys. (?).

Those types of people won’t get anywhere and if they do, great. That’s fine. I’m having an abundance mentality here. There’s plenty to go around.

Andrew: All right. You get this one day contest. When do you do the one day contest and what is it?

Sean: So when you see you need a spike in sales or sales aren’t going as well as you want, that’s always a great idea, to give a little prize. Hey, today, if you get 10 sales, you’re going to get a iPad. Or get five, you’re going to get a Kindle fire or whatever it may be. But if you see sales not where you like them for that one day out, that will almost always get them back up.

Andrew: All right. So you just toss out a one day contest. Let’s see. What is this? I’ve got this in my notes here. You took this screenshot. You are, by the way, you are doing more screenshots before we started than anybody. We probably should have just turned on your computer but I wanted a crisp connection because people love the audio. Thank you for that.

Sean: Yeah, that’s smart of you.

Andrew: So this is one of the screenshots that you took. What is it? It’s command, shift, four, or command, control, shift, four on the Mac. You did that. Those keys must be broken because you hit them so much. What is this? What are we looking at here and how does this relate?

Sean: This is from one of them, but this is, we like to do this in emails a lot. In these promotions, there’s thousands of affiliates that are on these lists and get these and all of our affiliates know that. So we always do a top 20 or we do, we recognize the top 10 and also the 20 that are right behind it, in order to encourage and inspire people. It feels good. When you want to be in that spot. It feels good to know, ‘Hey, I’m at that level with similar guys.’ or ‘I’m in the same league as these guys.’ It’s just a matter of personal recognition.

Our first couple of launches we only did a top ten. Then I said to Louis, ‘You know what, let’s do a top twenty. The prizes don’t have to be huge. They don’t have to be massive.’ If you go back to that top twenty graphic, you’ll see that we had several whammies. That was because we had a bunch we had wanted to spend for prizes, and I said, ‘How can we do this and still get 20 people in here?’ I had seen someone else do the whammy thing, and I thought it was hilarious. So, I said, ‘All right, we’ll have some whammies thrown in there.’

We were able to take a little bit away from the top ten and create a top twenty for the prize allowance by including some smaller prizes. But, these guys like to see their faces on there. They like to see their names. A lot of the bigger guys, if they promote, they don’t want to be 14h. They don’t want to be 13th. It makes them look bad. So, instead of sending one email, they might send two or three more because they don’t want to look bad.

Andrew: I see. I know that if I were on a list, I know Darren through his site, and I saw Darren is number 17, and I’m number 18, I’d want to really juice my numbers so I can beat him, because I know he’s such a big player in the affiliates space. He’s the guy who’s teaching every one else how to do it. If I could possibly beat him, I would want to.

Sean: Exactly. The other benefit is social proof. If there are several key players in your industry, or even one or two promoting it, if I’m a key player and I see that, I’ll think, ‘Well, they’re doing it. I should probably do it as well.’ or ‘OK. I was thinking about it, but now that I see he’s doing it, it must be a good product. It must be something I should get behind.’

Andrew: That leads into the next big point, which is to use video email to recognize certain affiliates. Let me see if I can bring up a screen shot of what you guys do there. What is this?

Sean: This is an email. We did a screen grab of the video that we put on the affiliate page. With almost every single email, almost daily. It’s not every day, but probably 80% of the days during launch we do a video, and we do an email. We go through a three to five minute video, and we give data with what’s going on with the launch, where we’re at, and who the leaders are. If we’re doing a one day, three day, five day or seven day contest, where people stand in that. It gives us the ability to recognize people. What Louis and I do with this is so dumb.

We do this from wherever we are. Sometimes we’re traveling. We did one from Australia. We’ve done these from Cabo. We’ve done it from our houses, apartments, offices, whatever. We just pull up, do a quick video. We keep it real and have fun. Our videos are ridiculous, Andrew. If you saw them, you’d laugh. We normally start the video out, Louis loves techno music, so there’s always some techno beat playing, and we’re dancing for the first couple seconds.

Then it just starts, we’re in a good mood. We’re having fun. We go through and recognize everybody in the contest who’s participating. It gives us the ability to get a message across, any important updates as well. We continually hear back from people that this is one of the best part about launches are the updates that come out on video. For whatever reason our affiliates love them.

Andrew: I see. So, it would be like a news program. Here’s where we are with the launch. This is what’s going on. This is what’s working for certain people. By the way, here’s a little bit of mm-mm-mm music.

Sean: We get ridiculous too. There was a time Louis and I were doing this. We used Skype to record it. We were actually sitting across the room from each other. While Louis was talking, I was throwing a football at him, and I was flying a remote controlled helicopter around his head.

Andrew: Really relaxed in a way I can never be. I’m always all business here. If we told jokes for two seconds, I’d go right back to this shot. This is my shot. If someone’s going for two long, or kidding around for too long, I go . . . If you watch me for a bit, you start [??].

Sean: Is that why you were doing that?

Andrew: It was good. I’m learning actually. It’s like, you can talk, you’re going on a little bit too long. Alright. If it goes even longer, I do one of these. I think, maybe I go back to, ‘Alright, lets, um, . . . ‘

Sean: You brought me back a couple of times which I appreciate.

Andrew: I’m like the least having fun person out there.

Sean: You know what we found? People love the authenticity behind us. For us, it’s the simplest, quickest, easiest way. It’s all about simple and easy and fast.

Andrew: The problem for me is that my very authentic self is very anal.

Sean: We see a lot of our affiliates emulating what we’re doing. We’re not original in any sense. I don’t want to say we’re first ones who did it. I see a lot more people doing video announcements. They are doing in front of green screens. They have fancy stuff. For me, I don’t have the staff or the time to produce something like that on a daily basis. It’s so easy. You just turn on Skype and do this and be done with.

Andrew: Totally. I relate to that better. I’ll tell you what else the green screen doesn’t give you. Otherwise I might do green screen in the future, too. But I’ll tell you what green screen doesn’t give you, especially in times like this. There are times when my eyes wander and I’m like what does he have there? Oh, he uses a Mac. That’s interesting. He’s got a… you know, it lets me get to know you a little bit but it gives me something to do.

Not now as the guy who’s running the board here, checking out the keyboard, making sure we’ve got all the shots aligned, but if I were a viewer I’d be paying attention to background. You know? My eyes would naturally wander and much better to keep them wandering in the video than to go off the video because you gave me green screen and nothing interesting.

Sean: Oh God, yeah. For me it’s just too complicated to produce on a daily basis. We just stick with what’s simple and works.

Andrew: All right, back to Mr. Anal over here pulling up the big board. You do this email to recognize the top affiliates. You call top affiliates personally. How many phone calls do you make? Then I’ve got a screen shot here of something related to that.

Sean: Yeah, the social [purpose] is biggest. With almost all of our top affiliates we have good enough relationships that we talk on the phone. What we’ll do is, during the launch process, just calls them up and says hey, thanks so much for sending the traffic and sales. We really appreciate you. Basically just reaching out and taking that extra step to personally thank somebody and let them know how great they are and how much you appreciate them I think goes a long way. Even texting, something as simple as texting like hey, I just saw that you started sending traffic. Really appreciate it. Hope it crushes. Let me know if you need anything.

Andrew: I see.

Sean: Just being there for them. I think you have a screen shot of social (inaudible).

Andrew: This is really good, by the way, for me to know. Because all I see as an outsider is you guys have an affiliate program and it must do well. What I don’t see is what are you doing to make your affiliate program go well? What are you doing to juice up the results? It’s the phone calls that I don’t see. It’s the webinar that’s in stealth mode that I don’t see. It’s really helpful for me to see this part of the process.

Sean: Yeah, for sure.

Andrew: Let’s bring this up.

Sean: Oh, this was just a social proof thing. I talked to one of my affiliates and this was one of the reasons they promoted. Which this was a big affiliate worth thousands and thousands of dollars to us. With most of our emails we like to report the data and with this one you can see through the first six days this launch is 193% ahead of the last launch that they tracked (inaudible). Sales are strong, coming in every few minutes. Thanks for your support. Webinars…

Anyway, we give out a lot of good data and any good positive data we have that sends kind of that social proof back to the affiliates is worth its weight in gold. I don’t have to tell you my exact sales number but if I tell you they’re double what we were on the last product launch. You know that was really successful. You think man, this is a good offer. It’s converting really well and doing really well. It creates that kind of social proof, if you will, that will get a lot of affiliates on board.

I had somebody on the last one call me and say hey, am you guys (inaudible)? You did really well with this launch and I just saw that you’re 193% ahead. Is it really going that well? Well, of course it is. That’s what you read. I’m not going to lie.

Andrew: You know what, sometimes talking to people one on one really helps. I’ll have conversations with people where beforehand they’ll tell me they are going to say certain things in an interview. Then I’ll say look, we haven’t fully started recording. Just trying to get to know you. What’s going on? Then they tell me how they’re going to inflate the numbers for the interview.

Sean: Oh God.

Andrew: But it’s one on one so they’ll do it. Or they’ll do, some people especially before interviews and courses, will just reveal stuff. They’ll just blurt stuff out because, you know, you’re having a one on one conversation.

Sean: Right.

Andrew: It’s like private conversation is like truth serum with some people. They’ll reveal things to me that, would you say this to journalists who are out to get you? Are you open mouthed like this with everybody?

Sean: Well, dude, you’re good. I’ve watched you pull information out of people and I’m like damn, how did he get them to reveal that? It takes two…

Andrew: I keep secrets. That helps. All right, back to the big board. Calling up affiliates personally and next you monitor sales in real time using… Can I show these sales? This is your real sales numbers. Or do you want to introduce this before I show it?

Sean: Show me what you’re going to show because I can’t remember.

Andrew: Well, first of all the program that you use to keep track of real time sales is what?

Sean: Colicky.

Andrew: Colicky. That’s GetClicky.com.

Sean: There’s several different real time monitoring stat things out there. I just happen to prefer and like this one. It’s crucial, crucial to watch your live tracking. Especially during a launch. I’ve got a great example as to why this is so important.

Andrew: Can I show this? You didn’t even tell me what this is so that it would surprise me.

Sean: Yeah, I wanted this to be authentic so I didn’t want to tell you what it was. This is, if you can zoom in you can see a number on the top and a number on the bottom. You see 1,200 hits, 250 hits. Then, if you look, this is our outgoing links. If you look, there are two different links there. And [??], so what this means, and it’s pretty simple, go to the next graphic.

Andrew: OK. This one took a little while to get, and I don’t even know what it is. OK.

Sean: You see the ‘add to cart’ right below the video there?

Andrew: Uh-huh.

Sean: That is a script we use, it’s on linked influence, I think, on most of our offers, if not all of them. When you land on the offer, there’s a video and then a sales letter. We don’t show that ‘add to cart’ video right away, because if you saw that when you landed there, you might be turned off and leave. Our studies have proven that. So, there’s a script that makes that ‘add to cart’ button appear right below the video at the moment the price is announced for the product. After we’ve established the value, and the need for it, then we reveal a price. Then that button appears.

Andrew: Let me ask you something. Does that happen about six minutes into the video?

Sean: Yes.

Andrew: So that’s why it took me six minutes to grab this screen shot? Now I get it. You wanted to wait for this to pop up so you could explain it. I’m glad also that we did this beforehand so that we wouldn’t have to wait six minutes for it to pop up in the actual session.

Sean: Yes. If you back to that screen shot.

Andrew: Let’s bring that up. This is the Clicky data.

Sean: I was looking at the traffic, and I said to myself, ‘How is this one with the one dot link [??] pay, how is this getting any traffic?’ I saw the one day in the live trap. I saw somebody click it. Here’s what happened, the back story behind it. We had gotten an upsell approved at the last minute on that particular product. That upsell ended up taking the average customer value up quite a bit, about 30%. A significant number.

What that means is that 100 people were buying the product, 30% were buying the upsell, which is a special one time offer. Right after they buy, here’s another offer if you want. It’s a really great deal. You can get it for x amount. A large percentage of people will take that. What we had to do was go back and change all of the links on our sales page so that when they click that link, they went through the right sales process that presented the upsell. Does that make sense?

Andrew: Yes.

Sean: So, in other words, if they click that link, then they buy the product, it says, ‘Thanks for the purchase. Here’s your product.’ If they click the other link, it says, ‘Thanks for your purchase, but wait. Before you get the product, here’s a special offer.’ A large percentage of the people were taking that, so the value went way up. I saw somebody click the old link a couple of days after I switched it, and I said, ‘They probably had the page open on their browser for a couple of days and they never refreshed and are buying now. They were waiting for payday or whatever.’ Then I saw it again, and I thought, ‘That’s really odd.’ So, I went and looked. What had happened was, I know enough editing to get myself in trouble, and if I had delegated it, it probably wouldn’t have happened.

Andrew: Editing the video page? I mean the page that has the video on it?

Sean: Yes. I went and edited that page. Any place where there as a ‘buy now’ link, which was the ‘buy now’ button and also several text links, where it might say, ‘I’ll take this offer now’. There were certain calls to action in text were hyper-linked. I went and edited them all. I forgot about that button. When I looked at the page, it wasn’t there. Does that make sense?

Andrew: So the main button, you didn’t adjust.

Sean: Not the main one, but the one that was hidden.

Andrew: Yes. This one. The one that says ‘add to cart’.

Sean: What I ended up learning from that was that about half of our audience was clicking that button based on the traffic. I don’t want to talk about this too much, because it’s really kind of depressing. It cost me more than $5,000 by not fixing that link. Had I not been paying attention to the live traffic, I would have never caught that people were clicking that.

Andrew: They were clicking the ‘add to cart’ button.

Sean: That’s the one that’s hidden and doesn’t show up until . . .

Andrew: So, if they were clicking this and it had the old link, the ‘add to cart’ button. What else could they click? Nothing.

Sean: If you were to scroll down the page, there are several ‘add to cart’ buttons placed strategically.

Andrew: So, what you’re getting is that people are clicking the other buttons, and that was taking them through the new process.

Sean: The correct process.

Andrew: The correct process, but the big button that comes six minutes into the video had the old process. So, going back to this chart here, which of these two links is the big button?

Sean: The one right below it.

Andrew: So, you somehow were getting 250 people out of 1209 were going to the old process, the one that doesn’t have the up-sell; the one that isn’t the newer, better, more improved, more revenue generating.

Sean: At the time I changed it, it was half and half, if that makes sense. Andrew: So I see. So it was fifty-fifty and if you hadn’t caught it then, you would have sent more people to the bad traffic, to the bad link. And that’s the reason why you want to use not Google Analytics, even though they have some good real time, but get Clicky. Actually, [illegible] tells you in real time what’s going on so you could adjust in real time, not the next day.

Sean: Yeah. I haven’t played with Google, but I know that Clicky is really good.

Andrew: Yeah.

Sean: You know what, this would have just, a lot of things could have happened aside from missing the sales. I would have fought my conversions on that upsell were horrible. And I would have spent a lot of time in here just working on approving that offer. My affiliates wouldn’t have earned as much. So it has a big effect. And had I not been paying attention to live traffic, I would have never known. Never known.

Andrew: All right. Finally, big board. Do these tests during the split launch, and there’s actually a lot of different split tests that you want to do after we’ve launched. Excuse me, during the launch. Let me read off what you’ve got here on the sheet and then we’ll. Or do you want to say, which, what do you recommend people split test? And then we’ll look at a graph showing one of your results.

Sean: So, this is kind of funny but like I really don’t recommend split testing during a launch. I do and I don’t. But, here is the thing. There’s a lot of tiny, I always recommend, I think you should always use split testing. I think the market is always changing and I think consumers are always changing. So what works today, may not work tomorrow, etc., etc. But when you have a launch, it’s, I mean it’s for us there was a lot of traffic. I mean literally, tens and tens of thousands of hits every day.

And, you know, one tenth of a percent can make a big difference in conversions to revenue. So we go through and we test things like font sizes. So, if our primary font size is a 12 or 14, we’ll adjust it up or down and see what happens. We’ll test colors on headlines. Again, these are things that are not major; that we’ve already tested; like header versus no header. Like, you know, dissolve plug-in versus not having the dissolve there. Certain headlines. We found like instead of saying “watch this video to learn the secrets of magic” we might say “Discover how everybody else is learning the secrets of magic” and for some reason that increases conversions.; by having that. So a lot of our major stuff we’ll test ahead of time, but once we get to what we think is a winning formula we’ll go through and start testing things like fonts.

We might test placement of testimonials; having them higher up on the page versus lower down on the page. We might test the color of the headline. We might test different styles of fonts. You know, all kinds of different tiny, tiny elements that might. You know, when you’re getting ten thousand hits a day or twenty thousand hits in a day, you can. If it makes one tenth of a difference to have a blue headline versus a red headline, or your “buy now” button is orange versus green. There are all these different elements you can test.

Andrew: What program do you use for. By the way, once you get into tests, it’s so fun and so addicting that I find myself just testing all the time. I try different button colors, I try different texts, and then people email me and they say: “Boy that’s ugly. What are you doing over there?” And they won’t realize they got caught in one of my tests. And they’ll say you’re absolutely wrong to have done this. You don’t understand. And then I look at the numbers and I say this is even better than. The numbers show. Sean: You don’t get it.

Andrew: Yeah. Exactly. Even the fact that you noticed enough to tell me says that there’s a reason why the numbers are better. It’s catching your eye.

Sean: Exactly.

Andrew: I never even want to say this publicly, because I don’t want to keep people from sending me feedback. Feedback is tremendously helpful and a lot of times, I use their feedback in tests, but testing is so much freaking fun. And it’s stuff that, the results are surprising.

Sean: it’s mind blowing for me the majority of the time.

Andrew: What program do you use? I use either Optimizely [sp] or I use Visual Website Optimizer’s my favorite one because it’s so easy to test. Which one do you use? Which one gets you involved?

Sean: My developer likes Google’s Optimizer and I think the other ones provide a little bit better. I think I used both of those last year or the year before: Optimizely and Visual. What’s the benefit of visual? Does it give you the ability, creates the pages for you and you just drop them in there?

Andrew: You just put a little snippet of code on your site and then you never have to say “my developer links” because you get to play with it yourself. It’s so easy. It’s like, you type the URL of the page you want to change, it shows you on the screen and then it says “what do you want to change?” and using WYSIWYG, very much like.

Sean: You just literally go in and change it.

Andrew: Yeah. Exactly, you go in and you change it, and you create a variation. And you can do multiple variant tests, you could send some people to a whole other web page. You just come up with whatever stuff you want and it tests it. And you could also say “once you find the winner, a clear statistical winner, just show it to everybody. Don’t even bother. And it’s wonderful.

Sean: But what algorithms do they use for that data? I usually like to see a hundred sales, or two hundred sales. If I’m doing two things, I like to see one hit a hundred before I go with the winner.

Andrew: There’s no hard and fast rule. I’ve actually had some tests out there for thousands and because the difference wasn’t statistically relevant, even though it seemed high, they didn’t kill it, and I remember one time I tested a red button versus a blue button at the top of Mixergy because everyone said red gets you more hits. So I did it. The first day I get 5%, I double my clicks. I thought, ‘this is wonderful. Why isn’t Visual Website Optimizer canceling it yet? It keeps going, keeps going.’ Suddenly it reversed to the mean. I’m talking about weeks have gone by, it reversed to the mean, and then the red does nothing and so now I understand why. The difference looked tremendous to me, but it wasn’t statistically relevant, and so they didn’t kill the blue and keep the red. They didn’t do what done instinctively, and so I like this statistical relevance of it.

Sean: I wonder how they know because it sounds like sometimes, through a couple thousand hits, it might make a change, and others might be 10,000 hits or more. I guess I need to get back on it. I loved it. I need to check it out have a conversation [?].

Andrew: Right, I don’t want to distract from this. In fact, here, we also have a screen shot. This is one of your tests, and I knew that actually when I saw this, that you guys were using Google. What is this test?

Sean: This was, oh, this is interesting. So we went back and switched the header recently. For some reason, I thought we had already done this, but I looked at Linked Influence and the header was still showing up there. One thing I want to point out that I think is relevant here, with this particular example, and I think you have a screen shot of the header versus no header.

Andrew: You mean the previous test results?

Sean: No, the actual page and how they looked.

Andrew: No [?].

Sean: It doesn’t matter if you do or not, but what my point is with this, is for some instances and some cases, even if you don’t get a better result, it may be worth going with the lesser result, depending on motivation. What I mean by that is, for us, we went ahead and went without the header because the change was big enough, but for some people, they may want that branding.

Andrew: Right.

Sean: It’s important for them that they have their logo and their header at the top, or it’s important that one thing looks a certain way because of personal branding, or over the long term, how people view their brand. Just because something converts better doesn’t always mean it’s better in the long run.

Andrew: Right.

Sean: So keep that in mind, but with this one, we took the header off. It was pretty substantial. If you look at the data to the right, scroll to the right, you can see the actual numbers in the bottom right-hand corner. I forget where we were. Okay, so you can see here through each page got somewhere around 7,000 hits and you can see there at the bottom, 40% improvement.

Andrew: Yeah, and look, even Google of course, does statistical significance here, so chance to beat original and observed improvement. So you’re seeing 40% improvement by removing the header?

Sean: Is that crazy?

Andrew: That is crazy. It makes sense though.

Sean: How? How does it make sense? What does it mean? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Andrew: Well, the thing is, what I learned is, I used to think you had to have a big logo on your site, and then what I discovered is, nobody cares what my logo is. Nobody cares what the website is. They care about what’s the benefit, and so the smaller the logo is, the more attention they get to pay to the reason they’re there…

Sean: I see, yeah.

Andrew: …but 40% blows my mind.

Sean: That’s a lot of data too, to come to that number.

Andrew: Yeah.

Sean: You can see it. It [?] as much variance from start to finish, so that was a pretty solid test and I didn’t get to a hundred on it, but I was like ‘you know what, I’m going to go ahead and make the switch. I’m convinced here.’ So anyway, testing is so weird and so fun.

Andrew: Yeah, right. You spend so much time here with me, you and I are like “Besties”. We’re practically married.

Sean: [?]

Andrew: We spent so much time before setting up, grabbing all these screen shots so we wouldn’t have to kill bandwidth as you loaded everything up, and it would all be ready to fly in. I appreciate that, and then it’s been now an hour and forty minutes since we started recording. I appreciate that too, and more than anything else, because you know I’m anal, I appreciate that you brought a lot of material. I couldn’t even fit it all on one big board. We had to have two big boards.

Sean: Well, listen, I appreciate you having me on again. I think I told you earlier that I was honored to be on and I love your show, so thanks again for having me on. I hope people have gotten a lot of value out of this.

Andrew: I’m sure they have and I’m looking forward to hearing from them what value they got out of it. Come back and let me know, and let Sean know, too, if you’re as grateful as I am that he went through so much detail. Shawn, how could connect with you?

Sean: Twitter is probably one of the best places, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Claus.

Andrew: What’s your Twitter handle?

Sean: Sean Malarkey [SP].

Andrew: Sean Malarkey [?] for Andrea to play. It’s at Sean Malarkey.

Sean: Very good. You spelled it right.

Andrew: I did? In all fairness, I’ve been looking at your name on my screen for a long time here today.

Sean: Yeah.

Andrew: All right, Shawn, thank you really so much for doing this.

Sean: For sure. Thanks again for having me.

Andrew: Thank you all for watching. See you

Master Class: How to get customers from Facebook
(even if you hate social media and refuse to buy ads)
Taught by Nathan Latka of Lujure

Report issues here

Master Class:
Facebook Marketing


About the course leader

The course will be taught by Nathan Latka. He is the founder of this website, Lujure, which helps businesses create custom fan pages in under 30 seconds.

Master Class Toolbox

Payvment Facebook App

Aweber

Constant Contact

iContact

Transcript

Download the transcript here

Andrew: This course is about how to drive people to your Facebook fan page so you can double your sales. There’s the outline of the course. The course will be taught by Nathan Latka. He is the founder of this website, Lujure, which helps businesses create custom fan pages in under 30 seconds. I’ll help facilitate. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com, where proven founders like Nathan teach.Nathan, I know we have a big outline here that we’re going to talk about, I want to make sure that people actually use what they’re about to teach them, so let’s try something brand new here. If you can find one idea in this course that you can implement in your business, you don’t have to, just one idea that you can implement in your business, and in the comments say how you could use it, we will pick one person who gets the most “likes” on his comment, and we’ll give him 30 minutes on the phone with Nathan, to work out their strategy one-on-one in complete privacy.But what I want you to do is think about how you can use this, because if you think about, “How can I use these ideas?” you’re much more likely to look for value that will help your business. And if you think about, “How can I implement it practically in my business?” those ideas will be yours, and you’ll be much more likely to implement them. So, that’s what it is. By “likes,” the comment that gets the most “likes,” the person who says how he can use these ideas and gets the most “likes,” will get a 30 minute conversation with Nathan to really go over they can implement these ideas and improve their business.

So Nathan, let’s jump right into the session here. You’ve used all the ideas in the course, everything you’re about to teach us, and as a result- well, let’s bring this up- this happened. Tell me about who’s in this picture? What exactly is going on here?

Nathan: So I will never forget the day that I was sitting in a statistics class here at Virginia Tech and it was this Korean lady who was teaching this class, and I just couldn’t understand her, and I had this special ring tone that I’d get on my phone whenever I would make a sale essentially, and the only way that people could buy from me was through Facebook. So we had a test in this statistics class one morning, and I had spent the night before pretty much hustling, and what happened was during that test, Andrew, that special ring, it was actually a special vibration pulse, it did it twice, and each of those sales were $700.

So I left the test going, “Man, that was one expensive fail,” and at that point I said, “To heck with it,” and what I did was I ended up buying myself a trip to Costa Rica. So there I am, in Costa Rica, having a blast. We were wandering through right next to Puerto Viejo. We wandered into this national forest, me and a friend, found this great island, and we’re just having a ball, and the cool thing about, Andrew, what people are going to learn in this course is that I set up my Fan Page as a system, so even while I was out here doing this, my fan page was still getting more traffic, getting more leads, and also closing more sales, because of this system, and we’re going to teach exactly how to do that today. It’s going to be a blast.

Andrew: How many sales did you make? What kind of revenues did you get from that?

Nathan: So I did that through Fan Page Factory, and that was before I founded Lujure. I did that while I was still living in my Barringer dorm room here at Virginia Tech’s campus, you know, mackin’ on Red Bull and pizza, and we did $73 thousand just selling these things. So we sold them for $700 a pop, and it was, man, it was a whirlwind.

Andrew: Alright, and you used many of the same tactics that we have right here up on the board, and you’re going to walk us through these tactics, and show us visuals, and make sure that everybody who’s watching this can take at least one idea and implement in their business, right?

Nathan: Abso-freakin-lutely.

Andrew: I love it.

Nathan: Copy and paste.

Andrew: All right, the first big idea is that you want to use Facebook search to find buyers and hot leads. Tell me about that.

Nathan: Absolutely. So, one of the things that people don’t realize about Facebook is that it obviously has that search bar across the top, but more importantly within that search bar you can type in whatever you want. So, in the example that you guys see here on the screen, let’s say I’m a global plumbing franchise, I could type in “broken toilet,” Andrew, into Facebook search, and you’re going to get all these returns. It’s usually wives who are pissed off that their husbands clogged the toilet and he couldn’t fix it, so they’re saying, “Oh, broken toilet, the kids are unhappy, etc., etc.”, and what you can do then is scroll through these responses.

So just to give people actionable steps: You put the search in at the top, you click the magnifying glass to the right, and then on the left side of the screen, which you can’t see in this screenshot, it says “Public Posts”, and when you click “Public Posts” it searches all 900 million status updates on Facebook. Every Facebook user who has public posts enabled, which is the majority. Usually, people don’t touch those privacy settings.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Nathan: And you can tap into what their deepest desires are. If I’m moaning and groaning about my toilet being broken, you better believe if a plumber calls me and tells me he can fix it, I’m going to say, absolutely. Get out here right now. I’ll pay you double.

Andrew: And you found your first customers this way, right? You were looking for people who had complaints and you jumped in and started having a conversation with them?

Nathan: Exactly.

Andrew: Even if it’s not plumbing, if someone is in our audience and say, has a business that has to do with conversion and split testing, here’s another screen shot that you pulled for us.

Nathan: Can you show your screen, too, Andrew? I can’t see it.

Andrew: Oh, yeah. Sorry.

Nathan: No problem. Yes.

Andrew: We have got to chop that out. We’ll chop it out. So even if it’s not plumbing, even if it’s, someone in our audience is much likely to be running a business that has to do with this topic with split testing.

Nathan: Exactly. So you could type split testing. And what you’re seeing right now is actually all of the results. You don’t see it on the screen shot, but over on the left you can go down a little bit and click public posts…

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Nathan: …which you can’t see it here, but you click public posts and it will search all those status updates for people that say, hey. I need help split testing. Andrew, there might be someone in your audience right now who’s watching, who’s building a service that helps people, small businesses manage their finances, a mobile app to manage finances. They could go in, like right now, pause this screen, pause the interview, open up another window and type in, I hate finances.

And you’re going to see a bunch of people who have posted something along those lines who are perfect candidates for your new software subscription. Verizon can go in and type, phone water, and you’re going to see a bunch of college dudes who are like, shit, I dropped my phone in the water last night and I need a new phone and… There’s a bunch of sales there. It’s pretty remarkable.

Andrew: How do you take a conversation that you weren’t a part of and make it into a sale that you can close without coming across as awkward and spammy?

Nathan: This is a great question and you have to do it very artfully. Here’s what I do. If someone is so pissed about something that they’re doing to put it on Facebook, they are desperately seeking a solution. You are like angel Jesus coming in and saying, here is this financial software, Joe, that you have been dreaming of. It’s going to save you time, energy, money. Come to our fan page. We’ve got a free tutorial. You can watch it there.

I mean the key thing to remember is, it can absolutely come off as spammy if the first thing you post is a link and it says, come buy my product. But if you go to Joe’s page and you also see that he loves “The Hangover”, the movie, and he also goes to Washington Redskins games, you have that whole portfolio right in front of you, talking points. It’s repertoire that’s handing you to on a silver platter. You just have to figure out how to craftfully respond and intertwine that stuff in to get him back to your fan page.

Andrew: I can’t believe that people are writing like this on Facebook. Let’s bring up one of these examples. I mean this is the one from before. I didn’t realize people were talking about broken toilets. This is, you just told us about some of the searches we should do and Dray here internally did a search for broken toilets and this is what she came up with. I mean people are just, I guess they’re having conversations like this on Facebook. I would never think to do that.

Nathan: Yeah. It’s really crazy. In fact, let me, Andrew, I’m going to turn this thing on to steal your screen real quick. Is that OK?

Andrew: Do you want to show your screen?

Nathan: Yeah.

Andrew: All right. Let’s take a look. Let’s…

Nathan: Let’s test.

Andrew: OK. Give me a moment here and now we’ve got your screen up on my screen.

Nathan: OK. So check this out. I could go on here. Say that there is a real estate professional watching.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Nathan: And they could search moving to New York, right. And what you’re going to do is click the search button here…

Andrew: Can you hit command plus a few times so that we can really zoom in on what you’ve got there?

Nathan: Absolutely.

Andrew: OK.

Nathan: Is that more clear?

Andrew: Yeah. It’s coming in right now. Yeah. There it is, moving to New York.

Nathan: And this is the screen shot, Andrew, that you were showing.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Nathan: But now go over here and click, public posts.

Andrew: OK.

Nathan: What this is going to do is show all these people that posted a little bit ago, about moving to New York, moving to New York. So this one has a friend is moving to New York. That’s a vacation to New York so those aren’t great leads. Those are great leads. Right here, I might be moving with her boyfriend to New York. That’s not a lead. Final work, family is moving to Albany, New York, right. So she obviously just landed a job, just got the final word and she says, hey, family’s moving to Albany, New York. That is a perfect opportunity. She posted that two hours ago.

She’s probably thinking right now, man, how am I going to get Comcast set up? Where am I going to find a house? Is it going to be an apartment? Is it going to be in the city? Imagine if you had, if Helena had it served to her on a silver platter and said, hey, I have a bunch of options for you. Here they are.

Andrew: I love that idea. All right, let’s pause your screen here and take a look at the next big tactic. There it is. Cool. So, the next big idea for us to talk about is to use the texting trick, the texting trick, excuse me, to get off-line customers. What is this?

Nathan: So, this is something that is just, nobody’s using it yet. And it’s crazy. I work with speakers, and this is one of the main uses for this. Anytime where you have an in-person event; Andrew, I know you started Mixergy. You had in-person events, right?

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Nathan: What you can do is tell people to text to the number, and go ahead and pull up that slide, Andrew.

Andrew: Let’s do that right here.

Nathan: To text, to 32665-fan, and then the URL of your fan page. So, right now you guys, everyone watching, text yourself, Andrew, real quick. I’ll give you a second. Pull out your cell phone, and once you have it, go into your text options, open up a new text and text to the number 32665, which is actually Facebook. That’s what it is. And in the message, just type FAN space, and then you can us [??], or you can use your own fan page, and click send. Andrew, what that does is Facebook automatically has your Facebook profile link the fan page.

So, when I was speaking, sharing the stage with a former president, there were about 1,500 people in the audience. I used this strategy, and I said, ‘Hey, guys, if you want to follow up with me, brainstorm some more . . .’. This was the picture of the audience I think you’re bringing up. It is, yeah. And I was on stage and I said, ‘Hey, guys. Pull out your phones real quick; text the number 32665 FAN Nathan Latka,’ and the majority of them did. And now, all those tangible relationships, there’s no way I could spend time talking to every single one of them, but they all connected with me online.

So, for people watching this, Andrew, that may have software companies, or they’re at CES [??], maybe the founder of [??] are watching, which is a great new hardware, with your IPhone. But, maybe they’re watching. When you’re at CES, you could create shirts that say, ‘Text and that number,’ because when you walk around people can do that without you having to talk to them, ‘cuz you’re only one person. It’s a great way to take those in-person connections and bring them online.

Andrew: I didn’t know you could do that.

Nathan: Yeah, it’s really cool.

Andrew: All right. Next big idea is, let’s bring it up. Build your list, your email list with a Facebook landing page.

Nathan: Yeah, this is something that every small business owner has to be doing; and the reason is this.

Andrew: I’ve even seen bigger businesses do this. I’m talking about some of the biggest brands now have a page that looks a lot like Bob’s page, that you’re about to show us. But I like that you’re showing us Bob’s page, because I want the audience to know that this stuff can be done by anyone.

Nathan: Absolutely, Andrew. And the crazy thing is, this is a real asset. I mean, when you have somebody’s email, if Facebook shuts down tomorrow, you still have their email. So all these people that are worried that Facebook’s going to shut down, I imagine your audience isn’t worried about that because they’re probably technically savvy–not 68-year old grandmas. But you have their email, and then you can email market to them. So, yeah, pull up Bob’s screen shot here real quick.

Andrew: It says Bob, right here.

Nathan: It’s Bob Berg [SP]. Yep. And this is on his fan page. You can see part of the fan page got cut off up there in the upper left, but it’s on his fan page. This is where you land when you first go to his page. And he offers some free value. On the bottom of this tab there’s a video of him where he’s teaching in front of thousands of people, and above it he’s simply asking for your email.

And the reason this is so powerful is that it’s much easier, the conversion rates are much higher taking emails off of Facebook than it is trying to drive people to your website and capturing their emails there. And that’s because Facebook users, whether they recognize it or not, Andrew, they have a subconscious closeness or affinity with those blue-toned colors of the website. They feel very comfortable there. They see pictures of their family on the left. They see their brands that they like on the right. They’re very comfortable there; they’re not on a foreign website, so they’re much more likely to give up their email.

Andrew: You know, I understand the value of an email address, and I like these pages, and I’m going to ask you in a moment about how to create a page like Bob’s page. But, maybe we should take a step back and see what the value is of a Facebook fan. I mean, I understand how this could work in person, but if I get, going back to previous stuff, if I get someone to text to Facebook “Fan space Mixergy to Facebook” what do I get when I get a new fan? What’s the big benefit of having more fans?

Nathan: This is why you’re awesome at what you do, you ask the right questions, I love this. This is the question that everyone is asking, what is the ROI on social media and here’s what it is. [??] did a study, a study and they came out and said that, ‘A Facebook fan is worth a $136.’ Another study came out, I forget my sources so I shouldn’t even say it, but it was closer to $2, so the question then becomes what is that actual value?

Let me give you an example from Mixergy, because I imagine there’s a lot of startups like Mixergy who probably are watching so for Mixergy if you do this at a live event and you get a bunch of people that like your page, what that does is, less than 3 percent of those people that like your page will ever come back to your actual fan page to interact. They will only engage in and they’ll only recognize your brand if they see you in their news feed and the only way you even have the opportunity to get into their news feed is if they’ve liked your page.

Andrew: But then I still have to, I still have to keep interacting with or getting them to interact with my Facebook fan page and with my brand or else I don’t show up as much in their big news feed because the news feed is programmed to only show the people who they interact with and care about most.

So now I have to keep cultivating that relationship with them. Ultimately how do I get a sale out of that, how do I get people who fan me, who I interact with who like the different messages that I put up to buy from me?

Nathan: Awesome, so Andrew if you, OK. …

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Nathan: If you saw … you’re friends obviously with Olivia on your Facebook page?

Andrew: My wife.

Nathan: If you saw … your wife, yes … if you saw an update from her that said she liked some romantic comedy, right, she liked the page and your anniversary is coming up, you recognize that she likes this romantic comedy but you know you guys haven’t seen it together so there’s an opportunity there because you have that relate, you know, you see that, she has that relationship now with that brand where that movie is, maybe you take her out to that movie for the anniversary and there’s a sale for the box office.

What’s important, what you get with a fan or a like is that you’re buying all of this first and second degree relationships of the person that clicks like, in other words …

Andrew: But that’s only for a moment, if I can close this sale in a moment, for example I am a plumber and I need somebody to buy for me, I can close that sale the moment that they fan me and they’re friends see it because they don’t need a plumber at the moment or a lot of people who are watching us are software entrepreneurs or in one way or another doing direct marketing on line. They want to get people to buy their software on line, to buy their products on line.

How do they go from being in that news feed to, how do they take someone from seeing them in the news feed to buying from them?

Nathan: Yes, so Lady Gaga does more sales on her fan page tab for her accessories then she does through her web site and the reason is this. You can imbed links in these updates that drive people back to specific custom tabs on your fan page which have products on them. If you put together Mixergy top 10 interview transcripts, package it as an eBook and put it up on a fan page tab with a PayPal buy now button below it you could then post an update and say, ‘Yes or no, how many of you also enjoy these interviews? Yes or no, do you agree these are the top 10 interviews?’ And then post a link to the buy page which is a tab on Facebook so than that link shows up in the news feed and it drives them to the buy process.

Andrew: OK. And the buy process could happen within Facebook or over on my site?

Nathan: It all happens in Facebook.

Andrew: It all happens in Facebook?

Nathan: Yes.

Andrew: What do I use if I want to sale within Facebook?

Nathan: There are a lot of great platforms out there so I’ll give some specific examples. If you are someone watching right now that has a lot of inventory, you want something like Payvment, P-A-Y-V-M-E-N-T, it’s a Facebook application that is specific for managing a lot of inventory …

Andrew: What is it?

Nathan: P-A-Y-V-M-E-N-T, I think I spelled that right, Payv, Payvment, V-M-E-N-T.

Andrew: P-A-Y-V …

Nathan: V-M-E-N-T.

Andrew: OK. There it is and this is if you have a lot of inventory?

Nathan: A lot of inventory.

Andrew: OK.

Nathan: You can also use things, so the purpose of using [??] you can do a single thing, like, if you just have an eBook you want to sell, it’s really easy to put a PayPal buy now button there.

Andrew: OK.

Nathan: The … what is another shop tab, S-H-O-P, T-A-B, competes more directly with Payvment, it’s for a lot of inventory. There’s a lot of niche specific, in fact I’m sure there’s probably some people watching this right now that are actually the founders of some of these companies that are creating niche specific custom applications for Facebook, built for certain check out applications in other words they’ll build a retail plug-in for artists to sell songs through, or for Andrew to sell interviews to, things like that.

Andrew: Why do I want to sell within Facebook instead of selling on my website?

Nathan: Because people are comfortable on Facebook. It’s dominating everything.

Andrew: I see.

Nathan: When I take you, I’m trying to think of a really tangible example that’s really going to ring bells when I say it, but when your with people that you love, you see picture of people you know on Facebook, you know the book laws, you’re comfortable there, when you’re with people and you feel like you know the space, you’re familiar with it, you have less barriers about is this scammy or is this product legitimate.

Andrew: I see.

Nathan: You see what I mean. You’re piggybacking off Facebook’s creditability, that’s the best way to say it.

Andrew: OK. All right, that makes a lot of sense. All right, so now going back to Bob, now that we understand the value of Facebook likes and how to get them and how to convert them into sales, Bob is doing something that I like, which is collecting email addresses. If someone in the audience and I, here at Mixergy, want to use Facebook to collect email addresses like Bob is doing right here in this screenshot, what do we do? What’s the software that we use to get this in there?

Nathan: What is your email, what do you use right now, Andrew, to collect your email addresses?

Andrew: A Webber.

Nathan: OK.

Andrew: Actually, A Webber does have some kind of plug-in that works here.

Nathan: They do. A Webber, Constant Contact, I Contact, Get Response, any email marketing platform where you can click a button and spit out an HTML code, you take that HTML code, you can use the (??) free version to do it if you want but you just drag in the HTML app, paste in the code and then, boom, it’s live on your page.

Andrew: Got it.

Nathan: (??)

Andrew: All right, one of the things I like about, actually, yeah, he’s saying free goodies. What should we be putting up on our page to get a lot of email addresses? Is Bob doing a good job here?

Nathan: Yeah, Bob is doing a good job. Anything that works really well on your website, on your side bar that you’re using to drive people…

Andrew: I see.

Nathan: … is going to work extra well on Facebook.

Andrew: So if I’m giving away a free course in exchange for an email address, I should try it here on Facebook?

Nathan: Absolutely, don’t create extra work for yourself.

Andrew: OK.

Nathan: Real quick, this is important. Anyone who’s out there that is extremely technically savvy, I highly recommend using the Facebook connect button to capture the email. They can click Facebook connect, pull it in, or the Facebook registration plug-in. if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t use those. But if you know what I’m talking about, use those because you’re conversions will go way up. Because it automatically gives you the email address associated with the Facebook account.

Andrew: Yeah, we’ve got to do that on Mixergy also. Now you’ve given me something that I need to get done and we need to AB test it, too, to see the see the power of it with our specific audience.

Nathan: Yes.

Andrew: Back to the big board and on the big board we’ve got build relationships and crush sales with webinars. I’m hearing more and more about webinars and I thought, first of all, I thought we were done with email. I thought social meant that email wasn’t as powerful anymore and, of course, I’m recognizing in my business, the more my email list grows, the more my customer base grows and I’m now obsessed with emails to the point of the first thing you see on Mixergy is an email collection form.

Nathan: [laughs]

Andrew: Hopefully, you’ll never see it again. The software cookie use so you can only see it once. And we’re looking for more ways to build that connection with people through email. Now I’m seeing webinars, as you were saying up here, what have you done with webinars and what should our audience do with webinars?

Nathan: Yeah, Andrew, a lot of people in the software community think webinars are for pansies.

Andrew: I know, and here’s the thing, I hear emails from entrepreneurs, especially in the B2B space, who use it all the time. And I say will you do an interview about webinars. They go no, I think people think it’s scammy or think people think it’s beneath a good company. But the use it, it works for them and I’m seeing the power of it.

Nathan: Why do you think that is? Why do think people think that it’s scammy?

Andrew: I’ll tell you why, two reasons. First of all, I’ll tell you why I see it more in B2B than I do in B2C. Businesses aren’t as excited about getting a free month off, they don’t care about the month off so much because it’s not coming out of pocket. The decision maker cares about is this going to be a lot of work, will I be able to convince someone else, will I be able to fully understand this software without having to learn it and then go learn a competitors software.

So for them, this is what I’m hearing in private emails with entrepreneurs who I’ve interviewed on Mixergy and haven’t yet let me do interviews, for those kinds of businesses. They want to be walked through. They want to have their questions answered. They want to see how their businesses could fit in with that, so that’s why it’s working. And as far as, why is it seen as scammy, it’s because I’ think a lot of the online marketers discovered the power of it and they used it for batter. They ruined the reputation of it and those guys have a need to keep talking about their webinars, they’re pumping the hell out of it. The guys are doing well with it with software, don’t want anyone to know. They want to keep the stuff quiet, right?

Nathan: Yeah.

Andrew: They guy who is doing B2B sales right now, who I interviewed in the past, who will not talk about his webinars and how he uses it, doesn’t want his competitors to look at the transcript of his interview and see what he’s doing.

Nathan: I’m going to make some enemies here. Yeah, I was hoping that we’re crushing our competitor so they can’t afford your premium subscription. No, I’m kidding.

Andrew: But it is working. Some people talk about it and I’m glad you are.

Nathan: Andrew, it is without a doubt, you have it on here, it is without a doubt thee the most successful way that [??] has grown is through these webinars. And it started, you can throw up that screen shot right now, Andrew, it started me of in my dorm room using Ustream. So I’m going to tell you guys about the webinar software in a second. And keep watching until the end of this training because I’m actually going to show you the pitch. I’m actually going to do the pitch to you. So you’re gong to see exactly how I do it.

Andrew: You’re going to pitch to people how you close sales in your webinars, right? You’re going to practice it. We’re going to show your computer screen and so on.

Nathan: Exactly. I’m actually going to give to you guys so you can look at it and say, “I’m going to customize it to my own thing.” I think that is cool. I would love that.

Andrew: All right. And you used this website, this free site, at first. You didn’t even use Webex or Go To Meeting, which we use.

Nathan: For those of you that are scrapping-along entrepreneurs, you got enough money together because you had to have Andrew’s premium thing, but you’re still in a closet with your startup, use Ustream or Live Stream, the free version, and film yourself or screen share a live, a broadcast to test it out to see if you can get the feel right. So throw up that screen shot of me, Andrew, in my dorm room. This is my first, one of my first ever Ustream shows.

Andrew: I don’t think I’ve got that photo? Are you saying you’ve got a photo somewhere of yourself in your dorm room?

Nathan: Yes. Oh, here, here, here. I’ll still the screen back.

Andrew: OK, let’s do it. Bring it up on your screen and I’ll show your screen.

Nathan: Because I wanted to show people, this isn’t something that is…it’s not glamorous or anything like that. It just is, it just works. Yeah, can you see my screen?

Andrew: Yeah, this is cool that I’m actually seeing your screen here on my screen and then your seeing it back reflected to you, I hope.

Nathan: Yep, I am.

Andrew: Let me try one thing here. Let’s see if this…no it doesn’t. OK.

Nathan: So this is me in my dorm room. You can see the bed up here. I’d sleep up here and I’d hustle down here. My desk was under here. Very small. But what I did is, I just filmed myself here, this is with Ustream, and I would…what I would do is I would take the headlines from Mashable and this was called “Up Late with Nate” and it had a theme song. It went like, “Up late with Nate, he’s got your social media facts all up to date, like, de, de de.” It was really cool. I thought it was cool, but I would do the show and people would just go crazy.

And I’m like, “All I’m doing is giving my opinion on Mashable headlines.” I took no time to prepare for it. I would literally launch the Web, launch the Ustream show and at the same time open up Mashable’s homepage and read off of Mashable and give my own feedback. And at the end I would say, “Yes or No? Do you guys agree or disagree? You’ve learned a lot on this webinar and if you want to take it to the next step, here’s what you do.” And then I’d go into the pitch.

And man, Andrew, that started converting sales. And I said, “I need to figure out a way to harness this, sharpen it, increase conversions.” And now, I’m about to show your users what we’re doing from the perspective of webinars, that is, it’s just absolutely crushing. We built a whole system around it.

Andrew: Let’s hang on and talk about this for a moment before you go into it…before you go to the next step. This is…the screen is paused, but I can still see it. There’s toilet paper over your right, your left shoulder. There is a bed over your right shoulder, your just…Are you on the toilet, by the way?

Nathan: People don’t need to know that part.

Andrew: OK. All right. So never mind that part of it, which just shows how you were hustling to get started, but you were reading Mashable headlines, I guess to get people’s attention, and talking about those headlines to have an opinion that people can either agree with and get behind you on, or feel like they need to disagree with and then they get even more charged up, but you were using just as a way of getting their attention and then you were selling them on Facebook pages?

Nathan: Exactly. So I would advertise this Ustream thing through my fan page. It’s called “Fan Page Factory,” which is actually still up to this day. But we don’t use it anymore, but I’d advertise it to there and then they’d show up to this link and I would do this. And I would listen to the consumers. I would listen to people on the call. I’d say, “Hey guys, like what do you want to do now?”

And the cool thing was, I would do these at around three in the morning because I had no competition at that time. Nobody else was doing it and, you know, the people that are really going to spend money on social media, are the ones that are so frustrated they’re staying up to 3 a.m., anyway. So those are the people who are going to buy from…, you know. So I would do these shows and I would ask for feedback and I remember one time, like if you give control to the users, let them run the stinking thing, they’re going to keep coming back. I remember one time I said, “What do you guys think I could do?” Like you do, “Welcome to Mixergy. Home of the ambitious upstart”, right. I would go in. I love that. I would go in and say, “What should I do on the next show?”

One time they said, “You should use those paper towels somehow in the next show”. So I spent my time putting together a paper towel suit. I stapled it together. I had a whole thing built out of paper towels, came on the next show and people started tweeting it out like crazy. Up late with Nate, like paper towel version. And I’m like putting this character behind it is what drove the value and the content. I don’t know how else to describe it.

Andrew: You showed me in private your Excel spread sheet with your revenue. You and I just were hanging out on Skype one time, you said, “Andrew, let me show you my screen”. You showed me how much revenue you were making, and that’s what led to an interview on Mixergy and then to this. Are you willing to share, I won’t reveal it even though I know the numbers. Are you willing to share with the audience how much money you’re making from a webinar?

Nathan: Yeah. I mean we, I’ll actually show that on the screen in that Excel sheet that I had for you. But we’re adding, we’re growing. Lujure’s growing right now at about 17% month-over-month, the MRR. A huge majority of that is webinars.

Andrew: How much could a webinar make? If someone in the audience has software or has a core series like I do here on Mixergy and says, hey you know what? I’m going to try doing webinars for people who are following me on Facebook. How much money could they get from it? Are we talking about just one customer? What percentage of the people who watch do you close?

Nathan: We’re closing at about 21% right now.

Andrew: All right. So 21% of the people who show up end up buying something, not signing up for free, but buying.

Nathan: Buying. A credit card goes in.

Andrew: OK. Wow. All right. One more thing…

Nathan: Yeah.

Andrew: Let’s suppose you’re going onto, going out and doing a show like this or maybe you’re just getting UStream, I popped the camera right back on you just as you were drinking… Or maybe you’re doing UStream or go to meeting and no one shows up? How do you close an audience when there’s like two people on a webinar?

Nathan: Those are the freaking best because what you do is, it shows what their name is, and what you do is, they have no idea that they’re the only two on, right, and they don’t have to know that. You don’t have to say like, “Shit. Well, I only have two people on, I’m canceling this webinar”. What you do is you say, you know what? You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to select two very special people to unmute and you unmute them and you let them go, right? What you do is you unmute them and if you’re the only one on I’d unmute you and say, Andrew, like we are stoked that you’re here today. And I’d say, Where are you joining us from? Oh, I’m from Europe and I’ll be like, great. We have an international audience on today, right.

So you know you create this, you don’t have to say you only have two on and then what you do is you talk to them. You give them a personalized thing. You go through your content and test new things because your risk is minimal. The maximum you can lose is two customers, right, that you don’t even have yet. But those ones close the best. I will never forget. I did a webinar one time when I was just starting. I got 23 people on it and we sold 20 of them. 20 of them purchased, a paid plan at the end of it and that is when I realized we have just got to figure out… Now, that is an extraordinary result.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Nathan: People that start for the first time, you very well may be talking to yourself. Make sure you record it and make sure you watch it back because that is…Seriously. That is so freaking important.

Andrew: I know that with UStream, I think UStream shows how many people are watching, but Go To Meeting has a way of letting you see who’s watching, their names, their email addresses, etceteras, whether they’re paying attention or not I think. But you can say, I don’t want them to know how many people are watching.

Nathan: Exactly.

Andrew: I don’t want them to see that they’re the only two watching.

Nathan: Exactly.

Andrew: All right. And actually, we rigged up Ustream in a way to kind of hid that too. It’s not as easy, but you can do it.

Nathan: Yeah, it’s great.

Andrew: And you can embed UStream within Facebook.

Nathan: Exactly.

Andrew: You can’t embed Go to Webinar, but you can embed the registration form, I think, within Facebook.

Nathan: Yup. Yup, you absolutely can.

Andrew: Of course you can, if you don’t know how to do all that you can just link out to it from Facebook at first.

Nathan: Exactly.

Andrew: All right. So going back to our big board here, we just covered build relationships and crush sales with a webinar. So you’re building Facebook fans by the way, you are then getting them into webinars very often and then you’re closing them on webinars.

Nathan: Exactly. That’s exactly right.

Andrew: And how much sales are you doing? You told it in the interview so you might as well say it now too.

Nathan: Yeah. No. We did, in our first year of business last year, we did over $400,000 in top line revenues.

Andrew: Yeah. So this is first year. You’re not talking about just pennies here. You’re really building up a solid business. You had to actually go and yell at all your people and ask them not to download anything while we were doing this interview to get speed going. You have people there to yell at and this is a young company that’s doing really well. So let’s go on to the next big point which is, analyze your data to close more sales and customize your sales pitch.

Nathan: Exactly. So I am, a lot of people, they’ll do the webinar and they won’t take anything away from it. What we started doing is saying, this is a great consumer touch point, touching them here on the webinar. What can we do after that? So I’m going to steal the screen back, Andrew…

Andrew: OK.

Nathan: …and show them this.

Andrew: And while you’re doing that, if you’re watching, while you’re doing that I’ll say this to the audience, if you’re watching and anything that we’ve talked about so far from this big board about, how to do search, how to use the texting trick, how to do a webinar, if any of it you think you could possibly use, in the comments just tell us how you could possibly use it.

I’m asking you to do this for yourself because if you start to think about how you can embed these ideas in your life without stressing over it you will naturally find yourself using it. And so add that into the comments how you could possibly use it and by user, excuse me, by student votes, the comment that gets the most likes, the most positive thumbs up, will get a conversation with Nathan where he goes over this stuff in a lot more private setting and a lot more personal setting. And so let’s now go over to his screen. I’m looking down on my keyboard to see which keys do it and that’s, those are the keys. All right. Now we’re looking at, what are we looking at? What is this?

Nathan: So what this is, this is the Excel sheet with all of the data from the webinar. So you can see here, I will systematize all this. It says, click registration link for the webinar, the go to webinar, 742. 293 of those registered and 227 actually attended. So you’re getting a really great attendance right there which I have got to be, about 80%. What this attentive shows, Andrew, is how long people are actually looking at your screen. So they may be in your webinar, but they’re probably multi- tasking. This attentiveness tells you, are they actually looking at the screen that you’re sharing to them? Are they watching?

Andrew: So if you have a 0.8 as you got there, what does that mean?

Nathan: 80% of the people that registered actually showed up on the live webinar.

Andrew: OK. And the attentiveness means 46.6, what does that mean?

Nathan: 46.6% out of, shoot, what is it out of? Out of, 100’s the best so that’s, it’s how long, it’s not how long. It’s, you could probably just actually call it a percentage, 46.6% of people are actually watching your screen.

Andrew: Paying attention. Or maybe 40, OK. All right. It gives you a sense of how much they’re watching so that you…

Nathan: Exactly.

Andrew: OK. So that you know whether you’re on or not. And you can actually, as you’re doing the session, you can see when people stop paying attention. This is all Go To Meeting, Go To Webinar…

Nathan: Go To Webinar.

Andrew: …that’s giving you this.

Nathan: Yeah. And it’s great because one trick, one tactic that you guys should all do if you’re doing webinars, to keep this attentiveness rate up, say things like, do you guys all see this I’m about to click? If you’re only going to watch five seconds of this webinar, you want to see this button I’m about to click. And then you can watch on the web statistics, you’re attentiveness shoot up. Seriously. Once you have 90% of people watching, then do it. And reel them in and it’s a great way to get your audience more engaged.

Andrew: OK.

Nathan: This is the average attendance duration in minutes. So on average those 227 attendees were in attendance for 62 minutes, an hour.

Andrew: That’s phenomenal. To get people to watch you for 62 minutes as you sell your product is phenomenal. You know I want to go back to this spread sheet, but what do you do to get people’s attention for that long?

Nathan: You make it about them. It’s got to be about them.

Andrew: But what do you mean? I always want to make everything about them.

Nathan: Yeah.

Andrew: How do I do that?

Nathan: I’ll show you. I’ll show you. OK. So what you do is, when I get the attendees come in, I see all their names and immediately I’ll start the webinar 15 minutes early and I’ll go, hey guys. Nathan Latka here with Lujure. We have got a remarkable program ahead of your guys today. I need to make sure you’re all sitting down because if you’re standing watching this webinar and you’re blown away by these tricks and you fall and break your arm, we’re not liable. So take a seat. You know you have got to add some personality. And then say, go ahead and type in the questions where you’re joining us from today. I learned that from Lewis actually.

Andrew: Lewis Howse.

Nathan: Lewis Howse.

Andrew: The guy who did a course here on Mixergy too, but…

Nathan: You get buy in, great buy in. That’s what I’m trying to say.

Andrew: OK.

Nathan: Get them bought into the presentation.

Andrew: Let’s take a look. I want to watch you somewhere. This is where people, we’re going to send people later on to your blog and this is where they can go and watch one of your sessions. Well here, actually people can’t see. There, now they can see it. This is where they will go if they want to watch one of your sessions and see how you’re doing this.

Nathan: Yeah. If you click that link there.

Andrew: This one right here. I’m not going to click it, but this is it.

Nathan: Yup. You click it and when it opens at the bottom of it there is the full webinar. And if you don’t want the content, the Facebook content, skip to about minute 45 and you’ll see me going into the pitch. But it’s really such, it’s not a pitch. What I do, Andrew, I told you about making it about the users?

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Nathan: I will ask the users. I’ll straight up say, hey guys, I’ve given you 45 minutes of crazy content and I don’t want to waste your time. You guys have families. So here’s what I want, if you guys are interested in hearing about my pricing plans I need you to tell me so type yes or no in the questions right now. Do you want to know about my pricing plans? And then bunches of people says, yes, yes, yes.

Andrew: They say they want to know about your prices?

Nathan: Yeah. Our prices. I’m creating buy in. So like what I do, and people are like Nathan, you’re bullshitting. You say everyone’s saying yes, but there’s probably nobody saying yes. So I’ll take a screen shot, because they can’t see the other chat people, so I take a screen shot of it, put it in Photo Shop and say, look. You said you want to see it and so does 90% of everybody else on this webinar. You guys are smart people committed to growing your social strategy.

Andrew: By the way, you intentionally keep them from seeing the chats to each other so you can control the conversation?

Nathan: Exactly.

Andrew: Right. You don’t want them to see that they’re talking to each other. You want them just to talk to you so that if you only have two people in the chat room, they don’t know that it’s only two people and if you’ve got a bunch of trolls and people who are all saying no to the pricing, you don’t want them to all see it. You can actually show the screen shot from a past session?

Nathan: Well, you could. I actually take them all live. Sometimes you’ll see someone, like I’ve been, it’s great when somebody cusses me out on a webinar in the chat and here’s why. When somebody’s like, this is, and if you’re listening at work, turn down the volume, but if they’re like, this is fucking bullshit. I can’t use this for my company, blah, blah, blah, I’ll unmute them. And I’ll say, John, why do you feel that you just cannot use this?

And what will happen is everyone, I’ll say, John, what’s your Twitter handle? And he’ll give it to me and I’ll say, guys, you know that John can use this. You guys are smart people. Tweet him ideas and tag Lujure media. So then they start tweeting to him, overwhelming him with ideas and I spend three minutes on the webinar with him and I’ll spend three minutes giving him ideas and I’ll say, John, are you a believer now? And he’s like, Nathan, this is remarkable. This is the strongest kind of feedback. I would pay people. I told you this, I would pay people to cuss me out on webinars because when a company has an enemy, you grow exponentially fasters.

Andrew: All right. I’m not going to edit this out so you can deny it. How do I do this? Screw it. You have got to trust that this is OK with this audience. This is a small audience of people who paid so it’s not going out to the broad internet. But here’s the thing, you sometimes will have people intentionally, I see the look on your face. Let’s zoom in. You’re not sure what I’m about to do.

Nathan: I know exactly what you’re about to say.

Andrew: You’ll sometimes have people intentionally say negative things about you on your Facebook wall. That’s all I’m going to say. How much of that story do you want to talk about?

Nathan: I’ll tell all of it.

Andrew: I’m going to put the camera right on you and put you on the spot.

Nathan: Yeah. And again, I’m going to look straight at you people and tell you this. When you have people, like if any of you right now go to PayPal’s wall, they can’t keep up with all the negative comments because there’s so many of them. What they did when they first started is they went and deleted these negative comments. Well that’s not going to stop the people from leaving negative comments. They’re going to talk about you online. At least give them the place to talk about it.

But when you’re growing really quick and you’re doing really well like Lujure is, you don’t get a lot of negative comments. But the second you do get a negative comment on your Facebook wall, I email blast it out to my whole email list of almost 36,000 people and say, hey guys, this guy things our product is crap. I could tell him that I think it’s great, but would you just mind taking a second and telling him what you think? And if you think it’s crap, tell me that too because I want to make it better. And they all go in and it creates a huge stream of people that are just like, this is remarkable, you’re crazy, they have great support and it’s the strongest form of social proof that you can get.

Andrew: I’ve heard of a company, you may not know these guys, but I’ve heard of a company that will have one of their friends go in and rag on their Facebook page just so they can have that kind of feedback, a reason to get people marshalling behind the company.

Nathan: Exactly. That’s exactly right. But we have, what we created when I first started Fan Page Factory, I created a competitor early on specifically to rally my troops to crush that other enemy when really you were running both sides of the equation.

Andrew: I should say that that was your previous company where you were doing everything manually and now you are on to Lujure where it’s all automated. You don’t have to manually create Facebook fan pages for people and, there it is, and image them.

Nathan: Exactly.

Andrew: You just send them to Lujure and they can do it for themselves. So walk me through the rest of these numbers as people can see on their screen.

Nathan: Yeah. So this is new sales quantity. So how many new sales we made on the call. Now, for those of you that are trying to make this comparable and get ideas for your own business, what Lujure is, it’s a monthly recurring subscription. So you see here, Andrew, 227 attended live. 28 purchased. So that’s a low conversion rate for what we usually average. But the actually number of the new sales was $1,368. Some of that was an annual plan, too, a $288 annual plan. This, the new MRR is what is added to our monthly bottom line. So you see here, what I do when I create these sheets is I copy and paste all of our new paying users.

Andrew: Before you do that, I think you might be on pause on your screen, ‘cuz I don’t see to the right of that. Okay, there we go. Okay. New MRR, these are new people who are going to be paying you month to month to month. Every month, because of this webinar that you did, you get a little over a thousand dollars, until some of these people cancel. So, that’s phenomenal–recurring revenue coming in.

Nathan: Yeah, and I’m not going to say what our lifetime value is, but it’s substantial. So, this is going to recur for a long time. And you can see here, most of the time I aim to sell people onto our $[30] a month plan. So you can see all our $30 a month purchases we got. One person purchased a $300 a month plan, here. But that’s the easy part. That’s the selling part. The more interesting part is the people that did not purchase. So, what Go To webinar will spit out for you is an interest rating. What this interest rating is is that it tells you how into your webinar that specific user was–how much were they watching? And then it tells you how long that specific user was in your session–in minutes.

Andrew: So, the person didn’t buy, but he spent 109 minutes in your session?

Nathan: Yes, so that is an easy close, if I get him on the phone.

Andrew: Oooooo! So you will call him up.

Nathan: Exactly. And I’ll say, ‘I can tell you’re a smart guy. You invested 109 minutes of your time on our webinar. I just want to call and make sure I got all your questions answered,’ because we keep all our questions stored right here, that they asked on the live call. And you can see, one of the questions I asked at the end of the webinar is, ‘How many of you are ready to buy, but you just can’t pull the trigger right now?’ And people will be like, I’m so close, I’m so close. Well, we get that. And then we just sort it, and contact them. So I say, ‘Was this demo helpful? Was the webinar helpful?’ And usually people say, ‘Yes.’ So, what I do is, this qualifies your leads. The people that have high [??] in the in-session duration, and high interest ratings are people that are easy to close, if you can email them, or get them on the phone. And I have their email here in this chart, too.

Andrew: Yeah, you and I intentionally went over this to make sure we were hiding people’s email addresses. But this is exactly what you get spit out from Go To Meeting, Go To Webinar?

Nathan: That’s correct. I do some custom work, here, like I will highlight these cells to add the color to them, to sort them, to make it visually easy.

Andrew: Right.

Nathan: But look right here. This person said they’re seriously considering buying. Right?

Andrew: Yeah, we’re talking about Number 76, ‘Seriously considering.’ That was the answer.

Nathan: Yep.

Andrew: And they still didn’t buy it. How do you know, how does Go To Meeting, or Go To Webinar. . .I keep saying Go To Meeting, but I mean Go To Webinar, how do they know that the person didn’t buy?

Nathan: Yep. That’s part of the magic sauce, here, that people won’t get anywhere else. What we do is, our [charge ??] back end will spit out these payments, and I take the emails of the people that pay and do a list comparison with the emails in the Webinar. So if there are duplicates, that means they were on the Webinar and they purchased. So I actually create what I call a buyer’s profile for the Webinars, so I know that the average buyers has an interest rating of about 55, and on average only watches about 63 minutes. So then I know; Nathan, when you do these two-hour long webinars you have a long tail after 65 minutes. The marginal value of those extra minutes decreases, so you optimize all of that.

Andrew: I see, and this is within Excel that you’re combining them; ‘cuz you could do them within Excel, right?

Nathan: Yes. You can do it within Excel.

Andrew: It’s basic Excel stuff, and of course, if anyone doesn’t know how to do it they could pick it up pretty quickly. But if they don’t they could just hire someone on Elance to an Excel spreadsheet like this for them. And you get one Excel spreadsheet from Go To Meeting. No, you can’t Go To Meeting, because that’s what we use internally.

Nathan: Or Go To Webinar. Same thing.

Andrew: Go To Webinar’s what I should be saying, because that’s the bigger product. So you get all the data from Go To Webinar; you get all the data from Chargify. You it each in a different spreadsheet, and then a third spreadsheet does the math on it, essentially?

Nathan: Exactly. We run it manually, and we’re actually to the point where we’re writing VBA code in Excel. That will automatically write an email that says, ‘Hey, (first name, last name), thanks for joining our Webinar. We really appreciate the hundred minutes of your time. You asked these questions. I just wanted to make sure that we answered them all. Send a reply email if we didn’t do it.’ And that’s all automatic, ‘cuz we’re just going to write VBA code in Excel that automatically sends those emails.

Andrew: Oh, I see it. I love that you get all this information back. So, this guy is Ben from Atlanta. He said, ‘Yes.’

Nathan: Yep.

Andrew: This is phenomenal.

Nathan: Yep.

Andrew: I love that we can show your computer screen, too. I want to see this stuff. I feel like it you and I knew each other, if the audience members listening to us right now knew you, they’d sit right by you at your computer, you’d show this whole stuff and it’d be fantastic but you don’t get to do this kind of conversation much with people where you go into their office and take a look at their computer screen and really see what they’re doing. You can learn so much.

Nathan Especially with webinars. People, again, we talked about this already. I don’t understand why people think webinars are spammy but they’re not. You can see here on this chart when I asked, I said, ‘You guys. I want to know if you want to know about our pricing and I need to feel that you’re passionate about it. I want to see exclamation points and hyper marks.’ This person was like, ‘shit, yeah I want to hear about pricing.’ So then I take a screenshot of that I show everyone on the call and then I also ask, ‘Hey, who has already purchased?’ And this person will say, ‘Yeah. I’m already on the consultant plan.’

Andrew: OK.

Nathan: Some people get really into it. [laughs]

Andrew: I’m a member already, I’m already on the consulting plan is line number 220. I even saw one person who said, “Get on with it already.”

Nathan: Yep.

Andrew: That person wanted you to move already.

Nathan: They wanted us to hurry up and show it. And the cool thing is this data will also show you the people that did not attend. So what do I do? I put them in the email list, I copy all their emails and put them in an email list and mail chimp and the next time we have this same webinar, I’ll email market to them to try and get them live because I know I can close them.

Andrew: All right. I love that and if you get anyone that says anything negative about you on Facebook, you’ve got this army of people who are going to… in fact, speaking of army, is there anything else on this big tactic before we go on to the next one because I want to talk about culting your audience.

Nathan: No, no, this next one, I think it’s really important. I finished, we’re good with that one.

Andrew: All right. Now we’re going to talk about how to create a cult by following up with people. So how do you create a cult with your brand by following up?

Nathan: Yep. So what I just talked about, where we had the VBA code that would automatically write back to you create, this just blows people away. They’re like, oh my gosh, we feel like we know this person, they feel connected with us and it’s great because we really do care. Everything that Lujure develops, we get the ideas from webinars and on meeting people, so one of them, I’ll never forget this, Andrew. He asked me, when I needed money, he’s like I want you to come to Toronto. I want you to do social consulting for me and I’m like, OK, why not. His name was Dean Braco [SP]. I headed up to Canada, this was about, right before Lujure started, when I was doing Fan Page Factory stuff, and I met for three days, I slept at his house with his family, got to know his kids and I taught them my theme song.

So the kids knew the theme song, I got a message after I spent that weekend with them, Dean sent me a message where he had snuck up on his kids, who were having a campfire in their backyard, and they were in a big yellow and black tent with all his kids friends all together, and his kids were teaching the other friends. And they were all singing it, dancing around in their tent, next to the campfire in their backyard up in Canada. I’m like this is what empowering, this is what it does, you empower people and then you have all this and their kids singing your theme song in the woods. It’s just crazy.

Andrew: How do I do this now with an audience of strangers online who I don’t get to meet directly?

Nathan: Here’s what you do. So when I get on these webinars with people, actually that’s the next tactic, that’s OK, you have to create polarization.

Andrew: Actually, I do want to stick with this. I don’t know if you have it but in the set in the conversation that you had before with Jeremy, before we started. I’m looking here in my notes.

Nathan: Yep.

Andrew: You were suggesting that you might be able to show us email samples, this is what you send to people. What you’re saying is that you follow up with people and as a result you build this passion in them. And I can see now how you know who to follow up with, you go back to your spreadsheet here, and you can see who watched the whole session but didn’t buy.

And you get them on the phone or you get them via email and you say why didn’t you buy or you get to know them and that builds a connection with people. Because they watch you for an hour, you’re kind of like a celebrity to them and now you’re talking to them and that really builds a bond. What else do you do like that and do you have the emails that you send people?

Nathan: Yeah, I would show it but I have to go under email to do that and there’s stuff in there that I can’t show on the screen in my email inbox but one thing that I’ll also do is, I will only do this after someone’s been on a webinar with me, but I’ll look up this person on Facebook. I’ll look at who they have listed as family on their Facebook profile and I’ll go read their latest status update.

So if Mary Jo Smith posted, I know she was on my webinar and she posted yesterday, ‘Man Brad hit a home run yesterday and was like a celebrity on the baseball team.’ You incorporate that in, send an email and said, hey Joe. I know you have a ton of questions we didn’t get answered on the webinar, I know you’re still celebrating the huge victory that Brad had last night, but let me know when we can answer some questions some of these questions for you.

There’s no excuses for all you entrepreneurs watching to open up some one’s Facebook profile and immediately study and build a rapport with them and get a response. Look at something you have in common and you go with it.

Andrew: All right, what else do you do?

Nathan: So we send a follow up email. What we do then is get all their questions answered and then they’ll do one of two things. They’ll either purchase or they’ll keep coming back on webinars, and this is a great tie into our next tactic, Andrew. So I’ll let you jump in.

Andrew: Let me make sure that I’ve got everything in my notes here about this section. You describe the emails, but you didn’t show it. You talk about how you get to know them when you talk to them on the phone. How you give them a sense that you have something in common and that you have something that you care about. Show polarizing comments where fans jumped in. You talked about that earlier.

So one what that you get people to feel connected to you like a cult is you tell them, this guy is saying something negative, if you feel passionate, go and defend us, go and stand up.

Nathan: I’m going to give you guys word-for-word what you should email out to your list if you get a negative comment. You want to say something like this.

In the subject line of the email that you send out to your list if you get a negative comment is, “This guy thinks we’re this bad…” Right, then in the email, take a screenshot of the comment on Facebook. Put it in the email as a picture and say, “Hey guys, we are just working our butts off here at headquarters trying create the best product for you, and guys, if we suck, we want to know. So go comment on this guys post and let us know could we be doing something better? Or are we really just horrible and we should pack up and quick right now.”

If you pitch it and you say something like, go defend us, people don’t get on the defensive for you, because you’re asking them to. If you make them feel it, they’re going to get much more genuine responses.

Andrew: All right, I love that, and I love the details of it. What is it called, case, copy, and swipe, I forgot. I want people to copy what you’re doing, and I want to give them as detailed an understanding of what you’re doing as possible. And of course they’re going to customize it to they’re own needs, but if they could just start off with yours, copying yours and then adjusting it, then you’ve gotten them halfway there. All right, next, last big item is, let your raving fans speak to double conversions on webinars.

Nathan: Yes, and rarely is anybody doing this. Which is why when we do it’s so effective. When you do a webinar Andrew, it is like a Vegas show, and the more strippers the better. The more entertainment the better, that was a bad analogy.

Andrew: I get what you’re saying, and believe me I’ve been stuck in bad analogies here. You’ve got the camera on you and you’re staring, and you’re going wait a minute, that’s little bit off with the analogy, how do I explain it.

Nathan: All right, so let’s get back to the good stuff. What you will do is, those people that were on a webinar, you know they watched a long time. They asked a lot of questions, you bring them back to the next webinar, and you recognize their name in the thing, so that when you do the pitch on the webinar.

Once you get through it, you’ll say, ‘You know what, let me get some real user feedback.’ And you’ll unmute the people that you know are in love with your product. So say one of them is Amy Lazarus, I know Amy is a huge fan, I’ll un-mute Amy and go, “Amy, you know $30 a month is basically like five Starbucks drinks, what would you tell people who don’t want to make a five Starbuck investment in their fan page business in the coming year? ” You unmute them, and they’ll go man, you guys are stupid, you need to go right now and purchase.

And I go, Amy. I put in a cheesy line, I go, “Amy, people are going to think I paid you to say that.” Which I obviously didn’t but it adds some credibility there. And what will happen is, I’ll say like you do, which is really effective by the way. You’ll go, ‘Nathan why are you doing this interview, why are you sharing so much, right? I do the exact same thing, I say, Amy why are you joining me on another webinar, giving me all your time? Why are you standing up for us? And then they get more excited, they’re like, ‘Cuz you f***ing rock, I love Lujure, and they start bragging more about it. These webinars are like a QVC show, ‘cuz I have a dashboard above my computer with the sales.

So when I use a word or phrase or unmute someone and I can see sales come in. I know that their story is resonating and converting so I’ll leave them unmuted, and let them keep talking and the sales keep coming in. And when the sales dry up from that person, I’ll unmute the next brand promoter, and you figure our which are the buzz words and what are getting people to buy. And you customize the next webinar to make it better.

Andrew: I love that, that’s so freaking exciting. This is one of the reasons I did Mixergy. I don’t think much of the world would get excited about seeing sales come in on a big tote board. For them, watching football scores come up on a big [??] board is more exciting. Seeing who got kicked off the island is more exciting. But a small group of people are really into business? Just imaging a [??] board of sales and the ability to control those sales with their mouths, with their ideas, is just so frickin’ exciting.

Nathan: I love it.

Andrew: I know. I want them in my tribe. I want to build a site for them.

Nathan: Yes.

Andrew: I got to tell you, I’m going to let you continue this, but really, if there’s one idea that you could use here, I’m going to tell you why you do this. I get no benefit out of you adding a good comment about how you’re goanna use these ideas, but I’ve had private conversations with Nathan, and now as I’m talking with him I’m thinking, boy, he’s giving me so much. And there’s still so much that he’s not going to get to in this session. I would pay, I would fight. I would do whatever I could to have a private conversation with Nathan. And if all you have to do was add one comment about how you’re going to use the ideas in the session.

That’s just tiny little thing to do, to get to have this conversation with Nathan were you get to find even more information, where you get to some of the secret stuff that I haven’t been able to get to. Okay, so there. Add your comment. Now let’s go back to this final point, here. Tell me about this. What else do we need to know to double conversions? And then I want to hear your sales pitch, if you can turn your computer on for us.

Nathan: Absolutely. So guys, again. A lot of people will create a webinar. A lot of these network marketer that are great at what they do will create a webinar that they know converts really well. Andrew, I’m sure you’ve seen these, where it’s like text going across the screen and it goes in red highlighter and yellow, and all that jazz?

Andrew: Yes.

Nathan: And they’ll throw them up and automate them. And people can tell if it’s automated or not. And what happens is you don’t have this ability to [??] people and create real life interaction. And that is where the value of Lujure is. We’re creating real connections with people. So, if I had to tell you guys one thing, figure out, get those brain advocates speaking for you. Un-mute them and let them go, then watch your sales go. And if they’re doing a bad performance, mute them and un-mute somebody else for an advocate.

Andrew: You do have phenomenal control in a session. When you’re doing a Go To Webinar session, you can mute and un-mute people at will. You can find someone who’s ragging on you and you can unmute them and talk to them. And then, as you say, you’ll find someone who loves the product and unmute them and have them go at each other. It’s almost like talk radio, where people are just looking for that wrestling match to have in public.

Nathan: The Howard Stern of software.

Andrew: Yeah. All right, you want to turn on your computer screen and run us through how you would do things.

Nathan: Yep, so let’s do this.

Andrew: Here, let me bring up your screen.

Nathan: All right. Let me pop this open. So, what I’m about to show you guys is literally the exact same sales pitch that I go through when I’m selling people. So, Andrew, am I good to go?

Andrew: Let’s just make sure it’s all loading up. Yeah, you’re great. It’s loading up great.

Nathan: I’ll say, ‘Guys, from my self and a Lujure Team, which you can see here now, thank you so much for joining us today. I want you guys to keep watching until the end of this, because I’m going to do all of our Q&A. I have a simple question for you guys. I hate wasting people’s time. So, yes or no? Who wants to see more about our pricing plans? And guys, I’ve got to feel the energy. I don’t want to waste your time. I don’t want to waste my time. I need to really know that you want to buy our product. So, post with capital letters to [??]. For those of you that are smart, you understand what a remarkable opportunity this is, so let me know in the comments.’

And the screen shows my comments with them, Andrew, and I’ll see it, and I’ll say, “Great. There are a lot of you that are really interested in this. Let me jump in. Here’s what we’re going to do. If you’re committed to taking the next steps on your fan page to really drive that social interaction, until the end of this webinar we’re going to offer you guys a few things.”

First, you’re going to get the blurred fan gate graphics pack, which is a $47 value. Now, Amy, are you still on muted? Is it worth $47? I know you’re using it. “Oh, my gosh, Nathan, it’s remarkable,” so social proof. In addition to that, you’re going to get 28 graphics, a $400 value, that you can use to copy and paste into your fan page. We’re really excited about that. And lastly, we’re going to give you, Amy, complete access to the undeniable Lujure system for $30 a month. Now, Amy, would you pay $521 for that? “Nathan, in a heartbeat. Lujure is so amazing. It’s changed my strategy.” Amy, we’re not crazy. We’re not going to charge you $521 until the end of this webinar. Amy and Andrew, you too, and John, and Joe from Canada, you can get it for 30 simple dollars. That’s five Starbucks drinks and a 94% discount. But what I want you guys to do is pay very close attention to the next slide, because there’s a massive award for the first ten people that go purchase. I want everyone to watch my screen right now. If you’re not watching my screen, bring up the webinar screen, because on the next slide there’s a remarkable opportunity for you. And here it is, the first ten people that go to Lujure.com/plans right now and purchase, you’re going to get our exclusive follow up webinar which is the secret of the masters and there’s a special guest on there. You’re going to learn exactly how to drive sales and business through your fan page with workbooks and a complete copy and paste sample.

Guys, we have this great 30 day money back guarantee. We’re not successful unless you guys drive traffic, email leads and revenues through your fan page and you’ve got my signature on that guys. Lujure.com/plans right now. There’s over 26,000 extremely intelligent people that are already using Lujure and they’re having remarkable success. I want you to be one of those people. So guys, I’m going to now jump into live question and answer and you have until the end of this webinar to go to Lujure.com/plans and check out. You’re going to get all of these bonuses today.

Amy, are you going to Lujure.com/plans right now?

Nathan, I already have the $300 a month business plan and anyone who’s thinking about $30, you better go do it right now. Then you unmute people Andrew, that are big brain advocates and they’ll start going back and forth and they’ll unmute people.

So that’s the end of the pitch for those of you watching. And I’ll going into Q&A and what I’ll do is I’ll unmute the brain advocates and I’ll then unmute people who are thinking about buying and I’ll say, John, who’s thinking about buying, talk to Amy who’s already bought. What questions do you have for her? So I just then sit back and I watch the sales and I see what buzz words are driving sales and you learn. Webinar to webinar you get better and better and that’s how it works.

Andrew: This is phenomenal. And we can watch the whole thing. First of all, we got a whole transcript crew… We’re going to create a transcript of this whole closing process that you just ran through so people can copy and paste it in their note, in their text doc-, sorry… in their note editors, whatever, in their text editors and really read how you’re doing it and break that whole process down.

But if they want to watch a whole session, tell me if I’m overdoing this guys. If you’re in the audience and you think I’m overdoing, referring to the guest site let me know, but I think it’s useful to go to blog.lujure.com and see how he does this in the course which is right here. It’s one of his blog posts right there. All right. This has been phenomenally useful. I’m learning things. Even though I’ve got the notes here from before the session, you and I have talked about this. I’m learning things and I’m looking forward to using them here at Mixergy. I want to hear how others do it, too.

So if you’ve made it this far and you haven’t found one thing to, one way to use this in your business then you’ve wasted your time and I don’t believe that anyone who’d sit this long would all themselves or anyone who even is a fan of Mixergy or is a customer of Mixergy and has been in the audience, I don’t believe they would allow themselves to waste their time. I know that you found at least one way, one idea here that you can use in your business.

What I’m asking you is to just tell us about it, to share it. Because when you do, you really own that idea. When you share it with other people you teach other people and you show them how they can use it too and that’s what I want you to do this, to think it through for yourself and to also share your ideas with others.

So if there’s one idea you got from this session, come back in the comments of this session and tell us how you could possibly use it in your business and based on the number of likes for the comments, we’ll pick the person who has the most likes and we’ll get them on the phone with Nathan for half hour private conversation about how Nathan and his ideas and his experience could help them in their business.

All right. How can people follow up with you if they want to say, thank you?

Nathan: Yeah. Andrew, they’re welcome to email me directly. It’s Nathan@lujure.com. We’re also always on our fan page so you can go there as well.

Andrew: Let’s take a look, by the way, one of the things that I like about your fan page is that you’re like gating, right? This is…

Nathan: Absolutely. And we’re texting it.

Andrew: This is how you’re getting people to like your page, by telling them that they can see what’s behind here.

Nathan: And we’re testing it too. If you click, more, on the left, Andrew.

Andrew: Let’s see.

Nathan: On the bottom to get more tabs.

Andrew: Uh-huh.

Nathan: You’re going to see three of them at the bottom. They have the 73,000, those are all split tests, different headlines, different colors, different formats and layouts…

Andrew: To see what gets the people to get the likes.

Nathan: Exactly.

Andrew: [laughs]

Nathan: This is, it’s which one gets the most opt-ins.

Andrew: I see. Oh, that was you. I didn’t mean to cut you off. All right. So that’s Facebook.com/lujure and of course there is, where is that, lujure.com. Wow. Thank you for doing this session with us.

Nathan: You bet guys. I hope you guys took something away from this and if you didn’t, you better email me because I’m going to make sure that you find a way to makes sales through Facebook, all right?

Andrew: I’m looking forward to it. Thank you all for watching. Looking forward to your feedback. I’m looking forward to hearing how you can use these ideas. Nathan from Lujure, thank you for doing this session with us.

Nathan: Thank you, Andrew.

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<href=”https://mixergy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Facebook.pdf”>Course Highlights

Master Class: Preselling
Taught by Clay Collins

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Master Class:
Preselling

About the course leader


Clay Collins is the founder of the Interactive Offer, a program that shows people how to co-create a product with their target market and then pre-sell it to them before they made it.

Intro


Intro To The Case Study and Timeline

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Case Study Materials And Stats

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Reminder: This Is An Adaptable Framework

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Step 1: Personal Update And Cliffhanger

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Step 2: Checking In Before Going Big

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Step 3: Your Flagship Article

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Step 4: Update And Final Call

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Step 5: Discover The Need

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The Survey

 

Step 5.1: Survey Results

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Step 5.2: Release Your Free Product

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Step 6: Ask If Anyone’s Interested

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Step 7: Let Them Know It’s A Go

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Step 8: Build Up To Your Offer

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Step 9: Announce Your Offer And Sell Out If You Can

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Step 10: Prep Your List For Cart Opening

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Step 11: Prep Your List For Cart Opening Part 2

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Step 12: Go Live

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Step 13: Answer Questions And Keep On Selling

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Step 14: Get Ready To Close Your Cart

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Step 15: Close Your Cart

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Conclusion

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Master Class Toolbox

Mind Map

Project Checklist

Case studies

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Master Class: Taxes
Taught by Cameron Keng

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Master Class:
Taxes


About the course leader

It’s led by Cameron Keng, a certified public accountant, and resident mentor and advisor at a number of New York Cities co-working spaces such as New York City, Grind Spaces, We Create, Green Spaces and Hubitat.

Master Class Toolbox

QuiBids

Grindspaces

We Create NYC

Green Spaces

Hubitat

How do I Pull a Google

How do I pull an Ikea Tax Charity

Pay yourself rent and deduct it twice Walmart style”

Autotax eBook

IRS Infographic

9 Tactics

Mergers and Acquisitions Guide

Transcript

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Andrew: This course is about what every startup founder needs to know about taxes. It’s led by Cameron King, a certified public accountant, and resident mentor and advisor at a number of New York Cities co-working spaces such as New Work City, Grind Spaces, We Create, Green Spaces and Hubatat? Hoobatat.Cameron: Yeah, HubatatAndrew: Hubatat. All right. What is Hubatat by the way? It’s a new co-working space, right?Cameron: Yeah, it’s a new co-working space by Tex Stores mentor. It’s supposed to be a mixture of an incubator (?). So he’s trying to bring (?) into the facility as well. So I think he’s got like four so far, so.

Andrew: All right, so you’re the guy that entrepreneurs are introduced to so they can understand how to structure their businesses. But you also weren’t an entrepreneur earlier on in your career and you needed to get, I think you said, 10,000 dollars to launch this business. Can you tell people just a little bit about where you got that money to give them an understanding of how taxes can impact their business?

Cameron: Sure. I mean, it’s very easy, honestly. When I first started I didn’t know much myself. So back before I was an accountant I figured a way where I could get NOL’s or losses in my company or business from prior years. And I used that loss to go back and then you know, get a refund from the IRS, which everybody’s always terrified of. But you know, you can get them to help you get C-Fund. That’s what I did.

Andrew: Okay. And we’re going to go into more depth on that tactic later on in the program. But basically you went back to the government, got a refund for taxes that he paid in previous years, and you’re going to find out how to do that. Let’s start off with the first tactic that you and I talked about before this session started. What’s the first thing you’d like to teach our audience here today?

Cameron: Sure. The first thing I want to talk about is avoiding sales tax. A lot of, especially Mixergy’s audience, is online tech software. So this day and age, tax law and online software has a huge disconnect. Only recently if you like the New York State Amazon law, which California is trying to copy on to, have they really started trying to come after online companies. And you know, they only go after retailers so most other companies don’t have anything to worry about, because under the current laws we’re fully protected.

So the best example I can give you is Quick Bids. So I don’t know if everybody knows Quick Bids. But Quick Bids is an online penny auction website. And what they do is they sell you these bid packages and then you use those bids to buy or bid on specific items. And whoever wins gets the item. Now this is really smart because I had a person who was contacting me who was scared shitless.

And literally they were terrified they were going to have to pay sales tax. Because think about it. If you’re selling iPads, all these Apple products and all these other things, you’re paying millions of dollars out in product. So your sales tax is going to be millions, too. He was really scared because he was thinking he was going to owe the state governments and sales tax about six million because of back taxes and all these other things. So he was literally shitting bricks. And I explained to him very simply. If you are online, you know, and you’re selling stuff. You have to understand, sales tax works on physical products.

So number one, when you go to a store, like a Wal-Mart or some kind of Staples, and you’re buying that copy of Quick Books or Turbo Tax, you know, do you understand what you’re really buying? Because most people don’t. What you’re buying is not the software, the IP. You’re actually buying that physical CD. That circular plastic disc, it’s worth nothing. But because you’re saying that it’s worth $50 you’re paying sales tax on a piece of plastic worth $50. Now in reality people don’t realize it has nothing to do with the software. So let’s say this then. Throw away the CD, no more CD, and just literally let them download it, you know. And if you let them download it, there’s no physical product.

Andrew: If you’re selling a download, no physical product, no taxes is what you’re telling us.

Cameron: Exactly.

Andrew: Okay. So first of all, let me just dig into the story that you just told us here. Quick Bids is not your client. You can’t or you won’t mention your client’s name. But you did have a client that was in a similar business. So we’ll talk a little bit about Quick Bids and we’ll understand that this would apply to your client to.

Cameron: Perfect.

Andrew: sorry. Perfect.

Cameron: Sounds perfect.

Andrew: If what they did was, instead of saying you’re buying a collection of credits and you’re going to get them digitally via e-mail and available to you on the web. If, instead of that, they said you’re going to have all that and we’re going to ship you a card that represents the number of credits that you have, they would have to pay taxes, because sales tax.

Cameron: They’d be screwed.

Andrew: They would have to collect sales taxes.

Cameron: Absolutely.

Andrew: I see. The reason a lot of times entrepreneurs who sell digital goods want to sell a DVD, or want to give people a card that represents what they just bought online, or sell a CD, is often they want to communicate value by giving people physical products. You’re saying, “Yeah, you’re communicating value, but what you’re also doing is you’re saying you want your product to be taxed. Then you’re going to have to collect and then turn over sales tax in all the different places where you’re selling within the U.S.” That’s why you’re saying, “Stick with digital.”

Cameron: Exactly.

Andrew: Find another way to communicate value instead of handing over something.

Cameron: Exactly.

Andrew: OK.

Cameron: That’s absolutely what I’m saying. I’m going to give you another example real quick. Old school companies, like SAP, and all these other companies, what they actually started doing is, you know, they have really big packages for products, so they actually did up a whole new way of selling it. Instead of just giving you these CDs themselves, they call it the drop and drop, so the drop and carry. They will actually come to your office and install the program with their CDs and leave with them. So, you don’t sell your products, they just give you the software. You’re still getting the CD, technically. That’s what they’re using. That was their way around it, originally.

Andrew: That’s fantastic. Right, because their selling really high-end software, very expensive. If they had to pay sales tax just because of those CDs, it would be outrageous.

Cameron: Yep.

Andrew: Instead, they’re getting around it by installing software. I sometimes feel like it’s only young entrepreneurs, young start-ups, that are hustlers. I love how even bigger companies know how to hustle. I love how they have their own way of dealing with the environment, as crazy as it is.

Okay. So, that’s the first tactic. Let’s take a look at the second tactic.

Cameron: Sure. The second tactic is a little crazier. It comes down to this, I’m not trying to be self-serving, or anything, but I’m just telling the fact, there’s an old saying, “You need to have an accountant and a lawyer.” Realistically, an accountant is more important because they deal with you on a day-to-day basis. Every year you have to see your accountant. You only see your lawyer when you get sued. So realistically, you’re going to hate your accountant three times more than your lawyer.

Having an accountant is important because he’s your adviser. You’re busy getting your top line, you’re income, as high as possible. There’s no way that you can really focus on your taxes, the back end, or the paperwork of your bureaucracy. It’s not your job. You know, the tail shouldn’t wag the dog.

So, when you do get an accountant, and if you do choose to get one, make sure that he’s an accountant adviser, and not a compliance monkey. You don’t need a monkey because you can just literally go to the IRS website and find the instructions to follow them yourself, if all they’re going to do is fill in numbers to boxes.

To give you an example of how you find an accountant that’s really good for you, it’s number one, the gut check. If you’re talking to someone, if you feel that they’re trustworthy, and you can talk to them comfortably, they’re not making you feel like a dipshit, honestly, for lack of a better word . . . A lot of accountants, they’re going to use big words and all this other BS, but that’s them showing that they’re actually crappy accountants. If you can’t make a complicated idea really basic and simple within probably five sentences, you probably suck. That’s what it comes down to.

Number two, your accountant, if he’s not teaching you, he sucks. You should always be learning something. What I just taught you right now, about sales tax, he should be teaching you that on a daily basis. When you have a conversation with him and he’s listening to you, he should actively say, “Stop. You have X, Y and Z. This is what you should know. Learn this.” It’s a constant teaching. That’s what, really, accountants should be doing, constantly teaching you and advising you for the future, even without you asking. If he is not doing that from the get go, he’s probably not going to ever do that.

Number three, just because he has a legal license – like my name has alphabet soup under it, it’s got a CPA, EA – and it’s all, to me bullshit. I don’t care, because at the end of the day, it’s about, “Do you know your information or not?”

A CPA is the best example. A CPA is actually broken into two parts. One is tax, and the other is audit. So, the audit only matters if you’re like a huge Fortune 500 company where you need to have financial standards like Google. If you’re a small business, you know, you’re starting off and you’re under, let’s say, $50 million, $10 million in net worth, that’s all your company has, you don’t really need to go file financial statements (?).

So, you need a tax accountant. Ask them, number one, “Did you work at a firm, and if so which firm?” It matters. If you’re in a Big Four, top four firms in major ones, they are literally huge. In comparison, the fifth largest firm, you can multiply that by 20, and it still isn’t as big as any of the Big Four. Any firm smaller than the fifth firm, you can put them all together into one, and they’d still be smaller than the fifth size firm.

Andrew: Are you telling us that we do want someone who has this big firm background?

Cameron: You would want to note if they do have that experience, because if they do, you need to understand that if they are from a big firm they are very myopic. Their focus is very, very strong in one pursuit, one thing. That’s good if it’s exactly what you have. So, for example, if they are in a big four, a major firm, they’ve only done software in your industry, beautiful. They know everything inside and out of your industry. That’s all you want. That’s all you care about.

If they are from a smaller firm, they are very well rounded. They are very broad in what they can do and what they have done. The perfect example is, if they were in a big four and all they did was real estate, and that means all they know is real estate. If you ask them questions about sales tax, they don’t really understand that stuff. They don’t know other [??]. So that’s how you want to understand that. But more importantly, you want to make sure were they actually doing taxes or not. It’s a big question. People don’t ask that, but you need to.

Number one, did you actually work in a tax-side of the firm, because just because you are a CPA you know nothing. I’ve seen CPAs who knew less than they really should be legally allowed to. It’s kind of embarrassing on my part, but it’s true. So ask them do they have experience in your industry. It’s very, very important. It doesn’t matter if they just have tax knowledge, but do they have knowledge in your specific need? Once you know all that information, those top three questions, in your mind, you can have a very good feeling of whether or not you like this person. Because if you don’t like them, you’re not going to work [??]. So it’s very important that you do.

And then after that, even if you like this person, go shop around. Never stop at your first [??]. When someone meets me, I always, always, always tell them, even if they like me and want to hire me right away, I say, “No.” Very simply because I want them to go talk to other people. Number one, I know when they talk to other people, they are going to see my value as greater, because I spend the time to teach them and to help them in that personal experience. Other people don’t mainly because they charge lesser rates and then when they do, they really don’t want to talk to you. They want you to get out the door. So, that’s what I would really say.

Andrew: Okay.

Cameron: Always shop around, always look for that right [field], and obviously, only pay what you are comfortable with, because if you can’t afford then it’s not going to be a good choice for you.

Andrew: Okay. I don’t want to get too deep into what you did for this guy you’re calling “Bob.” Bob is obviously not his real name and you’re not going to give us his company information, but you do want to illustrate to us what having someone who has an understanding of taxes and has the time to understand your business can do for an entrepreneur. So can you tell us, what was Bob like before you met him and then afterwards? What did you do for him?

Cameron: Okay, so Bob was a software company and he basically had a really well-established company. He was doing a lot of content, a lot of SASS software service online and then he was basically [??] American who had an S Corp, no tax planning, no nothing. The problem with that is, when you have an S Corp, all of that income goes straight to you as an individual.

So that means that you are paying 35 percent tax individually for federal and then he was a New Yorker so he was paying another 14 percent and that’s 49 percent taxes right there and then if you add sales tax and property tax and all these other things, it goes up to around 60 to 70 percent he’s paying on taxes every day. So it’s real expensive. He met me through a mutual friend or a client of mine and then he really couldn’t believe that tax planning was legal.

A lot of times people assume that if you’re planning it’s automatically illegal, but it’s not. I stay within the law because I’m scared to go outside of it, because then I’d lose my license. So what I did for him was very simple. To break it down, the first thing is, I saved him money at the federal level and then the state. I saved him money at the federal level because what I did was real estate is obviously a very old school [tech] industry which helps you generate a lot of losses or savings because even though you get income from the real estate, the depreciation of a real expensive building is a lot more than your income usually. So what I did was, I did a variation.

Andrew: The depreciation of real estate is what?

Cameron: The depreciation of real estate is, usually speaking, a really good source of creating losses, because it is a very large property, right? A lot of income. So, for example, the property is $100 million. Depreciation of $100 million is really sick. It’s a lot. So that helps you generate a lot of deductions and losses against your income.

Andrew: So basically, if you own a building that, what was the number that you used? If you owned a building that’s worth 100, let’s say, a million dollars.

Cameron: $100 million.

Andrew: You’d take a portion of that every year and you’d expense it. It’s as if a portion of that building is going to waste and so you get to take that off your income statement and that’s why real estate is so good for counter-balancing revenues. Okay, so you understood that for him. What did you do next?

Cameron: After I did that for him that offset his income for Federal a lot. And then at the state level he was doing a lot of business in Texas and in Texas it’s one of those states that’s really weird. So, normally you would think that you would pay taxes on income, but in Texas you don’t. You pay taxes on your gross sales. So, let’s say, for example, that you have $2,000,000 gross sales, but you lost $5,000,000. Now, normally speaking, you wouldn’t owe any taxes. But Texas, because it has a gross margin tax, you still owe taxes on that $2,000,000. So it’s really unfair for some people, like him and others. So what I did was, state taxes is 100% gain, so it’s a huge pie, and you want to separate that pie as much away from Texas as possible.

So, he has a lot of contractors, and all I had to do was basically hire an employee in Nevada and rent an office there. Because he’s an online company, he really doesn’t have an office or anything, it’s just kind of like contractors spread out. So we were able to say that instead of being focused in Texas primarily, by having that employee and office in Nevada, he was 80% in Nevada and only 20% in Texas. So we save a lot of money that way. So his taxes went from $5,000,000 all the way down to a $200,000.

Andrew: From five million to a $100,000 is what you reduced his taxes?

Cameron: $200,000.

Andrew: $200,000

Cameron: I can be more exact, but I don’t want you know if you want me to.

Andrew: You didn’t physically move his whole company. It’s a software company, so it doesn’t really matter where is. You just hired an employee, put him in Nevada and said now the company is running from here. All his other people were contractors so they weren’t employees so they could continue to work from Texas.

Cameron: Exactly.

Andrew: I don’t want to get into the depth of Bob’s situation, but the big picture message that you’re communicating here, is get someone that understands this and understand your business. You can actually save money. It’s not just about filling out forms and getting your taxes done. It’s about understanding your business and reducing your taxes. And that’s what you’re suggesting that you do.

Cameron: Legally, that is.

Andrew: What’s the next tactic? What’s the next thing you want to teach people?

Cameron: The next thing I wanted talk about is research and development – tech companies. I had a client where . . . Let me give you a short background. Only recently was this actually a great option for people like us, developers, etc. Previously, like in 2007, before they changed the law, this was really for companies like Pfizer, and manufacturing companies like Apple, because they had huge factories and a lot of moving parts, really physical labor.

But in 2007 they changed the rules, where it was opened up into the mainstream businesses. So software companies today, should really be taking advantage of this. The best example is, I have a client [??] business for a long time, and what happened was, he was developing this online software, and he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. And he never ever took this benefit before, so he effectively lost, I think, about $20,000 a year. That is basically for four years that I know of that he did this. He lost $80,000.

Andrew: What’s the benefit? I’m sorry I’m not following this. What’s the benefit? Where response to be doing with R&D?

Cameron: Sure, so basically when you pay a developer to develop something, that is automatically development cost R&D. The fact that he’s a developer, he’s developing. So his wage, the fact that you’re paying him a salary at all, is automatically considered research and development, because you’re creating a new product. Now, let me clarify something. A lot of people always ask me, ‘But I’m not creating something new. I’m just creating a variation.’, or ‘I’m reproducing the wheel.’ I don’t care. Is it new to you? If it’s yes, then it’s R&D. It doesn’t have to be new to the world, just need your company. Because you can’t go to somebody else’s company and take their item. You’re going to make your own.

So, in that aspect, even though you’re creating the exact same product, a clone, the best example is a Facebook clone. If you create a Facebook clone, that still an R&D expense. So you can still take a credit for it. Now, once you pay that income [??], you still deduct. The only difference is that when you file your taxes, you file one extra page. That extra page is yours in R&D credit form, and then you say I paid $100,000.

Depending on what type of contractor you hired, it could be 100% credible or only a portion of it a credible. It goes for 100% to about 65%. After that you multiply it out. I’m not going to go into paperwork because that’s what your accountant is supposed to do. He saved about $20,000 a year, simply because he had these expenses and he never took it before. So he lost $80,000 after four years, and that’s cash. Luckily, I went back and I got him back $20,000 from last year’s goal. So I could go back for one year for him.

Andrew: Okay, so let me make sure that I understand this. I hire a developer and I say I need a brand new shopping car for my website. I know there are shopping carts all over the internet but I have this customer shopping cart that I want you to build for me. I’m going to pay you $100,000 this year to build it and to keep growing this shopping cart feature by feature as I think of it and need you to implement it. I pay him $100,000. I deduct the $100,000 that year from my income because that’s an expensive of having to pay a salary. You say in addition to that I file, what, and what do I get? I file that one piece of paper and I get, what?

Cameron: Well that one schedule, that one schedule is the R&D credit schedule. And then it says that, okay, I spent $100,000. Assuming that you paid it to, let’s say, a 100% deductible company. It is then multiplied by a certain percentage. Your first year it’s multiplied by 3%. And then you can get $3,000 back, something like that. And that is a direct cash benefit. It’s not like a deduction, it’s cash. So that three grand is cash money in your pocket.

Andrew: I see, encouragement to do. It’s there to encourage companies to invest in research and development. And if you’re already hiring a developer, you should be aware that you are making an investment in the research and development of this country and the way that the government wants to reward you is by giving you money back. And what we need to do is when we’re showing our income statement to our accountant, we can’t just list out all our employees. We should say, look, this guy and that guy over there and that girl over there, are all specifically developing new software for me. They’re different from the person who is answering my phones. Go and get me the R&D credit schedule. And that’s what you’re telling us we should do.

Cameron: Exactly. And just to tie back to the first point, the point before about hiring a good accountant. Your accountant shouldn’t have to ask these questions even. He should be looking at your expenses and know off the bat. If he seen, I see developer costs, automatically should be like, oh, you know I should take this credit right? I’m just letting you know, blah blah blah. Ask a few questions, teach you, tell you, then just do it. So the whole point is he teaches you and tells you and then he just goes and do it. You know. That’s it. He just does it and you know about it. That’s all that should happen.

Andrew: Got it.

Cameron: And he should tell you right off the bat.

Andrew: Okay, all right. And we’re not telling the audience this so that they could do their own taxes based on what you’re teaching here today. You just want to make them aware of what they should be asking for and how they should be thinking about their business in relation to taxes and accounting. Alright, I love this one. What’s the next tactic? Sorry?

Cameron: Oh sure, just before I go on I want to say it like this. The best way to think about is kind of like Google ad words. When you pay Google ad words you’re paying a little money now to save or make more later. Same idea. That’s really how it should be. If you’re going to do it yourself obviously get some help, read up on it or something. But I wouldn’t suggest it if you’re going to do something crazy. But the next idea I’m going to talk about is incorporations. One thing I constantly get is, should I incorporate. And more often then now I’m going to say no.

As an accountant, I’m going to be honest, it’s better for me if you do incorporate because then you’ve got to pay me more. But it hurts you. So I don’t really give a crap about the extra couple hundred or a few thousand dollars here and there. Because in the long run I’m going to be (?) of you in your business. So to incorporate it’s a big deal. It’s not just creating a company, oh I’m sexy now. I have this crazy nice sexy corporate name and all these other things. There’s a lot of work behind it and there’s a lot of risk behind it. It’s not just protecting your liability, but it adds liability at the same time. Most people forget.

So the best example is, some people should or shouldn’t. When you do want to incorporate you should go through this idea chart that I have. The first question is simple. You know there’s three questions. A, do you have substantial liability? You know, if you’re in construction somebody’s going to get hurt, that’s just how it is. So if that’s the case you need to incorporate to protect yourself. Number two, are you getting investments. If you’re getting investment you have no choice but to incorporate because they’re going to force you into it.

To give you an example, Y corporations. Corporations are the only legal entity that allow you to have different types of stock. You can have Class A, Class B, Class C. So every time you hear about that Series A, Series B or all those different Series funding, those series are actually directly related to a Class A, B, C as well, So that’s why they’re like that. So, that’s why you incorporate, if you had funding. And then lastly, did you actually make money? Why are you going to spend money when you don’t make money? You might as well just not do that and save it and then reinvest it into the company and make money. So if you say yes to any of these questions, then great.

Now it’s time to consider whether or not you want to incorporate. If not, go for a DBA, which is a Doing Business As, very easy. What it let’s you do is, it let’s you say that, okay I am not a corporation but I’m going to call myself Cameron King Consulting. You can give yourself a business name. And it’s really cheap usually. You can go to your county clerk. Every state has a county. You go to the county clerk and you tell them, I want to file a piece of paper. Usually it’s a single sheet or two, max. And then they get it notarized for free right there because they’re legally required to give you a free notary. And then once you file that piece of paper you can go to the bank and open a bank account under that name. You can even get an EIN number or a Federal Employment Identification number, so that you don’t have to use your social security number. So you have all of these sheep’s clothing of a real business, of a real corporation, and without paying more bean. You know what I mean?

So once you do make more money, at least a minimum of 50 to 100 thousand dollars a year, then it makes sense to incorporate. Now when you do incorporate obviously there is the LLC, the series LLC, the LP S Corp. Usually if you’re a small business you want to go for the LLC or the S Corp. Because they’re going to be the ones that save you the most money. Series LLC means you never use it because you’re (?). It only really exists in Delaware. LLCs are great because they’re flexible and great to do things with. LP’s are only really used by old school business, mostly financial. To give you a quick reason why. Hedge funds love LP’s, because LP’s let their partners avoid paying employment taxes which is FICA and Medicare, which is 15.3%, very, very expensive. So that’s why they still use it. But normally speaking you wouldn’t do it, because you’d be working and that is not good.

Andrew: Can you talk a little bit about the…

Cameron: And then if you follow the chart, it shows you the rest.

Andrew: And we will be giving people this chart with the program so that they can download it and look at it on their own computers in a way that’s easier to see I bet then even in this video. But, can you talk a little bit about the difference between Limited Liability Company and a Corporation?

Cameron: Oh sure. A Limited Liability Company is basically an LLC. So LLCs are very different. They got really hot in the early 90’s, and the mid-90’s, because of the M&A craze, right. So the reason why they got so hot is because during the 90’s companies like Microsoft, these big Fortune 500 companies were realizing, you know what we can do? Oh this is awesome. We can go buy a shitty company with losses, merge it with mine who has billions of income, and then guess what? I save money. By literally saying this.

You take a crappy company who has 10 billion dollars in losses, right. Now that company has no value at all. But you know what? That NOL, that loss, is actually a value. So they will sell their company based upon their NOL’s. So if your tax rate is 30%, you’re willing to pay 20 cents on the dollar for every dollar of NOL they have. So you’d be willing to pay, let’s say, 200 million. So companies were doing that and using those companies to basically create those savings. So LLCs is simply a flexible entity that can allow you to be either a partnership in tax, or a corporation. So that’s why they’re good. Problem is you always pay self employment tax on them, period.

A Corporation is different because it’s an actual regular corporation. The good thing about it is, you can file for an S-corp. Yes?

Andrew: In an S-Corp, you only pay taxes once, the company doesn’t pay taxes and then force you to pay taxes again when you take money out of it. But Limited Liability Company, what’s the advantage for say a startup that might be listening to us right now?

Cameron: The advantage of an LLC for an S-Corp is that because you’re always going to be pivoting, LLC is going to be able to pivot with. So if a situation occurs where your LLC needs to change its tax strategy, your LLC can pivot at the same moment, same date. A Corporation can’t. The moment you create it, it stays dead. There’s no way to fix it. So that’s the real reason why an LLC is really good.

Andrew: Like, what kind of tax changes would you want to make that an LLC would enable you to do?

Cameron: Sure, I mean, you can number one, you can choose to either file as a corporation or a partnership. For example, if you’re a partnership all your money flows up. So if you’re only member in a partnership, and it’s as if you’re a single member, so that’s not really helpful to you sometimes. Maybe you want to stop that money from coming to you, because you don’t want to pay a lot of high taxes this year. So if you want to stop that money from coming to you, the only way to do it is to elect to be a corporation. So all you can do is check a box, boom, money stops right there. So that’s one way of basically (?) pivoted.

Andrew: I see. So if I don’t want to count the money that’s coming in from the LLC as my personal salary this year because something else is going on outside of the company, I can do that with an LLC. And if I want to restart it the next year, I can do that also with an LLC, that’s what you’re saying?

Cameron: Exactly.

Andrew: Okay. All right, what you’re telling us also, to non-incorporate is untraditional. I think most CPA’s, most advisors would say, incorporate, get that protection, and you’re saying, you have a different point of view. You think most entrepreneurs don’t need that protection that they think they need. They just need the paperwork and the confidence of saying that they’re running a company or an LLC and have that Inc. at the end of their name or the LLC and you’re saying it’s just not worth it. Focus on your business first. When you need it then go do and you’ve got a flow chart here to explain to people when they need it.

Cameron: I’m a big believer in bootstrapping. Don’t spend money that you don’t have, that’s my personal belief. When I’m doing business and I still do it today, that’s how I operate. I will not spend money that I don’t have. That doesn’t make sense. Why throw good money after bad?

When accounts tell you to go and incorporate every day they’re doing it because it’s just an easy answer to give and they want you to pay more money anyway, so that’s the real reason behind it, but if you think about it, what real benefit does it have to you? A tangible benefit. If you go through these three steps and you haven’t answered yes to any of them there is no tangible benefit.

Even if someone should sue you, what’s there to sue? There’s no liability there in the first place. You open up like a hair salon. Oh, I’m sorry, I gave you a bad hair day. Is that a legal liability? I don’t think so.

Andrew: I see. You know what? In my mind I always worry that it would be. That some little thing that I do is going to get someone to sue me, but you’re right, in many cases they’re not going to come and sue me for the little things that I’m doing when I’m launching a business. Let’s look at the next point. By the way, thanks for installing PowerPoint so that we can have visuals here.

Cameron: No problem. Actually, I was going to show you this thing. This is a person. It’s really funny, Hacker News, before I move on, emailed me this. I didn’t know about this article that popped up. This guy who was called Doug from Entinum [SP] Online, he created a website, which most people on Hacker News do and it was generating income. Not a lot, it was only a couple of dollars and he was only generating enough to pay for the server cost and to give you an example how many people use this, Google and dictionary.com actually contracts it to use his database to show how the origin of words are created or found.

He was doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He was a teacher for God’s sake, a professor. The IRS hit him literally I think December, right before Christmas, with a $46,000 bill. That’s not a lot of money for most people, but honestly speaking at the same time, $46,000 for a teacher right before Christmas, he literally had to cancel Christmas because he can’t afford it anymore. He didn’t incorporate when he should have, so this is just kind of like story tell.

Andrew: So in this case, you’re saying that he would’ve been better off incorporating?

Cameron: Exactly.

Andrew: OK.

Cameron: The reason why is he was making money. That’s the key. He was making money. If you’re making money, yes incorporate. If he was losing money then don’t, don’t incorporate. It’s really funny, but messed up at the same time. If you’re making money the IRS wants you to be a business because then you have to pay self-employment tax, 15.3%. If you’re losing money they don’t want you to be a business because then you can use that money to get a refund, so then they want you to be a hobby because then that hobby income or loss is no longer deductible against your income, so they want the best of both worlds and you’d have nothing so that’s how that works.

Andrew: I see.

Cameron: I just wanted to show that because he has income, that’s all.

Andrew: OK. So you’re saying when you do have income start filing and so you’re not against obviously incorporating ever, you’re just saying don’t make that the first step like a lot of entrepreneurs do. OK. Let’s take a look then at the next tactic.

Cameron: Sure. I have this situation where once you incorporate people think that I’m done. There’s no more to do. I’m good. No, no. You have to understand, when you incorporate you’re taking on a shit ton of legal liability, not just protecting yourself, but also hurting yourself. If you don’t respect that company as a separate legal entity, completely and separate to yourself, then you don’t have that legal liability of protection. The best way I describe it is a marriage.

I know you were married recently. If you don’t respect that marriage obviously, she’s going to kill you and divorce you at the same time. This is a very similar situation. If you don’t respect that relationship with the company, the company will also kill you and divorce you. It’s called piercing the corporate veil, which we always hear about. If you don’t respect the company you pierce that veil and then you are now personally liable for anything the company does.

The best example I can give you is this. I had a client, he was this old school douchey, Sicilian restaurateur and he was such a douche, I can’t even explain to you how much of a douche he was. What happened was he was so crazy in his aggressive tax planning that he treated the company not as a company, but as his little cookie jar. He would just dip his hand in every day. Why do I talk about hookers? Because in an actual quote I will tell you is that he said to me, specifically, I was like, what are meals and entertainment? He’s like, in the thickest disgusting Sicilian accent, he’s like, oh, I’m sorry. I needed hookers because I had inflammation in my groin. Like he would actually gesture to his crotch describing his needs for hookers. And he would actually make it to me, explain that it was a medical expense, he actually miscategorized it as meals and entertainment. So it should be fully deductible instead of being ….

Andrew: Ah, so he’s trying to get you to even expense, first of all he’s going to a hooker and second he’s paying with credit cards or checks, and second he’s trying to get you to expense it. Now that’s a clear violation on many levels. Most people, I can’t imagine anyone who is listening to us is going to be doing that. But there are other things that are more common that people do that pierce the corporate veil. And by that we mean, makes them lose the whole protection. If you don’t treat your company like a separate entity, the government’s not going to treat it like a separate entity. The IRS won’t treat it like a separate entity. And the whole purpose of setting it up is gone. So what are some more common things that people do.

Cameron: Sure, the first thing you got to do is keep a book, a record of all your stuff. That basically means you need an accountant. If you don’t have a set of accounting records that means you never respect your (?). Because how do you know if it’s our money or not if you don’t even keep track of it? So that’s first. You don’t have books and records I guarantee you you’ll automatically lose all credibility.

On number two. If you’re a corporation, corporations are very, very nit picky. They’re kind of annoying. They’re like that nagging wife. Because every year you have to file your Mit’s, your corporate meetings, you have to have a board of directors. These are real things that you must keep records of every year. Every month. You know, if you stop then that means you don’t have that protection anymore. That means that you aren’t treating the business as a business. There’s no like management. It’s just you doing whatever you want. You know. So, that is also very important.

Other things, for example, is one thing that is very innocent that can be very damaging to you is for example this. You’re having a rough patch right, and you know your company’s making money, so you take money out. alright. Now that is not money that you really want to be your income. So you just take it and you borrow it. But you don’t say anything, you just kind of take it out, you know keep (?) of it. That hurts you. Now, a lot of times when you take money out, if you don’t want to pay tax on it, one way of getting around it, legally speaking. And you know you’re not really trying to be cheating or anything.

You’re saying, all right, I’m going to take money out because I need it. That’s a shareholder loan. A shareholder loan, a member loan or a partner loan, is fine. That just means the company is lending you money and you’re going to pay it back. So if in between you’re using money from the company, fine. At the very minimum call it a loan from the company and you’re safe.

Now, you know it’s something so simple and minor that if you just did that one step, it would save you all this heartache. So that’s one thing I would definitely recommend. If you are going to take money out of the company, and it’s not income, it’s not something you’re going to pay taxes on. At the very least, please, call it a shareholder loan or owner loan, you know. And then give it back later when you do have the money, that’s all.

Andrew: Okay, if I’m out say with my friends, and I need to use my company card. Or I’m going on vacation with my wife and I need to use some money that happens to be in the company but not in my own personal account. You’re saying, make it into a loan, don’t just use it and expect that you’re going to pay back in the future. Or don’t use it and don’t expect never to pay back, because after all it’s your company and you’re the only shareholder, no. If it’s personal, make it a loan. Make it, take it away from the company before you go and use it.

Cameron: Exactly. Again, I know it’s annoying. And it’s really a pain in the ass. But it’s those little things that at the end of the day when you need it the most, it can really save you. Because you can always go to the court, always go to the person and go, you know what? I was all on the up and up. you know, look, even this $20 purchase which, really I didn’t need to keep track of, I did. you know, I did the right thing and I was trying my best. They can’t get you for fraud and they can’t get you for anything else. There’s no corporate bill, you know. Because you’re not worrying about it. You are doing it the right way.

And just to give you an example of how scary it gets. This Sicilian guy who, he’s a very, very well known restaurateur. He’s international. He’s everywhere, literally. You’ve probably eaten at his restaurant. So this guy he got to the point where the IRS said you’re so untrustworthy that we’re not only going to penalize you with penalties and interest, we’re going to assign you a legal chaperone.

What that means is, you are no longer allowed to make tax decisions for your company. If you want to do something you tell that guy, you ask him please. And then if he says no, you don’t do it. So literally, my accounting firm was assigned to him. And anytime he wants to even check a box differently, he has to get a whole written opinion which costs around I think $30,000 on average for him, minimum, in order for him to check box.

Andrew: This guy was your client?

Cameron: He was not my direct client but he was a client I worked on so if he was my client, I would have dropped him like awhile ago.

Andrew: At what firm did you work in?

Cameron: I worked personally in PWC [SP], KPNG [SP] and a mid-size firm. I can’t really say which firm it is because…

Andrew: Well, that’s okay. So you did work at the big firm?

Cameron: Oh yeah. I started off my career at PWC in the real estate group. I later on moved into KPNG to do financial [??] services for [??] and [??] Bank UBS. When I was at [??] UBC, I worked on [??] sliders and a few other [??]. It’s a really large field [??]. Later on then I went to the State Local group at KPNG where I practiced a lot of interesting taxes. A class I [??] there, which, this is off record so I can say this, so that’s why. I worked on Heineken, Pfizer, and all these other things. It was real interesting working with Pfizer because you start dealing with terms like keggers. You kind of [??] states, you would be like ‘all right.’ Due to these keggers, I am sorry. I don’t think I should owe you tax on these keggers, and that becomes a really common term that you start using which is kind of awkward.

Andrew: What’s a Kegger?

Cameron: You know those kegs, when you buy these giant barrels and gallons of beer. You get that metal barrel that actually holds the beer. That’s actually always owned by the distilling brewery. So that is always property by the company. So you have to go put a deposit down on that kegger and then later on, if that kegger is actually not returned, then you lose the money. But that’s always their property until you tell them that you lost it, which is actually very dangerous because – think of it this way. If you have a keg out in the world, just one keg, is that going to be a problem? Is that going to cause you taxes? Do you have property in the state?

Let’s be honest. No, right? But what happens when you have literally a hundred million dollars worth of keggers all over the world and at any given moment, any second, every day, you have at least one million dollars worth of property in the form of kegs in every state. Then you kind of have a situation there don’t you? So, when you scale up, I will say these little ideas become really weird when you scale up.

Andrew: All right. Let’s scale right back down to our audience and what’s the next tactic that a new entrepreneur or any start-up entrepreneur would need to know?

Cameron: Sure. Next tactic is filing your taxes, as basic as that sounds. Let me put it into perspective. At any given time, there is very easily around twenty different taxes you have to worry about. What I mean is tax forms, so if you are a partnership, you have to file your 1065 and you have to file your K-1’s which is the letters that you sent out to your partners, the owners of the company, and it’s one for each partner. So usually that can be like, I’ve seen [??] with thousands of partners. I’ve also seen partners with just one partner, so it depends on that. There’s also sales tax returns. Sales tax returns is an annual sales tax return. There’s a quarterly return. There’s employment tax returns. There’s your 1099’s. It goes on and on and on.

So obviously it’s really scary. To give you an example of a really common story that I have is Danny. So Danny Boy, he had a partner where he was a designer, a really good designer. He worked with very big firms. He worked as a junior creator, that kind of role. He had another guy who was basically the business dude, like the [??]. His job was obviously to handle the business. Long story short, Danny did his job. He did great design. They were really popular.

Andrew: Great.

Cameron: The other guy did shit, did nothing, literally. Made no sales, did nothing. He was basically your pro-typical situation where this guy was useless. You know when you talk to your developers and you say my co-founder is a [??] guy, and he did shit, that’s the kind of idea you should have in your mind. But of all things he did, he only did one thing, and the one thing he did was the wrong thing. It cost him $6,000 by doing that one wrong thing.

So basically what he did was, he had a corporation and he filed an S-Corporation. Now if he didn’t file the S-Corporation, he didn’t file his taxes. His penalty would have only been a couple of hundred dollars max, but because he filed an S-Corporation and then did nothing else after that, for each partner today, every month that you don’t file it, it’s a $200 penalty. So there are two partners. That’s $400 per month and then he didn’t file for a bunch of months.

So at the end of it, he owed the Federal government, I don’t know what it was. I think it was like six grand and then he owed the State government another three. So he actually owed almost $10,000, and the kicker is he spent, I think, $200 in expenses for the entire company for the whole year and he lost money because he never made a single sale, so no income, very little expenses, losses, and he owes $10,000 to the IRS and State government. I was able to basically talk to them.

Out of professional courtesy, they were able to forgive him on the Federal level, but I will give you a warning. If you are ever dealing with any State, they will never be nice. States are not nice because they’re poor. They are really mean and agitated. They’re kind of like rabid dogs that don’t let go once they bite you so he had to pay it back and then we got that done. The key and moral of the story is, file your taxes. Even if you have no income and you think that you don’t owe money, still file. Just because you don’t file, all of a sudden you have this $10,000 penalty, so whether you make money, lose money, don’t do shit for the year, just file it, out of peace of mind, [??] to your God, just file that return. That’s the most basic, simple advice I could possibly give for filing your taxes.

Andrew: You know, you curse a lot. One of the reasons why we invited you here is because I was concerned that if we had an old school, camera-ready accountant to talk about this, people would be bored to tears and they would feel like ‘this just doesn’t relate to me. I’ll hire someone else to do it’, and we said well Cameron’s [SP] going to be a guy who’s going to talk like our audience. They may sometimes be agitated by some of this stuff, but they’ll relate to it and then, of course, they can go and talk to their old school accountant if they want to. But you talk like this even with your clients?

Cameron: Yeah. My clients love it because I’m just talking to them as if I was talking to anybody else. It’s really funny because, as much as you think your accountant is really old school and conservative, behind closed doors we are a bunch of drunken bastards, literally, no joke. Every time we go to a conference, it’s literally booze-fest 2000 and whatever, so yeah. Think of it this way. When you’re dealing with the IRS on a consistent basis and you’re constantly dealing with tax forms, you have to curse. Otherwise you will lose yourself out of frustration and end up with angina chest pain.

Actually it’s become to the point where I actually don’t notice. I’m sorry. It’s funny though because I actually teach tax courses. I teach at a few private institutions in New York City and the students love me because I do curse, because it’s personal for them and also my most popular and most famous example that they love is actually my Pimp and Ho’s case. I literally take every tax case and explain it through the perspective of a pimp and ho, literally, consistently for about three months straight. It works for me.

Andrew: It gives them something to pay attention to.

Cameron: Just by using more [??].

Andrew: What is the next tactic? I know we’ve got a whole bunch here in this session.

Cameron: The next tactic is just saving your 15.3% on FICA and Medicare. It’s a real kicker so one clear example, you make a million dollars right, and you have to pay your 35% taxes on it, so I’m assuming that rate just as a guess, just for no reason. So after you pay that tax on that 35%, you don’t pay that 15.3% later. No, you pay that 35% and then another 15.3% on top of that 35. So at the Federal level alone, if you have to pay A, individual income tax and then another 15.3% for your Medicare and Social Security, that’s already at what.

Andrew: Are you saying 35 plus 15 is 50%. Are you saying we would be paying 50% in taxes?

Cameron: Exactly.

Andrew: Okay.

Cameron: No joke. That’s exactly, and that’s just Federal level. Then we have to add back into it the 14% from New York State.

Andrew: Okay.

Cameron: So after just those three taxes alone, you will have paid 65% [??] in taxes, which is really scary right? So to go back to my point, how do you avoid doing this? Well, remember when we talked about corporations, why you would use S-Corporations and a LLC? So LLCs and S-Corporations are the two most common types of incorporation for a small, young business and the reason why is because an S-Corporation and the LLC gives you single pass-thru taxation so you only pay tax once, which is great. But the S-Corporation, unlike the LLC, has a way for you to avoid paying your Social Security tax, alright. Not all of it but most of it, if you make money.

A perfect example is this. A scenario is you make one million dollars, right? If you’re an LLC, no matter how you cut it, you’re always going to be paying that 15.3%. At the end of the day you’re going to pay 65% taxes, right. If you’re an S-corp you are different. You can avoid paying that 15.3%. Why? Because. When you’re an S-corporation you are still a corporation, right? There’s nothing that says you’re not. Legally speaking you are 100% a corporation. Now the legal theory behind it is very simple.

When a corporation gives you money, what do you call that? A dividend. A corporate distribution. Regardless of how it comes out, it’s still by definition of law a corporate distribution. Now if you’re getting corporate distribution, and then you’re paying self-employment tax, how do you tax earned income from a dividend. A dividend by definition of law is passive income, it’s not earned. It’s just money that is coming to you from investments that you’ve already made.

So by a legal definition it’s illegal for the IRS or any type of taxing authority to tax you on that income for 15.3%.

Andrew: Okay. so now that you understand the legal law or the idea behind it, how do you do it?

Cameron: Very simple. When you file your taxes, right, there is a portion where you have to include as wages. So let’s say for example in the company your role is manager, okay? And you’re making one million dollars. The average salary by market for a manager is about let’s say 150,000 dollars, right? So you pay yourself 150,000 dollars. You pay 15.3% on 150,000 dollars. But what happens that that 850,000 dollars? You now distribute that as a dividend and guess what? You’ve now saved x amount of dollars from 15.3% simply by understanding the law and applying it correctly. Most companies, I can say probably 80% of the time that I have seen that have S-corporations never do this, never. Okay. They don’t have to do anything. All they have to do is file the form, correctly. Because they’re filing incorrectly by doing that.

Andrew: So if I understand you right. Let me sum up my understanding right now. First of all, this only applies to S-corp, not to limited liability companies, not to LLCs true?

Cameron: Yes.

Andrew: Okay. The big idea here is if you take money out as a salary you have to pay FICA. If you take money out as a dividend, you do not have to pay FICA. So the difference is saving the 15.3% or not. So you’re telling us, take dividends where possible instead of salary. Now of course there’s, you can’t take all dividends or else the government is saying, hey you’re robbing us. So you have to take a reasonable salary. And anything above the reasonable salary you’re saying, take it out as a dividend. Don’t be self-impressed by taking a bigger and bigger salary every year. Take a salary that makes sense, but no more. The rest should come out as dividends if you’re going to do it. That’s how you’re going to save us 15.3% with a little bit of extra work, but a big understanding of the system. Limited Liability companies, do they have anything like this?

Cameron: Yes. Their way of doing it is, remember when I told you, you can elect to be a corporation, by tax law?

Andrew: Right.

Cameron: So if you elect to be a corporation then you can elect to be an S-corp. So by becoming an S-corp in tax law, you can still do it.

Andrew: I see.

Cameron: So basically you’re taking the long road around. You can still do it but you’re taking the long road.

Andrew: Okay, I got it. So now you’re saying limited liabilities can do it. They just have to understand that they need to have themselves treated like an S-corp and this is an understanding of when it would make sense for them. Okay.

Cameron: And to give an example of how drastic this could get. I had a client who literally, her business is very interesting. She’s a psychiatrist and her client’s health is sexual offenders. So I went to Binghamton University. And I don’t know if you ever looked at a map of Binghamton University. Like if you looked at sexual offenders, entire city’s like one giant red dot. Like the entire like city is glowing. The reason why is the state likes to concentrate their sexual offenders in certain areas. And Binghamton happens to be one of them. so her business is very simple. She doesn’t worry about getting clients. The court appoints them to her. so she has a constant stream of revenue right there.

So her business is a $10 million minimum business. Her work share is $10 million. So she was paying herself completely in salary, right. Straight up W-2. So obviously you’re paying about 1.53 million just in that. So I explained to her the situation and literally she dropped to the floor. Now, considering she deals with sexual offenders all day she’s still like, you know, she’s pretty sensitive. So when she heard this she literally kind of like lost feelings in her legs. Because how would you feel if you found out that you’ve been overpaying 1.5 million for the last like four years.

Andrew: Oh wow.

Cameron: I think everybody would drop. It’s kind of devastating because she had a CPA. That’s a good point, she had a CPA. He didn’t do his job well though, but had a CPA. So just going back to a point to show you how devastating these things can be, you know. By simply doing a few number tweaks here and there, it can literally mean millions. It’s kind of scary. Especially when you compound the years together.

Andrew: Wow. Alright, let’s look at the next tactic. The next one is what we alluded to in the beginning of this session, right? This is the net operating loss and how to treat it.

Cameron: So this is my story. It’s really embarrassing kind of, and kind of stupid, but it is my story. I was, my background is this. When I was fourteen, so besides me being at eight a sweatshop worker, at fourteen I was a wholesale distributor of tapioca goods. So what happened was, I would be going out making sales care to all these little (?) shops in the city. And then I would sell them little tapioca ball packets. The sugar, the tea packets and all these. I had a really good connection with them but I stopped doing it after like less than a year. Because I made money but it was really, really exhausting. Because sales is just, it’s kind of like a constant battering of your ego. I got used to it, I didn’t mind it. But I just felt the time sink was too much for the cost.

So every day what you had to do was you just go out there and say, do you want to sell, do you want to sell? And you keep harassing the same people over and over again until they buy from you. Because you have no choice. That’s just how, especially Asians are.

Andrew: And at seventeen this is how you were making your living. Not living but this is how you were earning money.

Cameron: No, that was at fourteen.

Andrew: Fourteen, okay.

Cameron: So, I was doing that and I was making money but it just wasn’t worth the time. So I stopped. But later on years later, it got so hot. The tapioca business for some reason became this gold mine. It was kind of scary. I didn’t understand it, but I wanted to get into it. So when I was seventeen I was working night shifts at a hotel as a front desk guy during the night, and going to school during the day. And I really needed money. so what I did was I googled the word, scam. And after I googled the word scam looking for money, because I was desperate for capital, I had actually had stumbled upon the IRS website for Anna Wells, how to basically get money legitly, without lying to anyone.

Andrew: Basically the IRS said, you don’t need to scam, there are ways that we’re here to work for you. They were saying that they are not a confiscatory agency, they’re here to help. Alright, and so they said, don’t need to scam. And what did you discover when you searched that?

Cameron: Let me just clarify one thing real quick. This is before I ever became an accountant. This is when I was seventeen years old, so I don’t know shit about anything in tax. All I know is I need money. So anybody can do this, literally. I want to make sure that’s very democratic.

Andrew: Not only that, but I’ve got to tell you, that this was huge. What you’re about to tell us was huge for my company. We obviously had ups and downs in the business. I didn’t recognize that in the downs you can benefit from what happened in the ups, as you’ll tell us. You’re introducing it in a way that I think is shocking and gets attention, but this is a very legitimate way of doing business, but I didn’t know about it. As much as I’d studied accounting, and loved accounting. As much as I loved having conversations about taxes and figuring out what I need to do.. This is something that I just never read about, never was exposed to. And of course it works. And you’re explaining it in your own unique way which is cool and getting people’s attention. But I want to reassure them, we’ve gone through this at my company, at Bradford and Reed, we actually were audited and it was completely fine. We were audited, I don’t know why, but we were audited. It had nothing to do with this. And at the end of this they saw this process, there was no question about it. But, go ahead and explain this.

Cameron: Just to add to what you were saying, actually. People complain about GE a lot, General Electric.

Andrew: They complain about it, you said? What do they do with General Electric?

Cameron: GE, so basically they don’t pay taxes. The reason why is because they had a lot of losses in the past. So they also had a lot of NOL’s. So in the last year we keep seeing people complain about them, saying, oh they’re not paying any taxes. Well, it’s because he lost money too, you know. They had losses in the past and they’re going to bring it to the future to not pay taxes this year. So they’re doing exactly what you’re doing. So….

Andrew: Absolutely. Take this to your accounting professor, take this to your accountant, they’ll all agree. But explain the general idea of the concept because I just interrupted you to say, hey, wait, Cameron’s telling this in a funny way that’s designed to get your attention. But this is regular business practice. So what is it?

Cameron: So what happens. If you lose money today, you can use that loss that you generate today, right, and then take it back to prior years in your tax return and say, “OK. I made money last year, but I lost money this year. So, I can say I lost X number of dollars, amend my prior returns, ask the IRS for last year’s money back, which I paid taxes on, and get a refund. So that means I can fund my own business again this year. Again, I had about $30,000 in losses, I amended my return from the prior year and claimed those losses against my income from last year, then pulled back about $10,000 of taxes I paid last year.

So, in the current year, I got a refund of $10,000. That was enough for me to go buy my [sounds like] yoca, which I ultimately lost my shirt on. & was again. Just to give you the finished story on that. I didn’t realize that I had come in at the peak of the market so my contact selected me but they didn’t want to spend money because they were cheap. So, I, basically, I had to liquidate my inventory for about $.25 on the dollar. So, I lost my shirt. But, this is a very legitimate business practice.

Andrew: Here’s the general idea, here. You’re doing well in business. Year one, year two and year three, you’re paying taxes but in year four, you have a big loss. You can go back to the government and say, “Hey, I lost a whole lot of money this year. You now how I paid you money last year, when I made money? I’d like some of that back”. The question of how much you get back and what the percentages are and how it works we’ll leave to your account, but the overall understanding [is that] if you don’t know this, your account may not suggest it. My accountant, didn’t suggest it. Thankfully, we had a good chief financial officer who understood it and said, “Oh. Wait. This is what we need to do. We’re having a down year. This is the way to resuscitate or there is a way to benefit from it”.

The thing that I found, as an entrepreneur going through this, is when you have that down year, you beat your self up like mad and you’re not looking for opportunities, sometimes. You’re thinking to yourself, “How could I let this happen?” And the one big opportunity, you think you’re discovering, is that “At least I won’t have to pay real taxes, [that is], a lot of taxes, because we lost money this year”. You’re not thinking, “Wait. There’s something bigger here that’s available. You used it to find your business but we used it to just get a check and it was part of our business. I remember a, actually, going to the bank with the check for the IRS, with the amount that we got back and hearing, “Wow. You must have a great accountant”. And I thought, “Really? The credit should go to the CFO”.

So, that’s what we need to explain to people. Just remember the three words, “net operating loss, NOL”. If you have this issue come up you’ll understand that it’s an option on your menu as a business owner and to be able to go to your account and ask how you can make it work.

Finally, [our] last point is what? What is the last big tactic that were going to share with the audience here?

Cameron: [As regards] deferring your taxes, [I’ll] give you an example of how you can, basically, defer your taxes. When you’re doing taxes, 80% of the game is not avoiding paying them, but simply pushing them into the future. My biggest job is to, basically, push your taxes into the future, and when it becomes that future, I’m going to push them again, indefinitely. So, there’s no way to get rid of them, but you just keep pushing them.

I don’t know if most people know this but IKEA is a nonprofit, the world’s largest nonprofit. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is about $63 billion, but they’re about 66 or $68 billion. So, they’re, literally, the largest foundation in the world. But, unlike the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, their purpose is to bring design into the world, which is pretty [much] BS. To give you an example of how BS it is, they have $68 billion, but they’ve given away less than .1% of their entire net worth, to any type of donation or charitable contribution.

Andrew: IKEA has, because essentially they are a nonprofit that is not there to distribute cash. They’re a nonprofit in structure, is what you’re saying.

Cameron: Exactly. So in the 1980s, Ingbar Compbrad [SP], an ex-Nazi guy, and that’s proven, decided, “I want to protect my company”…

Andrew: This came out years later, where, it turned out that he [had], I forget what, connection to the Nazis. I think he apologized for it, but it’s true. He came out, and he did acknowledge it afterwards.

Cameron: Here’s a good story though. My friend who’s an attorney [and I] spoke to his son and his son was really funny. He was a genuinely nice guy, not a Nazi at all. He was disgusted by that. But, at a dinner party one day he actually said to the lawyer, my friend, “Oh. This is so embarrassing but I want to show you this”. He took him to the attic and pulled out this photo album [which had a photo of] his uncle and his father in full Nazi regalia and brown shirts. And he thought, “What the hell is this?” My attorney friend, actually, is Jewish. So it was very awkward, but funny at the same time. So, yeah.

Andrew: But that was just shocking. So this is the guy that is Mr. Ikea, all right, and you’re just adding color to his story by telling us about his past. Sorry, go ahead.

Cameron: But yeah, so, what they’re doing here it’s very simple. What he said is, I’m going to throw everything into the foundation. And that is right here the red, in the middle. And then once everything is in the foundation I’m then going to go to every country and create the exact same model where I will have the company have a distribution channel. That’s one company. Property channel, which holds the (?), and then the retail channel which is the actual company that is generating the income. (inaudible).

If you look at the last line here at the bottom, Ikea Property, Ikea Distribution, Ikea Retail. So what happens is, Ikea Property is going to be charging everybody else property rent basically. And they do this because you can basically double your deductions for rent due to this strategy. Wal-Mart does it as well. They recently got hammered because things went bad. Distribution is basically their trucks and stuff. And then there’s Ikea Retail. Ikea Retail says that all the income that comes in is going to be going through this company and then going up into the foundation. So because the ultimate owner is a foundation, none of them really pay taxes at all on any level.

So what happened is I found out about this because I was working as a staff accountant back in the day at one of the major accounting firms. And I was really annoyed because I was dealing with this tax return that fell on my desk. And it had this really benign name, Interactive Transaction Five. And what I found out was when I was drunk at the bar after tax season, my managers told me, oh you realize like you were working Ikea, right? I was like, what the hell is that, why is it Ikea? It was Interactive Transaction Five. It’s like, no, this is part of a series of corporate entities that roll up into one of these Ikea corporations. And I was like, that’s fucked up. So he told me, he gave me the whole…

Andrew: So, you were working for Interactive Transaction Five and you didn’t know that you were basically working for Ikea. This was just one of their …

Cameron: Yeah, I had no idea.

Andrew:….entity names. I see.

Cameron: Because that’s how it is. You know, all these companies. They have literally hundreds of companies that you, they just have like very boring names, very vanilla. And you don’t know what they are until you (inaudible) into the actual name of the company. So, I found out after the fact that what happens is the money rolls up and up and up, and then because it goes to this non-profit they don’t pay any taxes. They have zero taxes. They get away with it because Ikea is the single one, the single greatest employers in Sweden. So one thing you’ll hear every single Swedish person say is, like Ingvar Kamprad, he’s such a douche, but he made jobs. So, the government really doesn’t bother him either. So the really…yes?

Andrew: I’m sorry, you go ahead. You go ahead, I don’t want to interrupt.

Cameron: The really scary thing about this though is how does he defer taxes? Very simply. Because it’s going to a non-profit it’s deferred indefinitely. The money stays in non-profit, it just gets (?) into the future forever (?). So how do you get the money out of non-profit? Very simply. If you look on the bottom dotted line. This is a very benign contract where it says 3% franchise fee for all sales. So what happens is, 3% of every single dollar that they sell from Ikea is going to go to this separate company in The Netherlands called Inter Ikea Systems BB. And they hold all of the intellectual property trademarks, designs, from Ikea. So you’re paying for those designs in the IP. But then rolls up into a company in Luxembourg to finally Netherland/Antilles, and into Ikea Holding.

What does all that mean? Very simple. It goes from the European countries into the Cayman Island. Netherland/Antilles is a Cayman Island. Cayman Islands has a flat tax about like 15 grand. And you don’t pay anything after that. So what happens is he literally pays 15 grand a year and then takes a couple billion home, free. So that’s how he defers his taxes.

Andrew: All right, before I ask my follow up question, let me ask you this. Do you have, are there articles that you want to show us from Wal-Mart or Google or anything else or should I just ask at this point?

Cameron: You know what, I’ll leave those links in the bottom. So I’ve written articles that explain to you the transactions of how Wal-mart saves money, how Google saves money. I break it down into the simple parts. I draw diagrams like this. I drew this myself to kind of help people understand it. So I will give those links on the bottom as well.

Andrew: Okay, so we’ll give people the articles for Wal-mart and Google. But, let me ask you this then. The person who’s listening to us right now is not going to go and create a company in the Netherlands that feeds the company in Luxembourg that feeds to a company in the Cayman Islands, Netherlands/Antilles, I can’t read it even. What can they do based on this? What can the person who’s listening to us do now based on what you just told us here about deferring taxes?

Cameron: So, a simple way of deferring taxes is things like taking advantage of Section 179. Section 179 is a situation where the law allows you to, let’s say, if you buy a bunch of computers or capital assets, you can literally take that deduction today instead of in the future. So, you’re not deferring your taxes or your tax benefit you’re taking today; you’re going to push that over to the future. So that’s one thing you can do. But luckily, Obama recently enacted a law that said that you have 100% bonus appreciation, so, normally speaking, under Section 179, there’s all these rules you have to worry about, but because of bonus appreciation, there are no rules. Everything you buy this year and next year is 100% deductible, no matter what [??] appreciation. So that’s one very, very, basic, simple . . .

Andrew: So, we’re talking about 2011 and 2012, you buy a computer right now you get to deduct it all at once.

Cameron: Exactly. No questions asked.

Andrew: OK. So, in the past what would happen is, say you bought a computer for $1000, you couldn’t take the expense for $1000. You would take the expense for a percentage of it, and another percentage the following year, until the thing was over. And you’re saying now, you write the whole thing off. So it’s a good opportunity to go buy equipment, or if you all are already buying it, make sure that you write it off.

Cameron: Exactly. Normally a computer is a five year asset, so you’d appreciate it over five years. Basically, the way appreciation works in the U.S. is that it is top heavy. The first year you take a large chunk of it, so later on you start taking less and less and less. That’s how it usually works. It’s kind of like a curve where it goes high to low.

Andrew: OK. It’s this way on our screen because it reflects. For some reason the video that we have here is sometimes backwards. It’s kind of odd. Let’s see if we can test it out. See look. Backwards?

Cameron: I see it straight.

Andrew: You see it straight, so it reverses it for you but not for me.

Cameron: I wonder why they did that?

Andrew: It was kind of odd because I had Nancy Duarte on, and I wanted her to hold her books up all proudly, and I’m sure on her side it looked OK, but for the audience it look like I was holding up these backward books.

Cameron: Wow.

Andrew: The big picture there though is defer your taxes. Wherever possible push the tax payments into the future, and then you’re saying, even push them further out once they’re due. Where possible take expenses early and push taxes into the future. Alright, let’s go over what we’ve talked about here, and let me see if I can sum this up. The first thing we talked about is selling digital products as opposed to physical products. We get excited about physical products because they feel real, but really, those will force you to collect and turn over sales tax.

We also talked about getting a specialized accountant that’s not just going to be a compliance monkey. We talked about filing papers for R and D, if you have a developer, if you have someone who’s basically doing development make sure that you get the benefit for it and that you don’t treat them and those expenses as regular expenses. We talked about when and why to incorporate and other options, including DBA, doing business as, and an LLC. We talked about keeping business transactions separate from personal. You don’t appear slowly corporate veil, and you have that picture of a hooker up on the screen. We talked about making sure that your filing all of your taxes properly, and in our notes before the session, you said there are over 20 plus different taxes or tax paperwork that a person listening to us is going to have to be aware of.

Just know that you going to have to file it, and this is one of the big takeaways, even if you didn’t make money this year you’ll still have to file something. We talked about taking distribution instead of a salary to save 15.3% on taxes. We talked about the net operating loss, and how it helped you start your business, which unfortunately didn’t go so well. And finally, we talked about the need to defer your taxes to save money today. All right, can you bring up that first slide that you had up on your screen at the beginning of the session? Let’s tell people how they can contact you. There it is. This is your personal e-mail address. And why did you put your phone number up here?

So basically I made a promise to a friend last year that I’ve been able to keep sometimes. I made a promise to a friend that I made on Hack[SP] news, that I would try to officially, monthly at best, to basically offer some help to people. So basically, every so often, I’ll put my name out there, do my e-mail and personal information, and people literally just call me up. You’d be surprised how many people do actually use the phone number. I was, actually. I didn’t think people were actually going to call.

Andrew: I wouldn’t think.

Cameron: I did it like just a whim, to see how it worked. Well yeah, so that is my personal cell phone. I will not be able to pick it up, so anybody that does call me within the next like 30 days. I’m in Asia right now working on a project with Derek Sivers on Entrepreneurship in Asia. So I won’t be able to pick up that phone. So if I did it would just kill me in fees, so. The number is off for now. But if you e-mail me, I promise I will get back to you.

Andrew: Don’t make that promise. Say you will do your best. Don’t promise something that if you’re going to be in Asia that you might not be able to live up to. Let me suggest this to the audience. As always, if the first thing you do is say, Hey Cameron just told me that I can call him up or e-mail him and I’m outside the 30 day period where he’s out of the country so I can call him and he’ll be there. I’m going to ask him for all the tax advice that I possibly can. If you do that, you’re being generous and you’re saying that you will help out. I think that’s a terrible way to start a conversation and start a relationship. The first thing I would do is just shoot you a quick e-mail saying, hey, just watch the whole thing. I dig your attitude, I like that you curse. Or I watched the whole thing and one of the ideas that you gave me really stuck with me and it’s something that I hope to use in the future, thanks for putting it out there.

Even better I would find your website and I would find a way to give you some feedback on it or offer to help you. And then after you build that relationship, either by saying thank you or offering some kind of help, then it becomes easier to ask for help in return. And that’s what I suggest. But Cameron is being very generous. He’s got his contact information up on the screen and you can take it any way that you like and approach it any way that you think is best.

Aright, Cameron, thanks for walking us through all this. I really appreciate it.

Cameron: Sure, one last thing. I do have two e-books that I made. One is for employment tax, which is something that people get really scared about. That’s the one tax that you can’t avoid no matter what. So even if you have a company they can actually directly skip over your company and take money out of your bank account. So if you ever do get audited, I did write an e-book to help you guys with that. I also wrote e-book if you are lucky enough to be that small percentage of people who can sell your company, there is a mergers/acquistions books that I wrote. It was very quick. It gives you a good pointer overall. A friend recently just sold their company for like, for I think like 50 or 85 million dollars. So he just experienced it himself and it was pretty rough so.

Andrew: Where do we get them?

Cameron: I’m going to basically give it to you and then you can just put it up and let them download it.

Andrew: You’re just going to give it to the audience.

Cameron: Yeah.

Andrew: All right, well I really appreciate this. I know the amount of work that you put into this program. I’ve got the notes here to show how much work you put into it. I appreciate that you’re being so generous with the audience. Again, if you found this valuable I always say, don’t be in the audience of life and just passively watch life as it happens, or as other people do it. Find a way to get on the field.

And the way to get on the field is to just at least connect with the person who you’re watching, and to say thank you. I’m going to say thank you to Cameron. I’m also going to say thank you to you for watching this. If you got anything out of this and you want to report back to me. Even if you’re not ready for me to ever talk about it publicly, I urge you to do it. I want to always get feedback from you guys on what you’ve done with what you’ve learned.

So come back to Mixergy.com/contact and let me know. Cameron thanks for doing this session. Everyone else, thank you all for watching.

Cameron: Oh, I just want to say that I want to thank Andrew, too. Because I’ve been a big fan of Mixergy. I actually just purchased the Mixergy Premium, and it’s been great, so.

Andrew: Thank you.

Cameron: That’s actually how I started contacting Andrew, so, I just want to say thanks, too.

Andrew: Thank you, thank you. I’m really glad that I got to meet you. And Derek Sivers, the guy’s interview that he did on Mixergy helped me see things in such a great way, like, he reminded me of the power of systemizing. He went back and forth with me on the philosophy of business which sometimes helps you rethink the way that you’ve been looking at the world. You really, he’s lucky to be working with you and you’re lucky to be working with him and I’m looking forward to seeing your book with Derek Sivers. He’s one of my all-time favorite entrepreneurs.

Cameron: Definitely, definitely.

Andrew: Thank you. I’m sorry, go ahead. I keep interrupting you, go ahead.

Cameron: It’s okay, I’m sorry, I swear to god my last word. Just a funny thing. When I first spoke to Derek Stivers in person he actually kind of scared me because, he’s a really nice guy, but it was scary how nice he was because I’m from New York. Because he was so nice I was actually a little terrified. I was like, this is so not normal. I was like on paranoia. I’ll just say that. But, that’s it, I’m done.

Andrew: I’m from New York too and I feel the same way. My wife is not and I actually went to school in Brooklyn. And because of it I feel like I’ve just been scarred for life. I can never leave a bag anywhere without watching it, I always lock every door.

Cameron: Exactly.

Andrew: All right, thank you for doing this. Thank you all for real. Bye.

Viso-Ikea

Viso-Incorporation Decision Tree

Viso-Walmart Captive REIT Chart

Master Class: Focus Tools
Taught by Ari Meisel of Leedpro

Report issues here

Master Class:
Focus Tools

Length: 48:43 minutes

About the course leader


It’s led by Ari Meisel, a serial entrepreneur, author and achievement architect.

Master Class Toolbox

Elance

Evernote

Google Docs

Tungle

Vitamins On Demand

Rentomatic

Virtual Post Mail

Shapeways

Amazon Subscribe and Save

Fresh Direct

Task Rabbit

Other Inbox

Crossfit

Sealfit

Evolution of the Virtual Assistant

Outsource Everything

Transcript

Download the transcript here

Andrew: This course is about focusing on less so you can have more impact. It’s led by Ari Mizelle, a serial entrepreneur, author and achievement architect. I’m Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, where proven founders teach. Ari, can you tell our audience what life was like before you did what you’re about to teach us here today?Ari: Sure. I had, when I was 20 years old I got involved in a real estate project in upstate New York. I bought these eight old buildings with a dream of turning them into lofts. And basically I didn’t know anything about real estate or construction. The deal was that anybody that worked on the job had to teach me their trade. So I spent the next two years, 18 – 20 hours a day learning and doing every construction trade imaginable.I was basically burning the candle at both ends and the middle and running the business, learning construction, doing the construction. At the end of three years I was about as burned out as I could possibly be. And basically got really sick. A couple of years later I got diagnosed with Crohn’s disease which is an incurable, chronic inflammation of the digestive tract. And I was on death’s door pretty much, taking 16 pills a day and just overwhelmed by stress and work and $3 million of debt when I was 23 years old.

Andrew: Wow.

Ari: It was a weird place to be.

Andrew: Wow, and it’s one of those situations where you’re already working 20 hours a day. How many more hours can you possibly find to add to the business so that you can try to get yourself out? At that point you can’t add anymore. You’ve got to focus on doing less and doing more of the right things. Where were you after you did what you are about to teach us?

Ari: So, I mean, after a lot of self-analysis and experimentation I was actually able to overcome this incurable disease and (?) in France, which was an unbelievably amazing experience. It’s something I never could have hoped to do. In addition to that I am a green building consultant. I’ve become an expert in that field. I’m an author of a book on that subject. A real estate developer, a real estate broker. I’ve been an advisor with several start ups since then. I have this (?) and my consulting and coaching company where I do (?) protection. And I’m going to be a Dad in about three weeks.

Andrew: Congratulations. And I see you actually here coming across on the finish line at the Ironman. The Ironman of course most people wish that at some point in their lives they’ll get to do a marathon. The Ironman has a marathon length run but before you even get to that you’ve got to do essentially a marathon length swim and a bike ride that’s over a hundred miles which is like the marathon equivalent for cycling. And then you finally get to the marathon. So you were really able to get in shape and to achieve a lot both professionally and personally and I want to know how you did it. I want to know how my audience can do it. What’s the first step and how does this first tab up here, e-lance fit into it. What’s that first step?

Ari: Well, the one thing I want to tell people to (?) is that the framework that I’ve developed is optimized, automated, outsourced. And that is how I attack every problem, every issue in that order. So first we have to optimize as much as possible, realize what the problem is, get down to its barest minimum then automate as much as possible, maybe all of it, and whatever is left outsource to another person who may be better at it or cheaper so that you can focus on what you need to. The goal of everything that I do now and everything that I’ve been doing for over a year now, is to free up that extra hour or that minute or even a second of my time so that I can free up my mind and use it for what I want.

So, basically Elance and a lot of people are probably familiar with it, but e-lance is like the worlds largest (?) for outsourced talent. You can pretty much post on any job that you want to be done, something that can be done remotely. So anything from graphic design, web development, programming, virtual assistance, you name it. So I knew about it but I wasn’t really into it at the time, and I had created this green building company and green consulting. And the lead certification process which is the number one green (?) system is very contrived in the way that it’s (?). It’s all, there’s like 500 pages of pds (?) that you basically have to fill out and operate.

And the truth is that green building is an art in a way and there’s a lot of very high level stuff to figure out. Unfortunately you get bogged down by a lot of really badly planned minutiae. And filling out an online pds on a system that works on one version of Safari and not another version of, it’s archaic. So I took a shot with e-lance and I’ve tried to find an architect that knew me and could work the way that I work and get a lot of my (?).

And I found a guy who was amazing. He lives in Minneapolis and he’s been working for me for two years now and he’s the backbone of my business. And I’ve also hired on an engineer, these two people are not full-time. They’re amazing at what they do and it’s, the economies of scale work out. So that I can basically run a one man shop but I have a full team supporting me. And it essentially enables me to spend about two hours a week on my green consulting business dealing with the really high level strategic planning issues that only I can deal with.

Andrew: So I’ve actually heard of course of hiring developers on e-lands. I’ve heard people say that they’ve hired virtual assistants on e-lands. But to find an architect is surprising. I actually even heard, I’m hearing more and more that people are taking higher level jobs and passing them on to outsourcers through e-lands, including things like writing to reporters, creating press releases. All right, so one of the things that you do is you look for jobs that you can pass on to other people. You go to e-lands, you find somehow who can handle that job, you pass it on to them. What else.

Ari: Well, so really the first, before you do anything is kind of get that 80/20 rule. That we, I’m sure a lot of people know about it. But essentially you know 80 percent of your benefits come from 20 percent of your inputs kind of thing. So really analyzing where you’re spending your time, how you’re spending your time, what you’re doing with that time and what are you really getting out of it? So we know where to zero in and focus our efforts. In my case 80 percent of my time is being spent filling out PDFs that somebody else can do faster and better than me because he’s got expertise and I don’t do that. For several clients and get into sort of a group. Whereas I need to focus my time on that 20 percent that we deal with the clients, figuring out the overall strategy (?) that we’ve been (?).

Andrew: Okay. All right. And I’ve got to say, that that’s something that was hard for me to do even here. For a long time I was editing my own interviews, I was editing my own courses. I was not transcribing the work myself but then I would go and collect the transcription after it was done from the course of the interview, and then post it up on the website myself. And then I realized, like you’re saying, so much of this work can be outsourced and it’s so easy to do it with sites like e-lance. Alright, let’s talk about this next tab that we’ve got to show the audience. What is the next step and then how does this next secret tab right here, not so secret tab, factor in?

Ari: The next step is one of my personal favorites which is what I call creating an external brain.

Andrew: Okay.

Ari: So we are not very good at multitasking. Even if you think you’re good at multitasking, you’re not, I’m not. It’s just not the way that our minds are evolved. And the truth is that keeping ten tabs open on chrome, that’s not multitasking. And eating while talking on the phone is not multitasking. There’s very few true example of real multitasking in modern society and the only one that I can ever think of is a commercial pilot who is paying attention to eight instruments, talking to his co-pilot, navigating, talking on the radio and (?). But for the majority of us when we’re trying to divide our time, we also divide our quality. That’s just the way it is. We have a limited amount of resources that we can use at any given time. And as a matter of fact, as everyone knows, I’m sure from high school and from movies like we only use five percent of our brains anyway.

So, when this really struck me was that when I was in high school, like every week I’d probably come up with a new business idea. And I have a notebook about that phase from high school that has probably just hundreds of business ideas in it. 99 percent of them are crap but I have these ideas. And then when I got to college and after college I was really, I was noticing that these ideas weren’t coming anymore. And I kind of just accepted it and figured maybe I’m just getting older and my imagination is not what it was. So when I started doing (?), I started to get those ideas back. It felt like my brain was being reawakened.

The idea of creating the external brain is to offload your thoughts and your encounters as much as possible. Essentially we’re talking about note taking, something that I historically was very bad at. But something like Evernote, which is what we’re talking about here, works on every platform and it syncs between your iPhone, Blackberry, anything. Basically you can keep notes as URLs, sound bites, videos, photos, articles, anything. You name it, you bunch it together.

What I find is no matter what it is, get that idea out of your head so that you can be thinking about something more actively. What happens is a week later you happen to be looking in your Evernote and you see scraps of this and scraps of that and a really good idea comes together. Evernote is taking it even a step further now, they just came out with two apps yesterday. One called Food and one called Below. Below is basically about remembering everybody you meet by picture, by context, and by geographical location. It’s really incredible. It’s just feeding the idea that we don’t need to be the database for a lot of the things that we need to know about to interact.

Andrew: Yeah. Is that your dog, by the way, in the background?

Ari: Sorry, is it loud?

Andrew: No, it’s just part of the experience. What kind of dog do you have?

Ari: I have a Jack Russell and a Boston Terrier and my parents’ Miniature Dachshund is here.

Andrew: Cool. I have a Jack Russell mix. I wanted to get a Boston Terrier because they’re great dogs but they were hard to find. At least, when I was looking.

Here, look. I’ll show the audience this, too. I use Evernote for everything. It helps so much. I keep a checklist for doing these courses. I hope there’s nothing embarrassing here. No, there isn’t. It’s things like is there enough hard drive space to record this course? This is a fat mamba-jamba file that’s going to come out of the end of this course. I want to make sure I have room on my hard drive. Am I recording it on Screenflow? I once recorded using the wrong mic. To keep from forgetting, I have a little checklist that includes record with the right mic. Make sure I’m recording the computer audio so I make sure I get your stuff in there, too. Every step.

Ari: I like it. It’s got caffeine on it, I like that.

Andrew: Yeah, actually I don’t mean. It would be cool if I meant just caffeine on in here. Caffeine is the program that I use on the Mac that would keep my screen from dimming so that the audience doesn’t have to look at a dim screen because Mac auto-dims the screen.

It’s all these little things that I keep here and now, even though things go wrong in the interviews, I don’t sweat it because I know exactly what needs to get done. Here, I should be checking that one off. I just get it done before the interview. It’s a huge time saver. I know you’re going to show us Google Docs but I personally prefer Evernote because there’s so many ways to get notes in there. If I come up with an idea I just quickly email it myself and it goes into Evernote. If I want to share a set of ideas with someone else who I work with or with an outsourcer I could share them easily. It’s terrific. If I want to give this checklist to someone else who will one day lead these courses they will know exactly what needs to get done. Yes, we did talk about shutting off all other applications.

Ari: Yeah, so I love Evernote for the majority of that stuff. What I like Google Docs for is really for collaborative stuff. If you’re like in a team and you’re doing a group brain dump it’s really good for that collaborative aspect. Cloud storage in general is one of my (?). I have 12 in-drop boxes, all on this computer, and that’s it. I refuse to have anything else consolidated on my computer. Essentially if my computer blew up I could be up and running on another computer in about three minutes. I’m as much web-based as I can possibly be.

Andrew: OK. Next.

Ari: Right, this is another one that is really fun that we kind of came up with, which is choose your own work week. This is not the four hour work week. This is something completely different. Basically my work week, and I feel like I’m going to scuttle myself by explaining this, but my work week is Tuesday-Thursday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. That is by no means the only time that I am doing work because I do work seven days a week, at 2:00 in the morning because I love what I do and I’m always wanting to work on different things. My work week is the time that people that I do business with can reasonably expect to interact with me. Either by email, phone, or in meetings. That enables me to have a legitimate four day week every week. I grouped together my business activity so that I can get into business mode. One of the things that people who work from home and entrepreneurs and not corporate people find very difficult is to be in work mode while not being in a work environment. It’s not that work-life balance, it’s the work-life separation.

To do that, I use several different tools to keep people basically within that parameter, but one of the best ones is Tungle. What Tungle does is it syncs with your schedule in real time, and it gives you this public URL that people can go to, and they can see available times that they can suggest a meeting with you, so it’s like office hours. You don’t have to register to choose a meeting with me. I keep this in my e-mail signature (?), and I think the average number of e-mails to set a meeting is seven. So, we have to figure out a time, a place and a different time of (?).

All I do now, and people love it. I just say, hey, here’s my schedule. Take any time that works for you. It makes it flexible for them even though it’s flexible within my parameters. As you can see, it’s only showing you availability between Tuesday and Thursday and for the majority of people I interact with, they’ll just assume that I’m really busy on Friday and Monday.

It’s particularly good if you need a schedule, like several meetings or interviews all at a row, but getting things into more of a compartment, basically. That’s why this actually applies to people who work at home or who work in a corporate environment. You can choose those times when you’re going to do certain activities. I only do sales meetings in the mornings, for instance or I’m only going to be dealing with e-mails or (?), or I’ll only do overseas calls at this time, but get them all broken down in one place. Your head gets in there and you get in a routine, the efficiencies just come out of it naturally.

Andrew: I don’t use Tungle, I use Google Calendar which has now a new way of letting people book times with you based on your availability, but the same rule applies. It’s a huge time saver for me. I actually don’t make myself available as much as you do. For me, it’s Thursdays in the afternoons, a big block of time. I do a set of 15 minute super focused phone calls, and it helps a lot. I’ve learned that by doing these courses.

What’s the next big tip that we’re going to give the audience?

Ari: The next big thing is customization.

Andrew: OK.

Ari: You don’t have to accept that the mass produced product isn’t necessarily the best product for you, and this goes from anything from food to vitamins to clothing to software. I use a company called VitaminsOnDemand who make a customized supplement pack that I take every day with the vitamins that I want. It has to do with the experimentation that I went through with my Crohn’s disease, and I could never find the perfect mix. So, there does exist a site that . . .

Andrew: There is a place out there that will customize vitamins for you?

Ari: VitaminsOnDemand.com.

Andrew: Wow. All right. I didn’t know that.

Ari: That’s just it. Your reaction is what I’m teaching people. When you have a problem, a solution probably exists and if it doesn’t, you can make one, and this is how. Software is one that makes a lot of sense to people, and the story that I like to tell is I used to use a service called Rentomatic.com which is just for tracking rental checks because I had these different rental properties. It was great. If the tenant was late, I would e-mail them. It was really good, and it was free, and then they started doing, well, they started charging like $50 a month. I didn’t think it was worth it for what I was doing. I only had eight properties.

So, I went on Elance, and it was like a full disclaimer here. I didn’t make any money off of this, but I went to Elance and I basically said, “I need a copy of this site for my own uses.” For $115 somebody, a programmer in the Ukraine, made me an exact copy of Rentomatic’s system, basically with some customizations for me and none of the extra stuff I didn’t want. That’s why it’s been over a year.

Andrew: Is that what this is right here, Virtual Post Mail?

Ari: This goes a little further. Basically, (?) now I just use Virtual Post Mail which is like virtual class mail. It lets you get your postal mail visually, and they have a check cashing, a check deposit service. Now, all my rent checks go to Virtual Post Mail, and I have a virtual assistant check on the 10th of the month to see what came in and what didn’t.

Andrew: I see.

Ari: And then, Virtual Post Mail deposits all the checks for me. It’s an automation that did not exist before.

Andrew: I see. Let me ask you something. I understand Rentomatic and how effective it is and it’s a disappointment when the price goes up. If you’re a guy who likes to focus does it make sense to go and hire someone else to create a version of it instead of saying hey, I’ll pay a little bit more so that I can focus on the few things that I do really well instead of becoming a project manager for new software?

Ari: Well, that’s the thing. With something like this and with Elance, I don’t have to be project manager. I put up the post, people bid on it, I say yes and four days later I have a working product. The point of it is, well, I say exact copy but the product I got didn’t have any of the frills. It didn’t have any of the extra stuff that I didn’t want and it had two or three features that I would want that were not in the real original product. I got it tweaked to what I want it to be and then instead of paying $50 a month for a year or two, I got it for $115 once.

Andrew: I see. OK, so the big point that you’re saying is you don’t have to accept…

Ari: (?) Sorry, even further to that, which is a really cool story, is that I switched to a Mac about a year and a half ago. I wish I had done it years ago. I got the new Mac Mini. There were no wall mounts available for it, at the time when it came out, for some reason. I wanted a wall mount. I had a design in mind. I am not a drafter, by any means, so I drew a really bad drawing of what I thought would be a cool wall mount. I put it on Elance and said I need a technical drafter to make this into an actual product drawing. For $30 someone made it into a really beautiful drawing that looked like an architectural plan.

Then I went to Shapeways.com which does on-demand fabrication of products for you out of glass, wood, metal, plastic, whatever you want. I got this mount made for me for like another $30. For $60 I had a custom made Mac Mini mount that I had designed myself with no experience at all. The whole thing took me about 10 minutes of my time. Then Shapeways has its own ecommerce platform so I immediately turned around and sold my newly designed product and I sold eight of them.

Andrew: I see.

Ari: It actually, I could have made that into a business if I wanted to. It was really fun. The solution did not exist, I figured out how to create it.

Andrew: I see. That is the big take away. The big take away is you don’t have to accept what’s out there. There are now tools online that will enable you to create what you want. Often it’s cheaper than using the tools that are out there that don’t really fit you. In your case Rentomatic didn’t really fit you. For less money you were able to create your own product. Then you moved on to virtual post mail, which is what we have here.

You talked about Shapeways.com as the site that you used to manufacture the idea that you had. What was the site that you used to get the design?

Ari: Elance.

Andrew: Oh, so you went to Elance and said this is what I have in mind, design it for me and then you took that to Shapeways. Let me bring up Shapeways. Shapeways.com, let’s bring that sucker up. I see. I didn’t even know this site exists.

Ari: It’s so cool, you can get things made out of plastic, or glass, or rubber, or metal, or wood. It’s very, very cool. It’s basically free printing is what they do. That makes it so they can do things on demand, one off, really cheaply. It’s really good for prototyping. I don’t know the first thing about prototyping but I got this done with very little time and effort.

Andrew: All right. What’s the next big idea?

Ari: Stop running errands. Nobody should be running errands, ever. I’ve met one person in my life that said that she enjoyed running errands. I was just dumbfounded. I didn’t have any (?). In general, errands are a waste of time. They’re not efficient. The stores are busy. You always forget something that you need to get. You never get enough. It’s a bad process.

The very first thing is Amazon Subscribe and Save. Basically, any product that’s a non-perishable household good you can do Subscribe and Save on Amazon and you get a 15% across the board discount. You choose how many units you want every month, every two months, whatever it might be. You can cancel at any time. You can get an extra shipment at any time. It’s amazing. Basically in the last two years my wife and I have not had to shop for toilet paper, paper towels, laundry detergent, dishwashing detergent, toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo, dog food. The list goes on. It’s cheaper. It’s automatic. You can get things on a schedule that you might not remember, like the fact that you’re supposed to change your toothbrush every three months, so every three months we get new toothbrushes from Amazon and, I can’t even, it’s probably saved us days of time that we might have otherwise wasted.

Andrew: Oh, I’m loving it.

Ari: But the thing with stopping running errands is…(?)

Andrew: Sorry, wait, the connection…

Ari: (?)

Andrew: Sorry, can you start that thought again? I just missed it.

Ari: Oh, well, basically there’s things that you can completely get done for you and then there’s things that you can have people help you get done. So in addition to Amazon’s Subscribe and Save, which is mostly non-perishables, there’s – in New York, at least – or the tri-state area, there’s Freshdirect.com for groceries, and I think out by you there’s coupon day?

Andrew: Yep.

Ari: …there’s definitely grocery delivery resources in most, yeah, so most major cities have grocery delivery service. I happen to like shopping for groceries with my wife, but especially now with the baby coming and stuff, it’s definitely convenient to just pull it up on your iPhone app, pick the things you want, and the next day it’s there and the quality’s great.

But then the next task, the next thing is TaskRabbit. TaskRabbit is big on the tech crunch scene, but basically they have a group of doers that will get things done. So whereas Elance is for outsourcing every remote task, TaskRabbit is for getting things done that need to happen on-site. You can get somebody…what’s nice about TaskRabbit is they’re people with actual skills, so you can have them not only go to IKEA and pick up a dresser for you, but you have them bring it over and actually put it together.

I taught one of my skill circle classes last night about [??] and I had a TaskRabbit named Ryan come and sit in and take…skilled to take class notes for me for the entire hour of the class. Basically, I mean, you can have them write thank you cards, you can have them help you with laundry, cleaning, whatever it might be. Same thing as Elance – you post up a task, people bid on it, and then you pick a person on there and get it done.

Andrew: All right. You know what I haven’t tried yet, is to have someone from TaskRabbit go to Trader Joe’s for me. I love the food there, but I hate the long line here; it literally will wrap around the store. Can’t stand it. I sometimes calculate in my head how much money I could be making if I sat at my desk instead of sitting, or standing in line at Trader Joe’s and it drives me frickin’ nuts. But for some reason I just haven’t thought to try TaskRabbit for it.

Ari: Yeah, I’ve had them go to Trader Joe’s (?) and been very happy with that-

Andrew: Really?

Ari: -not to stand in the line, because in New York, tooâ?¦

Andrew: The thing about-

Ari: â?¦it wraps around the store three times.

Andrew: The thing about grocery shopping and one of the reasons why I hesitated with it is that they’d have to trust me to pay them, what do I pay, 200 bucks for groceries? So do I front them the money or do they trust that I’ll pay them?

Ari: No, well TaskRabbit…the service has your credit card, so, you know, you’re pre-authorizing things and then, you know, the money, it’s like escrow, basically.

Andrew: All right, so they can be sure they get their money without me having to trust them with it.

Ari:…yeah.

Andrew: All right. Apparently I’ve got trust issues, and we’re ready to go on to the- oh, by the way, look, I’m loving getting Amazon, getting food from Amazon. In my office, I used to go to the kitchen over here where they have all kinds of junk food. Now I go to Amazon…it’s kind of, we’re getting sidetracked, but I love this! I just get to eat dry fruit, which, for me, is wonderful, it’s a great snack. I’m trying to run another marathon and I need to get in shape, and this helps me. Instead of eating junk food, I eat this when I get hungry.

Ari: You should try Raw Revolution 100 Calorie Raw Bars that Amazon has, they’re amazing.

Andrew: All right. I’m writing that down. I need to get in shape like you.

Ari: Yeah. [chuckles]

Andrew: All right, Raw Revolution is written down…what’s the next step, and how does this site fit in? I’ll hide it for a moment.

Ari: So the next one is to put your finances on auto-pilot. I’m sure that lots of people read about this. Again, though, this all kind of hearkens back to self-analysis and figuring out where you’re spending your money. It’s not- it’s more about figuring out where the money’s going and just by that awareness you can find efficiencies and savings. So Mint, you know, is the gold standard for kind of managing all of your accounts and seeing how much you’re spending on shopping and how much you’re spending on utilities or whatever it might be. Also, if you could pull up OneReceipt.com?

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Ari: Which is a service that I just found out about a week ago, and I’m already hooked on it and love it. I met with Michael, one of the (?). Basically one receipt takes, it pulls in all of your e-receipts for an e-mail and you can mail in receipts or you can e-mail in receipts, take pictures with your phone. What it does that the other services don’t do is it doesn’t just say, here’s the (?) receipt, here’s the data. It actually breaks down the receipt and gives you each product that was in the receipt, itemized. So for someone like me who spends a (?) spends 28 percent of their monthly income on Amazon, it’s nice to actually see one receipt giving the breakdown of the seventy five items that I got from Amazon this month.

Andrew: So with this, I would just forward my Amazon receipts into on receipt, one receipt would organize it, and if I had a paper receipt take a picture of it and one receipt organizes for me too?

Ari: You don’t even actually have to forward it. It will pull all of the receipts out of your e-mail automatically.

Andrew: Okay. Alright, and what do you automate? I understand automating with…

Ari: Once you figure out that (?) a sense of where you’re spending your money and you know, oh I don’t need to be paying that much for my cable bill, or (?). Sorry, that’s the next phase which is bill strength. So bill strength sort of does the analysis for you and it will look at your TV and cable or TV and internet, cell phone bill, gas, credit card, things like that. And based on their actual usage and where you spend your money will recommend products that will save you money and will tell you how much.

And it’s really valuable information like for one (?) service you’d think that they might recommend you change services, which is a hassle in itself. But no it told me that you have a 900 minute per month plan and you’re only using 480 minutes. And you really should switch to the 600 minute plan and save, you know, 800 dollars this year. I mean, use that site for like five minutes and you could save like hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

Andrew: All right. Let’s keep it moving. What’s the next one?

Ari: So the next one is, it sounds like a broad topic but just organization. And my, for me I look at it kind of backwards. Organization is not the framework. The framework is what will kind of get you to the organization. Organization for me is more of a benchmark. So all it is, all you have to do is set limits. Upper limits and lower limits. And use those to just kind of give yourself a checks and balance of where you’re out and maybe if you need to change things.

So the example that I always tell people is when I moved a couple of years ago I had an entire closet full of electronic debris, for a better word. You know, cables and old keyboards and computer webcams. And I was like, this is ridiculous, I don’t need any of this stuff. So I limited myself to an egg crate, a box like this. And it’s full and it’s in the bottom of my closet now, and I probably still don’t need what’s in there, but it’s a manageable size. And if anything ever has, if I want to put something in there, two things have to come out.

So one in, two out policy, which I apply to all storage situations. I will never have more than ten e-mails in my inbox. My iPhone. I have 112 apps on my iPhone, but I will never go past one screen. I have a lot of folders. If I ever want to put something else in the food folder and it’s full I’ve got to take something out. And all of those (?) of apps that I haven’t used in months. So it’s a self-cleaning self-efficiency policy that just works very well.

I mean if you are constantly missing those limits, it doesn’t mean that you have to punish yourself. It just means that something in your system needs to change.

Andrew: All right, so you set floors and ceilings on the work on what you allow yourself to keep. All right. How does this site…

Ari: Well I mean, anything. In the amounts of working out, in the amounts of reading every night. Whatever it might be. Setting those limits. And then this is, so other inbox which you’ve just pulled up. For that, this is what I always recommend. To the person who has 1400 e-mails in their inbox, like my mother, for instance. It wouldn’t be worth anybody’s time to kind of go through that, explain and set up all sorts of (?). Just use otherinbox.com which will automatically categorize your e-mails very intelligently. And you can take a 1400 e-mail box down to like 20 in about 15 seconds.

Andrew: So it will go in my in-box. I guess I give it access to my google.apps account or my other e-mail. It will go in and it will organize it for me and tell me how many invitations I have from sites like Evite and Facebook, how many receipts I have in my in-box and so on. And then I could mark a bunch of them as read without having to get involved with all of the different receipts that have to be taking up time.

Ari: Right, it will also help you unsubscribe from unwanted emails. It will organize tracking numbers from Amazon or UPS and it will put the delivery date of the package into your Google calendar. It’s an amazing thing, an amazing program. It’s great.

Andrew: OK, does it help you deal with all of the email that you’re getting from friends or from strangers who are looking for help with something or were just trying to reach out?

Ari: Yeah, I don’t use (?) because I have my own different system put in place. This is what I do for the person who’s hopeless, drowning in their inbox. My system is very simple. I have one folder called optional. All the newsletters, deal sites, Facebook notifications, LinkedIn, whatever it may be, that all goes in the optional folder. The point is there’s probably things in there that I might enjoy reading but none of it is important. If I go away for a week and I don’t check my email and I come back and there’s 500 emails in the optional folder I know with complete confidence if I click mark all read I’m not missing anything.

Andrew: OK.

Ari: (?)

Andrew: All right. What’s next? We kind of talked about matching calendar items. Maybe, we can skip past that to the next item.

Ari: Sure. The last thing is really wellness. It’s the mind-body connection. I don’t think you can enjoy your life without being healthy. In my coaching work, I work with a lot of different individuals, and I set very specific goals for specific needs. Whether it’s weight loss or they’re concerned about heart health, or whatever it may be.

I have two recommendations that I feel very comfortable making to the general public as far as fitness and nutrition. The fitness one is Crossfit. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried, have you ever tried Crossfit, Andrew?

Andrew: I haven’t but I’ve heard so much about them that people have told me that I need to get the founder on to do an interview. He and I have been talking, actually, he and his assistant and I have been talking about having him on. I’ve heard that it’s really impactful. What has it done for you?

Ari: OK, first of all I was really skeptical but I wanted to try Crossfit when I came back from Ironman. Crossfit is basically, it’s a mixture of body weight motions, elliptic lifting, power lifting, calisthenics, plyometrics, high intensity training. Most workouts are between 10 and 20 minutes but they’ll leave you absolutely destroyed. What happened was, I did the Ironman and I felt like I was superman but the truth was that I was actually very functionally weak. You train your body to be this lean, mean biking, swimming, running machine and then when you go to pick up…

Andrew: You lost connection there. What you were saying is you go to pick up groceries and you hurt your back.

Ari: Yeah. I played golf with my dad a month before the Ironman and my back hurt for three days. I’m 29 years old, it’s ridiculous. I tried Crossfit. The idea behind Crossfit is basically to be fit for life. The reason I can recommend it to anybody is that it is universally scaleable. Every workout is scaleable from a five year old to a 70 year old, literally. They can do the same workout, just maybe different weights or different heights of a box or whatever it may be.

When I got back from Ironman and I started Crossfit my maximum deadlift, which is basically just lifting the bar bell from the ground up to your knees, the heaviest lift that people can do. My maximum deadlift was 95 pounds. That might seem arbitrary to most people, what that literally means is that if my pregnant wife fell on the ground I could not pick her up. After a month of doing Crossfit my max deadlift was 350 pounds. My body morphology changed quite a bit. I feel like I’m a much more stable person. And, because there is such a high intensity cardio component to it, I ran my first sub-six minute mile, ever. And I’d been training for the Ironman for a year.

Andrew: Sub-six minute mile? Wow.

Ari: 5:46. (?) more injury proof than I ever have and I just can’t strongly recommend it enough to people. The other thing is there’s a big community aspect to it who does the same workout every day, or they change the work out every day. Everyone is doing the same work out together. A lot of it is done for time, so you can always improve and it’s really something special. You can see examples of it there because they post all work outs for free. Each affiliate has its own website. And then, as far as nutrition goes . . .

Andrew: Wait. So, you’re saying there’s a website where people can come on and get the training that they want. Where would I go to do that, or where would the audience go and do that?

Ari: Right there, you’re looking at it right there.

Andrew: So, they’re saying, today we need to do five rounds, do 400 meters, 10 burpee box jumps, whatever that is, 95 pound sumo dead lift, et cetera.

Ari: Yeah, but go down to the next one and what it says.

Andrew: OK. I see back squat. Actually, is it just back squats?

Ari: Yeah. That day it was back squats, but basically you do the three reps and then you add some (?) and then you do three reps, and that’s the work out for that day. It’s very well rounded, and it’s . . . For a 70-year-old they might do 45 pounds and then 50 pounds, and then a 24-year-old guy might do 300 pounds, who knows? But they’re doing the same motions, and they’re working together on this stuff. And also, it’s amazing.

As far as nutrition goes, the best kind of well rounded, easiest diet that I can recommend to people is (?) which was made very popular by Graham Hill of Treehugger. Essentially, it says on five days you don’t eat anything with a face.

Andrew: Sorry. It says what?

Ari: Five days a week don’t eat anything with a face, and then the other two days you can kind of go wild. And then, I would also add cut out sugar as much as possible. The best thing about it is you can start today, it’s not an enormous lifestyle change. It is healthier. There’s no (?) It’s definitely healthier for you. You’ll live longer. You’ll feel better. You’ll feel lighter. Your skin will be better, also, which makes you probably sleep better. It’s better for the environment because you’re cutting out 70% of your meat consumption which is really water intensive and cheaper. You know, meat tends to be expensive. We did a test, and it’s the best all around diet that I can recommend to people.

Andrew: All right. Of course, actually, you tell me. The setting of a goal, like running a marathon or running an Ironman, does that help you get running more and help you stay in shape?

Ari: That’s a really good question. A lot of people have to be goal oriented to stick to something. For me, that was really important. Most people are really bad at setting up goals, and I would say that saying I want to run an Ironman, if you’re not a runner, for instance or say you’re like a 10K or even a 5K runner, saying you’re going to run a marathon is not a reasonable goal. Not meaning that you can’t set that as a goal, but that’s not the goal you should have. The goal you should have is to run a 10K, and then the goal should be to run a 20K. You have to take it step-by-step.

Seal Fit, which is the Navy Seal version, cross fit, they have their hell week, where it’s literally a week of hell, that’s working non-stop, and then they always say . . . a lot of these guys come in to hell week, and their goal is to make it to Friday. That will get you killed. Your goal should be to make it to sunrise.

Andrew: Make it to where? Make it to sunrise.

Ari: To sunrise.

Andrew: I see. So, go one step at a time.

Ari: Exactly.

Andrew: Don’t aim for a marathon if you’ve never run before, aim for a 5K, and then move up to a 10K, then a half marathon, et cetera. But having those goals, I know it helps me. What about you?

Ari: Absolutely.

Andrew: Having that marathon or having those goals, that’s the only thing that gets me going.

Ari: A hundred percent. There has to be an end in sight, kind of, for a lot of this stuff. Especially since I like to say (?) I need to . . . there has to be the next thing. I’m not going to do Ironmans forever. There’s got to be something else, so there has to be a natural finish.

Andrew: All right. Ari Mizelle, thanks for . . . actually, let me ask you this one last question. What’s the single best thing people can do to get themselves organized and focused? What’s the big life happening?

Ari: The single best . . . well, get a virtual assistant.

Andrew: A virtual assistant . . .

Ari: Yeah, and I absolutely mean that for anybody. Whether you’re a student or a stay at home mom, or a corporate person or an entrepreneur. Not only having someone to help you out with tasks, like a virtual assistant, but working with a virtual task, a virtual assistant. Having to explain the task the task that you want done is an exercise in itself that will make you more efficient. And it will let you practice delegating and outsourcing and focusing on the things that are more important to you.

Andrew: All right. Where do you get your personal assistant?

Ari: So, I actually have a brand new service that I would recommend that is, they’re kind of in beta this week and I think that they’re going to go totally live next week. It’s called outsource.everything.co.

Andrew: Let’s go to that.

Ari: And I’ve tested, and it’s amazing actually. The site is so like clean and not advertising. The reason is that these guys are so high level with their assistants. It’s just mind boggling how good they are.

Andrew: Yeah, this site looks a little too basic. It almost looks like. This site looks a little too basic. They’re using Weebly, they are, not much going on here. But you’re saying the service is good.

Ari: I’m saying that the service is the best. These guys offer assistants like I’ve never seen before. And I have a very weird, very stringent test that I put virtual systems through. And this is the only company out of twenty that was ever able to pass that test. So I don’t know when this interview’s going to come out but they probably will be live by then. And they’re just, I actually kind of love how basic their site is because their service is what speaks for itself.

Andrew: Alright, and I see the prices right here up on the screen. $14.75 an hour down to $13.38 an hour, depending on how many you get, how many hours you want. All right.

Ari: They’re $12.38 an hour.

Andrew: Did I say that wrong? $12.38 an hour or $14.75 an hour. What kinds of tasks do you give your personal assistant?

Ari: Everything from research stuff to calling for making appointments sometimes. This past week my brother in law and sister in law are going to be visiting us in a month and they have a one year old. And they need a car service from the airport that has car seats. So I had the assistant call and find somethings that offer that. I’ve had them do lead generation stuff for me, data entry with Excel. I mean, everything actually. I really, I’m dependent in a lot of ways. But at the same time the way that my tasks are set up they’re really replicable to number of assistants. So if I had to start up with another assistant, the learning curve would be about 5 minutes.

Andrew: All right. Well thank you for doing this session. I’m looking forward to people giving me their feedback on it. And of course, if you’ve got anything of value I hope you go to AriMizelle.com, there it is up on the screen. And thank him. Actually where’s the contact, there is it right here, e-mail address. Well, thanks for leading us through this course, I appreciate it.

Master Class: Outsource
Taught by Liam Martin of Time Doctor

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Master Class:
Outsource

Length: 88:00 minutes

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About the course leader

It’s led by Liam Martin, he’s the co-founder of Time Doctor. It helps you track your time, monitor your distractions and get more done.

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Master Class: Profitable Ad Buying
Taught by Max Teitelbaum of WhatRunsWhere

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Master Class:
Profitable Ad Buying

Length: 59:11 minutes

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It’s led by Max Teitelbaum. He’s the co-founder of WhatRunsWhere which help customers buy display media more intelligently and profitably for their campaigns.

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Transcript

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Andrew: This course will give you proven customer acquisition tactics. It is led by Brian Kaldenberg. He is the president and founder of Proofreading Pal, the site you see on your screen right now, an online proofreading and editing service. I am Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, where proven founders, like Brian, teach. Brian, what was life like before you discovered these customer acquisition tactics that you are about to teach our audience today?Brian: Well, that would take me back to life in May 2010. That was when we launched Proofreading Pal, and life was much different back then than it is now. It was much more difficult, much more stressful. We launched Proofreading Pal, we had our proofreaders in place, but we were not getting orders. I would go to bed at night and it would be three or four days since we had our last order, and my biggest fear was, “Well maybe this business isn’t going to work out how I planned. Maybe there is just not room for me in the industry.”My other fear was: “What is going to happen with our proofreaders?” That is, “If we get a project, are our proofreaders still going to be around to do the project, or are they going to be burned out or tired of sitting around five or six days and only one project?” so that is kind of what life was back in May 2010.

Andrew: You have stats, I think, that you said for the first time you are willing to share publicly. Can you show those?

Brian: Yes, I will show those.

Andrew: This is for the first month that you were in business, and you also have the second and third month to give people an understanding of where life was, and there it is. I will let you take it from here.

Brian: This is May, when we launched, and you can see we go our very first order May 3rd. The second order did not come in until May 10th, and it is lots of days without orders, and to be honest, it does not get any better in month 2. This was June 2010–the same thing–lots of days without orders.

Andrew: I see a lot of zeros: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0. There is a 3 day that must have felt exciting, but it is surrounded by 1s and 0s and more 0s even than 1s, so this is where it was.

Brian: Then July.

Andrew: Here is the third month.

Brian: Yes, the same thing, and through tactics that I am going to show you today, this is where we are now, sixteen months later into the business. I am going to show you a chart here.

Andrew: All right, and again, this is the first time that you have shown this chart publicly like this, but in order to help the audience understand what is possible, you agreed to show it, and these numbers–this graph–looks way, way impressive.

Brian: Today, we are over 19 projects now, on the day, and this month estimated we are only about halfway into November, where we should go over 410 projects this month. It has been a lot of hard work, but we are here today because of the tactics we have implemented, so why don’t we jump into tactic number one?

Andrew: Sure. In fact, let me do a quick breakdown of what is coming up for the audience. You guys are going to see how to buy traffic from Google and other search engines. You are going to find out how to design your site for conversions. I am looking over to the right, because that is where my list is. You are going to see some basic on-site SEO. You are going to find out how to ensure your site has valid code and CSS file and why that is important to getting customers. You are going to find out how to optimize your site for speed. You are going to learn how to get links–a surefire way to get links.

It is going to cost you a little bit, but you are going to get links, and you are going to find out how to do that. You are going to find out how to create a blog that does not just tell people about your business, but actually gets you ranked high in Google search results. You are going to even discover a Craigslist method for getting you new customers. You are going to find out how to keep the conversion going after you finally get a customer, and you will do that by increasing the lifetime value of your customers and–I will leave this as a mystery tip–Brian is going to teach you how to move in with your customers, and I think that is really impactful.

We will save that for last, because I want anyone who the whole time sits like this with their arms crossed saying, “I know this; I know this; I know this,”–I want even that person at the end to say, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and I have a feeling that for most people including that person, there is a lot along the way that they are going to be able to pick up. As you said, Bryan, the first tactic has to do with buying ads. Why buying ads before all these other tactics? Why does that come first?

Brian: It is because you need to learn which keywords work, which keywords convert. You need to get your feet wet and making some changes to your website to help convert, and the quickest way to get that test running is to do Google Ads.

Andrew: OK.

Brian: People might say don’t do Google Ads, do search engine optimization. Well, it takes a long time to get your website optimized in Google for certain keywords. You spend a lot of time and money. You don’t get high on Google search engines and the natural results without spending money. The main reason you do paid search first is to find out which keywords work.

And so, we have a theory called triangulation method, and it’s a real quick easy way for you to get into Google advertising to start sending traffic to your website without breaking the bank account, and that’s what I’m going to show you how to do first here. We’re going to go into my Google AdWords account, the last 30 days.

Andrew: As a big picture overview of what’s coming up, you’re going to show them how to pick keywords. You’re going to show them how to write the ads based on those keywords, and then you’re going to explain where those ads need to link on your website. So, keywords, ads and landing page, and then we’ll get deeper into landing page later.

I do see it now up on my screen, the Google AdWords, and the audience sees it up on their screen. What’s the first thing that we do?

Brian: Well, first I don’t want people to get scared because they see these numbers. We were not spending this much 12 months ago. We’re increasing our budget every month because Google AdWords is working. So, don’t see these numbers here and think, oh, I can’t spend $5,000 a month on Google because that’s what we’re spending. We built it up into a successful campaign

The first thing is you want to separate out your content traffic from your search traffic. Create a separate campaign that’s only going to house your search traffic. Then what you want to do is you want to create ad groups, and what ad groups are is ad groups house keywords and ad groups house ads.

What triangulation method helps you do is pair key words up with specific ads, and so we have what I’ll be referring several times here as what’s called exact match ad groups which will have one to two keywords inside of them that are exact match keywords. Meaning the only time your ad shows up is if you type in that keyword exactly, and we have very specific ads for those keywords.

Another type of ad group I’m going to be talking about is called phrase match ad groups. Inside phase match ad groups we have phrase match keywords. What a phrase match keyword means is we’ll use the keyword proofreading service, for example. Someone might type in best proofreading service our AdWords show, or someone might type in college essay proofreading service or someone might type in proofreading service 24/7. It allows us to show up for all of those keywords from the same group, and then I’ll show you . . . The goal of the phrase match is to identify these keyword phrases that we might not have thought about and then move them, transition them into exact match ad groups so we can write a more specific ad.

Andrew: I see. So, earlier when you were talking about proofreading service as a phrase match, any additional keywords that users might type into Google in addition to those three words, proof reading service, any time they type in those three words plus others, you’ll show up if you picked phrase match.

The goal then is to see what they are typing in in addition to proofreading service and then isolate those. Maybe, they type in college proofreading service and you get a good response from that. You’ll isolate that phrase with the extra word, and then you’ll make it into an exact match where the ad only shows up when users type in that exact match. And that’s what we’re trying to do, find those keywords that are appropriate for exact match ad buys.

Brian: The whole reason we’re doing this boils down to what’s called CTR. What that stands for is your click through rate. Google does not make money in Google AdWords advertising unless ads are being clicked. And so, Google will favor ads that have a high click through rate because they’re making more money.

One of our competitors might be bidding two, three dollars more per click than you, but their ad gets clicked 50% less. Google is going to show your ad ahead of them, you’re going to get more clicks, and you’re going to pay less per click. That’s why it’s so important to use triangulation method to target keywords to be able to write specific ads because the bottom line is what it really does is it helps increase your CTR score. So what were going to look at is two ad groups right not. We’re going to look at editing service, which is in phrase match because it has the quotes around it.

Andrew: Quotes means phrase match and it’s a broader search, and the brackets means what?

Bryan: Brackets means exact match. So I’m going to first take you inside of editing service. The exact match editing service ad group. And so you see inside here we have editing services and editing service and that’s it. If they type editing service or editing services they show if they don’t they do not show.

Andrew: And the ad the show of course is the one that we see at the top of the screen which is 24-7 editing service 100% satisfaction guarantee the only way that that shows is up is if people type in only editing service.

Brian: So we know that, that’s the only key words that our ads will show up for there fore it lets us write a very specific ad. [??] I’ll go and do our ads here and you can see we have the word editing service in there. Because we want have the key words that they’re searching for as much as possible because Google will bold those keywords. And so we can edit here, in the headline of ad you definitely want to have [??] keyword. And I like to try to use an adjective with the keyword as much as possible.

Then down here you still want to try to include the keywords. But we like to use points of differentiation in here that our proof reading service might offer that our competitors don’t. One of the things that we offer that not all of our competitors do is the 100% satisfaction guarantee, so we put that in there. Another thing that we do, that not all of our competitors do is two editors on every document. And so we’ve got the word editor in there again. We’ve got the word editing service is there again, and then finally it’s the display URL.

Do not forget that you can do whatever you want with the display URL. And so a lot of people just type in their URL like that and leave it. Very important, go ahead and add in another keyword if you can possibly fit it in there. You might as well because it’s Google’s silver bullet. So that’s the art of writing ads and then write two ads and let them compete against each other and to find out which one is doing better. These ones are doing pretty similar, they’re 7, versus a 6.9%. So this is the nuts and bolts of a successful exact match ad group.

Andrew: I just want to emphasize this, because earlier we had an issue, we recorded this before. And when we recorded before you actually did a search for editing service and you showed how your competition’s not putting in the keywords into the ad. So you’ve got bold keyword, bold keyword, bold keyword, really standing out, and they don’t have anything and it looks like they’re just background to your ad.

Brian: I think we did essay proof reading.

Andrew: I think that’s one ad that you’re showing us.

Brian: So here’s our ad essay proofreading, bold, there you can clearly see it. You can clearly see proofreading in our domain is bold. You can see essay at the end of display URL. They even bolded proofreaders, even though it doesn’t match up 100% it’s still close enough, and then essay. Now look at this one down here. They have proofreading and services is all. I don’t see essay once. I think of all these ads are ad sticks out the most as far as how many times it’s bold. This one only has two bolds. This one over here has one bold, essay is all. So they’re doing a poor job.

Andrew: And because you’ve got an exact match you know the specific keywords that your searcher is looking for. And you can stick those keyword all over the place in the add where its appropriate. Could you just show us maybe one phrase match so that we can see how you would pick a keyword and make it, and move it up a level to the exact match.

Brian: So we’ll transition into phrase match. The downfall of exact match is, we’re here in our exact match editing service ad group. What if someone types in APA editing service? What if someone types in essay editing service, or resume editing service? We’re not going to show up for that keyword right now, because we’ve got exact match keywords in our exact match ad group. This is where phrase match comes into play, and so I’m going to go up here to our phrase match ad group right here – and remember, ad groups house keywords and ads. And we just put these quotes around for our own internal organization, to know that it’s the phrase match ad group.

So I’m going to go into there. Now in this ad group, we have the same two keywords, “editing services” and “editing service”, with the quotes around them, so they are phrase matched. This whole ad right here will show up for “fast editing service”, “best editing service”, “resume editing service”, “college student editing services” – it would show up for all of these different types of keywords. Which is great, but now what we want to do, is we want to look at these keywords.

Maybe there’s a key phrase that’s searched for quite often, and maybe there’s an opportunity to move that into an exact match ad group, with an exact match key word, with an ad that’s more directly written towards that exact key word. So I’ll show you how to go and find those keywords. Let’s go look at the last three months of data – 08, let it refresh here – so we’ve now got about 400 – let’s go back five months. So we’ve got 776 pieces of data to look at. So I click this little box that highlights these – oh I’m in the ads, I need to go into keywords.

Andrew: I see you’ve clicked the tab that says “Keywords”, and the reason you’re doing this is because you want to see the performance of your keywords. It’s going to take a moment to come up on my screen.

Brian: There we go. So I’ve got these two keywords here, and I click this little box to highlight them, and now I want to know what the exact phrases are. So I click the “see search terms”, and I click “selected”, and then – boom. So, “editing services for writers” has been clicked 159 times, VERY high CTR of 17.5, it’s got 9 transactions for me here, and I’m converting at 5.66% – that’s pretty darn good – and it’s costing me about $67 per transaction. Which a lot of people will think is high, but what we’re going to talk about later on in this episode is how maximizing lifetime value is where you can make this profitable. So I’ve targeted this. This is a keyword where I think, “You know what, I could probably do better if I wrote an ad more specific for it.”

Andrew: I see, so now what you would do, is you would pull that out, you would have a separate ad written just for writers – it would maybe say something like “editing services for writers” – and that way people who are typing that phrase into Google will see your phrase that looks like the perfect match with what they’ve just typed in, and they’ll be more likely to click.

Brian: Should I show them how to do that?

Andrew: Yeah, let’s take a look at how you do that.

Brian: Okay, so let’s just copy this from here – copy – and I’ll go up to my ad groups again, and I’ll create a new ad group.

Andrew: And you’re actually about to buy this ad, right, while we’re watching you?

Brian: Right. I put brackets around it, for our own internal organization, just so we know it’s an exact match – “editing service for writers.” For the top I might put, “Editing Service Writers.” So this can probably say the same two – I’ll change “proofreaders” to “editors” on every document, and then we’ll just put “writers.” And bam, we’ve got a more specific ad now that’s written for this keyword. Then down here, I add the keyword? And I put brackets around the keyword. This lets Google know this is exact match now. If it were phrase match, I’d put quotes – we’re going brackets – and see, it shows you right here, advanced.

Andrew: There it is. Let’s just pause for a second, and now people can see, under the keyword section it says, in brackets, “editing services for writers” and now you need to make your bid. And you know how much it’s worth to you; it’s obviously based on your experience.

Brian: Yeah. And then I’ll just hit “save ad group”. Now, let’s see, it’s Editing Services Provider. It’s a new ad group in my campaign, and the ad is pending review. So, that’s triangulation method in a nutshell. And once you get use to it, it’s a very, very successful tactic that most U.S. competitors aren’t doing. And it’s a good way for you to get your feet wet in Google, and start driving traffic to your website, to find out which key words are converting, and then we can move into search engine optimization.

Andrew: Ok, so one of the key phrases that you have is resume proofreader service. People seem to be typing that into Google. You have an ad with that phrase. What do people see when they end up, when they type that and then click your ad?

Brian: Ok, so you can see here, we’re moving into conversion, right?

Andrew: Yeah. So now we’re going to…One of the things you want us to understand is buy ads from the beginning, your telling people. It’s a good way for you to get consistent, dependable traffic. It’s also a good way for you to learn what key words work for you. But you also say the next step is to create a page that is designed for conversions. Not for beauty, not for personal satisfaction, that you feel proud of the design. It has to have conversion in mind. So let’s take a look at what a conversion based landing page for you looks like.

Brian: OK. So this is our landing page that’s been optimized for the key words Benzenite [SP] Proofreading Services. The very first component that I feel is important for conversion is special proof, it’s also known as testimonials. You can see at the very top of the website we have a testimonial. Another way to provide social proof is the Facebook Like link, and also show the number of people that Like. Now, you can control this. If I didn’t want to show this number, I can turn it off.

Once we went over 100 people who liked our Facebook page, I decided to have it show the number. Those two things are important. Another thing that is important, is highlight things that you feel are important to your customer, and might make you a point of differentiation from your other competitors. One thing that we know, is that a lot of our competitors don’t accept and proof read documents 24/7 [??]. We put that up there real big [??] so customers know [??]

Andrew: Sorry, the connection was choppy there for a moment. So, what you’re saying is that a lot of your competitors don’t accept documents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You do. That’s important to a segment of your customers. They want to know that they can submit a document overnight, because they happen to finish it at one in the morning, and that there’s someone there to pick it up. And that’s why you highlight that on the page. You also highlight to the right of that a phone number. Does that get used?

Brian: Yeah. We get calls all the time. [??] We’re open from 8AM to 10PM every single day [??] Christmas, Thanksgiving. You name it, we will be here to answer your phone calls. That’s another point of differentiation [??] customers. Our other competitors don’t offer [??], a lot of them don’t [??].

Andrew: Sorry, I think we’re a little choppy because that second tab for Google campaign management seems to be taking up a lot of bandwidth. So, if you turn that off, we’ll probably end up getting more bandwidth for this connection. That’s the ad word campaign.

Brian: [??] better now?

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, there we go, much better.

Brian: Better now? OK.

Andrew: So, now we can go back to your page, and you’ll show us what else is going on, on here.

Brian: OK. So, another way to increase conversion is if you have really good customer service that’s available, advertise it. Let the customer know. Why would you hide your 800 number down at the bottom of your website, when that’s definitely something that makes people feel comfortable, that they know they can call? Same if it’s live help. Just makes your website seem more live, it’s actually a real chat. It’s a service that you can get for free. It’s from Comm100.com. That’s C-O-M-M-100.com. And the way we set it up is when we’re logged in [??] images here. I’m going to go away, here’s my little, here’s our chat right here.

Andrew: Let’s give it a moment to come up.

Brian: This is the chat.

Andrew: What you’re going to show us is the chat window that you see when peopling…that tells you where people are on your website through your funnel and enables you to chat with them. And you can pop up a chat window for them if you want to start a conversation with them, but you don’t do that. Or you can wait for them to chat with you. And there’s the Comm100, C-O-M-M-100. A free application?

Brian: Free application. And then, the way we set it up, if I go away on here, this little window just disappears. I’m refreshing here. This chat button will go away.

Andrew: Okay. I see.

Brian: So that’s another way. It makes your website feel more alive which increases the chance someone might order from you, especially in our business, and it lets them ask a question if they have one. Other items that are important are trust logos. We’ve got McAfee Secure. For us it’s $800 a year. It lets people that our website is secure. It scans our website every couple of days, sends us a notification if there’s any security loopholes that we need to shore up. 100% satisfaction guarantee – very important. We stand by it. It makes the customer feel that you’re confident you can do a good job.

We also have some corporate customers here that we kind of rotate through that I need to add to our list because we don’t have very many. This lets people know we accept credit card, we accept debit card, and then GoDaddy SSL certificate. We go off the extended validation for our SSL certificate. Reason being is because when you start a checkout process it just adds this little green thing up at the top here. It’s just a little thing. We like it. It’s a little more visually appealing. The cheaper SSLs won’t do that.

Andrew: Let’s give that a moment to come up on the screen. What you’re saying is that on people’s URL bar, on that address bar, there’s a big green note that says that this site is safe and that adds a sense of security to people. I can’t believe how when we test, and we’ve done A/B tests with these shields, how much it increases conversions. I would think that at some point people would say I’ve seen these logos all over the internet. I get it. The internet is safe. I don’t need this security anymore. But even with my audience, a sophisticated audience, seeing a shield increases conversions. I remember asking Ann Holland who runs a website called which test one about why do people, when you run A/B tests, why do they trust those logos? Why are they more likely to buy with them and she said, “Andrew, people don’t even think about it. They just see it and then they feel safe and they move on. Most people aren’t spending as much time analyzing our websites as we are and that’s why it just works. It quickly gives them a sense of security.”

While I talked I now see the Proofreading Pal LLC right up there in green on top and that’s why you have that certificate there. How about two other areas of this landing page that you want to point out to the audience so that they can learn from that?

Brian: Sales copy is important. We’re still trying to master it. We have room for improvement but your copy needs to sell. We like to highlight our points of differentiation. There are two proofreaders for every document, one of the very few proofreading services that does that, so we always try to talk about that. Satisfaction guarantee. And then finally we have a video here. It’s a little animated video. It’s about 35 seconds with voice over and it basically just takes them through the just of what our service offers. So you combine all those things together and make it easy for them to buy your product or start the checkout process. Across the top, you can see it’s real easy – start now, start now, start now.

Andrew: I see. Sorry, again the connection was going a little funky but you were saying make it easy for them to buy and right at the very top of your screen you’re showing five different ways for people to buy.

Also, we’ll talk about the title tags and H1 tags, but the heading here on this section is superior resume proofreading and this is what people would see if they were looking for resume proofreading. You’re taking them to a page that continues the conversation they started with you when they typed in a search on Google. They type that search, resume proofreading, they see the ad that you’ve written that includes the word resume proofreading and they come to this page where that phrase continues and they see that what they started on Google they can complete on your website with all those start now buttons. They pick the option that they want.

I’m sorry for recapping so much but every time there’s even a little bit of a lag I want to make sure that the audience gets to pick up on all of it. Is there anything else on here or is it time to move on to the next step?

Brian: I think it’s time to move on.

Andrew: Okay. Can you close this tab too and that way hopefully we’ll have a little more bandwidth still for the conversation?

Brian: Yeah, let me just log out of my chat. The next tactic, so now you’re getting traffic to your site, you’ve learned some things, and you’ve set your site up to convert better. Now you know some keywords that might be working for you. Now it’s time to dabble in search engine optimization. The first thing that you need to do is you have to have the foundation down first. It’s just like search engine optimization is a very large algorithm. The foundation though, if you get that down first it makes all the other little add ons much more successful.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to show you a page on our website that does fairly well for search engine optimization. It’s the keyword resume proofreading service.

Andrew: And when people type that in, let’s see where you show up.

Brian: First and second.

Andrew: First and second results. How long have you been in business?

Brian: We’ve been in business for about 16 or 17 months.

Andrew: Okay. So we’re not talking about a business that’s been around for five years and has had a chance to work at being at the top. We’re talking about a new business with few changes to the site have helped you get this high. All right, so what do we do? How do we do that?

Brian: These are some of the basic items that are the most important – you have to have these. Your title tag, which is in the upper left hand corner. Resume proofreading services is our title tag. Then the next thing is your meta description and your meta keywords. This is in the code. Your meta description needs to also contain the keyword that you’re optimizing for. Your meta description needs to be written in a way that contains that keyword but also is kind of attractive because typically that’s what’s going to show up in the Google results, what you have in the meta description.

So if you go back to our Google result here, our premium resume proofreading service is the best way to guarantee your…

Andrew: And that’s what’s in your meta description and that’s where Google pulled that?

Brian: Correct. The final thing is the meta keywords and this is in the code too. Put the keywords that you’re going for in the meta keywords. Now the key is don’t put too many keywords in there. You want to be very specific of what you’re going for. You can’t dilute it. So we’re doing resume proofreading services and that’s it. If we added resume proofreading services and then also essay proofreading services to this page and tried to optimize for both, we probably wouldn’t rank in the top ten for either. So you want to be very specific. So those are the very first things.

Then you see right here, superior resume proofreading. This is actually inside of an H1 tag which is in the code. H1 tag is basically your header tag. That’s how Google sees it. A lot of sites don’t even have an H1 tag. It’s very important to have the H1 tag at the top and to also have the keyword inside that H1 tag.

Andrew: Okay.

Brian: Then your text needs to have sprinkled in the keywords. In this case resume proofreading service – your text should have the word resume proofreading and services in the copy of the page. So those are the basics of what many will refer to as on page optimization.

Now we go a step further. I’m going to show you a few other things that are also important that most of your competitors probably won’t be doing. Do you want me to just jump into that, Andrew?

Andrew: Yes. So now we’re talking about the next section of the conversation here.

Brian: What we’re talking about now is the architecture of your code. Google will reward you very slightly for having what’s called strict XHTML valid code and also making sure that your CSS file validates. We like to validate with the W3C website. I’ve got the buttons down here to show just to automatically do it but if I click this it’s going to validate this page with the W3C. You can see this document was successfully checked as SHTML 1.0 strict no errors. Now, what we’re going to do just for fun is we’re going to see how Andrew’s site does, and we’re going to validate his site. Here’s what’s really nice about this is: so, he has some errors. He has actually 37 errors. It’ll show you all of the errors, what line, what column they’re on. So, if Andrew wants, he can have his web developer go through, and they can get these errors cleaned up.

Andrew: Right.

Brian: They’re just minor coding errors that W3C doesn’t like. Another benefit of getting these cleaned up is chances that your website will look normal across all browsers increases dramatically. So, that’s another perk of making sure your website validates. Andrew: And will the course include . . .

Brian: The other thing is the CSS file . . .

Andrew: The course tool kit will include, of course, links to these two validators, the one that you just did right now. There’s also a CSS file validator. We’ll include a link so that people can check their websites.

Brian: So, my CSS file validates, too. All you do is put your CSS file in there, and it’ll validate it. That’s an important thing, and it will give you a slight SEO advantage. Now, another thing that Matt Cutts. That’s his name, right, Matt Cutts?

Andrew: Yep. There it is.

Brian: He’s the blogger for Google. He’s the blogger for SEO. I think it was a year ago they mentioned that site speed is going to become a factor in Google’s algorithm for how they decide to rank you naturally. And so, it’s important to try to optimize your site to load quickly.

There’s a tool, and I’m going to take you in our web master tools. It’s showing that we’re doing slow back in September. I don’t know why because our site has been optimized for speed, so just ignore these.

Andrew: If there’s a blip, you’d jump in there, and the idea is that you want us to come here to Google.com/webmaster/tools – I think most people in our audience are familiar with it, but you’re saying, use it; be more than just familiar with it and check out your site speed. Once we’ve checked out our site speed, what about that install page speed Firefox button? What do we do with that?

Brian: OK. So, Google recommends this. It’s a tool that you can install with Firefox. It’s called Page Speed, and you can run it, and you can analyze any page on your website and it’ll show you how you’re doing and also things that you can improve on. And so, we’ve actually got this installed, and I’m going to run it on our home page.

Firebug, open Firebug. I’m going to refresh analysis. Our home page, we’re ranking 95 out of 100. We typically want all of our pages ranking over 90, but the nice thing, all these little arrows, it’ll give you advice on what you need to improve. So, optimize images. If I put this arrow, optimizing the following images could reduce their size by 13%, and it shows the images. Unfortunately, these are images that are hosted on other websites so we can’t optimize them. The cool thing about it though is it actually provides you the optimized version, and then it’s real easy to replace things with the optimized versions.

Andrew: I see.

Brian: Let’s just go see Mixergy real quick. Oh no. I hate to pick on you. Let’s skip this.

Andrew: That page, by the way, has been doing really well for us, that welcome mat.

Brian: So, web developer Firebug, open Firebug, analyze. Andrew is at 82, not bad.

Andrew: Not too bad.

Brian: There’s room for improvement though.

Andrew: All right.

Brian: It’s got the red ones. Andrew would obviously look at first, then the yellows and so forth. So, a great tool to help you find ways to improve your site.

All of those things we talked about, on page optimization, validating your code and then the speed optimization, I like to bundle them all as part of your foundation. It’s not going to get you to the top necessarily. It’s almost, a good analogy is a football team. If a football team is really good on the offensive and defensive lines, they’re typically a good team and if they can piece together some other parts, a good wide-receiver, maybe a good quarterback or a good kicker, they can really become an excellent football team and that’s where, what I’m going to talk about now is link-building.

Andrew: OK. So we’ve built up, we’ve SEO’d our site. It’s time to get some links to help drive it further up. Can you turn off the Mixergy page? Partially because I’m embarrassed that we didn’t do so well on those tests, but also I want to make sure to save as much bandwidth for you as possible. Actually the Mixergy page isn’t a bandwidth, it’s a suck.

Brian: OK.

Andrew Warner: But the more resources, the better. All right. So, yes, what do we do to get some links?

Brian: OK. Well, the reason you need links is because Google sees them as votes for your website. So let’s say you and a competitor are going after the same keyword, then all those things that I’ve just talked about, the foundation so to speak, you guys are pretty much equal on that. Google is then going to look at who has more links, who has better links, and that’s going to be their next deciding factor as to who ranks higher.

So a good quick way to start getting links and to do it relatively inexpensively is, the service that I like to use is called “iNet Zeal” and it’s a directory submission service. They’re going to submit you to multiple directories and when Google spiders those directories it will show as another inbound link for your site. Now I’m going to show you kind of a quick way to get going with this. If you go to the website, click “directory submission”, go down to the regular service. Let’s do 500. $70 will get you into 500 directories. They’re white hat and SEO-friendly directories.

Andrew: And it’ll get you submissions to 500. What percentage of those submissions will end up leading to links to your site?

Brian: Typically what I’ve found, and I’ve done this maybe 15, 20 times, is maybe about 80%.

Andrew: OK. So that every 100 that I buy, I end up with 80 links, which is not bad.

Brian: And then you can put in your root level domain. Unfortunately, you can only put in one URL, put in some key words that you want to go for and then the descriptions for each one. So I’ll do one, let’s say I want to optimize for . . .

Andrew: . . . resume proofreader.

Brian: Resume proofreader. And then down here I put “proofreading pal, specializes in resume proofreading, 24-7”. And that’s all I put. So it’s a good way to get links coming into your site and that’s iNet Zeal. Another way to get links is to make sure that you have a Facebook account with a link pointing to your site or a Facebook page for your business, YouTube, Twitter . . . what are some other main ones? Yelp and Foursquare and all of those social media sites, make sure you have a page because that’s a free, easy way to get an inbound link.

Doing online interviews like I’m doing here with Andrew is a great way to get a link. Anytime your local newspaper, a local website, a blogger, your TV news station, anytime they do an article on you, a lot of times those things are getting put on their website now. Make sure, go and look and make sure they gave you an inbound link and link to your website because it’s very valuable. So those are some other ways to get inbound links and all of those things encompass together make up a very good SEO strategy.

Andrew: By the way, you did something that was really impressive. When you got mentioned by a local newspaper that didn’t link to you, you just called them up and said, “Hey, can you please include a link? It’s valuable.” My wife was recently in The Guardian in England. They mentioned her. They gave links to the other two people in the article but they didn’t give one to her. She didn’t even think, “Hey, you know what? I should make a phone call here and have them link over to my site so that I can start ranking because of their link.” Call them up, get the link.

If Mixergy mentions, well, maybe not Mixergy, don’t start calling me guys, you of course, as the leader need to get the link, but I don’t want people who we happen to mention to all start requesting links. Actually, I take that last part back. Every single site that we talk about here, we will include a link to within the course notes, so that if you don’t remember whether it was iNet Zeal or ZealNetI or whatever, it’ll be there so you can just go a click on it and get it.

All right. So now that’s getting links to the site. You want to start talking about what we can do about long-tail keyword traffic? What do you do?

Brian: Okay. We like to go after long tail keyword traffic with a blog.

Andrew: Mm-hmm?

Brian: And, so you know the main keywords you want to go after. There are keywords that you might not ever think of, and in the industry they’re called long tail keywords. So what we like to do is create a blog, and write articles about anything and everything pertaining to the products and services we offer. Hopefully, these articles will have enough obscure keywords that might match up with the obscure long tail keyword phrases being searched for, that will rank.

We have an advantage, too, because our proofreaders write our blog posts. Most of them are very good writers, and they know what to write about, and they know what the customer’s looking for. One of our blog posts was about how to choose a proofreading service. Not a very high-volume keyword, but probably searched for a couple times a day.

Andrew: What was the phrase?

Brian: “How to choose a proofreading service.”

Andrew: Could you type that in, and let’s see where it comes up? …”How to choose a proofreading service.”

Brian: And again, we just launched our blog six weeks ago. So we’re third here, for this.

Andrew: There it is.

Brian: What about “rush proofreading service”?

Andrew: And by the way, that’s third under eBay and Harvard, so we’re in good company.

Brian: And then, “rush proofreading service”, we’re second. So I’ll take you into our blog now. Same principles apply as far as SEO. We have a title tag. We have a description tag. We have meta-keywords. We have an H1 tag right here. Very keyword-rich content. A lot of people – and I know, Andrew, we’ve discussed this – their blog doesn’t even look like it integrates with their website very well. What was the word you used? It looks like a separate entity.

Andrew: It is! And I can’t even figure out how to go from their blog back to the website that they talked about, because the headline on their blog, or the logo on their blog – if I click it, it just takes me back to the home page of their blog instead of their site’s home page or the product that I’m trying to buy.

Brian: And so, what I recommend for your blog is to try to keep it within the same architecture of your normal site, and realize that a lot of these people coming to your blog might be looking for tips or how-tos. They weren’t necessarily in the market for proofreading, or whatever service you offer. They’re a little more of a cold visitor, so it’s important that you still have all of these conversion mechanisms. In fact we need social proof right now on our blog – I see we don’t have that – but the video is still here, the trust logos, things like that.

Andrew: Right down to the “Start Now” button that enables them to just go and step through the process to buy.

Brian: Yep. And so, that’s a benefit of a blog. Another benefit is that people can share these articles on their Twitter, their Facebook; they can e-mail them to a friend. And then finally, we like the commenting.

We’ve used Discuss Commenting – I know that you use that on Mixergy, Andrew – and the reason I like it is because it allows a customer to have their own Discuss account with their picture. It also allows the customer, if they’ve set Discuss up right in their settings, to show their comments on their Facebook wall or their Twitter. I don’t do that with my Discuss account, but if someone wants to comment on my blog post and also share it on their Twitter, more power to t them.

Andrew: All right. So, you talked to me earlier about how one of the ways that you figure out what to blog about is by going through that process that you showed us right at the early part of this course, which is going through the AdWords that already work for you and seeing, “All right, can I write a blog post on this topic, so that anyone who’s searching for it can potentially see my blog post and become a customer.”

The other way you told us that you find blog topics is by going through your Google Analytics and seeing, “What are people searching for and ending up on my site? Maybe I could create a post specifically on that topic, so that when they search they come to something that directly matches what they’re looking for.” And maybe you can start ranking higher. So that’s the way that you look at a blog, whereas most people might think, “Well, what do I feel like today? What’s going on in our company today? What do we want to announce?” No. You’re thinking, “What’s the customer thinking? What’s the customer searching for?

How do I make that process from that search to making a purchase goes smooth and as easy as possible. Yeah, all right. So let’s turn off that tab, also. We’ll come back, actually I guess we should leave that tab up because it’s your site. I want one tab at least with your site so we can tell people where to come back in the future. And now, the next area of conversation is Craigslist. What have you done with Craigslist? If you turned off that tab we’ll come back to it.

Brian: Well, Craigslist … we were out sourcing Craigslist ad posting to a service in India. And they would post two times a day on the twenty most populated cities in the United States. And so, I’ve got a example here of, now Craigslist is kind of tightened up their security measures and so now you have to have phone verified accounts. And so we’re trying to find a way around that right now because it was successful, it was generating fifty to seventy-five visits a day. So, here’s Chicago Craigslist, services offered, writing and editing translation is the category. And so they would go into this category on the twenty most populated cities and they would post an ad twice a day. An ad that would something like this image ad.

Andrew: OK.

Brian: And there’s people out there, believe it or not, that need proof reading and they think Craigslist is the place their going to find it. And so we had success with it, it’s relatively inexpensive way to drive traffic. And also you are technically providing another inbound link to your web site every time you post an ad in Craigslist.

Andrew: OK. And instead of doing it yourself you hired a company in India to go through twice a day and post each one of those cities. And the general idea, if not the specific idea, the general idea still works. OK. So, now we’ve gone through all the trouble of getting a customer. They have bought from us. Most people at that point would say, “Yay, I need to go and get more.”

In our conversations one of the things I admire about you is you say, “No, I worked this hard to get the customer, now it is time for me to build that relationship with them.” Because it’s easier to get more business from the same customer than to go hunt down a stranger and convince them that I’m a good guy and he needs to be buying from me. And you automated a lot of the process that many people in the audience are going to have to do by hand and maybe find an automation system for themselves to do. But, I don’t want them, of course, to use your system because it’s proprietary but I do want them to understand what you do so they can find their own method of doing this and I appreciate you opening up the doors and showing us behind the scenes how you do this. So, this is your customer relationship management software, you built it yourself. When you log in, what do you see?

Brian: OK. I’ll go ahead and log in here. And it’s basically just free forming things that we keep track of inside of here. The first being, and I’ll start talking about it before the page comes up is, we have projects waiting for follow up call. Being it as we are an online business there’s not a large opportunity to have interaction with our customer. And we really wanted to be able to do that. And so, every time a customer orders from us and their documents completed, we give them a courtesy call. And we use that courtesy call to let them know their document’s ready. To let them know, and I’ve got the script, I’ll bring the script up here.

Andrew: OK. And even the script you’ve very generously agreed to let people in the audience have and of course if you are not in the proof reading business, in fact if you are in the proof reading business you don’t want to use the exact script. What you want to get though is and understanding of what Brian does after someone buys from him. And what Brian does is he calls them up and take us through this. What is this?

Brian: So we’ve got a script for, if it a repeat customer these long ones are if it’s voice mail. And then we got a script if it’s a new customer. And our CRM system the customers name will show in green if it’s a new customer, we want to treat them a little bit differently. Let’s say the customer answers, basically these things highlighted in blue are the things that we really want to make sure we cover. So, let’s say I called Andrew after his project was ready I would say, “This is Brian. I’m calling with Proofreading Pal, this is just a courtesy call to let you know or to ensure that you received your most recent order.”

If he says, you know, yeah I got it or I didn’t get it. Well, then we move on. I just want to let you know that we also have an order status link which is located in the upper left hand corner of our website. You can always download your document there and your document will be available there for up to seven days. Then the final things we really want to stress is again to let them know that we’re open daily 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Finally, we want to say the word proofreading pal one more time and thank them before we get off the phone.

So education is one thing that we try to accomplish in our courtesy call. Then you see down here we have some questions that depending on how the conversation was going we might find out how they found out about us. We might ask them for feedback or if we can use that on our testimonial page if they said something nice about us and also a lot of times questions will pop up – how does track changes work which is a feature in Microsoft Word and we can then take care of that situation for them right then and there so they can move on to working on their documents.

Andrew: I see. Right a lot of people don’t understand that they can track changes in Word. One of the reasons why you have that question is that we tend to think that Analytics is going to tell us everything about our users but you made a point in our conversation before this that if someone watches this course and goes to proofreadingpal.com and buys from you, there’s no analytics in the world that’s going to say he heard this conversation on his MP3 player while running or watched it on his iPad in the living room and then the next day typed in proofreadingpal.com and bought. The way that you’re going to find that out is when you make a phone call to them and say thank you, you should know this, you should be aware of that, this will help you next time, and by the way, how did you find out about us – that’s the way you find out where they connected with you first.

Brian: The courtesy call provides that value. The other thing that it does is that if we didn’t do it at all, is our brand gets a little bigger spot in their brain from this courtesy call which increases the chance that they’ll remember us next time or that we’ll popup in a conversation because how many customers…does Zappos call you after you get your shoe order? I don’t know. Maybe they do; maybe they don’t. But it’s almost like it’s so different that it’s the chance that we might come up in conversation just out at the bar or in class or at a conference I think increases.

So the next aspect of our custom built CRM system you’ll see here is customers needing gift package. This is what Andrew referred to at the very beginning of the show. We call it moving in with your customer and so if I clicked in here it would show me we have 14 customers right now who need a gift package from us because they’ve either ordered from us two times or their original order was over $75.

What we’ve decided to do for our gift packages is pretty darn simple. We’ve got two, and I’ll try to hold them up here so you can see, two branded proofreading pal ink pens. They get two of those. They get a personalized thank you note from me which I sign. By the way, if I sign like 100 of these, I don’t write any more because I’m always on the keyboard, my hand is always killing. Then finally a proofreading pal chip clip magnet.

The reason I use this is because at my house we put these on our fridge and then they hold pictures up on the refrigerator. Some people probably actually use them for chip clip magnets, but I was thinking college dorm rooms, there’s one thing that is always in a college dorm room and it’s a mini fridge and so I was thinking they’ll stick this on their mini fridge, friends are in there playing video games, and somebody asks what is proofreading pal, and boom – we are living in their dorm room and now they’re talking about us. So that’s another piece of our CRM puzzle. Finally, you see here we’ve got Facebook searches.

Andrew: There is something too – just being a physical presence in your customers’ lives, whether you do a pen or something else. When you are a physical presence in your customers life you stand out in a way that you wouldn’t if you were just another website. I’ve actually referred over and over transcription service on Mixergy and they still can’t remember the name. They will email me over and over asking me who is that transcription service that you use. Who is the transcription service you use? I used them two months ago, I can’t remember their names, and I can’t find them in my inbox.

When you go offline, make a connection maybe that day you can’t, maybe not that you can’t that’s way different from the kind of connection that you make online ordinarily. I understand the value of that. Yes, this I like especially like too, that the way that you don’t just connect with them by sending them a gift pack, just make a phone call. You really are bonding with people as a proofreading company, to bond with people this way is just unusual. So talk to me about that last one? Or that second to last one and then we’ll go to the last one too.

Brian: So Facebook, every single customer that we get, we try to find them on Facebook through my personal Facebook account. And we send them a message, we thank them for using our service and I want to be friends with every single one of my [??] proofreading customers. And we send them that friend request, this is basically a custom built application that let’s us do this efficiently, and we’re finding about 80% of our customers on Facebook and then, of that 80% about 50% will accept my friendship. And then they can kind of follow me.

I like to follow Gary Vaynerchuk, he does a really good job. So our customers can see what I’m up to, if I’m up tailgating at a Hawkeye football game, or on a trip. Builds that extra relationship with them, and I can also see what they’re up to. One of the things I have to [??] be a little bit more careful about is what I say and do on Facebook, that’s one of the downfalls. I wouldn’t recommend doing it if you’re going to be very, very pro a certain political party or anything like that. We get our customers commenting on some of my wall posts, and then the only way to physically invite people to like your business Facebook page is to suggest to friends. And so every month or two I’ll go through and all the friends that I added that I haven’t suggested like Proof Reading [??] page, I’ll do that. And so that’s another benefit of the Facebook search.

Andrew: All right, final point here is the quick quote section. I see that there is a zero on that. How does somebody end up in the quick quote section and what do you do with them?

Brian: Our website has a way for customers to generate real time quick quotes. It gets emailed to them and if they do not become a customer within I think we’ve got it set at three hours they filter into this quick quote field. And then I can click on this, open it up, see their name, look at their document, see the word count and then I can email them or call them and find out. Notice you did a quick quote, we’re curious what’s the reason you didn’t order and we can really glean a lot of information from those phone calls and emails. Often times it’s related on price and if the documents something I think we would like to do, I can then throw them a coupon code and try to convert them that way.

Andrew: I love that you do that, most people I think, me included, don’t know how to bring back potential customers who’ve gone through the process, but haven’t pulled the trigger and made the purchase. So they give you their phone number, they’ve gone through the process you at the very least can call them up and find out what happened and maybe do a little something to tip them over the age and get them to buy. Alright, this has been incredibly helpful.

You’ve given so much, let’s bring Proofreadingpal.com up, but while I say this. I’ll say thank you to you. I want people to see it because I want people to see that customer service tab at the very far right of the page. There’s a way to contact Brian, and I hope, I always say this. If you got anything out of this, don’t just be a passive viewer in life, say thank you. When you say thank you, it goes a long way to building a relationship. Maybe not one that you want to call on today. But maybe five years from now, maybe a year from now. Maybe six months from now, you guys will end up working together.

Maybe by contacting Brian, frankly I actually don’t know what happens. It’s so odd, I had someone in the audience say Andrew, you told me to say thank you to a guests, I said thank you to people even though I’m in China. Nobody can even call me because our hours are upside down from yours. But one of your guests happened to be in China. He saw that I’m in China, he took me out for lunch. We had this incredible conversation. I introduced him to China, he introduced me to business in a way that I could have never had gotten even from Mixergy courses. So I always say find a way to connect with a guest and say thank you. And now you know how to do it.

One more thing. We’ve given you so much, I know sometimes at the end of these courses you feel a little overwhelmed, don’t. Look for just one thing that you can do after this course. Do it, then let me know about it. I’m always looking to hear from you about what your successes are with what you’ve learned in these courses and also what your challenges are. Send them to me and I promise if you want privacy, you don’t want me to reveal it to anyone. I’m proud to say that I can keep your secret. But I am looking forward to hearing from you about your wins and your challenges. Brian, thank you for doing this course. I’ll be the first person to and hopefully many, many others will do the same thing. Thanks for teaching us.

Brian: Thanks, Andrew, it’s been a pleasure.

Andrew: Thank you, thanks for teaching us.

Master Class: Customer Acquisition
Taught by Brian Kaldenberg of ProofreadingPal

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Master Class:
Customer Acquisition

Length:65:00 minutes


About the course leader

Brian Kaldenberg, President and founder of Proofreading Pal, an online proofreading and editing service.

Master Class Toolbox

Google AdWords

Comm100

GoDaddy

Firebug

iNetZeal

Disqus

Craigslist

ProofreadingPal Call Scripts

CSS Validator  Example 1  Example 2

Page Speed Plugin

INSTALL PAGE for Firefox and Chrome

Transcript

Download the transcript here

Andrew: This course will give you proven customer acquisition tactics. It is led by Brian Kaldenberg. He is the president and founder of Proofreading Pal, the site you see on your screen right now, an online proofreading and editing service. I am Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, where proven founders, like Brian, teach. Brian, what was life like before you discovered these customer acquisition tactics that you are about to teach our audience today?Brian: Well, that would take me back to life in May 2010. That was when we launched Proofreading Pal, and life was much different back then than it is now. It was much more difficult, much more stressful. We launched Proofreading Pal, we had our proofreaders in place, but we were not getting orders. I would go to bed at night and it would be three or four days since we had our last order, and my biggest fear was, “Well maybe this business isn’t going to work out how I planned. Maybe there is just not room for me in the industry.”My other fear was: “What is going to happen with our proofreaders?” That is, “If we get a project, are our proofreaders still going to be around to do the project, or are they going to be burned out or tired of sitting around five or six days and only one project?” so that is kind of what life was back in May 2010.Andrew: You have stats, I think, that you said for the first time you are willing to share publicly. Can you show those?

Brian: Yes, I will show those.

Andrew: This is for the first month that you were in business, and you also have the second and third month to give people an understanding of where life was, and there it is. I will let you take it from here.

Brian: This is May, when we launched, and you can see we go our very first order May 3rd. The second order did not come in until May 10th, and it is lots of days without orders, and to be honest, it does not get any better in month 2. This was June 2010–the same thing–lots of days without orders.

Andrew: I see a lot of zeros: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0. There is a 3 day that must have felt exciting, but it is surrounded by 1s and 0s and more 0s even than 1s, so this is where it was.

Brian: Then July.

Andrew: Here is the third month.

Brian: Yes, the same thing, and through tactics that I am going to show you today, this is where we are now, sixteen months later into the business. I am going to show you a chart here.

Andrew: All right, and again, this is the first time that you have shown this chart publicly like this, but in order to help the audience understand what is possible, you agreed to show it, and these numbers–this graph–looks way, way impressive.

Brian: Today, we are over 19 projects now, on the day, and this month estimated we are only about halfway into November, where we should go over 410 projects this month. It has been a lot of hard work, but we are here today because of the tactics we have implemented, so why don’t we jump into tactic number one?

Andrew: Sure. In fact, let me do a quick breakdown of what is coming up for the audience. You guys are going to see how to buy traffic from Google and other search engines. You are going to find out how to design your site for conversions. I am looking over to the right, because that is where my list is. You are going to see some basic on-site SEO. You are going to find out how to ensure your site has valid code and CSS file and why that is important to getting customers. You are going to find out how to optimize your site for speed. You are going to learn how to get links–a surefire way to get links.

It is going to cost you a little bit, but you are going to get links, and you are going to find out how to do that. You are going to find out how to create a blog that does not just tell people about your business, but actually gets you ranked high in Google search results. You are going to even discover a Craigslist method for getting you new customers. You are going to find out how to keep the conversion going after you finally get a customer, and you will do that by increasing the lifetime value of your customers and–I will leave this as a mystery tip–Brian is going to teach you how to move in with your customers, and I think that is really impactful.

We will save that for last, because I want anyone who the whole time sits like this with their arms crossed saying, “I know this; I know this; I know this,”–I want even that person at the end to say, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and I have a feeling that for most people including that person, there is a lot along the way that they are going to be able to pick up. As you said, Bryan, the first tactic has to do with buying ads. Why buying ads before all these other tactics? Why does that come first?

Brian: It is because you need to learn which keywords work, which keywords convert. You need to get your feet wet and making some changes to your website to help convert, and the quickest way to get that test running is to do Google Ads.

Andrew: OK.

Brian: People might say don’t do Google Ads, do search engine optimization. Well, it takes a long time to get your website optimized in Google for certain keywords. You spend a lot of time and money. You don’t get high on Google search engines and the natural results without spending money. The main reason you do paid search first is to find out which keywords work.

And so, we have a theory called triangulation method, and it’s a real quick easy way for you to get into Google advertising to start sending traffic to your website without breaking the bank account, and that’s what I’m going to show you how to do first here. We’re going to go into my Google AdWords account, the last 30 days.

Andrew: As a big picture overview of what’s coming up, you’re going to show them how to pick keywords. You’re going to show them how to write the ads based on those keywords, and then you’re going to explain where those ads need to link on your website. So, keywords, ads and landing page, and then we’ll get deeper into landing page later.

I do see it now up on my screen, the Google AdWords, and the audience sees it up on their screen. What’s the first thing that we do?

Brian: Well, first I don’t want people to get scared because they see these numbers. We were not spending this much 12 months ago. We’re increasing our budget every month because Google AdWords is working. So, don’t see these numbers here and think, oh, I can’t spend $5,000 a month on Google because that’s what we’re spending. We built it up into a successful campaign

The first thing is you want to separate out your content traffic from your search traffic. Create a separate campaign that’s only going to house your search traffic. Then what you want to do is you want to create ad groups, and what ad groups are is ad groups house keywords and ad groups house ads.

What triangulation method helps you do is pair key words up with specific ads, and so we have what I’ll be referring several times here as what’s called exact match ad groups which will have one to two keywords inside of them that are exact match keywords. Meaning the only time your ad shows up is if you type in that keyword exactly, and we have very specific ads for those keywords.

Another type of ad group I’m going to be talking about is called phrase match ad groups. Inside phase match ad groups we have phrase match keywords. What a phrase match keyword means is we’ll use the keyword proofreading service, for example. Someone might type in best proofreading service our AdWords show, or someone might type in college essay proofreading service or someone might type in proofreading service 24/7. It allows us to show up for all of those keywords from the same group, and then I’ll show you . . . The goal of the phrase match is to identify these keyword phrases that we might not have thought about and then move them, transition them into exact match ad groups so we can write a more specific ad.

Andrew: I see. So, earlier when you were talking about proofreading service as a phrase match, any additional keywords that users might type into Google in addition to those three words, proof reading service, any time they type in those three words plus others, you’ll show up if you picked phrase match.

The goal then is to see what they are typing in in addition to proofreading service and then isolate those. Maybe, they type in college proofreading service and you get a good response from that. You’ll isolate that phrase with the extra word, and then you’ll make it into an exact match where the ad only shows up when users type in that exact match. And that’s what we’re trying to do, find those keywords that are appropriate for exact match ad buys.

Brian: The whole reason we’re doing this boils down to what’s called CTR. What that stands for is your click through rate. Google does not make money in Google AdWords advertising unless ads are being clicked. And so, Google will favor ads that have a high click through rate because they’re making more money.

One of our competitors might be bidding two, three dollars more per click than you, but their ad gets clicked 50% less. Google is going to show your ad ahead of them, you’re going to get more clicks, and you’re going to pay less per click. That’s why it’s so important to use triangulation method to target keywords to be able to write specific ads because the bottom line is what it really does is it helps increase your CTR score. So what were going to look at is two ad groups right not. We’re going to look at editing service, which is in phrase match because it has the quotes around it.

Andrew: Quotes means phrase match and it’s a broader search, and the brackets means what?

Bryan: Brackets means exact match. So I’m going to first take you inside of editing service. The exact match editing service ad group. And so you see inside here we have editing services and editing service and that’s it. If they type editing service or editing services they show if they don’t they do not show.

Andrew: And the ad the show of course is the one that we see at the top of the screen which is 24-7 editing service 100% satisfaction guarantee the only way that that shows is up is if people type in only editing service.

Brian: So we know that, that’s the only key words that our ads will show up for there fore it lets us write a very specific ad. [??] I’ll go and do our ads here and you can see we have the word editing service in there. Because we want have the key words that they’re searching for as much as possible because Google will bold those keywords. And so we can edit here, in the headline of ad you definitely want to have [??] keyword. And I like to try to use an adjective with the keyword as much as possible.

Then down here you still want to try to include the keywords. But we like to use points of differentiation in here that our proof reading service might offer that our competitors don’t. One of the things that we offer that not all of our competitors do is the 100% satisfaction guarantee, so we put that in there. Another thing that we do, that not all of our competitors do is two editors on every document. And so we’ve got the word editor in there again. We’ve got the word editing service is there again, and then finally it’s the display URL.

Do not forget that you can do whatever you want with the display URL. And so a lot of people just type in their URL like that and leave it. Very important, go ahead and add in another keyword if you can possibly fit it in there. You might as well because it’s Google’s silver bullet. So that’s the art of writing ads and then write two ads and let them compete against each other and to find out which one is doing better. These ones are doing pretty similar, they’re 7, versus a 6.9%. So this is the nuts and bolts of a successful exact match ad group.

Andrew: I just want to emphasize this, because earlier we had an issue, we recorded this before. And when we recorded before you actually did a search for editing service and you showed how your competition’s not putting in the keywords into the ad. So you’ve got bold keyword, bold keyword, bold keyword, really standing out, and they don’t have anything and it looks like they’re just background to your ad.

Brian: I think we did essay proof reading.

Andrew: I think that’s one ad that you’re showing us.

Brian: So here’s our ad essay proofreading, bold, there you can clearly see it. You can clearly see proofreading in our domain is bold. You can see essay at the end of display URL. They even bolded proofreaders, even though it doesn’t match up 100% it’s still close enough, and then essay. Now look at this one down here. They have proofreading and services is all. I don’t see essay once. I think of all these ads are ad sticks out the most as far as how many times it’s bold. This one only has two bolds. This one over here has one bold, essay is all. So they’re doing a poor job.

Andrew: And because you’ve got an exact match you know the specific keywords that your searcher is looking for. And you can stick those keyword all over the place in the add where its appropriate. Could you just show us maybe one phrase match so that we can see how you would pick a keyword and make it, and move it up a level to the exact match.

Brian: So we’ll transition into phrase match. The downfall of exact match is, we’re here in our exact match editing service ad group. What if someone types in APA editing service? What if someone types in essay editing service, or resume editing service? We’re not going to show up for that keyword right now, because we’ve got exact match keywords in our exact match ad group. This is where phrase match comes into play, and so I’m going to go up here to our phrase match ad group right here – and remember, ad groups house keywords and ads. And we just put these quotes around for our own internal organization, to know that it’s the phrase match ad group.

So I’m going to go into there. Now in this ad group, we have the same two keywords, “editing services” and “editing service”, with the quotes around them, so they are phrase matched. This whole ad right here will show up for “fast editing service”, “best editing service”, “resume editing service”, “college student editing services” – it would show up for all of these different types of keywords. Which is great, but now what we want to do, is we want to look at these keywords.

Maybe there’s a key phrase that’s searched for quite often, and maybe there’s an opportunity to move that into an exact match ad group, with an exact match key word, with an ad that’s more directly written towards that exact key word. So I’ll show you how to go and find those keywords. Let’s go look at the last three months of data – 08, let it refresh here – so we’ve now got about 400 – let’s go back five months. So we’ve got 776 pieces of data to look at. So I click this little box that highlights these – oh I’m in the ads, I need to go into keywords.

Andrew: I see you’ve clicked the tab that says “Keywords”, and the reason you’re doing this is because you want to see the performance of your keywords. It’s going to take a moment to come up on my screen.

Brian: There we go. So I’ve got these two keywords here, and I click this little box to highlight them, and now I want to know what the exact phrases are. So I click the “see search terms”, and I click “selected”, and then – boom. So, “editing services for writers” has been clicked 159 times, VERY high CTR of 17.5, it’s got 9 transactions for me here, and I’m converting at 5.66% – that’s pretty darn good – and it’s costing me about $67 per transaction. Which a lot of people will think is high, but what we’re going to talk about later on in this episode is how maximizing lifetime value is where you can make this profitable. So I’ve targeted this. This is a keyword where I think, “You know what, I could probably do better if I wrote an ad more specific for it.”

Andrew: I see, so now what you would do, is you would pull that out, you would have a separate ad written just for writers – it would maybe say something like “editing services for writers” – and that way people who are typing that phrase into Google will see your phrase that looks like the perfect match with what they’ve just typed in, and they’ll be more likely to click.

Brian: Should I show them how to do that?

Andrew: Yeah, let’s take a look at how you do that.

Brian: Okay, so let’s just copy this from here – copy – and I’ll go up to my ad groups again, and I’ll create a new ad group.

Andrew: And you’re actually about to buy this ad, right, while we’re watching you?

Brian: Right. I put brackets around it, for our own internal organization, just so we know it’s an exact match – “editing service for writers.” For the top I might put, “Editing Service Writers.” So this can probably say the same two – I’ll change “proofreaders” to “editors” on every document, and then we’ll just put “writers.” And bam, we’ve got a more specific ad now that’s written for this keyword. Then down here, I add the keyword? And I put brackets around the keyword. This lets Google know this is exact match now. If it were phrase match, I’d put quotes – we’re going brackets – and see, it shows you right here, advanced.

Andrew: There it is. Let’s just pause for a second, and now people can see, under the keyword section it says, in brackets, “editing services for writers” and now you need to make your bid. And you know how much it’s worth to you; it’s obviously based on your experience.

Brian: Yeah. And then I’ll just hit “save ad group”. Now, let’s see, it’s Editing Services Provider. It’s a new ad group in my campaign, and the ad is pending review. So, that’s triangulation method in a nutshell. And once you get use to it, it’s a very, very successful tactic that most U.S. competitors aren’t doing. And it’s a good way for you to get your feet wet in Google, and start driving traffic to your website, to find out which key words are converting, and then we can move into search engine optimization.

Andrew: Ok, so one of the key phrases that you have is resume proofreader service. People seem to be typing that into Google. You have an ad with that phrase. What do people see when they end up, when they type that and then click your ad?

Brian: Ok, so you can see here, we’re moving into conversion, right?

Andrew: Yeah. So now we’re going to…One of the things you want us to understand is buy ads from the beginning, your telling people. It’s a good way for you to get consistent, dependable traffic. It’s also a good way for you to learn what key words work for you. But you also say the next step is to create a page that is designed for conversions. Not for beauty, not for personal satisfaction, that you feel proud of the design. It has to have conversion in mind. So let’s take a look at what a conversion based landing page for you looks like.

Brian: OK. So this is our landing page that’s been optimized for the key words Benzenite [SP] Proofreading Services. The very first component that I feel is important for conversion is special proof, it’s also known as testimonials. You can see at the very top of the website we have a testimonial. Another way to provide social proof is the Facebook Like link, and also show the number of people that Like. Now, you can control this. If I didn’t want to show this number, I can turn it off.

Once we went over 100 people who liked our Facebook page, I decided to have it show the number. Those two things are important. Another thing that is important, is highlight things that you feel are important to your customer, and might make you a point of differentiation from your other competitors. One thing that we know, is that a lot of our competitors don’t accept and proof read documents 24/7 [??]. We put that up there real big [??] so customers know [??]

Andrew: Sorry, the connection was choppy there for a moment. So, what you’re saying is that a lot of your competitors don’t accept documents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You do. That’s important to a segment of your customers. They want to know that they can submit a document overnight, because they happen to finish it at one in the morning, and that there’s someone there to pick it up. And that’s why you highlight that on the page. You also highlight to the right of that a phone number. Does that get used?

Brian: Yeah. We get calls all the time. [??] We’re open from 8AM to 10PM every single day [??] Christmas, Thanksgiving. You name it, we will be here to answer your phone calls. That’s another point of differentiation [??] customers. Our other competitors don’t offer [??], a lot of them don’t [??].

Andrew: Sorry, I think we’re a little choppy because that second tab for Google campaign management seems to be taking up a lot of bandwidth. So, if you turn that off, we’ll probably end up getting more bandwidth for this connection. That’s the ad word campaign.

Brian: [??] better now?

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, there we go, much better.

Brian: Better now? OK.

Andrew: So, now we can go back to your page, and you’ll show us what else is going on, on here.

Brian: OK. So, another way to increase conversion is if you have really good customer service that’s available, advertise it. Let the customer know. Why would you hide your 800 number down at the bottom of your website, when that’s definitely something that makes people feel comfortable, that they know they can call? Same if it’s live help. Just makes your website seem more live, it’s actually a real chat. It’s a service that you can get for free. It’s from Comm100.com. That’s C-O-M-M-100.com. And the way we set it up is when we’re logged in [??] images here. I’m going to go away, here’s my little, here’s our chat right here.

Andrew: Let’s give it a moment to come up.

Brian: This is the chat.

Andrew: What you’re going to show us is the chat window that you see when peopling…that tells you where people are on your website through your funnel and enables you to chat with them. And you can pop up a chat window for them if you want to start a conversation with them, but you don’t do that. Or you can wait for them to chat with you. And there’s the Comm100, C-O-M-M-100. A free application?

Brian: Free application. And then, the way we set it up, if I go away on here, this little window just disappears. I’m refreshing here. This chat button will go away.

Andrew: Okay. I see.

Brian: So that’s another way. It makes your website feel more alive which increases the chance someone might order from you, especially in our business, and it lets them ask a question if they have one. Other items that are important are trust logos. We’ve got McAfee Secure. For us it’s $800 a year. It lets people that our website is secure. It scans our website every couple of days, sends us a notification if there’s any security loopholes that we need to shore up. 100% satisfaction guarantee – very important. We stand by it. It makes the customer feel that you’re confident you can do a good job.

We also have some corporate customers here that we kind of rotate through that I need to add to our list because we don’t have very many. This lets people know we accept credit card, we accept debit card, and then GoDaddy SSL certificate. We go off the extended validation for our SSL certificate. Reason being is because when you start a checkout process it just adds this little green thing up at the top here. It’s just a little thing. We like it. It’s a little more visually appealing. The cheaper SSLs won’t do that.

Andrew: Let’s give that a moment to come up on the screen. What you’re saying is that on people’s URL bar, on that address bar, there’s a big green note that says that this site is safe and that adds a sense of security to people. I can’t believe how when we test, and we’ve done A/B tests with these shields, how much it increases conversions. I would think that at some point people would say I’ve seen these logos all over the internet. I get it. The internet is safe. I don’t need this security anymore. But even with my audience, a sophisticated audience, seeing a shield increases conversions. I remember asking Ann Holland who runs a website called which test one about why do people, when you run A/B tests, why do they trust those logos? Why are they more likely to buy with them and she said, “Andrew, people don’t even think about it. They just see it and then they feel safe and they move on. Most people aren’t spending as much time analyzing our websites as we are and that’s why it just works. It quickly gives them a sense of security.”

While I talked I now see the Proofreading Pal LLC right up there in green on top and that’s why you have that certificate there. How about two other areas of this landing page that you want to point out to the audience so that they can learn from that?

Brian: Sales copy is important. We’re still trying to master it. We have room for improvement but your copy needs to sell. We like to highlight our points of differentiation. There are two proofreaders for every document, one of the very few proofreading services that does that, so we always try to talk about that. Satisfaction guarantee. And then finally we have a video here. It’s a little animated video. It’s about 35 seconds with voice over and it basically just takes them through the just of what our service offers. So you combine all those things together and make it easy for them to buy your product or start the checkout process. Across the top, you can see it’s real easy – start now, start now, start now.

Andrew: I see. Sorry, again the connection was going a little funky but you were saying make it easy for them to buy and right at the very top of your screen you’re showing five different ways for people to buy.

Also, we’ll talk about the title tags and H1 tags, but the heading here on this section is superior resume proofreading and this is what people would see if they were looking for resume proofreading. You’re taking them to a page that continues the conversation they started with you when they typed in a search on Google. They type that search, resume proofreading, they see the ad that you’ve written that includes the word resume proofreading and they come to this page where that phrase continues and they see that what they started on Google they can complete on your website with all those start now buttons. They pick the option that they want.

I’m sorry for recapping so much but every time there’s even a little bit of a lag I want to make sure that the audience gets to pick up on all of it. Is there anything else on here or is it time to move on to the next step?

Brian: I think it’s time to move on.

Andrew: Okay. Can you close this tab too and that way hopefully we’ll have a little more bandwidth still for the conversation?

Brian: Yeah, let me just log out of my chat. The next tactic, so now you’re getting traffic to your site, you’ve learned some things, and you’ve set your site up to convert better. Now you know some keywords that might be working for you. Now it’s time to dabble in search engine optimization. The first thing that you need to do is you have to have the foundation down first. It’s just like search engine optimization is a very large algorithm. The foundation though, if you get that down first it makes all the other little add ons much more successful.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to show you a page on our website that does fairly well for search engine optimization. It’s the keyword resume proofreading service.

Andrew: And when people type that in, let’s see where you show up.

Brian: First and second.

Andrew: First and second results. How long have you been in business?

Brian: We’ve been in business for about 16 or 17 months.

Andrew: Okay. So we’re not talking about a business that’s been around for five years and has had a chance to work at being at the top. We’re talking about a new business with few changes to the site have helped you get this high. All right, so what do we do? How do we do that?

Brian: These are some of the basic items that are the most important – you have to have these. Your title tag, which is in the upper left hand corner. Resume proofreading services is our title tag. Then the next thing is your meta description and your meta keywords. This is in the code. Your meta description needs to also contain the keyword that you’re optimizing for. Your meta description needs to be written in a way that contains that keyword but also is kind of attractive because typically that’s what’s going to show up in the Google results, what you have in the meta description.

So if you go back to our Google result here, our premium resume proofreading service is the best way to guarantee your…

Andrew: And that’s what’s in your meta description and that’s where Google pulled that?

Brian: Correct. The final thing is the meta keywords and this is in the code too. Put the keywords that you’re going for in the meta keywords. Now the key is don’t put too many keywords in there. You want to be very specific of what you’re going for. You can’t dilute it. So we’re doing resume proofreading services and that’s it. If we added resume proofreading services and then also essay proofreading services to this page and tried to optimize for both, we probably wouldn’t rank in the top ten for either. So you want to be very specific. So those are the very first things.

Then you see right here, superior resume proofreading. This is actually inside of an H1 tag which is in the code. H1 tag is basically your header tag. That’s how Google sees it. A lot of sites don’t even have an H1 tag. It’s very important to have the H1 tag at the top and to also have the keyword inside that H1 tag.

Andrew: Okay.

Brian: Then your text needs to have sprinkled in the keywords. In this case resume proofreading service – your text should have the word resume proofreading and services in the copy of the page. So those are the basics of what many will refer to as on page optimization.

Now we go a step further. I’m going to show you a few other things that are also important that most of your competitors probably won’t be doing. Do you want me to just jump into that, Andrew?

Andrew: Yes. So now we’re talking about the next section of the conversation here.

Brian: What we’re talking about now is the architecture of your code. Google will reward you very slightly for having what’s called strict XHTML valid code and also making sure that your CSS file validates. We like to validate with the W3C website. I’ve got the buttons down here to show just to automatically do it but if I click this it’s going to validate this page with the W3C. You can see this document was successfully checked as SHTML 1.0 strict no errors. Now, what we’re going to do just for fun is we’re going to see how Andrew’s site does, and we’re going to validate his site. Here’s what’s really nice about this is: so, he has some errors. He has actually 37 errors. It’ll show you all of the errors, what line, what column they’re on. So, if Andrew wants, he can have his web developer go through, and they can get these errors cleaned up.

Andrew: Right.

Brian: They’re just minor coding errors that W3C doesn’t like. Another benefit of getting these cleaned up is chances that your website will look normal across all browsers increases dramatically. So, that’s another perk of making sure your website validates. Andrew: And will the course include . . .

Brian: The other thing is the CSS file . . .

Andrew: The course tool kit will include, of course, links to these two validators, the one that you just did right now. There’s also a CSS file validator. We’ll include a link so that people can check their websites.

Brian: So, my CSS file validates, too. All you do is put your CSS file in there, and it’ll validate it. That’s an important thing, and it will give you a slight SEO advantage. Now, another thing that Matt Cutts. That’s his name, right, Matt Cutts?

Andrew: Yep. There it is.

Brian: He’s the blogger for Google. He’s the blogger for SEO. I think it was a year ago they mentioned that site speed is going to become a factor in Google’s algorithm for how they decide to rank you naturally. And so, it’s important to try to optimize your site to load quickly.

There’s a tool, and I’m going to take you in our web master tools. It’s showing that we’re doing slow back in September. I don’t know why because our site has been optimized for speed, so just ignore these.

Andrew: If there’s a blip, you’d jump in there, and the idea is that you want us to come here to Google.com/webmaster/tools – I think most people in our audience are familiar with it, but you’re saying, use it; be more than just familiar with it and check out your site speed. Once we’ve checked out our site speed, what about that install page speed Firefox button? What do we do with that?

Brian: OK. So, Google recommends this. It’s a tool that you can install with Firefox. It’s called Page Speed, and you can run it, and you can analyze any page on your website and it’ll show you how you’re doing and also things that you can improve on. And so, we’ve actually got this installed, and I’m going to run it on our home page.

Firebug, open Firebug. I’m going to refresh analysis. Our home page, we’re ranking 95 out of 100. We typically want all of our pages ranking over 90, but the nice thing, all these little arrows, it’ll give you advice on what you need to improve. So, optimize images. If I put this arrow, optimizing the following images could reduce their size by 13%, and it shows the images. Unfortunately, these are images that are hosted on other websites so we can’t optimize them. The cool thing about it though is it actually provides you the optimized version, and then it’s real easy to replace things with the optimized versions.

Andrew: I see.

Brian: Let’s just go see Mixergy real quick. Oh no. I hate to pick on you. Let’s skip this.

Andrew: That page, by the way, has been doing really well for us, that welcome mat.

Brian: So, web developer Firebug, open Firebug, analyze. Andrew is at 82, not bad.

Andrew: Not too bad.

Brian: There’s room for improvement though.

Andrew: All right.

Brian: It’s got the red ones. Andrew would obviously look at first, then the yellows and so forth. So, a great tool to help you find ways to improve your site.

All of those things we talked about, on page optimization, validating your code and then the speed optimization, I like to bundle them all as part of your foundation. It’s not going to get you to the top necessarily. It’s almost, a good analogy is a football team. If a football team is really good on the offensive and defensive lines, they’re typically a good team and if they can piece together some other parts, a good wide-receiver, maybe a good quarterback or a good kicker, they can really become an excellent football team and that’s where, what I’m going to talk about now is link-building.

Andrew: OK. So we’ve built up, we’ve SEO’d our site. It’s time to get some links to help drive it further up. Can you turn off the Mixergy page? Partially because I’m embarrassed that we didn’t do so well on those tests, but also I want to make sure to save as much bandwidth for you as possible. Actually the Mixergy page isn’t a bandwidth, it’s a suck.

Brian: OK.

Andrew Warner: But the more resources, the better. All right. So, yes, what do we do to get some links?

Brian: OK. Well, the reason you need links is because Google sees them as votes for your website. So let’s say you and a competitor are going after the same keyword, then all those things that I’ve just talked about, the foundation so to speak, you guys are pretty much equal on that. Google is then going to look at who has more links, who has better links, and that’s going to be their next deciding factor as to who ranks higher.

So a good quick way to start getting links and to do it relatively inexpensively is, the service that I like to use is called “iNet Zeal” and it’s a directory submission service. They’re going to submit you to multiple directories and when Google spiders those directories it will show as another inbound link for your site. Now I’m going to show you kind of a quick way to get going with this. If you go to the website, click “directory submission”, go down to the regular service. Let’s do 500. $70 will get you into 500 directories. They’re white hat and SEO-friendly directories.

Andrew: And it’ll get you submissions to 500. What percentage of those submissions will end up leading to links to your site?

Brian: Typically what I’ve found, and I’ve done this maybe 15, 20 times, is maybe about 80%.

Andrew: OK. So that every 100 that I buy, I end up with 80 links, which is not bad.

Brian: And then you can put in your root level domain. Unfortunately, you can only put in one URL, put in some key words that you want to go for and then the descriptions for each one. So I’ll do one, let’s say I want to optimize for . . .

Andrew: . . . resume proofreader.

Brian: Resume proofreader. And then down here I put “proofreading pal, specializes in resume proofreading, 24-7”. And that’s all I put. So it’s a good way to get links coming into your site and that’s iNet Zeal. Another way to get links is to make sure that you have a Facebook account with a link pointing to your site or a Facebook page for your business, YouTube, Twitter . . . what are some other main ones? Yelp and Foursquare and all of those social media sites, make sure you have a page because that’s a free, easy way to get an inbound link.

Doing online interviews like I’m doing here with Andrew is a great way to get a link. Anytime your local newspaper, a local website, a blogger, your TV news station, anytime they do an article on you, a lot of times those things are getting put on their website now. Make sure, go and look and make sure they gave you an inbound link and link to your website because it’s very valuable. So those are some other ways to get inbound links and all of those things encompass together make up a very good SEO strategy.

Andrew: By the way, you did something that was really impressive. When you got mentioned by a local newspaper that didn’t link to you, you just called them up and said, “Hey, can you please include a link? It’s valuable.” My wife was recently in The Guardian in England. They mentioned her. They gave links to the other two people in the article but they didn’t give one to her. She didn’t even think, “Hey, you know what? I should make a phone call here and have them link over to my site so that I can start ranking because of their link.” Call them up, get the link.

If Mixergy mentions, well, maybe not Mixergy, don’t start calling me guys, you of course, as the leader need to get the link, but I don’t want people who we happen to mention to all start requesting links. Actually, I take that last part back. Every single site that we talk about here, we will include a link to within the course notes, so that if you don’t remember whether it was iNet Zeal or ZealNetI or whatever, it’ll be there so you can just go a click on it and get it.

All right. So now that’s getting links to the site. You want to start talking about what we can do about long-tail keyword traffic? What do you do?

Brian: Okay. We like to go after long tail keyword traffic with a blog.

Andrew: Mm-hmm?

Brian: And, so you know the main keywords you want to go after. There are keywords that you might not ever think of, and in the industry they’re called long tail keywords. So what we like to do is create a blog, and write articles about anything and everything pertaining to the products and services we offer. Hopefully, these articles will have enough obscure keywords that might match up with the obscure long tail keyword phrases being searched for, that will rank.

We have an advantage, too, because our proofreaders write our blog posts. Most of them are very good writers, and they know what to write about, and they know what the customer’s looking for. One of our blog posts was about how to choose a proofreading service. Not a very high-volume keyword, but probably searched for a couple times a day.

Andrew: What was the phrase?

Brian: “How to choose a proofreading service.”

Andrew: Could you type that in, and let’s see where it comes up? …”How to choose a proofreading service.”

Brian: And again, we just launched our blog six weeks ago. So we’re third here, for this.

Andrew: There it is.

Brian: What about “rush proofreading service”?

Andrew: And by the way, that’s third under eBay and Harvard, so we’re in good company.

Brian: And then, “rush proofreading service”, we’re second. So I’ll take you into our blog now. Same principles apply as far as SEO. We have a title tag. We have a description tag. We have meta-keywords. We have an H1 tag right here. Very keyword-rich content. A lot of people – and I know, Andrew, we’ve discussed this – their blog doesn’t even look like it integrates with their website very well. What was the word you used? It looks like a separate entity.

Andrew: It is! And I can’t even figure out how to go from their blog back to the website that they talked about, because the headline on their blog, or the logo on their blog – if I click it, it just takes me back to the home page of their blog instead of their site’s home page or the product that I’m trying to buy.

Brian: And so, what I recommend for your blog is to try to keep it within the same architecture of your normal site, and realize that a lot of these people coming to your blog might be looking for tips or how-tos. They weren’t necessarily in the market for proofreading, or whatever service you offer. They’re a little more of a cold visitor, so it’s important that you still have all of these conversion mechanisms. In fact we need social proof right now on our blog – I see we don’t have that – but the video is still here, the trust logos, things like that.

Andrew: Right down to the “Start Now” button that enables them to just go and step through the process to buy.

Brian: Yep. And so, that’s a benefit of a blog. Another benefit is that people can share these articles on their Twitter, their Facebook; they can e-mail them to a friend. And then finally, we like the commenting.

We’ve used Discuss Commenting – I know that you use that on Mixergy, Andrew – and the reason I like it is because it allows a customer to have their own Discuss account with their picture. It also allows the customer, if they’ve set Discuss up right in their settings, to show their comments on their Facebook wall or their Twitter. I don’t do that with my Discuss account, but if someone wants to comment on my blog post and also share it on their Twitter, more power to t them.

Andrew: All right. So, you talked to me earlier about how one of the ways that you figure out what to blog about is by going through that process that you showed us right at the early part of this course, which is going through the AdWords that already work for you and seeing, “All right, can I write a blog post on this topic, so that anyone who’s searching for it can potentially see my blog post and become a customer.”

The other way you told us that you find blog topics is by going through your Google Analytics and seeing, “What are people searching for and ending up on my site? Maybe I could create a post specifically on that topic, so that when they search they come to something that directly matches what they’re looking for.” And maybe you can start ranking higher. So that’s the way that you look at a blog, whereas most people might think, “Well, what do I feel like today? What’s going on in our company today? What do we want to announce?” No. You’re thinking, “What’s the customer thinking? What’s the customer searching for?

How do I make that process from that search to making a purchase goes smooth and as easy as possible. Yeah, all right. So let’s turn off that tab, also. We’ll come back, actually I guess we should leave that tab up because it’s your site. I want one tab at least with your site so we can tell people where to come back in the future. And now, the next area of conversation is Craigslist. What have you done with Craigslist? If you turned off that tab we’ll come back to it.

Brian: Well, Craigslist … we were out sourcing Craigslist ad posting to a service in India. And they would post two times a day on the twenty most populated cities in the United States. And so, I’ve got a example here of, now Craigslist is kind of tightened up their security measures and so now you have to have phone verified accounts. And so we’re trying to find a way around that right now because it was successful, it was generating fifty to seventy-five visits a day. So, here’s Chicago Craigslist, services offered, writing and editing translation is the category. And so they would go into this category on the twenty most populated cities and they would post an ad twice a day. An ad that would something like this image ad.

Andrew: OK.

Brian: And there’s people out there, believe it or not, that need proof reading and they think Craigslist is the place their going to find it. And so we had success with it, it’s relatively inexpensive way to drive traffic. And also you are technically providing another inbound link to your web site every time you post an ad in Craigslist.

Andrew: OK. And instead of doing it yourself you hired a company in India to go through twice a day and post each one of those cities. And the general idea, if not the specific idea, the general idea still works. OK. So, now we’ve gone through all the trouble of getting a customer. They have bought from us. Most people at that point would say, “Yay, I need to go and get more.”

In our conversations one of the things I admire about you is you say, “No, I worked this hard to get the customer, now it is time for me to build that relationship with them.” Because it’s easier to get more business from the same customer than to go hunt down a stranger and convince them that I’m a good guy and he needs to be buying from me. And you automated a lot of the process that many people in the audience are going to have to do by hand and maybe find an automation system for themselves to do. But, I don’t want them, of course, to use your system because it’s proprietary but I do want them to understand what you do so they can find their own method of doing this and I appreciate you opening up the doors and showing us behind the scenes how you do this. So, this is your customer relationship management software, you built it yourself. When you log in, what do you see?

Brian: OK. I’ll go ahead and log in here. And it’s basically just free forming things that we keep track of inside of here. The first being, and I’ll start talking about it before the page comes up is, we have projects waiting for follow up call. Being it as we are an online business there’s not a large opportunity to have interaction with our customer. And we really wanted to be able to do that. And so, every time a customer orders from us and their documents completed, we give them a courtesy call. And we use that courtesy call to let them know their document’s ready. To let them know, and I’ve got the script, I’ll bring the script up here.

Andrew: OK. And even the script you’ve very generously agreed to let people in the audience have and of course if you are not in the proof reading business, in fact if you are in the proof reading business you don’t want to use the exact script. What you want to get though is and understanding of what Brian does after someone buys from him. And what Brian does is he calls them up and take us through this. What is this?

Brian: So we’ve got a script for, if it a repeat customer these long ones are if it’s voice mail. And then we got a script if it’s a new customer. And our CRM system the customers name will show in green if it’s a new customer, we want to treat them a little bit differently. Let’s say the customer answers, basically these things highlighted in blue are the things that we really want to make sure we cover. So, let’s say I called Andrew after his project was ready I would say, “This is Brian. I’m calling with Proofreading Pal, this is just a courtesy call to let you know or to ensure that you received your most recent order.”

If he says, you know, yeah I got it or I didn’t get it. Well, then we move on. I just want to let you know that we also have an order status link which is located in the upper left hand corner of our website. You can always download your document there and your document will be available there for up to seven days. Then the final things we really want to stress is again to let them know that we’re open daily 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Finally, we want to say the word proofreading pal one more time and thank them before we get off the phone.

So education is one thing that we try to accomplish in our courtesy call. Then you see down here we have some questions that depending on how the conversation was going we might find out how they found out about us. We might ask them for feedback or if we can use that on our testimonial page if they said something nice about us and also a lot of times questions will pop up – how does track changes work which is a feature in Microsoft Word and we can then take care of that situation for them right then and there so they can move on to working on their documents.

Andrew: I see. Right a lot of people don’t understand that they can track changes in Word. One of the reasons why you have that question is that we tend to think that Analytics is going to tell us everything about our users but you made a point in our conversation before this that if someone watches this course and goes to proofreadingpal.com and buys from you, there’s no analytics in the world that’s going to say he heard this conversation on his MP3 player while running or watched it on his iPad in the living room and then the next day typed in proofreadingpal.com and bought. The way that you’re going to find that out is when you make a phone call to them and say thank you, you should know this, you should be aware of that, this will help you next time, and by the way, how did you find out about us – that’s the way you find out where they connected with you first.

Brian: The courtesy call provides that value. The other thing that it does is that if we didn’t do it at all, is our brand gets a little bigger spot in their brain from this courtesy call which increases the chance that they’ll remember us next time or that we’ll popup in a conversation because how many customers…does Zappos call you after you get your shoe order? I don’t know. Maybe they do; maybe they don’t. But it’s almost like it’s so different that it’s the chance that we might come up in conversation just out at the bar or in class or at a conference I think increases.

So the next aspect of our custom built CRM system you’ll see here is customers needing gift package. This is what Andrew referred to at the very beginning of the show. We call it moving in with your customer and so if I clicked in here it would show me we have 14 customers right now who need a gift package from us because they’ve either ordered from us two times or their original order was over $75.

What we’ve decided to do for our gift packages is pretty darn simple. We’ve got two, and I’ll try to hold them up here so you can see, two branded proofreading pal ink pens. They get two of those. They get a personalized thank you note from me which I sign. By the way, if I sign like 100 of these, I don’t write any more because I’m always on the keyboard, my hand is always killing. Then finally a proofreading pal chip clip magnet.

The reason I use this is because at my house we put these on our fridge and then they hold pictures up on the refrigerator. Some people probably actually use them for chip clip magnets, but I was thinking college dorm rooms, there’s one thing that is always in a college dorm room and it’s a mini fridge and so I was thinking they’ll stick this on their mini fridge, friends are in there playing video games, and somebody asks what is proofreading pal, and boom – we are living in their dorm room and now they’re talking about us. So that’s another piece of our CRM puzzle. Finally, you see here we’ve got Facebook searches.

Andrew: There is something too – just being a physical presence in your customers’ lives, whether you do a pen or something else. When you are a physical presence in your customers life you stand out in a way that you wouldn’t if you were just another website. I’ve actually referred over and over transcription service on Mixergy and they still can’t remember the name. They will email me over and over asking me who is that transcription service that you use. Who is the transcription service you use? I used them two months ago, I can’t remember their names, and I can’t find them in my inbox.

When you go offline, make a connection maybe that day you can’t, maybe not that you can’t that’s way different from the kind of connection that you make online ordinarily. I understand the value of that. Yes, this I like especially like too, that the way that you don’t just connect with them by sending them a gift pack, just make a phone call. You really are bonding with people as a proofreading company, to bond with people this way is just unusual. So talk to me about that last one? Or that second to last one and then we’ll go to the last one too.

Brian: So Facebook, every single customer that we get, we try to find them on Facebook through my personal Facebook account. And we send them a message, we thank them for using our service and I want to be friends with every single one of my [??] proofreading customers. And we send them that friend request, this is basically a custom built application that let’s us do this efficiently, and we’re finding about 80% of our customers on Facebook and then, of that 80% about 50% will accept my friendship. And then they can kind of follow me.

I like to follow Gary Vaynerchuk, he does a really good job. So our customers can see what I’m up to, if I’m up tailgating at a Hawkeye football game, or on a trip. Builds that extra relationship with them, and I can also see what they’re up to. One of the things I have to [??] be a little bit more careful about is what I say and do on Facebook, that’s one of the downfalls. I wouldn’t recommend doing it if you’re going to be very, very pro a certain political party or anything like that. We get our customers commenting on some of my wall posts, and then the only way to physically invite people to like your business Facebook page is to suggest to friends. And so every month or two I’ll go through and all the friends that I added that I haven’t suggested like Proof Reading [??] page, I’ll do that. And so that’s another benefit of the Facebook search.

Andrew: All right, final point here is the quick quote section. I see that there is a zero on that. How does somebody end up in the quick quote section and what do you do with them?

Brian: Our website has a way for customers to generate real time quick quotes. It gets emailed to them and if they do not become a customer within I think we’ve got it set at three hours they filter into this quick quote field. And then I can click on this, open it up, see their name, look at their document, see the word count and then I can email them or call them and find out. Notice you did a quick quote, we’re curious what’s the reason you didn’t order and we can really glean a lot of information from those phone calls and emails. Often times it’s related on price and if the documents something I think we would like to do, I can then throw them a coupon code and try to convert them that way.

Andrew: I love that you do that, most people I think, me included, don’t know how to bring back potential customers who’ve gone through the process, but haven’t pulled the trigger and made the purchase. So they give you their phone number, they’ve gone through the process you at the very least can call them up and find out what happened and maybe do a little something to tip them over the age and get them to buy. Alright, this has been incredibly helpful.

You’ve given so much, let’s bring Proofreadingpal.com up, but while I say this. I’ll say thank you to you. I want people to see it because I want people to see that customer service tab at the very far right of the page. There’s a way to contact Brian, and I hope, I always say this. If you got anything out of this, don’t just be a passive viewer in life, say thank you. When you say thank you, it goes a long way to building a relationship. Maybe not one that you want to call on today. But maybe five years from now, maybe a year from now. Maybe six months from now, you guys will end up working together.

Maybe by contacting Brian, frankly I actually don’t know what happens. It’s so odd, I had someone in the audience say Andrew, you told me to say thank you to a guests, I said thank you to people even though I’m in China. Nobody can even call me because our hours are upside down from yours. But one of your guests happened to be in China. He saw that I’m in China, he took me out for lunch. We had this incredible conversation. I introduced him to China, he introduced me to business in a way that I could have never had gotten even from Mixergy courses. So I always say find a way to connect with a guest and say thank you. And now you know how to do it.

One more thing. We’ve given you so much, I know sometimes at the end of these courses you feel a little overwhelmed, don’t. Look for just one thing that you can do after this course. Do it, then let me know about it. I’m always looking to hear from you about what your successes are with what you’ve learned in these courses and also what your challenges are. Send them to me and I promise if you want privacy, you don’t want me to reveal it to anyone. I’m proud to say that I can keep your secret. But I am looking forward to hearing from you about your wins and your challenges. Brian, thank you for doing this course. I’ll be the first person to and hopefully many, many others will do the same thing. Thanks for teaching us.

Brian: Thanks, Andrew, it’s been a pleasure.

Andrew: Thank you, thanks for teaching us.

Master Class: Persuade with Stories
Taught by Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design

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Master Class:
Stories

Length: 34:39 minutes


About the course leader

Nancy Duarte, principal of Duarte Design, which has created over a quarter of a million presentations that have shaped the perception of the world’s leading brands and thought leaders.

Master Class Toolbox

Nancy’s Blog

Steve Jobs iPhone launch (Part 1)

Steve Jobs iPhone launch (Part 2)

Transcript

Download the transcript here

Andrew: This course’s mission is to show you how to tell stories, to change minds, and persuade people to act. It’s led by Nancy Duarte, principal of Duarte Design, which has created over a quarter of a million presentations that have shaped the perception of the world’s leading brands and thought leaders. Nancy is also the author of “Slide:ology”, which I have right here, and “Resonate”. I’ll help facilitate. I’m Andrew Warner, founder of mixergy.com, where proven founders, like Nancy, teach. Nancy, take it away.Nancy: Thanks Andrew, it’s really great to be here. I appreciate you having me. It’s interesting, the power of an idea. Because, when you say, I have an idea, what you’re saying is that you can change the world in some way. So, if you look around, wherever you are right now, and you look around at everything that you can see, those things, at some point, were invisible in someone’s mind, and they were just an idea. But somehow, that person communicated them in such a way that they became reality.And most of the ideas we have are going to change the world in some way, and each of us wants the world to be a better place. So, the power is actually in the idea itself. Now, what’s interesting about an idea is it actually has a life cycle to it, and most of these ideas manifest themselves through business. And business is a lot like life. You know, we’re born, we live, we die, and business kind of go through the same life cycle. They start, they grow, they mature and then they decline unless, somewhere between growing and maturing, they reinvent themselves, and then they have to reinvent themselves again.

My own small firm, we have 100 people, we’ve been through four reinventions in 22 years. Because, what happens is, the needs of your customers change. What currently meets your customers’ needs today might not be what meets your customers’ needs in 18 months. So that means you have to kind of change your organization, change your products, change your services, modify your people, align them around being at this new place in the future, so that your company can survive and be reinvented. Well, understanding the customer needs, getting your employees to align to this new place in the future is very hard, and it takes a lot of persuasion, and it takes a lot of communication to get everybody at the right place in the future. So, the best way to persuade people and to change them is through story.

There’s something really powerful about the structure of story. For some reason, preliterate and illiterate generations, for thousands of years, have been able to tell their cultural stories and keep them in tact for thousands of years. It’s this structure that we’re able to recall and retell easily. The other thing about stories that’s amazing is we actually get physical reactions to stories. We have physical reactions to stories that we can’t even control. Our human body just reacts to it. Our eyes will dilate, our heart will race, we may get a chill down our spine. It’s not very often that we feel that way with a presentation, but we can feel that way with a story. Something happens when we insert a slide in the mix, and everything is flat lined.

I set out to determine why there is such a big dramatic gap between when a storyteller is there and you’re leaning forward and your heart is racing, and suddenly, you become a presenter and everything is just dead. So, I spent two years of intensive study, an enormous amount of hours every day. And I want to walk you through kind of the discovery that I went through, because I had a story about cinema literature and screen writing, and I also have the context of all the presentations we’d done, and then I studied, also, the greatest speeches of all time. I overlaid all these things and had a whole bunch of findings that actually led to a pretty major discovery that I made. So, I want to walk you through some of the insights and then reveal to you this story structure discovery that I made. So, it seems real obvious to start with Aristotle. Every great story should have a beginning, middle and an end. But if you notice, there’s a turning point where the beginning turns to the middle, and when the middle turning to the end. Every great presentation should have a beginning, middle and end. Yet, most of them don’t even have this very simple, basic story structure.

So, what is this three act story structure? Basically, the first act has this likeable hero, and then they encounter these road blocks, and there’s this structure, and after that struggle, they emerge transformed. In its most simple three-part story structure, this is what happens in a story. When I started getting into hero archetypes, I got pretty excited. I thought, well, if we’re overlaying story over a presentation environment. You have the presenter and you have the audience. I thought, well, it felt to me like the presenter was the central figure of the story which means they were the hero of the story because we’re talking the most, their well light and they have the attention of the audience on them. But I was actually profoundly startled as I started to study the archetype to figure out that in reality the presenter’s not the hero, the audience is the hero. See what happens is, if I put an idea out there for you to contend with and you reject my idea, my idea it feels. Then in reality you have all the power of the idea, on whether it lives or dies.

And ideally, as the presenter I want you to latch on to my idea, hold it dear and run out of the room and try to change the world with it. So suddenly then, in this presenter/audience relationship, I have to approach you from stance of humility, suddenly, I’m not the most influential person in the room but the audience is. So I started to think about that, then who is the presenter in this situation, and in reality the presenter is Yoda, or the mentor. The mentor admits in movies the three things, they help the hero get unstuck, and they bring a magical gift or a special tool and that’s what you’re supposed to do as a presenter. You’re supposed to bring incredible value to your audience whereas they feel they have the feet of someone very wise and they gained something valuable from life.

Now, I’d be remiss to tell that story without touching on Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey. Now he was a drama, a mythologist excuse me, he traveled the world and studied most of all cultures greatest stories. And when he overlaid all these cultural stories, a pattern emerged, an eighteen part story pattern. I want to go over a few parts of this pattern with you. So, every hero starts out in an ordinary world. They’re just going along their average day and something happens to them, suddenly their like, oh my gosh, I need to contend with this, my world would become out of balance. And initially, they are confused.

They’re like, you know what, I don’t want to jump in to all this drama. But then they meet with the mentor and the mentor gets them to cross the threshold. Now this is the same thing you need to do as a presenter. Your audience walks into your world; you’re going to give them some challenging information. Their initially going to be like, wait a minute, I don’t agree with Nancy, or I don’t agree with that presenter, but as you keep meeting with them they’ll eventually cross the threshold from their perspective over into your perspective in the special world where your idea exists.

Because when I came across Freytech’s dramatic structure I got really excited because it was a shake. The stuff Raytag wrote was that you wrote drama and studied drama. He believed a story had a 5 act structure, which was an exposition, a rising action, a climax, a falling action and a denomal [SP], or the unraveling. And, I love that it was a shape. I was like, you know what, if great presentations had a shape what shape would they be? Are there shapes that the greatest communicator’s have used and what happens after setting story and all that, I came to my office and I drew a shape. I was like, oh my goodness; I think this is the shape. It just felt like the shape.

So I took this shape, I overload it over two completely opposite types of communication, and it worked. So, I took Martin Luther King’s, I Had a Dream Speech, which is a brilliant piece of oratory. I took Steve Jobs 2007 iPhone launch speech and it worked. So, you, what the shape was that I discovered that day. I think it’s amazing, um, I will go through it with you, but this is the shape that you should draw on a piece of paper before you start writing any presentation.

So, it has a really clear beginning, like every presentation should have a beginning, middle and end. The beginning that the greatest communicators have used is they establish what is. And then they contrast that with what could be, making that gap dramatically clear. Now this gap between what is and what could be is like the Encida incident, or the call to action in movies. Suddenly this is the thing that brings their world out of balance cause you’re establishing here’s what is, and they should pretty much, the audience should be agreeing, yeah, that is what is, yep. That is what is, they should be like, that’s what is. And then when you introduce what could be, this new thing in the future, they should be like, wait a minute, you know, that’s interesting but you’re going to have to lure me over.

Well, the middle moves back and forth. Here’s what is, here’s what could be, as a structural device. So, what you’re doing is you’re contrasting what is and what could be. And by doing that, it’s making what is not that appealing and it’s making what could be very alluring. It’s just this powerful tool of contrast to draw them to this place you want them to be in the future.

Now the last turning point there is a call to action, and every presentation should have a call to action, but you should never stop at the call to action, because you don’t want to end with this laundry list of things to do. Because there’s a principle of brievancy [SP] that states that people will remember the last thing you said, more than they will remember the beginning or the middle. You want that last thing you say to be unbelievable. So to conclude a great talk, you need to describe the new bliss, the new norm, you’re proposing, how utopian is the world going to be with your product adopted, how amazing is the company going to be if we all rallied around this initiative. You need to describe what’s going to happen in a very blissful and appealing way, so people will remember how glorious it is, if they align with your ideas.

So, once I had the shape, I realized I could use it as an analysis tool, I started to transcribe everything, every page that I thought was great, all kinds of things. I want to show you though, the two speeches that I analyzed that day, that I uncovered the forum. This is the shape that all the greatest communicators use, average communicators not so much, so.

First, I want to review with you, the Steve Jobs 2007 iPhone launch. He changed the world, definitely, he changed the computing industry, gutted the music industry and completely changed the way we interact with devices. I want to show you the shape of his 90 minute long iPhone launch. There are not very many CEOs that can sustain the engagement of an audience for 90 minutes, I don’t know a single one, other than Mr. Jobs’ ability to do that.

So here’s the shape of his 90 minute talk, you can see he starts off establishing what is, he’s back and forth between what is and what could be, ending with the new bliss. So, let’s zoom in on this. The white line is him speaking over time, you can see he cuts to video a few times in the intro. Then he demos his product, and then later when I scoot across, you’ll see he brings guest speakers up.

So, what Mr. Jobs is doing is mixing it up, it’s not just him doing this one way dialogue, around his material. He’s making what’s going on, on stage, very interesting and mixing it up a bit. So you can see what’s interesting here is each one of these vertical tic marks, is where the audience laughed, and each one of these vertical tic marks is where the audience clapped. This is a lot of physical reaction, we talked about story eliciting a physical reaction, the audience is physically reacting to Mr. Jobs, in almost 30 second increments. That is amazing, they’re actually feeling something, during this talk.

So when he first establishes what could be, he says this is the day I’ve been looking forward to for 2 1/2 years. The fact that Mr. Jobs knew about the iPhone for 2 1/2 years, is what makes this next tic mark particularly interesting. He’s known about this product, he’s tested, he’s used it, he’s very familiar with it. This vertical tic mark is how many times Mr. Jobs marveled at his own product. So he’s already known about it for a couple of years, he loves it, his passion for his product comes out. Because he’s saying, isn’t this awesome, isn’t this great.

Mr. Jobs is modeling for us, how he wants us to feel towards his product. So then he say’s every once in awhile a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything, and it has changed everything. Now, it stays white up until this point. Mr. Jobs has only projected pictures of the phone, he’s showing here’s a little hole that does that, this little button does this, and it’s off, basically, he’s just showing slides of the phone.

He did that on purpose, because it’s at this moment, when it turns to orange, that created the star moment of the whole key note, and the star moment is an acronym for Something They’ll Always Remember. This is when Mr. Jobs turned the phone on, you can actually hear a collective gasp from the audience, aahh, when everyone saw scrolling for the first time. They knew that he had truly made a revolutionary new product.

So if you scoot across, you can see some blue at the top, that’s Larry Page, CEO, Google CEO, then you see a long black screen at the bottom, that’s when the AT&T CEO came up, and it was awful. He read off of a 4×6 card, he repeated everything that had been said, he brought nothing new to the table, he took way too long. No laughing, no clapping, no marveling going on, the whole time he’s up. Then you can see there’s a break in the line there.

That’s when they had a technical malfunction, the clicker broke, in the hand-off from AT&T back to Mr. Jobs. So, what does the greatest business communicator of all time do when there’s a technical malfunction? He tells a personal story. He filled the time by telling a story about how he and Steve Wozniak, used to do television jamming, when they were in college, and when the students got up to adjust their television signal they thought something they were doing, contorting their body was controlling the signal. Very funny, and then he ends with the new bliss.

He gives a quote. He said there’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love, I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it’s been. We have always tried to do that at Apple from the very beginning, and we always will. Mr. Jobs is making us a promise, they will continue to make revolutionary products in the future. That’s controlling the bliss.

So when I looked at Dr. Martin Luther King, who was an amazing advocate for civil rights and a very big voice that actually transformed all the country. He gave a 16 minute long “I have a dream” speech, and this is the shape of that speech. You can see he starts off with “what is”, moves back and forth between “what is” and “what could be” and things with a new list.

Now, this is when I want to stretch out instead of zooming in because I want to actually put the transcript of his talk in here so you can see how I move things from “what is” to “what could be”. The pro’s there. I actually will align to one side “what is” and align to the other side “what could be”. But, interestingly Dr. King was a Southern Baptist creature, and he did these long dramatic pauses in between each one of his bursts. He would do a burst of beautiful prose, and then he would take a long pause. So, at each pause I did a line break.

If you look at the shape of his actual speech, it looks much more like poetry or prose, and that’s what partially made it so beautiful. So, I want to cover up his prose here with a gray bar and use it as an information device. And so, we could look at how he talked through his material.

Everywhere you see a blue bar, that’s where he used repetition. The actual rhetorical device is repetition. Say it once, say it once, say it a third time which creates emphasis. You’re emphasizing this point by repeating it.

All of the pink, which is just really dramatic through the whole piece, these are visual words and metaphors. It’s like Dr. King was painting his words like a scene. He uses carefully crafted words to convey his message. It’s kind of funny because I think if he could have had slides that day his speech wouldn’t be one of the most historically beautiful speeches of all times.

So, the green batch is familiar songs, hymns and literature which we’ll address more towards the end, and then the gold bars are everywhere he made a political reference. This was a politically heated time. He is standing in the Mall in D.C., in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and he’s basically telling the politicians you have broken your promises to the Constitution. You’ve broken your promises of the Declaration of Independence and rightly so. That’s partially what makes this so powerful.

He stays in “what is” for quite some time until the very end. He uses a visual metaphor, and he says, “America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check that has come back marked insufficient funds.” So, that’s like a call, and this is the first time the audience really roared and clapped. His response call was actually when the audience went nuts for the first time. He says, “We have come to cash this check, a check that will give us on-demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

He used a metaphor that is familiar to all of us. Nobody wants to have no money in the bank. We don’t want insufficient funds, so he talked about insufficient funds and freedom. This was very powerful because they actually liked screamed. This is the first time they were screaming in the actual recording.

If you scoot across, you can see the frequency gets more and more dense and tighter. It’s moving back and forth more rapidly, and this is his very famous “I have a dream” speech. So, he kicks off “I have a dream”, and the first time he replies to “I have a dream” he uses a political reference. It’s awesome. He says, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the meaning of this creed that we hold these truths as self-evident that all men are created equal.

He moves back and forth at the phrase level between “what is” and “what could be” with his “I have a dream that one day I have a dream that one day”. When you use that contrast at the phrase level, it becomes our most beloved and most cited parts of the speech which is fantastic.

As we scoot across to the end, you can see it’s more heavily riddled with green and blue. Now, green was spiritual songs and hymns and literature, and blue was repetition. So, the first batch of green was scripture from the Old Testament and the Book of Isaiah. Basically, what he was saying, if we do this, we are fulfilled in the scripture. Well, who wouldn’t want that?

So, then he uses a lot of repetition. The second batch of green is a song. It’s a patriotic song, My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. It’s very patriotic. What I love about him picking this song is this is the same song they use in the anti-slavery movement where they changed the words as an outcry out of rage. They would change the words to things like “My native country thee where all men are born free if white thy skin. I love thy hills and dales, but I hate thy Negro (?).”

He picked a song that they had sung together patriotically. They had also sung it together out of rage. He knew what would unite them, and he knew what would incite them, and he used those tools to move them. So then, he repeated songs from the hymn, let it ring from New York, let it ring from Mississippi.

The third batch of green are songs from that patriotic song, and the fourth batch of green is the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty I’m free at last.” What Dr. King did in his very famous climax here is he said things that he knew would incite the audience, and he resonated with them there. Things they’ve done together, things they thought were sacred together, things that he knew were already inside of them, and he moved them there. That’s the power of what made such an amazing speech.

Now the odds are really low, that you’ll be able to use scriptures in your next product launch, but the principles are still true. You need to find something deep inside your audience, you need to know them well enough to touch them inside there, with something that is already resonates inside of them, and that’s what resonating really is. Dr. King had to make a lot of sacrifices, of his ideas to become reality. [inaudible], his dad was a letter opener, and he ultimately gave his life for what he believed was true and right.

Now, not very many people on the phone had to make that kind of sacrifice either, but it is true that we have to make some sort of sacrifice to see our ideas become reality. Now Dr. King absolutely changed the world, and we all can change the world too. All the time I hear, “Gosh, that’s great Nancy, you use Steve Jobs, you use Martin Luther King, but I’m just the middle manager, or I’m just an entrepreneur or I’m not trying to do the kind of movement that Mr. Jobs or Mr. King has done.”

Well, I contend that we’re all born, to do something powerful and make a difference on this earth, because we can use that we’re just this or that as an excuse all of our lives. But, you know, Martin Luther King was just a preacher, Steve Jobs was just a college dropout. So we can’t use that as an excuse, to make sure our ideas become reality. I want to end with a personal story, about the kind of passion it takes to be an entrepreneur, because trust me, I know. It’s hard, I’ve been doing it for 22 years.

So, when me and my kids go to Hawaii, I take them to this vintage European store, and the owner of the store is a storyteller. He very carefully puts on these cotton gloves, and with these huge posters he turns the pages, and tells us a story. These posters were precursors to advertising, they had a huge headline, beautiful conceptual graphics, everything a slide should be, actually. So I’m flanked by my two kids, one is on either side of me, the guy turns the page, this beautiful poster is there. I lean forward and I say, “Oh my gosh, I love this poster”, and both my kids shriek back and say, “Oh my gosh mom, it’s you”, and this is the picture that he had unveiled.

I don’t know if I should be happy that this is what my kids feel about me, but this is their perception of their mom. You know what? It takes a lot of energy and a lot of passion to be an entrepreneur; it takes a lot of commitment. I love this, because she is the standard bearer and the standard bearer in battle, goes out first and they’re the most likely to be killed because they’re carrying this very brightly colored standard of who they’re representing. So she’s all fired up, and I’m like, what is she holding here, in her hand, which she is all fired up about, is something seemingly insignificant. It’s [??] baking spices.

So here she is, all fired up about this product, that she’ll risk her life and limb about something that seems insignificant. Well if you were to change that little [??] to communication, I guess it does look a lot more like me. Because, you know what? I am fired up about communication because it is the one thing that is going to change the world, it’s the one thing that we need right now, it’s the one thing entrepreneurs need to invest in. Because it’s the people that communicate your ideas well, are the ones whose products are getting purchased, the ones whose services are getting acquired, they’re the ones whose employers are aligning right now.

Communication is the single, most critical thing that we need to be investing in, right now. So you need to put the same kind of passion you put into building an organization, into how you’re communicating your product, so that you win. So I know everyone, probably, that’s listening to this webinar, has something inside of them, some dream, that they let die, or something that they need, that they treasure that they need to communicate. If you invest in your communication skills, once your product goes out there, or your services are engaged, you really will change the world, and I know you’ll make the world a better place. I want to thank you Andrew, for having me on today.

Andrew: Thank you. What a wonderful presentation. It’s almost intimidating, by the way, Nancy, to see your presentations. Because I keep thinking about all the mistakes that I must have made as I created PowerPoint slides and other presentations. You know, before we started this session, I talked to my members about this upcoming session, and they’re waiting for it to be published on Mixergy. The one question that a few of them had was, and they all happened to be software engineers, as you’ll see. They say, stories are great for salespeople but we have software companies that we’re running, we’re selling software, we’re trying to get people to sign up and use our SAS based software. Don’t facts convince our customers better than stories, shouldn’t we have more bullet points with the features we have in our products, and not stories? Or maybe the benefits that those features give? What do you say to that?

Nancy: Yeah, that just cracks me up, because humans are the ones using the products, and any time a human is involved, there’s a great story. You know, there’s ways to incorporate a story into how you demo the product, they way you fill the fields in and the scenario, you build around your demo could be awesome. You look at Steve Jobs’ 2007 iPhone launch, “Oh, I have a voicemail message from Al Gore. Oh, I’m going to call him. I’m going to order 4,000 lattes.” It was awesome and it was all orchestrated in an amazing way and I think that’s a cop out. Interestingly, I get this push back all the time, “Oh I have a technical offering. I’m not a story-teller.”

So I intentionally analyze the Cal-Tech professor, Richard Feynman, thinking, “A lecture on gravity? Could that be any more boring than a software demo?” I analyzed his lecture thinking it would have a much looser frequency and believe it or not, the frequency of his lecture is tighter. It moves back and forth more rapidly between what is and what could be. It’s like people don’t want to put the energy into their communication to make it great, so it takes less energy to make it good. It takes about three times the amount of energy to get to good as to get to great. And people don’t want to put that amount of energy into it, but that’s what it takes. So it all depends, I guess, to the software question, how badly do they want to sell their product? If they don’t want to sell it that badly then, yeah, they can not incorporate a story.

Andrew: And, Nancy, if we were to use story to communicate, and I know my audience, they want it badly, they’re willing to put in the work. If they were to create their own story, would they put the shape down on a piece of paper and, literally, underneath each section of that shape, the high and the low, put the parts of the story in the presentation? Is that the way the presentation starts, with the shape?

Nancy: Yeah, kind of. It’s actually more of an analysis tool. It’s almost like you can hope that you say all those things until you’ve actually transcribed your speech and actually analyzed it, you don’t know if you’ve actually had enough contrast in it. The first thing you have to do is think through who’s in the audience and you need to get to know them, kind of like what I was saying about Martin Luther King. They’re not going to change unless you know what’s inside of them and you need to resonate what’s already in them. It’s not like you can pronounce all this stuff on them and they’re going to suddenly be moved.

You have to figure out, “What’s unites them? What excites them? What kept them up last night? How much money do they make? How do they spend their money?” You have to really obsess over, “Who am I talking to as a human? And what is going to move them from point A to point B?” Now the second thing you need to do is you need to define your transformation. The reason why we love stories so much is we love to observe transformation. We’re paying, like $12 in some places, to see a movie because we love to watch people struggle and emerge transformed.

So you have to define, “How is this audience going to struggle and what is the transformation I want at the end?” If you don’t define that before you start to collect and create your content, you’re not going to just arrive at this transformation automatically. You have to define the transformation and then everything that you create, you support that transformation. And then you need to make sure that you’re creating enough contrast, with enough dramatic information, to keep them interested and keep it alluring. But there’s some steps you need to do before you just start to think through what is and what could be.

Andrew: When Seth Godin was on here to talk about “Linchpin”, his book that was published at the time, one of the first questions, in fact, THE first question that I asked him about was the lizard brain, the challenge that entrepreneurs have and people have, that internal voice, as he calls it “the lizard brain”, and he said, “Andrew, that’s not an inspiring way to get started. Let’s talk about the possibilities for what’s great, and then we’ll talk about the challenges which come from having that lizard brain.” Are you suggesting that the other way might be better, to start off with the challenge, with the frustrations, with where we are today, and then go to where we could be? And if we do, what about the issue of starting in an uninspiring place, at a point where we’re threatening the audience, we’re putting a threat out there?

Nancy: Well, what you’re doing is not really threatening them. It’s not appealing to the lizard brain at all, I don’t think, because I think the lizard brain reacts to its most basic survival need, if I understand how you’re defining the lizard brain. It’s usually like fear-based, fight or flight-based. So I’m not saying freak them out or scare them. What I’m saying is, you need to establish the current reality that everyone agrees to.

And it doesn’t have to be this big, old, long thing, it can be pretty short. It’s just establishing the reality. So, in story-telling, I was saying, everything starts in the ordinary world, and then they move into a special world of transformational power, and then it moves back into the ordinary world. It’s like a circle. And so what’s happening is you’re just establishing what their ordinary world looks like, “Here’s where we are. Here’s where thriving, here’s where we’re not, here’s what’s the reality, or here’s the big elephant in the room.” And they’re like, yeah, pretty much, because if you don’t address the elephant in the room, you talk about the future all you want, but they’re thinking about the big old elephant. So, all you’re doing is just establishing what is, and then you say, but look, here’s what could be. So, I’m not saying belabor it, and freak them out by it, and cause a sense of fear at all. That’s not what the establishment is for.

Andrew: Don’t heighten the frustration, don’t dramatize the problem. Just lay it out there.

Nancy: And make it real, and make sure it’s pretty much the consensus of what reality really is.

Andrew: I see. So, they recognize the way they are, and then see that you’re the leader who’s going to take them to the next level.

Nancy: What happens is, immediately, you’re building consensus. You’re like, yeah, smart guy. That’s totally what’s on my mind. He’s absolutely right, oh my God, he thought about that too? That was on my mind, too. Wow, you know, that’s pretty insightful, blah, blah, blah. And then you say, you know, this is our reality, or this is what is status quo, and we’re going to move to this new place in the future.

Andrew: OK. One final question. This comes up… Is it possible to incorporate this storytelling structure into a one minute video, into the short attention span that people have online?

Nancy: Absolutely. I mean, it can move back rapidly at a phrase level. In my book, I highlight Abraham Lincoln. His Gettysburg Address was three minutes long. You could use the same principle for one minute. And what he basically did is he just used the front part of the form. He established what is, moved to what could be, he had a call to action and the new belief. And that’s the shape he used, that’s actually the structure of the Gettysburg Address. Interestingly, Abraham Lincoln, in two hours, was going to be in an Aristotelian eulogy, with the full honor. They felt like, you know, to honor the dead, you have to give them a long time.

And instead of taking two hours, he took two minutes, and it leads to this powerful tight peak. Doing something in a minute, two minutes, three minutes, is like three times more difficult than doing something in an hour, just rambling right. Because when you have to narrow it down to a minute, it has to be tight, it has to be succinct, and it has to be powerful. But these principles apply to video, they apply to blogging, they apply to marketing. Anytime you’re trying to change a perception, the principle applies.

Andrew: All right. Finally, you mentioned that you need a call to action at the end of a presentation. What’s the call to action here? What would you like our audience, who’s now watched this full program, to do?

Nancy: I want them to completely change their mindset about communication. You know, we become subject matter experts or we become excellent in our field, and it takes hundreds of thousands of hours to do that. It takes thousands of hours to be a really good communicator. I really want people to kind of close that gap. Everyone’s looking for the [?]. Maybe somebody who watches your program is the new Steve Jobs. We’ve got to make a significant investment into our communication skills to really make an impact, a significant impact, on the world. So, call to action is understand the kind of sacrifices it takes to become a great communicator, and make that sacrifice. Because, the reward, the upside of the reward, is almost immeasurable.

Andrew: Well, I know I’m willing to put in that investment, and I’m going to continue to do it, along with my audience. I always say to my audience that if you’ve gotten anything out of a program, I urge you to thank the guest, to reach out, and in this case, I urge you to reach out to Duarte Design, to say thank you, and to see, you have workshops on your website, right?

Nancy: Yeah. We have workshops.

Andrew: For anyone who wants to go to the next level with their storytelling and presentation skills can go.

Nancy: Yeah. We have one going on today. I don’t know if you heard screaming and shouting in the background that they were doing.

Andrew: No, I didn’t catch it. But I did catch that you and I are both in a city with sirens and noises, and I appreciate being welcome [?] like this.

Nancy: I know, you had like, three of them! You’re welcome.

Andrew: Well, thank you, Nancy. Thank you all for watching. I’m looking forward to all of the feedback and especially the success stories. So, if you’re using this program to give a presentation, to even create a short video, don’t just put it out there. Put it out there and send me a link, let me see it so I can share it with the rest of the Mixergy community. Thanks for watching, and I look forward to your feedback. Bye.

Master Class: Outsourcing Mobile Apps
Taught by Michael Moon and Quoc Bui of Free The Apps

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Master Class:
Outsourcing Mobile Apps

Length: 57:49 minutes

About the course leader

This course is about how you can create your own iPhone app using outsourced workers. It’s led by Michael Moon and Quoc Bui, founders of Free The Apps, the company with over 35 million mobile app downloads.

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Transcript

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Andrew: This course is about how you can create your own iPhone app using outsourced workers. It’s led by Michael Moon and Quoc Bui, founders of Free The Apps, the company with over 35 million mobile app downloads. You can see their website right there on your screen. I’m Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy.com where proven founders like Mike and Quoc teach. Guys, can you show my audience what’s possible? What have you guys been able to do with what you’re about to teach the audience here today?Mike: We’ve created a pretty sustainable app business. We reached a really big milestone recently. We just hit the $1 million mark on AdSense, and this is AdSense only. It doesn’t include the earnings that we got from Apple and iApps and AdMob and all the other app companies.Andrew: So, let me look at this. This is over the last two years, October 23rd, 2009 to October 13th – which was just a couple days ago – 2011, $1.09 million in AdSense revenue.

Mike: Yeah.

Andrew: While that other app loads up, what other revenue do you have? Do you guys offer all your apps for free?

Mike: Yes.

Andrew: OK. So, beyond AdSense, where else does the other revenue come from?

Mike: iAds also is a big one, but iAds wasn’t out back when we first started. That’s a pretty good source of revenue, also. AdMob is a big one.

Andrew: OK. Actually, at the end of this session we’re going to show people the specific ad networks you work with. We’re going to tell them which ones you recommend, and we’ll get into all that, but for now we just wanted them to see a sense of how much revenue you guys are doing and one source is AdSense, which you just showed us. What are you showing us now?

Mike: This is our app figures account. We logged into it. You can see if you look at the all time that we’ve had a little over 35 million downloads. This is showing the dates when we first started, the graph down here, of around August 1st, 2009 to December 31st, so we weren’t getting a ton of downloads all the time. When we first started, we were getting about 5,000 downloads and then it started to take off when we started creating more apps. As you go down here, Christmas of 2009 was huge. We got 231,000 downloads in one day, so we got in at a pretty good time.

Andrew: That’s unbelievable. I think most people would be glad if all time they got that many downloads. Oops. I just got a pop-up on my screen here. Remind me later about that. Here you guys did it in one day; you were able to pull that out. Let me ask you this: Before you did all this you talked to me, before the interview, about how you got a little lost and you were taken in by a free lancer. Can you talk just a little bit about that because I think that it seems really easy when you see how big your numbers really are, but it was a struggle to get here. You guys learned a lot and you’re about to share with us what you learned, but what’s one of the big issues that you had as you were figuring this stuff out?

Mike: One of the first couple projects that we did we picked a freelancer. He looked really good, and he started one of our first projects. This is actually one of my first projects, and then we had three ideas that we wanted to do. Before that freelancer finished the first project, we decided to just give him all three projects. That didn’t turn out really well because he turned out not to be able to finish the first project very well, and the second and third ones just didn’t finish. So, that was a big blow, but, instead of quitting, we decided to pick up, try some new ideas and find some new developers. That stopped momentum a bit.

Andrew: A big chunk of what we’re about to talk to people about today is about how to find the right freelancer, partially because you guys got burned that way and partially because if the person who’s watching us today is not a developer, can’t do the whole thing himself or herself, they’re going to need to find the right freelancer and avoid what happened to you and find the right freelancer so that they could get that bump there that I see up on the graph on your screen. I get a sense of where you are now. Congratulations. I get a sense of the danger of not doing it right. Let’s talk about how you do it. What’s the first step?

Mike: The important part is a lot of people are usually scared to outsource their thinking. You know, “I have this awesome idea. What if somebody wants to steal it? You need to protect yourself with a NDA, so let’s pull that up over here.

Andrew: All right.

Mike: And this is the NDA we use for one of our specific apps panorama.

Andrew: So, you guys have all developers that you work with sign a NDA?

Mike: Yeah. And we include a link for that later so they can download it in case they want to use it as a template.

Andrew: All right. So, the NDA that you’re showing us right now, this is something that whoever is watching us can copy and paste and just basically steal your NDA and use it.

Mike: Yeah. Exactly. Just fill in the blanks.

Andrew: All right.

Quoc: It’s actually one of the bonuses that we give away in our e-Book package. We’re just going to link it to you guys so you guys can download it and start using it today.

Andrew: One of the things that I love about you is it feels like it just knocks the stuff out and it’ll work. But what I love about you guys is that you’re hustlers. You sell everything, like everything is available for sale, part of a package. At the end of this session, most people who teach courses on Mixergy, at the end of the session, they go, “All right. Thanks for having me on here.”

You guys go, “Andrew, we’ve got a way we want them to take the next step, and if they want to buy something, we want to have that for you”. I love this mentality because I feel like you’re finding opportunities by trying all these things. You’re finding opportunities in the app store. You’re finding opportunities by creating products to sell people. And frankly, you and I connected because you wrote a book on how to do this, and I said I’ve got to get the guys behind the book and the people with the story that I read about in the book.

So, NDA, is this really an issue though? Are we really when we’re trusting our ideas to outsourcers, there’s really a risk they’re going to take the idea. Have you guys seen that?

Mike: Honestly, no, I don’t think it is that big of a deal. People are scared by it, but people on things like eLance, they’re not out there to steal your ideas.

Andrew: So, this is mostly just you saying, we’re going to cover our butts here, and we’re going to show the person who we’re working with that we’re serious about these ideas. But you’re not expecting to have to go to court with this or even have anyone steal your idea.

Mike: Yeah. Exactly.

Andrew: All right. Fair enough. But we’re releasing our ideas into the world, if we have this idea that we can pass to people who can just copy and paste it. All right. Next step is what? Now that we’ve got a little bit of protection, what is the next thing we do?

Mike: So, the first thing you want to do after that is create a wire-frame for your product. You need to let the developer know exactly what you want and where you want your app to work. This is the exact wire-frame actually that was used to create our panorama app.

Andrew: OK.

Mike: We just go step by step of what we want, where we want the app placements.

Andrew: So, let me take a look at this and ask you some questions to make sure that I understand it. First of all, this looks really basic. Is this the whole wire-frame that you sent over, the whole logic?

Mike: It’s really basic. We tried ones even more basic than this where we just have a pencil and paper and draw it out and take a picture of it. It’s very basic.

Andrew: Yeah. I think actually for this course, you said we’ll just grab the piece of paper that we used for one of our past apps, but frankly I think this is much better because it’s easier for people to duplicate this, and I don’t think a piece of paper on the screen will show up that realistically, will it?

Quoc: No.

Andrew: So, let me see if I understand what you’ve got here. What you have is you’re saying, give me a splash screen, some kind of screen that pops up as the app is loading. Then, what’s that second rectangle that that top splash screen’s arrow pointing to?

Mike: The one that’s pointing down?

Andrew: Yeah. So, the splash screen leads to what?

Mike: So, the splash screen loads and we have one of the gray screen advertisements right there to show while the app is loading.

Andrew: So, the first thing you want to show people is an ad because you guys make money through advertising.

Mike: Exactly. And you don’t always get to show when the apps already doing something, when it’s loading.

Andrew: I see because there’s nothing else for people to do except to look at the ad. OK. By the way, before I continue asking you about this, what does this app do?

Mike: It basically takes a series of photos and stitches them together to create one panoramic photo.

Andrew: OK. So, you just want an app that lets people take a photo, photo, photo, photo; stitches it together and gives them one panoramic photo. That’s simple actually. All right. I get it. So, you’re saying, show a splash screen, then show an ad. Then, where does it go? It goes up to a diamond shaped little chart item. What is that? That’s a decision.

Mike: Yeah. So, basically if they’re going to be taking a bunch of portrait photos from landscape photos.

Andrew: So, you want to know: is it portrait or landscape? Let’s suppose it’s portrait. So, it takes them up to the take a photo screen. Then it goes to the right. After they take a photo they get to view it, either check and say yes or redo it and take another photo, right?

Quoc: Yes.

Andrew: OK, and then what you’re doing is you’re leading them right back to the same take a photo page, right?

Mike: So, it’ll be taking a series of photos until they click, make my panam now, which is when it will start merging those photos together. So, you need a minimum of at least two photos.

Andrew: OK, so you can’t see it where I’m pointing so I’ll just talk it through, but the right most screen shots, the one that’s a start over, reshoot photo one and underneath it, done. That’s essentially where they’re done. Once they’ve completed this process, they hit the done and that’s it.

Mike: Yes.

Andrew: Alright, then let’s see from there what happens. You take them to, what does it say on the far most rectangle?

Mike: Oh, on the right?

Andrew: Yeah.

Mike: Yeah, that’s another gray strike full screen advertisement, so that’ll pop up as it’s merging, which is the bottom left screen. So, as it’s merging the photos together it’ll show an ad.

Andrew: Got it. Got it. OK. And then you show them the photo.

Mike: Exactly.

Andrew: And that’s it. And it looks like you say, do you want to add this to your iPhones photo collection. But you don’t have a tweet this, or Facebook this, or anything like that at this stage, do you?

Mike: We did, but we had those on the written description that just went more into depths of the wire-frame.

Andrew: OK. So, this is it. You hand them this with the written description of what happens and this is your first version.

Mike: Yep.

Andrew: Alright, I have a few questions about this. First of all, what program do you use, this is such a dorky simple question but I want to cover all my bases here, what program did you use to create this?

Mike: I think it’s Sierra basic, maybe I even used like MS Paint on Windows on my old computer or something. I mean sometimes we use Photoshop, just really simple stuff.

Andrew: So that’s it, it’s just that basic and of course, Google.docs has a flow charting system and I’ve seen people even use, what is it Picnic, no not Picnic. I guess it doesn’t really matter if you guys can use Microsoft Paint to create this then, then it shows how basic it is. What are you guys doing on PCs?

Mike: Oh that, well I’m not on a PC anymore.

Andrew: Oh, right, now that you guys have done well, one of the first things you did was buy a Mac?

Mike: Right.

Andrew: All right, fair enough. So this is the simple, what is the cost, and you’re going to show me how to find a developer to get this done for me, but what does it cost to have a developer build this?

Mike: Actually, anywhere from one to four thousand. It’s like one thousand to four thousand dollars, depending on the simplicity of the app.

Andrew: This specific one, what would it cost? If I were to say, hey, you know what, Michael and Quoc just put an idea in my head, I’m going to do panoramic photos also, I’m also going to put adds in, but I’m going to beat them by putting in only one ad instead of two ads and I’ll mop the floor with them. If they wanted to do that, how much would it cost them to duplicate this?

Mike: This is a little more complicated because of the Photo stitching, so I would guesstimate like, four thousand.

Andrew: OK.

Mike: We had this app developed half a year ago or a year ago, so this was done a while ago, so back then I think we paid about four thousand for it.

Andrew: OK.

Mike: Yeah.

Andrew: All right, so on a simpler end, if I just wanted to say take, I say it’s Christmas coming up and I want a photo where someone can take a picture of their friend and then like on top of the photo put a Santa Claus hat. What would that kind of photo, what would that kind of photo app cost me? About a thousand?

Mike: Five hundred or less.

Andrew: Five hundred or less.

Mike: All you want is just a hat, just a hat on the picture?

Andrew: Yeah, and you adjust it on the screen so it goes exactly on the person’s head. I’m just trying to get a sense of what a simpler app would cost.

Mike: Yeah, less than a thousand.

Andrew: Less than a thousand bucks.

Mike: Yeah. It’s just a simple one hat, but if you want different types of hats and you want, like a beard, different things like that, like different art that you can put on a face, we actually have apps that do that. I think that’s like two to three thousand.

Andrew: Two to three thousand to go a little bit higher end. All right, and the revenue would come from advertising. Let’s talk about how to find a developer for this because this is a great idea but if I end up stuck with a developer for hours and months and it goes too far than the whole idea flops.

Mike: Sure.

Andrew: So, what do I do now?

Mike: So, what we did was since we created, since we were using the panorama wire-frame, we wanted to stick with that application. But since we had that created a long time ago, we wanted to start out fresh. So, two days ago we actually put up, we put up a job on Elance, with that exact description, the MDA and the wire-frame, we just wanted to see what kind of developers would bid on our application.

Andrew: OK, so I asked you to walk me through the whole process and show my audience the whole process of creating an app and you said, hey, you know what two days ago on Elance we put up an app, we’re going to trust Andrew’s audience to see this and we’re going to show it all in public. This is what you put on Elance asking someone to design your next app for you.

This is the next piece of the million dollar idea, of the million dollar business. Mike, you’re smiling, but let me tell you something, this is the same thing, when I had you on the interview, I said the same thing and the audience agreed with me. I have people who’ve done nothing with their lives, nothing with their businesses, who approach me and say, “Andrew, I’m the best at this, I’m phenomenal”. They come on screen and they’re talking like they figured everything out, not only business but they figured out women, men, life, marriage, like that, they figured it all out. That’s the way they come across.

You guys, I know you guys, we have friends in common, I know that you guys are the real thing and you come across like, we just built a Word app, you know, or not a Word app, we just built an MS Paint doc, this is no big deal. So I have to, if the audience is seeing me compensate by being more enthusiastic it’s A) because you earned it and B) because you will not express anything. So, I’ve got to do everything. I mean you’re really showing Elance.

I’ve had other entrepreneurs on here who’ve done iPhone app development and I’ve said, will you show me your screen on Elance and they’re like, are you out of your friggin mind? I don’t know who watches this stuff, I’m not about to share it. So, I appreciate that you’re doing it and I want the audience to appreciate that too, so I’ve got to stop and say it.

All right, now I’ve zoomed in on your screen, I see now Elance. Can you walk me through what you’ve done here and what we need to do if we’re going ask someone to create our iPhone app?

Quoc: Right, sorry for not being more enthusiastic, we’re just trying.

Andrew: I can cover for it, believe me, I’ve got triple the enthusiasm, I’m holding back right now.

Quoc: We’re just trying to have people not make the same mistakes we made and not really trying to sell anything, so.

Andrew: All right. So let’s take a look. So, what are you seeing? Actually, know what, let’s see if we can do this, can you hit command plus on your keyboard, that will make your text a little bit bigger and it will fill up more of the screen.

Quoc: How’s that?

Andrew: It’ll take a second for it to show up on my screen and while it does, why don’t you start walking me through this. The app is called photography iPhone application.

Quoc: Yeah, so we want to make a title kind of generic, you know, we don’t want to put everything in there so we just, pretty much they’re going to create a photography iPhone application, so hopefully we’ll be targeting the developers that have worked with photography applications who know a thing or two about features, photo, video.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Quoc: And, in our description, we wrote up a pretty basic description. It says, we also attached the wire-frame that you saw previously. So with that we also added a pretty basic description saying we had to stitch multiple photos by aligning, blending, stitching them together to create one photo. That’s pretty much the gist of the application.

Andrew: I see. OK. So this is actually you recreating the Elance request that you had up before, right? This is not for a new app, right?

Quoc: Yes.

Andrew: OK, alright, I misunderstood but I get what you’re saying. OK, so, what you’re showing in the description, this is the way you describe it. Very basic, we need an application that can take multiple photos and stitch them together to create a panorama photo. We need it to be able to stitch multiple photos by aligning, blending and stitching them together to create one panoramic photo and then underneath it you say, we also need AdWorld implementation with AdMobs, Quattro, Google Ad Sense by using generic notifications.

Please let us know if you guys can take on this project for us, how long it’ll take, how much it’ll cost and what’s that last line there? Before, oh, OK, this is the part you weren’t sure you even wanted to share with the wider audience but I said go for it. Before applying, please include a signed copy of our NDA and we have attached and included the very top of this reply the specific key words so that we know you’re human and the specific keyword is, I am human, and the reason you said that people should add that last section is, why?

Quoc: Because sometimes people reply, automatic replies, so they’ll just reply to tons of iPhone app development jobs and they don’t really read the description, it’s just a mass reply.

Mike: And I’m pretty sure there’s probably bots out there too that just spam all these things with bids.

Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I guess if what you’re doing is reaching outsourcers who develop automation software, of course they’re going to develop automation software for themselves to auto reply to all the Elance opportunities that are out there.

Quoc: Yeah.

Andrew: OK, so that’s what it is. And now, you already got, even those this is a fake, now that I see a fake and this is why I should hold back my enthusiasm, I thought this was a real app. It’s still very useful but I’ve got to react in a different way to this. Alright, this is real responses that you go to the test description that you put up two days ago.

Mike: Yes.

Andrew: OK, great. Thanks for doing that, by the way, for taking the extra time in creating this description and adding it to Elance. So let’s see what people responded with.

Quoc: OK. And a big reason for this is because after you find developers that you know and trust, we’ll go back to them for future projects.

Andrew: OK.

Quoc: After they finish a project, everything went really well. So after a while, you don’t have to use Elance as much, once you find trusted developers. So the reason why we posted this is because, we didn’t actually do this project through Elance. We used a trusted developer.

Andrew: Got it. OK.

Quoc: For this one. That’s why.

Andrew: But first, you’re finding your developers through Elance. Once you get to know them, and you like working with each other and it feels like you can read each other’s minds, then you just go directly to them. So let’s see who responded . . .

Quoc: So first of all, I was . . .

Andrew: I’m sorry, go ahead.

Quoc: So first of all, I was using Elance. So that’s why we want to show this.

Andrew: OK. And they even did a case study on you guys, they did a whole post about how you guys keep using them.

Mike: Yes.

Andrew: And have built a successful business with them.

Mike: That’s also cool, because a lot of people ask, “How do I know how much this app is going to cost me?” And you put it up on Elance, you get a bunch of different bids, and you can just tally up the average and figure out what the going rate is.

Andrew: All right, so it actually feels sometimes to me, when I post a job requirement on Elance, that it’s a job in itself just to go through all the responses, and it’s hard to figure out who the right person is. Walk me through how you figure out who the right outsourcer is to use for this.

Quoc: OK. So here are a couple things that we look at. Here’s the first bid. And Elance makes it nice, so you can message the people back, or you can create your own personal notes about the bid. So these notes, nobody can see except yourself.

Andrew: OK. I see – ignore or not.

Quoc: So these are real useful. See the cheat notes, right?

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Quoc: So for this first guy, he didn’t write the “I am human” part at the very top. Just a very generic message. Hello sir, I am interested in this project. So right away, it’s a red flag. It’s a signal.

Mike: Yeah, if he doesn’t even mention anything about the app that we just described.

Andrew: OK. So he’s offering to do it for $4,712.33. I see.

Mike: Yeah.

Andrew: That’s his way of saying, even though he’s probably not human, that’s his way of saying I am human.

Quoc: So it’s just generic. He says nothing about photography applications, or anything about our requirements, which is a red flag, too.

Andrew: OK.

Quoc: So he clearly didn’t read the description. Let’s see, the second one, see it’s “I am human”. He’s attached the NDA, and he talks about how they have experience with applications utilizing camera hardware, photo, video manipulation features. So that’s a big thing that we look at too, is have they done something similar?

Andrew: OK. Let me give that a moment here to see it. It says, “Please find attached NDA document. We have very good experience with iPhone, iPad applications utilizing camera hardware, including photo and video manipulation features. Here are some of the relevant applications that we’ve developed.” And he links to some Flash and PDF file.

He also says he’s not ready to say the amount that he’s going to charge. Is that common?

Quoc: That is common. Sometimes they won’t say how much, so it will take a couple back and forth discussions. They just wanted to get to know, they wanted to know more details about the application before they give us an estimate.

Andrew: OK.

Quoc: Because, since our description was kind of general. We did have a wire-frame, that was pretty specific there, but they wanted more information before they give us a number, so they don’t scare us off.

Andrew: I see, OK.

Mike: They want to get us.

Quoc: They want to hook us in, first. So that’s their way of doing it.

Andrew: And so they start asking you more questions?

Quoc: Let me see. This guy didn’t ask us more questions.

Andrew: OK.

Quoc: There are other ones that do. But this one, this is one of the ones that I would have replied back to, because they have experience with video and photography and stuff.

Andrew: OK.

Quoc: So that’s important for our applications. Since we have photo manipulation and stitching and blending. So usually we picked about three to four, that we’d reply back to with even more details, more information. And then we’ll pick from there. So we narrow it down.

Andrew: Would the first thing you send out be just the wire-frame as you showed it to me, the flow chart?

Quoc: Excuse me?

Andrew: Is the first thing you send out just the flowchart that you sent me? Or do you do the flow chart plus the text document that you described?

Quoc: Uh, we send out both.

Andrew: Both, OK. And then later, you follow up with how much more information or what other information?

Quoc: Whatever questions they may have.

Andrew: Got it. OK. So, let’s see who else is on there. That’s the first real person’s response. Let’s see what else you got.

Quoc: Here’s another. These guys are from the United States.

Andrew: OK.

Quoc: That’s one thing, too. If somebody’s from the States, we might be able to communicate with them better. The time zones are the same. If they look good, and the price is good, we might pick them over someone who’s overseas.

Andrew: I’ve talked to an Indian entrepreneur who said that he couldn’t work with Indian developers. I said, ”What’s the issue?” He said, “The problem is that they’re not walking around with iPhones in their pockets all day.” That the developers that he hired actually didn’t have iPhones in the office even. They were just working off of the desktop version of the iPhone, the one that lets you simulate the iPhone.

He said, “You know, even if they had a real iPhone in the office, the fact that they’re not walking home and playing with it before they go to sleep, that they’re not waking up to the iPhone alarm, means that they don’t have the same feel for it.” That’s why he prefers to work with European developers, and you’re also making a similar case for American developers. They probably are walking around with the iPhone in their pocket and are itching to develop something for it.

Mike: In our experience, the best developers we’ve found are from Russia, the Ukraine. We’ve had really good experience with developers there.

Andrew: Can you say, “I’m looking for either guys in my time zone, in my country, or in specific countries like the Ukraine?”

Mike: Can you repeat that?

Andrew: Can you say that you’re looking for developers from specific countries?

Mike: I think we can.

Andrew: But it’s not something that you guys do right now. You just know that it’s a possibility?

Quoc: Yes.

Andrew: Let’s take a look at the next one. He goes, “I’m human” and take it from there.

Quoc: He knows that we’re in San Diego. He did his homework.

Andrew: I love that. What else are you looking at here?

Mike: That was nice. Let’s see. He just says he wants to speak with us in more detail.

Andrew: What about it here makes you feel like this is someone I’d consider working with? He’s in the U.S., you said. He said, “I’m human at the top.” He also noticed that you were in San Diego, so he cares enough to do a little bit of homework. Right now, all those things could just mean that this is a guy who spends a lot of time networking, and not necessarily a good developer. How do you know he’s going to be the right developer? What clues do you have that let you know whether he will or will not be?

Quoc: Some other things we might look at are his ratings.

Andrew: OK. 4.7.

Mike: 4.7 average. How many repeat clients?

Andrew: How can you tell if he has repeat clients? Oh, I see right there. No, actually, I don’t see it. Where do you know if he has repeat clients?

Quoc: We scroll over, and so we know that he’s made $56,000 in earnings, right?

Andrew: Right.

Quoc: Below that, you’ll see it says client [??]. It says 20 total and 11% repeat.

Andrew: I see, yes. So, he has some repeat clients, right?

Quoc: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: Got it. Got it.

Quoc: The repeat clients is a good thing, yes. If we work with a bad developer, we’re never going to develop good projects. They’ve had 37 jobs. That’s a pretty good sign. Just because they’re in the U.S., we might message them back. But, they didn’t really say anything about photography applications or video or anything like that.

Andrew: OK. The way that you would message them back is, you have to just use the internal messaging system at Elance, right? People don’t want you to talk offline.

Quoc: Yes. We want to use their messaging system if we work with Elance.

Andrew: Why?

Quoc: Just in case problems arise. So, we’ve had it before where, say a developer was taking too long, or they just weren’t doing the project correctly. They couldn’t finish it. So, it’s a good thing to have all your messages on Elance. Then if you need to go into a dispute, Elance can step in and then they can review it. So, everything’s there for them to see.

Andrew: Got it. How much is Hypeconcepts LLC willing to do this for?

Quoc: They didn’t specify.

Andrew: All right. And, you’d said earlier that’s a pretty common thing.

Quoc: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: OK. Is there one other one you want to point out before we move to the next stage here?

Mike: Here’s one. Do you see the Harold Solutions?

Andrew: It’s going to take a moment to come up on my screen. Right now I see Alioth Technology Consulting Company, LTD in China is willing to do this for $4500. Karmic Solutions is willing to do this. We see that Karmic solutions has a lot of payment, I think it’s $76,000. Here’s Harold Solutions. What are you noticing about these guys in India?

Mike: These guys, you can tell they’ve actually reviewed our requirements and they summarize what we need. So, here’s the three bullet points they’ve summarized, and they actually asked us relevant questions. So, it’s as if they’ve already started.

Andrew: I see. Is there an option to save captured panorama effect in the application? Are you going to provide graphics in U.I. or do we need to? This is really good feedback. So, this person really cares, and this person understands the project and has gone through each one of the flow chart steps. I see. So, right now, I’m seeing several people who I’d want to at least engage in conversation with. How do I know which of them is the right one for me to work with?

Mike: To me, a big thing is if they worked on similar projects in the past. This guy, he asks good questions, but if he’s never worked on an iPhone app in his life, if he doesn’t have anything to show or he does have something to show but it’s not a well made app, then I probably won’t work with him. Sometimes you just have to pick one and go with it.

Andrew: Got it. Maybe now is the right time to look at feedback. Is there anything you want to show us from the proposals you just got?

Mike: No. I think that’s it.

Andrew: Can you tell from the proposals how much you should pay for this based on what people have all ready suggested or is that not possible yet?

Mike: I don’t think this is a good reference yet since it’s only been two days. Usually we’ll leave up my description for around a week to get more proposals and a better idea of how much we should pay. I would say this is along the high end of $4500.

Andrew: Of what it should cost.

Mike: Yes.

Andrew: OK. So, what you do to figure out the price is, tell me if I’m wrong, you just go through all the proposals and, based on what prices people are pitching, that’s how you know how much to charge.

Mike: Yeah. You get a pretty good idea from that.

Andrew: OK. That plus experience from having created apps in the past. Do you guys have a network of other iPhone app entrepreneurs that you reach out to and say, “Hey, are these guys full of crap or is this really the price? Should it be $4500 or maybe we just didn’t explain out app properly so they think it’s more complicated than it is and that’s why they’re all charging in the $4000 range?”

Mike: This is a pretty good way of doing it because they can do the closed bids where they can bid and the other people who are bidding can’t see what everyone else is bidding, so it’s a pretty good way to do it.

Andrew: I see. So, now you get this. You go back and forth with people. You pick one of these developers and say, “You’re the guy.” What do you do now in the back and forth to make sure that this gets done right?

Mike: After you pick the developer, it’s just a lot of back and forth. They’ll e-mail you or they’ll message you on Elance with a “Here’s a new build. Here’s what we’re working on.” Then they give us a build that we install in our device and we’ll play with it, we’ll test it, and we’ll give them feedback.

So, what we’ve found is that the easiest way is to just make a list, just a numbered list, of things they need to change, things they need to fix, bugs. So, here we took a screen shot of actual feedback we gave for the panorama edition. These are two separate examples.

Andrew: OK. Let me take a look at this. This is you guys responding again. You’re giving them feedback within the Elance platform and you’re saying, “The UI looks great. We love the way you implemented how it stitches from portrait to landscape.”. Then you have a list of bugs and also you have a smiley face there. One bug we caught was that when you click the finish button, the green check mark, on the “Take left most photo 3” it shows “Panorama taking photo number 2”. We’ve attached a screenshot, bug.png. They should both be the same number 3, and the only pull up menu that should have the previous number is when you click the back button. See correct.png.

All right. So, you’re just showing them each step that needs to be fixed, and then you have the summary of fixes. Summary of fixes: 1, Fix the number in bug.png, 2, remove backspace on toolbar highlighted in red in portrait.png, 3, move sign “Take left most photo X” below the ads. See portrait.png and landscape.png. Do I have that right, Mike?

Mike: Yep.

Andrew: Then below, again, it’s similar. Can we give this to people? I know we’re giving them the NDA. Can we give them the screenshot of this, too?

Mike: Yeah.

Andrew: All right. I’m not really sure that this specific feedback can help. But, who knows? Any little bit of just looking over your shoulder and seeing how you do it, I think, can potentially be helpful.

Mike: It’s just showing how detailed you want to be when describing your bugs to developers because some people will just say, “Oh, this doesn’t work.” But, that doesn’t help the developer in figuring out how to reproduce the bug and how to fix it. Not everybody’s a QA expert. Right? So, this is just kind of a step by step showing how detailed we are in listing the app so developers can easily fix the bugs.

Andrew: You’re at this point installing it on your iPhone and, whenever you see a mistake, hitting both buttons, doing a quick screen shot, and basically emailing them or attaching it to the Elance bug request.

Mike: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: OK. What else do I want to know about this process? So, you had an issue where you gave someone too much work and it took you too long to know that this free lancer was not getting the job done. I just recorded an interview a moment ago with an entrepreneur who said it took him three months to figure out that the first developer he hired was just never going to get it done.

How do we cut back on that time? Is it just enough to say in Elance or whatever system we’re using that we’re going to set up four milestones for payment. The first one is when you get started. The second is when you deliver the first version, and if you don’t deliver the first version by a certain time, you’re done. Is that how you guys protect yourselves?

Quoc: I’ve never done that.

Andrew: So, how do you do it? How do you protect yourselves from developers who just take forever and don’t get anything done?

Mike: We probably just stop at the milestone and give what has been created so far to a new developer.

Andrew: So, you do use milestones.

Mike: Yes, we do.

Andrew: How many milestones? At what point do you have them and what percentage of the overall do you pay out at each milestone?

Mike: We usually don’t even have an initial payment. The first payment’s usually after the first milestone where they give us the first test version of the app.

Andrew: How much do you give them at that point?

Mike: Depending on how many milestones, maybe 25% to 33%. We usually only break it up to only four total milestones or three. Usually three.

Andrew: Three total milestones. Are they equal payments or is there a different amount?

Mike: I think it’s an equal one, and we’ve also done where the final one is the most.

Andrew: It seems to me that it’s not critical how much you do it, just that you have milestones, that you break them up, in your case either three or four stages. You don’t have to pay right away, but you do say, “At version one, you hit a milestone” and you get either 25% or 30% of the overall. That’s the way you guys do it.

Quoc: Yeah. Just make sure that those milestones are actually worth how much you’re paying them.

Andrew: I see.

Quoc: You don’t want the milestone to be 50% of the payment when it’s 10% of the total work.

Andrew: Have you ever had someone hit a milestone and not deliver the goods?

Mike: Yeah. That happens all the time.

Andrew: So, what do you do if you’ve said to them, “In one week or one month you need to give me version one of the panorama app, and when you do that I will give you $1500.” The time comes. They don’t deliver. What do you do?

Quoc: We just wait longer. We’re actually pretty nice. We’re pretty chill.

Mike: Yeah, we’re very nice.

Quoc: You could be micromanaging. You could be on them every day, but if they told you something came up, then sometimes you have no choice but to wait a little longer. When you reach your tipping point where it’s like “It’s been three months since the milestone. I haven’t gotten anything.”

Then that’s when you can go to them and say, “We’ve wasted too much time. We need to get another developer.” That’s how Elance protects you. You can request your money back, even money that you’ve all ready paid them for past milestones.

Andrew: So, if they hit milestone number one, they hit milestone number two, but they miss the third milestone and they haven’t even started to aim at the fourth and final milestone, you get the first two milestone payments back, you’re saying.

Quoc: You could go into dispute about that. So, first you talk to them and say, “You know what? This project’s never going to be complete. You’re not going to deliver us the complete project, and we want our money back because we want to start with a new developer.” Sometimes they’re OK with it.

We’ve had this happen to us where sometimes they’ll say, “OK. We can’t just finish it, so here’s your money back.” Sometimes they’ll fight it. They’ll say, “We did this work. We’re not going to give you your money back.” That’s when you should go into dispute with Elance, and that’s where the past messages and all the milestones that you set up come in handy.

Andrew: OK. You guys seem pretty chill. It’s not a matter of just pushing back on them or being slave drivers with them or worrying that maybe you’re being push-overs. You just set up your milestones. You expect them to hit it. They probably do. If they don’t, you give them a little more time. It’s that chill. I’m OK if I do that. I don’t have to freak out, and you know me, I would. You’re saying no.

Quoc: Yeah. The big reason for this setting up passive income is so that we could be a lot more stress free.

Andrew: I see. That does seem like a big thing for you guys. It’s not a goal for being the next big iPhone developer. I’m trying to think of who you guys might be aspiring to, but I can’t even. In fact, why don’t you tell me? Who is it?

Quoc: Angry Birds.

Andrew: Angry Birds. Yeah. You’re not trying to be like them.

Quoc: No.

Andrew: No, you just want to make some money on the side. The person you told me earlier that you’re thinking of is Tim Ferriss, the Tim Ferriss four hour work week. You want to chill and build this thing. It doesn’t have to be high stress. You’re not trying to create the next big iPhone app. I see the feedback. I understand the loop.

You’ve told me that people are underestimating free apps, that if they wanted to charge, Apple makes it easy to charge and sends them a check, but if they want to go free they don’t understand that it’s a viable business model. It’s worked for you guys. It’s where 100% of your revenue comes from. So, teach us. Now we’ve got this app. It’s time for us to make money. What do we do?

Quoc: That’s a big question. It’s “How do you make money when all of your apps are free?”. How we make money is off of advertisements, just like how Google made a big portion of their money. It was through advertisements on the web.

So, there are a lot of different ad networks that you can put onto your applications. You can have a banner ad, which is a very small piece at the top, or you can have full screen ads. When we first started we were just using Apple.

Mike: Yeah. We were just using Apple because AdSense wasn’t out yet and Apple didn’t have iAds yet.

Quoc: Yeah. This is before Apple bought Quattro. So, we just used AdMob. You don’t want to use just one ad network because their fill rate won’t be 100%.

Mike: And all the ECPMS will be different on all the ad networks, too.

Andrew: So, what you’re showing us is Ad Whirl, your dashboard, this is where you decide which ad network Ad Whirl should serve up in all of your apps.

Mike: Yes.

Andrew: OK. Why are you doing 90% Google AdSense and only 10% of iAd?

Quoc: We found that Google AdSense is paying us the most money.

Mike: We should probably update this, though, because AdSense is getting phased out.

Quoc: They’re paying us the most, so we wanted to show that 90% of the traffic should try to pull from AdSense. The nice thing about Ad Whirl is, let’s say there isn’t an ad to show, so the flow rate isn’t 100%, it would jump to the next one. It would pull an iAd.

Andrew: I see.

Quoc: If we were only doing Ad Mob then the times where there is no app to show, when the flow rate isn’t there, then you’re losing lots of money pretty much.

Andrew: All right. Which of the networks do you recommend the person who is listening to us now take a look at, AdSense, iAd, Ad Mob. I see Bright Role is on there, any of the other one’s even worth their time, should they just focus on the top three that you guys are working with?

Mike: For full screen ads, Gray Stripe is a pretty big one, they should definitely try those.

Andrew: If their doing full screen ads, Gray Stripe, that’s what they should use. OK.

Quoc: They can also use, so we’re actually going to, for our future updates we’re going to start using more Ad Networks, just to try to diversify a little bit and see if we can make more money. So, we’re actually going to start incorporating In Moby, Jump Tap, Millennial and, I think that’s it. But we’ve also heard good things about Mob Clicks. You just have to try them out.

Andrew: OK.

Mike: And a good thing about ad mediators, like Ad World, is you can try all of them out. You can give them all a little piece and see how much money you make.

Andrew: Will they do the analysis for you? In other words, will they say, hey, you know what? Ad Mob is sending Mike and Quoc the most revenue, the best bang for their CPM. I’m just going to show Ad Mob and de-emphasize iAd and Google Ad Sense, or do you have to go in and manually do that?

Quoc: With Ad World it’s manual.

Andrew: OK.

Mike: Yeah.

Andrew: OK, what else do I need to take a look at here? What else do I need to know about Ad World?

Mike: Yeah, if you wanted to cross some of your applications, like we crossed from a lot of your apps, so when a new app comes out we’ll probably push a lot of advertising so that new app in a lot of our old apps.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Mike: Ad World makes it pretty easy with house ads, you can just put in a house ad.

Andrew: Got it, I see it right there, so let’s take a look at that. Are you linking directly to those ads, by the way? Or are you using linkshare?

Mike: To our apps?

Andrew: Yeah, so here’s what I heard. I just did an interview with an entrepreneur who’s in the app space and he said this. He said, “Look, I have on all my apps a list of all my other apps so that anyone who signs up for one app can hopefully sign up for more.” And he said, “What I realized recently was, I can just do a link from, instead of linking directly into the app store and letting people go and get my app, I link to my app in the app store using a linkshare affiliate account.”And even though, he says, my apps are free, if the person goes into the app store and buys an app that costs money, I get money back. He told me that for 72 hours after someone clicks using your affiliate link, you end up getting a paid affiliate commission on that person. Did I just blow your minds?

Mike: We do use linkshare.

Andrew: You do use linkshare. OK.

Mike: Yes.

Andrew: So, how do you know that? When he told me that, I’m not an iPhone app developer, I’m a guy who’s just a student learning. I guess he might have figured this out on his own, but how did he figure it out and how did you figure it out? Or is there someone out there that you guys are reading? Is there a blog that you guys are reading? Is there a message board that you guys are talking on? Do you go to an event where you get to meet people and hear this stuff?

Quoc: I think we read it somewhere.

Mike: There’s so many sites that we read, I don’t know.

Quoc: Yeah, we might have heard from somebody that there’s an affiliate program for the app store and we just decided to try it out.

Andrew: OK. Can you bring up that page that you had up a moment ago? I was talking and didn’t let people see what point you were about to make on it. And while that’s loading up, while Mike is loading that up, Quoc, can you recommend a few sites for us to look at to read more about this? Where are you guys reading about the industry?

Quoc: I don’t know.

Andrew: It’s a bunch of sites, you said earlier, but you can think of one? There isn’t like a Tech Crunch for this, there isn’t a Mashable?

Quoc: No, I mean, honestly, I don’t really keep up so much. I try to see what other people are doing, as much.

Andrew: OK.

Quoc: The biggest thing we do is pay attention to the apps store itself. See what’s high up in the ranks, what people are interested in, what the trends are. So, keeping an eye on the app store is a big thing.

Andrew: OK. All right, so what is this page? This is where you would add your house ads, your saying.

Mike: Yeah, exactly.

Andrew: OK. And you just click the add button and go from there. All right, so this is the whole process. Let me ask you one other thing that I see we don’t have a tab for. In fact, while you answer this, maybe you can bring up the next tab and give it a chance to load.

Marketing, we now have the app, it’s in the app store, we’re proud, we want people to use it. I know it’s a little outside the scope of this course, but do you have a couple of recommendations of what we can do to get people to actually use our app?

Mike: There’s a lot of good marketing sites out there. Apalon.com’s one of them, what’s the one where they can?

Quoc: Combo app.

Mike: Combo app is another good one.

Andrew: So, it’s Combo app and what’s the other one?

Mike: Apple On.

Andrew: Apple On. The word apple and O-N .com.

Quoc: No, it’s A-P-A-L-O-N.

ANdrew: A-P-A-L-O-N. Oh, I see, OK, and what are these sites?

Mike: There are a lot of different packages you can purchase, and they’ll do a lot of things like send out press releases, just get the word out about your app, get you a lot more downloading. There are even guarantees like, they’ll guarantee you a top 10 spot in whichever category you’re in or you get your money back.

Andrew: OK.

Quoc: See, so they help drive traffic, like they drive traffic to your app to raise it in the ranks, to hopefully get other people to see your app, too.

Mike: Yeah, for these I would recommend not using them right away. I would actually just release the app on your own and you can send your own and see if it grows organically on its own, and if it doesn’t then try one of the marketing packages that they offer.

Andrew: OK. All right, so Apalon, Combo App, I’ve got to do a whole other course probably on just how to promote an app once it’s in the store but I feel like just getting it in the store can either bog you down in months and thousands of dollars and wasted time and money, or it can work the way you guys have it working, where you put it out there, you go back and forth a few times and you’ve got your app. I mean, you put your proposal out there and you get your app. Quoc, you were going to say something.

Quoc: One thing about marketing is a good icon, it’s a good screen shots and a good title. Those are the things people will see right away.

Andrew: Who do you turn to for that, for that design? Is it also the same person who does your Elance?

Quoc: No, we actually look for a graphic designer for that too. And the graphic designer, you can find that in either Elance or 99designs.

Andrew: Got it. Do you go on 99designs and put up a proposal, or do you see who won other proposals and you say, I’m going to hire him directly?

Quoc: No, we put up proposals on 99designs.

Andrew: OK. All right, you’ve got something up on your screen. What is this?

Mike: They can, for everybody whose watching this, you guys can go to freetheapps.com/mixergy and we’ll have a link there to the NDA there that you guys can download. We’re also showing our link to our e-book.

Andrew: OK.

Mike: We’re looking to have it up for a limited time. 50% off for anybody who saw this. Also the app code is another really good program. It’s a step-by-step course on how to build a sustainable app making business, and how you can directly work with us on apps. And it talks about how Bitzio, the company that acquired us, can acquire you guys, too.

Andrew: All right, let me pause here for a second actually. You guys are selling a ton, but man, you’re not selling here. Like, I mean, you’re just, this is what we have and let me just make sure, at least, that people understand it. I’m not going to do a big sale job here because I know that people who got this paid for this course and they don’t want to be sold on anymore, they just want to learn what’s going on here, but this is important.

If they go to freetheapps.com/mixergy what they’re going to see is the NDA that you’re giving them, you’re also going to show them a link to the book, “How to Make an iPhone App with No Programming Experience”, it’s a book where you go into depth about what they just learned here and you also have “The App Code” a full blown step-by step course on how to build a sustainable app making business. Who did you guys do the app course with?

Quoc: The app course is actually not ours. It’s our friend, Anish.

Andrew: OK, so Anish put it together and you guys are recommending it and you also have a link to all the Elance articles about you, to 99designs doing an article about how you guys use them for design, to Mixergy the interview, the first one, where you and I first talk and freetheapps, the passive income life with Quoc.

Hey, Quoc…actually, I think we’re good here, freetheapps. You know what I’m wondering is, and why don’t you bring up the books so people can see that, too and the last tab is the company that, have they bought you guys out yet there? What’s the deal? Can we say that their buying you?

Quoc: Yeah, so the thing with Anish is that he had an app business to and he got acquired by Bitzio as well and that’s part of what the app code is talking about.

Andrew: OK.

Quoc: It’s how his company got acquired by Bitzio and our company got acquired by the same. So, we’re going to be working together.

Andrew: Got it.

Mike: It’s a pretty sweet presentation that would definitely do a better job than this, trying to explain it.

Andrew: I think you guys just did a great job. You kept it really simple, you kept it actionable. Everything that you guys talked about we can do. In fact, I could actually see someone saying, you know, I’m not ready to build an app right now, but I’m going to just try it.” If they can create a phony app – not a phony app but a proposal that they’re not planning to build. If a person’s listening to us and they have an idea to, at least, put their idea out there and see what the response is. You’re also saying Bitzio . . .

Oh, there it is. It actually is press released. So Bitzio has acquired your business. Congratulations! So, why are we showing this? What’s your idea for the audience with this? What’s your vision?

Quoc: They could get bought out, too.

Andrew: How could they get bought out? How could they get bought out by these guys, by Bitzio?

Quoc: Bitzio is in an acquisitions mode, so they’re looking to buy out good developers or just good apps. So, if a company makes a really good application, they could possibly get bought out for a lot of money.

Andrew: All right.

Quoc: So, that’s another exit. That’s another exit way to do because when people find out that we make apps, they all say, what now? What’s the next step? So, getting acquired is an awesome next step.

Andrew: Gotcha. All right. Did you guys get all cash for your deal?

Quoc: No.

Andrew: A share in the business?

Quoc: No.

Andrew: It’s shares and a payout over time.

Quoc: Mm.

Andrew: And is the payout over time in cash?

Quoc: Yeah.

Andrew: It is. So, cash over time plus shares in their publicly traded company. All right. Let’s get your website up one more time so people can see Free the Apps. It’s the first tab on your screen. While that’s up there, I just wanted to say, Mike and Quoc, thanks for leading this course. Thanks for showing us how you guys did it at FreeTheApps.com.

Mike: Thanks again, Andrew.

Andrew: Thanks. And for everyone who’s watching us, I actually just before I started this session, I got an email from someone who took a past course and sent me a screenshot with what he was able to do as a result of it.

If you go through this process and have your proposal up, have your iPhone app up, whatever, I want to know about it because I want to congratulate you. I want to know about it because I want to be able to help you out as you do it. I want to know about it if you’re doing this so that I can tell the audience on Mixergy that you did it as a result of this course.

So, come back to Mixergy and let me know. Thank you all for watching.

Master Class: Customer Acquisition Blueprint
Taught by Juan Martitegui of MindValley Hispano

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Master Class:
Customer Acquisition Blueprint

Length: 94:00 minutes


About the course leader

It’s led by Juan Martitegui, the founder of Mindvalley Hispano.

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PDF of the course presentation

Transcript

Download the transcript here

Andrew: This course is about building your company’s blueprint. It’s led by Juan Martitegui, the founder of Mindvalley Hispano. The website you see up on your screen right now, which sells personal growth products to Latin American customers. I’m Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, where proven founders, like Juan, teach. Juan, if the person who is listening to us absorbs everything you’re about to teach them, give me an example of what they can do.

Juan: Well, they would be able to start doubling their business and doubling it again and doubling it again with mathematical certainty. This process is about giving you a framework, a way of thinking about business, that you can start making very predictable incremental improvements that will get you down the line to doubling you business. So if you apply this framework to your business, you will get the certainty that if you keep doing it, you will get a business twice the size as you have now. So that’s the goal of this session.

Andrew: And you know that because you’ve been able to do this at Mindvalley?

Juan: Correct, if you go to the next slide, there’s a graph our sales. Now we don’t disclose our sales, but actual was 2010. That year we were able to share with people our numbers. I started this company, during my first month, I did, like, $6,500 U.S. dollars in the first month. Then I started applying this process and compounding my effort and in a little bit less than a year we were at $60,000 a month or $58, something like that. So basically we got to almost 10 times the size in less than a year. Of course the base was small, but that’s very significant, especially if you take into account we’re selling to Latino American customers, who have no credit card sometimes, an info product. So it’s not the most, coolest business in the world or any fancy thing that goes viral, but it works and I’ve seen it working for many, many companies that I advise or help friends. So it works.

Andrew: OK. All right and you’re going to show us this same system that you’ve applied at your company and I want to get started. So what’s the first thing we need to do?

Juan: So basically the decision will be splitting into three sections. The first section will be, I will share with you some big ideas that makes this work. The second thing of the session I will start teaching you the concepts to apply the framework and then in the third part of the session I will show you how I apply this concept to any business and I will show you particular strategies about traffic conversions. Whatever metric you need to improve, so you have knowledge already to apply to your business. But the most important thing to know the tactics, is the strategy that you will bring your business, so you can predictably double. So let’s get to the first big ideas.

Andrew: OK.

Juan: So the big idea number one is that we are all in the same business. What I mean by that is, when you look at from a 10,000 foot view, basically all the businesses are structured in the same way. Basically if you can go to the life in a business, what you need to do is, you need to turn and impression. Which is an ad, which is a customer telling another word of mouth marketing, which is a sign in the street . . .

Wait a minute, froze my computer, there we go.

. . . which is an ad on the street or which is a flyer that someone gives you on the street. That’s an impression and no one can give you money or buy anything from you if they don’t know you. So the first thing you need is an impression. That’s no matter what business you are in. So we need to turn impressions into, if you go to the next slide, we need to turn impressions into money and hopefully not only into money, but in the next slide we will see, happy customer. So every business needs to turn advertising impressions. They do their service. They provide their products, they should have money and a happy customer.

[Moving to the next slide] We will see that that is the basic structure of any business. If the cost of providing the impression of doing the marketing plus the cost of delivering your service or your products are lower than the revenue that you are making for that transaction, then you have a profitable business. It is very easy to understand. You are spending in marketing, you spend in getting your name out, you spend on giving an awesome service and then a customer gives you money for it.

When I give this session I ask people, “Can you think of any business that does not need to do this?” And there is no way they can come up with a business that does not need to do this. It could be that they do not pay for the marketing because it is word of mouth, but you are paying in a way, that you are getting your customers, training them to let people know or being an awesome service so that they comment about it. There is no business on earth that does not need, does not have this structure, so once you understand that, and of course… [You can go to the next slide]

If the cost of marketing plus the cost of delivering your goods or services is more than the customer pays you, then you will go broke. That is the big idea number one, which is we are all in the same businesses. We turn impressions into money and happy customers.

Andrew: OK.

Juan: The second big idea where this framework is based on is at a mathematical level, you can only grow your business in four ways, and those ways are the following; you can get more prospects to your business, more people that are interested in buying from you. Then you can get those prospects to convert better to customers. If you have 1,000 people passing by your shop, then someone that comes into your shop would be a prospect. How many of those you convert to customers, if you do that, that is the second way to improve your business. Then, when a customer buys something, you can get that money per transaction up.

That happens when you go to McDonald’s and they say, “Do you want fries with that?” Or when you go to Amazon and you see all of the recommendations. The fourth way to grow a business is to get people buying more frequently from you. Any idea that you apply to your business will fall under one or two of these four categories. Again, I ask people and we can do the exercise right now, I can ask you if you can think of anything that does not fall into or impact these four areas?

Andrew: No. I can’t think of one example that does not fall into these four. But let us thing about a software company, an online software company, they sell software as a service, they get paid every month when users continue their membership, the way they grow their business is by finding more prospects, meaning more people who see the ads or give them email addresses
or somehow become potential customers, they could get more business by getting more customers, meaning turning those prospects into customers, or they can find the current customers who are already paying them $50 a month and get them to buy an add-on service and go to $75 a month. Or, they could go from charging every month, to maybe finding a service that they can offer on a weekly basis and charge people more frequently.

Juan: Yeah, or for example, they can offer an affiliate offer of another software that can integrate with them. That is getting people to buy from me a second time.

Andrew: I got it.

Juan: Or, they can increase the length of the membership, let us say a customer stays for only 4 months, if they get them to stay for 8 months they are increasing the frequency, because they buy 8 times, not only 4. That is basically the idea.

Andrew: The way we use this is, when we are thinking how do we grow our business, or how do we even build our business, we just have to keep thinking about these four buckets, not the infinite number of possible changes we could make to our business, but these four buckets, how do we impact each one of them?

Juan: Correct. Now, when we go through the session, I will show you how to think in an organized way so that you do not go after the, last [??] deal that teaches you the new technique without structure, because then you are learning, and learning, and learning and you cannot give in to that little. You are learning different things and you do not know if that is what is broken. So it sounds [??], then you just can get information overload because you do not know how to apply. This framework, it is all about getting all of those ideas, but it is killing it and making them work one at a time, or four at a time, as you can see now, and getting yourself organized and testing new things.

Let us go to the next slide and I will show you the last big idea of this framework is based on, which is the stacking effect. You go to the next slide, please, and you will see here are two guys, the guy on the left, normally people know who it is, it is Einstein, and he says, “Compound interest is the world’s greatest discovery.” Then the other guy, who is a little bit more famous in America, is Benjamin Franklin, he says, “Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.” They both agreed on that.

What happens mathematically is this, [let us go to the next slide] if you go and you get a business that is doing $100 a month and now you do 20% better in finding more prospects, now you have a business that does 120%, $120/month because you are getting more people to that shop. You are getting more people to that landing page. You are getting more people to have meetings with your sales guy, that’s a [??].

Now you say, okay, let us convert 20% better of those prospects. Now you offer a guarantee, before you were not offering a guarantee. The prospects say, “Oh, there’s no reason.” Now you convert 20% better and we do not know if it will be 20%, 25%, 15% but the main idea is that you get the concept that when you start compounding things that impact these four main areas, it is very easy to double your company.

Then you say, “Okay, let us increase the money we make per transaction per customer. Let us offer an add-on service, let us offer a premium service, let us offer something that allows us to charge 20% more or to offer something.” It could be a partner probably, it does not mean that I need to be there, but I am making 20% more money. Let us find a way to keep in touch with these customers so that we can get them to buy from us 20% more frequently. If they are buying once a quarter, let us get them to buy once every two months, or whatever.

If you compound those things, you will get to instead of doing $100, you will get to $207 which is more than doubling it, but let us say we doubled the business, these are the main three ideas this model is based on.

So let us go directly to how we implement this and how we structure the business so that we can take advantage of these three main ideas.

Andrew: Before we go to the next slide, if you don’t mind, so you as an entrepreneur, Juan, you get up or you start your month and you think about, “I’ve got these four different levers, what am I going to focus on now and how do I get 20% more?” So if, for the month you are saying to yourself, or for whatever period you decide you want to work on it, you say, “I want to find a way to increase, to get more prospects. How can I get 20% more prospects?’ Is it about changing the landing pages, is it about adding a guarantee as you said, is it about doing something else, like maybe finding a new source,” and that is what you focus on and you just go to 20%. If it is about getting more customers, it is, “How do I convert 20% more of those prospects into customers?” That is the way you want us to think about our business and that is the framework that you are going to be showing us throughout the session?

Juan: Correct.

Andrew: OK. All right. So we are ready to go to the next step, and there
It is.

Juan: Here are the three steps to apply the framework. The first thing you need to do is to blueprint your business. What I mean by that is, it can be on a napkin, it can be on your notepad, it does not matter, you blueprint your business. Remember, every business goes from an impression to a happy customer that gives you money. So you put all of the steps in the middle, and we are going to do the exercise right now with some examples.

Then after you do that, you pick four and you measure where you are at now, so let us say right now I am getting 100 prospects a week, or a day, or a month, or next month I want to have 120 and right now I am converting of those 100 prospects, I am converting 10. For the next month I want to find strategies, information, ideas that help me convert [??]. Now you are learning and your ideas have structure and you do not go crazy trying to implement 30 things at a time and you get an email from someone that says these work and you change all of the priorities of your team and you say, “Let us try these now.” You drive people crazy. You drive yourself crazy. You do not have the predictability that you will double your business because you are shooting all over the place.

If you get organized, and I wish this was fancy, fun and whatever, this gets results, as anything you would structure to, it is not the most fun thing to do, what I say is, let us have the fun within the framework. Let us have fun and become creative when you are talking about how to increase this metric by 20%. There you can be creative, let your imagination come with ideas but do not mess with the framework. This will give a lot of [??] to your efforts and you know when you execute something and you keep executing it, because of mathematics, you will double your business.

So measure your big four, and after you do that, you need to take persistent, this is something that if you increase each of these factors 20%, you will double your business but that does not mean that the first idea you apply you will increase it 20%, you need to try. Organize, which is, I do it once a week. The month has four weeks, we have a month of prospects and so I go for traffic. We have the week of conversions so I test conversions. Every month I try to do this. Sometimes I double the business in a month, sometimes I do not, but I know that if I keep doing it, it will double.

Andrew: That is where you focus, Juan? You say, ‘We are going to focus each week on another one of these four items?’

Juan: Correct. It depends on the business, if your business is very complex you may want to do it by month, it depends on the implementation time.

Andrew: But for your business, it is every week that you do this?

Juan: Correct.

Andrew: OK.

Juan: Yeah, and maybe sometimes an implementation takes longer than a week but it does not matter but that week I push it forward very, very fast with a lot of strength and focus goes there and then we move to a [??].

The other thing is take persistent, organized and educated actions. This shapes your learning so that you do not go and buy any book that you come across, you buy the book that you need to improve on that thing. So if you want to get more traffic, you go with your Mixergy and you buy the social media course or whatever, now this shapes your learning.

Let us go to the first step, let us go to the next slide and see how we blueprint the business. Let us give an example of a shop that faces the street. What is their blueprint? Basically, they have people walking by, right?

Andrew: Um-hum.

Juan: If you are in the middle of nowhere, you are screwed; no one will come to your shop. People walking by. Then you have people stopping by because you put something there on the shelf or in the window that is interesting so that people say, “There is an offer, let me look there.” So you got their attention. Then you have people that they enter to shop. That is another prospect for an offline type of shop; someone that showed some interest in what you have to offer. Then you have people engaging with your employee, with the salesperson.

Some guys will try on the clothes, some people will buy and if they buy, you have an average sticker price and now you offer, like, do you want socks with that, or do you want a tie with that, or do you want, whatever, an extra whatever with that. So you got people on average [inaudible]. And then you’ve got people coming back again. They’ve had an experience so you ask for, hey, when it’s your birthday, can I give you a call, we make you offers when it’s your birthday. You can run strategies for people coming back.

And then you have people referring to their friends because they have a . . . So that’s a blueprint. And again, I’m not claiming that this is the blueprint for any offline shop, but I would say for most offline shops, it would work something like that. But the good thing is, you do it your way. I’m here just showing you some examples.

Andrew: OK. And so you’re saying . . .

Juan: You go to the next . . .

Andrew: . . . we sit down and you’re going to show us another example of this, but . . .

Juan: Yeah.

Andrew: . . . one of the first things you would do, if you had time to be a consultant and help other entrepreneurs with their business, and I know that you don’t, but if you did, if you came in as a hired gun you would say, we’re going to sit down and we’re just going to spend a few minutes writing down this outline of what our business is going to do. Where people come in, what they do next, what they do after that, and then how they end up becoming customers. And that’s the first thing you want us to do, and you’re going to show us another example of a company that does that.

Juan: Yeah.

Andrew: OK. Here goes.

Juan: So, let’s go now to a B2B business. Suppose you’re selling to industries or to factories. It’s a longer sale cycle. I’ve been a sales guy for a long time. And sometimes it’s a pain in the ass, you start a deal and it gets a year until you sign the contract. So what you do there is you say, OK. What’s my target market? How many people are there, common industries I can sell to because it’s not unlimited. So then you’ll probably give them a call or send an email or have some sort of initial contact. You will go back and forth until you get a meeting. That’s kind of a measure of a sales guy. This could be also kind of the grouper mold. What says people do when they’re in grouper, right? So they can get to a person [inaudible]. And then after the person takes the meeting, it’s either a good job, people will buy, or ask for, request for a quotation. Something like, hey, OK, I’m interested. Just send me a proposal.

And then after that, you will have people that say yes, and close those deals and you will have a first deal value. When I reach first deal value and again, you could have add-ons and you could do all sorts of things to make that deal bigger. And then you go and you have repeat purchases. How many times they run the group one offering groups, each happens to be grouped. Now how many of these guys, you can get them to give you referrals. That would be another thing. So that’s the blueprint for a B2B business. But as most of the people here, they’re probably in web businesses. I now included an example of a web business.

So the first thing you have is the target market on the web. My products, they are not bought by all the people. They’re probably people that are watching Mixergy, they’re not interested in, like what are meditation, or, I don’t know. It could be that they are. But it’s not that my most likely target market. So I won’t run ads there. But I start with that. What’s my target market? Then I say, OK. The first thing that happens is people see my ads. Then, after they see my ad, I need to get them to click on my ad. Then I need them to sign up as a prospect. Then I need them to, after they sign up as a prospect in my business, I say hey, you’re interested in this, the free report that I promise you, it’s on the way. But if you’re really interested, here is a one time offer. If you take it now, it’s 30% off and again, some people are comfortable in that. In my business it works, so I do it. Because I tested it and with this one I said, OK, how can I increase the conversion and if I put a one time offer, it worked better. So I left it there. There are some people . . .

Andrew: By the way, that totally worked on me with Get Clicky. I’ve been using their free version for a long time. And then suddenly they had this one time offer. Said if you finally want to stop being a cheapskate and not paying for the full service, we’re giving you an opportunity to get it at something like 50% off, and it’s going to go away within, I think it was two days. I said, you know what? I have been using it for a long time, this is just the thing to get me to get started. I paid up and I’ve been a happy customer ever since. So I see what you mean. So that’s a way of getting more of those prospects to become customers, and we’ll talk more about that, I’m sure.

Juan: Correct. So then people download my report and if they didn’t buy there, they would download the report that I brought in landing page. And then the goal of the report, and my follow up sequence is to get them to visit my sales page, right? Because there is where they can give you money. So I do everything I can to get people to my sales page. Then some of these guys will contact customer support, to see if there is a human behind the company, and we’re selling to the American customers. Sometimes they are afraid to put their credit card online. Again, here I’m giving you, I don’t want any Latin American guy to feel like, I’m from Argentina myself, but in reality, people are a little bit afraid, to do some transactions online. So they contact the customer support, some of us convinced him and they become a customer.

Again, we have average initial price, and we try to get them to a buck, buy another product and we try to get them to refer to a friend via social media, video, audio, whatever. So that’s kind of our model.

But instead of just showing the blue print, let me show you exactly my ads, my landing page, so you see the crafts graphically. So in the next slide, you can see like for example, people search for meditation, they will see my ad that says something like learn meditation, see the method.com. And discover the power of meditation in United State, here is a free audio. So people click there. And if they didn’t search, maybe they were in a page about meditation. So instead of doing their search campaign, we Google ours, I go, I do a content campaign. And I buy ad-sense ad. Or they said in their profile, that they like meditation or UFO or something like that, I show them an ad on Facebook.

Doesn’t matter what they do or how they see my ad, they will go when they click the ad, they will go to the next page which is the landing page. And there will say, “Hey, get you a free course, give me your email, etc, I’ll send you the lessons. Basically I’ll follow up with you”. After they do that, they see the one time offer that I was talking about, and after that, they will go into a follow up sequence, I use Office Auto Finder list, I can not endorse them enough. I think it’s a great service.

Andrew: This is what you use to send out your emails?

Juan: Yeah. Correct. And basically here I have a long cue of emails, that I let create a relationship with them, introduce myself as the author of the product. Kind of let them know that I’m interested in their success, and give them free tips and sometimes I send them my email here if they are ready to buy. But this is fully automated. So if I want to increase the visitor to my sales page or I wanted to run a promotion, where I’ll go after the promotion work, I would add it to my follow up sequence. Because I try to increase 20% at a time, the amount of people that they go to my landing page, to my sales page. And if they click on some of the emails, they will go to my sales page, It’s a long form sales letter, and why we do this, because it works better than the other sales letter. Now we’re testing media sales letters, and they tend to work better than this normal sales letters.

Andrew: I’m using another computer in the background to record this. That’s what was popping up.

So let me see if I got this, this is the first thing that people see in either search ad or an ad on Facebook, or maybe an ad on a webpage, that you bought Google ad-sense ads on. They click on one of those ads, they end up on your landing page, where you get their name and you get their email address. the next page after that, you say, I’m going to give you a one time offer to buy. So first you get their email, then you ask them to buy, then after that, if they don’t buy, then you get them into this email process, where you email them, it looks like all we’re seeing are two, four, six, seven days of emails, where you have a whole spot…

Juan: I have a 160.

Andrew: How many days? 160 days in your system, where you know what email they get that on day 0, meaning that the day they signed up, what email they get on day 1. And you just kept playing with those emails and test them to see what could increase conversions.

Juan: Correct. And after that, if I run a promotion, after the people go through those lists, and the promotion worked, I added and automated. So every time, when I started and I only had 7 [??], I could afford to pay $0.50 per prospect, because I only did follow-up for 7 days. Now I can afford to pay a lot more per prospect. Anyone that wants to go to my space, they need to be willing to pay what I pay if they want to beat me and I would say it is almost impossible that they are willing to start that way.

Andrew: Right.

Juan: Because I can afford to pay a lot more to buy that customer. Then after that…

Andrew: You click on one of the emails and they end up on a long-form sales page, and long because long works. You and I have had conversations where you say that sometimes you would like to do a different design or a different approach then the long form sales letter, but if it works, I have to go with the numbers, the numbers are king.

Juan: Correct. Basically what the numbers tell you, numbers are people, right? A lot of people say you are very metrics driven, things like that, and if it was code, and being number driven for me, if they are the right numbers, it is very people driven because they are telling me in huge amounts of significance, because I am not pulling this out of an idea of mine, this is probably a sales letter that sold hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they are telling me that they like this more than a short thing saying “Buy Here.”

After you have that blueprint, now you are ready to go to the next step which will be “Pick Four and Measure.” You have all new groupings and what you are going to do is just pick four, for that month, for that quarter, it does not matter how you do it, the time here is, the one applying the framework says what will happen.

Now, if you go to the next slide, ‘Just pick 4 and measure’ and then how do you pick four? I use two criteria to pick those things. One is cost effective measurability, for example, how many people sign up or what is my cost per lead, it is very cost effective because AdWords gives me that metrics out of the box. What would happen if I start answering customer support emails in 5 minutes or less? That is very hard. It could be that [??] could do it but I cannot. I do not even know the math to do [??], it is very complex for me so I do not do it. I try to pick things that are very cost effective in terms of how I measure them.

It could be visitors to the sales page versus buyers. Very easy to measure, analytics versus my shopping cart. It could be average per transaction, very easy because my shopping cart tells me that. So I try to pick things that are very easy to measure. C.T.R. on an ad, or things that are there in your system, and then I try to find things that I have the gut feeling that it is easy to improve, like a headline that sucks, or I read this book now and think that if I incorporate this idea I will be able to improve this thing, or I bought this course and discover that Facebook ads are working, I am not doing Facebook ads, can I increase my traffic by 20% with Facebook ads? It could be, let me try it out. That is what I do.

Andrew: What you are saying is that you are giving up certain potential growth opportunities just because you cannot measure them and you cannot figure them out?

Juan: Yeah. Basically, I can do that but it is not part of my framework. I can go and change the logo, or do some branding thing, but I know that the result is unpredictable and some people are comfortable with that. You know, I am an entrepreneur; I get paid by results, and why do things if I have a limited amount of time and a lot of ideas that can give me a predictable outcome, why would I do something that I can not measure, and I don’t know if I was right or wrong? If I ran out of ideas, and sometimes it happens. What I do is say, “OK. Let me try this thing that we don’t know how impactful it will be, and we can not measure it, but it’s cool, and I think I will do better”. And that’s your sense and that’s fine, and you can invest sometime doing that. But if all you do is speaking ideas that you can not measure, well, go and play the roulette, it’s like, I rather don’t do that.

OK. So let’s go and see, this is the examples, remember I told you we were going to talk about the big ideas, the frame work we’re covering now. And here on my examples where we based all the strategy I want to teach you on how I increased the business, will be based on speaking these four things.

This was my blue print, and I paid how many people to see my ads, because if I get more people to see my ads, I get more traffic to my landing page. Again, this assumes that they will convert more or less the same, that’s not always the case, based on traffic, nothing converts as well as ad words, so maybe you need an increase of 40% of Facebook traffic to get that 20% of boost in sales. And doesn’t matter, the idea here is that you start doing things in a structured way, and you don’t know that they will convert at a lower rate, because you haven’t tried it.

So how can I get more people to see my ad? How can I get more people to sign up more? How can I get more people to visit more of my sales page? And, how can I get more people to become my customer?

That will be the four things, that I’m going to show you now, strategies that I would apply, where to get ideas from, and where to learn, we’ll cover all of that. So, people not only get the framework, but they will get some strategies that they can implement right now, in the business.

Andrew: Let me ask you this, before we move on. You said that one way to grow your business is to have your current customers buy from you more frequently. And I see that in your Blue Print that, buys another product, is the second to the last item, refers me to a friend, is another way to do that.

Why aren’t you also blocking those off and saying, I could be focusing on getting more of my customers to buy more products.

Juan: Oh. Because this is an example for the next month.

Andrew: Oh, I see. So every month you say, “I’m only going to focus on four ways to get customers “. Maybe the following months you focus on, “How can I get my current customers you buy more product?” But for this month, you picked just four, and these are the four, you’re going to think about.

OK. I see. Got it. I’m with you now.

Juan: OK. Let’s go to the next slide. So now we got to the part where you have identified your regret, you picked the four, and you measured them, what’s the current state. Now you going to take organized, and persist in it.

The next slide I’m going to show you, remember our goal is directing your business by doing just 20% in four compound areas. Get more traffic, get more prospect, convert better, and get them to buy more frequently every month.

So a lot of people ask me, how difficult is, the next line you’ll see the question, ‘How hard is to improve 20%?’

So here is the month, suppose you get 1000 people to your landing page, and you get 10 desired responses, or to your sales letter, you get 1% of the people to buy. That’s ten out of a 1000. To improve to 20% sounds like a lot. But in reality from the 990 people that did not buy, you just need to do better with two of them. So can you really work, can you roll through a course, can you ask for the opinion of a friend, that will tell you something to do better with two out of 990, should be very easy, when you think of it this way.

So that’s kind of my idea, a lot of people gets scared, they say, “Dabbling in business is difficult”. If you compound the right things, 20% is not that difficult to get there. Maybe you do not do it with the first idea, or the second, but with the third or the tenth idea, you will reach that point where you got 20% better, it is not that difficult.

How to get organized, what I do with my team is say, “OK, week one will be focused on getting more people to see my ads. Week two, get better conversions of visitors to prospects. Week three, get more people to my sales page more often. Week 4, improve sales page conversions.” That would be my focus. Or, it could be that I am working with an employee, now I have a team so I can go and say, “What did you do this month?” I go to the AdWords and say, “You need to increase the traffic by 20% and you have a month to do that.” All you do that month is that, because all you have is one focus and one priority. I can delegate and control it very easy because we know where we are at, we know what the goal is so any delegation problems are gone. You talk to the designer and say, ‘Improve these landing page conversions by 20% by testing the colors, the [??] shot, whatever…

Andrew: Juan, you give them a month to do this? You say, “This is my focus this week.” Or do you say, “I am going to give you a month to get this right?”

Juan: I give them a month because now I have a team, but when it was just myself and my wife working, we would do it by week.

Andrew: OK.

Juan: They can run all of the tests that they want and sometimes they know that one week one, I am focused on this thing, so the other guys need to figure it out by themselves. On week two I will take my time so that I can control and suggest ideas to improve these things.

Basically that is how you get organized. It could be that you give them a quarter. If you are working for a multi-national company, it might be harder to test things and to get things rolling, so you give them a quarter. It does not matter, you can give them a year, I do not care. The main idea is that you use compounding and organization.

Now, if you are a sole entrepreneur, you do it yourself and you have a weekly focus. If you have a team or a company, you dedicate that impact area, that leverage point [??] and you go with a weekly or a monthly focus, or if you are a multi-national you give them a year, I do not know. But, the beauty of this is that you can now use that, your guys have a very clear outcome that they need to achieve. It is very easy to control. It is very easy to delegate and in our case, we give them access to as many learning resources they need to do that job. You can buy courses, you can talk to us, you can talk to some of our partners or friends that are conversions experts, I will hook you up with whatever guy you need so you can implement in this area.

Andrew: I see.

Juan: After that, you stop information overload and you focus on what you need. You get educated. If you are out of ideas, if you do not think that you can improve it by yourself, you can hire an expert, or you can buy a course, or an [??] about that main thing. You do not buy a deal because it looks cool, you buy it because you need it for that week or for that month. That is the main idea on how you can information overload.

Now that I have shown you the framework, is it clear?

Andrew: Yeah, it is. Usually I do a whole lot more talking and a whole lot more pushing, but this makes a lot of sense. It is simple, elegant and I can see it working. Part of me just wants to ask questions and push, and see if we can find some way to debate this but there is no need for it. If it works and it is simple enough to work, I want to keep it that simple, I do not want to over-complicate it just so that we can feel like we are doing something, or just so I, as the co-presenter, can feel like I am putting my fingerprint on it, no, it has got to be what it is, and it has to stand as elegantly and as effectively as possible.

Juan: Yeah, and we can argue a lot about it, but it is like arguing with math. It is like, 2 x 2 = 4. It is not like I came up with that, it is just math, and it may be that it does not compound exactly, and it may not be perfect. I’m not saying you will double your business every month or whatever, but if you increase 20% all of these things and they are perfectly compoundable. I have no doubt in my mind you will double your business because it’s math.

Andrew: And what you’re saying too is sometimes you miss the mark. Sometimes you aim for 20% and you might end up with zero. Sometimes you aim for 20% and you discover that just a few changes to a landing page give you 30% lift, but the goal is, we’re just looking 20% at a time and we’re going to allow those 20% wins to compound.

Juan: Correct.

Andrew: OK. Cool.

Juan: That’s the main idea. So may I show you some strategies? Some things that actually that are proven to me to increase 20% or more and I will show you split-test graphs and everything.

Andrew: Oh I’d love to see that, yes.

Juan: OK. So let’s go to the first thing. Let’s say we’re talking now in the wigwam goal. Which is get more people to see my app. So when I launch a business, I mean normally when people launch a business. Let’s say I have a law of attraction business, right? So it’s a course where I teach law of attraction to people that are interested. It may be weird for some of the guys listening to this that I’m talking about math and business and then I have this [??] on the side or whatever, but it doesn’t matter. It’s what I am that matters.

Andrew: Do you teach, by the way, the law of attraction course and the other courses that you have on Mindvalley, are you teaching them all yourself? No.

Juan: No. Some of them I am, some of them I find an alpha and I’m going more the other way a lot more now. Because basically I cannot be the expert in 20 different things. Even if I actually researched them and I had experiences with, I can teach them, and whatever it’s just not good for branding. Again, I haven’t tested that, but I believe so, but it’s one bet. I don’t play roulette all days.

OK. So when I start a campaign, normally I would start, if it’s about law of attraction, my keywords would be love attraction, love attraction course, movie the secret, or whatever, like, very related terms.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Juan: So now in the next week I say, ‘I need to increase the traffic 20%.’ How can I add more keywords if before I had only law of attraction, I would say add 20% more keywords. We would be law of attraction course, law of attraction domino, law of attraction book, law of attraction whatever and you have more keywords. Or what you could do is add more ad groups that are not that closely related, but it could be a target market they are interested in that. For example, guys that are interested in meditation or relaxation or visualization they could be interested in my course. So I would go on my AdWords scale and say let me try meditation and my meditation course and the ad says, “Do you want to learn law of attraction?” It doesn’t mislead or anything, but the main idea there is because you’re kind of targeting the same kind of customer avatar. The same guy, you have a chance to convert them, right?

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Juan: So that could be a way that people increase 20% their traffic. I see it a lot of companies doing this. That they only, for example, if you have a customer support software, you could say, “Sell more by giving awesome customer support” and now not only you not only beating customer support software you will be in sales mix or sales courses or whatever because you relayed that prospect because of what he wants to do is sell more. So if you can prove them how they can sell more with your customer support software by answering quicker, by answering well, by having automated FAQ’s or whatever. Now you have a guy and you increase the traffic. So that would be one way to get more people to see my ads. I can go on and on and on with more keywords, more ideas or whatever.

You can do lateral thinking for ad placements. A lot of people, they sell in my industry weight loss programs, right? So they go weight loss, weight loss, weight loss. Weight loss products, weight loss forests, weight loss peels, weight loss diet, weight loss food, things like that. What if you go and put ads in a wedding site where you buy gifts? People go there to buy a gift to a wedding, if you are a woman, you want that dress to fit you. So now, you go with a weight- loss product that went very well in something that is American that is an explorer, because a lot of people do not go and advertise weight loss products on a wedding site. Or you have a weight loss product and let us say that someone would advertise it in a parenting site, parenting tip type sites, because usually if you are pregnant you want to get that weight off, now you have a weight loss product in something that the traffic is very cheap.

Andrew: Right.

Juan: You start doing lateral things. Suppose Mixergy, you go and instead of advertising in normal entrepreneur [??] or things like that, you go to women entrepreneurship forums. Want to become an entrepreneur? And these things are a little bit, if you can relate it well, it could be less targeted, or shop vortex, where you say, ‘Why are you searching for a job?’
Entrepreneurship teaches you have they got those reasons, so now, you are expanding laterally and you get another audience that was not part of your audience but in reality they needed you. That is another way to increase your traffic.

The other way to increase your traffic would be other channels. For a very long time I was only with Google, because I was comfortable with the platform and it works great.

Andrew: You said only with Google? That was where you focused.

Juan: And then I started saying, “I hit the max here, I cannot add more keywords, I cannot add more add groups, let me go into other channels.” I started going into affiliate efforts and doing affiliate marketing, and then I did Facebook and now I am in Yahoo, and now I am starting to do MediaBox. What is cool is Google AdWords has a placement report where you can go and run a placement report and see what the placements are where your ads are doing well, where you getting a lot of sales and a lot of traction there. So you run a placement report where there is enough volume for me to justify that investment, and would go and directly contact the site and say, ‘Hey, I am doing well. I have learned a lot of techniques,’ I think there is a profit course that talks a lot about that, I do not remember the name of the guy, [??] Mixergy. The guy has templates to contact the site.

Andrew: [Elio Lichtenstein], he said that is what he did. Elio, he said he basically just went directly to the sites because then they could cut out the cut that Google takes for placing those ads and he can then give the publisher a more secure, long term revenue source, and he locks in for himself a good revenue source too.

Juan: Correct.

Andrew: So you are saying you see your numbers in Google, in the ad buys that you do through Google on other sites, if you find one person who is doing especially well for you, you just go and make a deal directly with them? That is another way of pursuing a different channel.

Juan: Correct. And then you do social media, S.C.O. and things like that, and you can keep adding channels. That would be how I would approach with one goal; I would meet with my team, or sometimes I feel especially strong about something, I would say, “You got to do this week or this month.” That would be an example.

Let us go to week 2. Now we have decided to increase the amount of prospects that are here. We get more traffic now so we decided to increase the sign-up rate and the amount of prospects. Basically the way you do it is by doing [??], so you send 100 people here and 20 sign up, 100 people here and 24 sign up, now you have got a 20% improvement. I test very different designs. I hope people see this in the [??], if not I can send you the URL so people can see the actual URLs or the screen shots.

Andrew:

Yeah, we will give them this PowerPoint so that they can take a look at it themselves. Maybe I will convert it to PDF so that it is a more universal, easy-to-use format. But, what you are saying is, these are two actual sites, two pages that you tested?

Juan: Correct. I got 25% improvement in the right one.

Andrew: Wait, so the right one did better than the one on the left?

Juan: Yes.

Andrew: I’m so surprised.

Juan: And I don’t know why.

Andrew: Sorry?

Juan: And I don’t know why. I would have bet my everything on that the left one would do better.

Andrew: I would have thought the one on the left would do better, too. Got a phone number which feels more trustworthy. The right one has more links, which means there are more ways for people to leave the page and still the right one does better, but that’s why we A/B test.

Juan: One has kind of an arrow that points to the sign-up form. Where this one, the sign-up form is right there, but some people they don’t feel that comfort with that. So I don’t know. When you test then you can elaborate your theories and test it to see. What I can tell you is this didn’t work that well.

Andrew: OK.

Juan: I mean, I won this one, but the first one I didn’t. So that’s fine.

So on this next slide. So what are the things you can test in a landing page? You can test the headline, by far that would be like 60% to 70% of the landing page that makes the highest impact, what you promise in the headline. You can test the layout of the page. If you put the sign-up form in the right, if you put the sign up form in the left. Always try to put the sign up form on the right for several reasons. Sorry, I have a little bit of a cough. For several reasons. People are used to sign up in the right for emails, [??] and things like that. It matters where the eye finishes, not where the eye start and with like this one.

Andrew: Left to right.

Juan: [??] But you guys understand what I’m saying. That would be my recommendation. You can put the less fields you put the better. You can, this was a surprise, by the end of the cast. The call to action, if you put the button, you change it follow down to get instant access to send it to me. It has a very high impact. I will show you in the same space how a button can increase your sales by 33%. You can double your sales just by changing what the button says. I mean it can be the same company, same people working, you can change a place, you double your sales. So that’s fascinating for me and when you discover one of these you say, ‘Oh all the money I lost last year,’ but it’s fine, you know. You got to keep learning.

You can test the lead magnet. Some people you can test a free trial. You can test a report, you can test ‘Sign up for a Webinar.’ That will make an impact also. You can test the image or the hero shot. Sometimes there’s a nice girl. Sometimes it’s whatever it’s a screenshot of your product. You can test the colors. You can creativity icons if you have ‘As Seen on NBC, ESPN,’ whatever you’ve seen the product there. You can test that and you can put some testimonials. We did testimonials. If you’re advertising Google, just be careful because, yeah why.

Andrew: Why? Testimonials with Google is an issue?

Juan: The FTC guidelines, basically Google is a lot more aware of FTC guidelines and sometimes people go and say, ‘Oh I lost eight pounds or whatever’ . . .

Andrew: Ah I see.

Juan: . . . and now the FTC has some guidelines that they say you can only advertise testimonials that are representative of the average experiences of the users. I’m not a lawyer. I shouldn’t be listened by any lawyer or go and talk to your lawyer, whatever, don’t put testimonials. Generally, I would say in a landing page if you don’t do it very carefully, I don’t think you will be out of trouble with Google if you put testimonials. Especially if they’re a little bit more pushy. So that’s things you can test in the landing page and a lot of people will come and say, ‘Juan, I’m not an expert on this, how can I get ideas?’ So if you go to the next slide.

Andrew: By the way, I’m seeing here. It looks like you bought your landing page design, the one that you’re showing us on the slide here. You bought it from Theme Forest?

Juan: ThemeForest. Yeah.

Andrew: ThemeForest is fantastic for buying these kinds of landing pages, it is only like $12, they look stunning, they are easy to work with, and they get how to increase conversions.

Juan: Yes. It is awesome. So here…

Andrew: Oh, I see.

Juan: Where do you get ideas from? One place to get ideas from is test photo speed companies, because they want to brag about speed testing and they show you a lot of user cases that they did better. So you go to [??], optimize me, visual works site optimizer, they have blogs, very active, they post experiments, info, graphics and things like that, they will give you very awesome free training about landing pages and how to increase landing page conversions.

You can go to [Google] Website Optimizer, also, I use Google Website Optimizer, I do not use any of the other guys because of the amounts of traffic I buy, they get a little bit expensive, but for people that do not depend on a lot of traffic, it is an awesome solution, but I cannot use them because it gets really expensive.

Andrew: Congratulations on all of the traffic.

Juan: Yeah, well, some days we get 2,000 – 3,000 sign ups per day.

Andrew: Wow.

Juan: Across the company, it is a lot of traffic. And then the guy said [??] metrics, I never talked to the guy or anything but they ran an awesome blog and they seem to understand what conversions is all about. Read their blog. They are very active. They are more like an evangelizing company, they go and teach so it is nice.

The other thing that you can do is go to the [??] or marketplaces, for example there you have [themeforest] [??] \ [??] \marketing\landingpages and you will get a ton of ideas. The good thing about that is, if you like an idea, you can buy it for $15 or $20, it is very inexpensive. You change the logo and you have a new landing page that is working, very easy and very inexpensive. Or, you can go to Portfolio Sites of Design Firms.

Then what you can do is go to companies with crazy testing contracts, for example, Google is famous because they tested 16 different shades of blue for their boxes, and crazy [??] like that, because they have a lot of traffic so they can do it. So, when you see that those things work better
for them [inaudible, problem with audio] you are going to ask the Amazon [??], things like that, we give it a try and sometimes it worked. So, that is nice, Amazon is also an awesome company to look for what they are doing. Then you can read blogs of conversion experts and gurus, there is a lot of crap out there also. A lot of people putting articles and things like that, I don’t know, you may [??] for yourself.

Then you can get a formal education and books. You know, like always be testing, it is a very famous book on G.U.I. Website Optimizer, and I really encourage you. You are going to be in this business for long, you have got to understand speed testing and you have got to understand conversions. It is better, even if you need to hire an outside consultant, it is better if you really understand what you are hiring for, what you are aiming for, what the language is that you need to speak to the guy in, and you will be better at spotting guys that are just starting out and things like that. That would be my recommendation.

This one is huge for me, brainstorm with your team, talk to customer support or the chat agent, because sometimes the chat agent or customer support team would say that a lot of people are contacting them with these questions. OK, so put it on the landing page because it means that people are interested in that. Or in [??], they are interested in that. Why not clarify there.

Then, you can also look at Ask, like direct response marketers and the line where you are crossing the [??] line and direct response, it is not my job what you feel comfortable with. But I will promise you a sales letter telling a story, will do better than a screen cast video of you doing click, click, clicking, in your applications. But again, that’s kind of a reputation of my industry and things like that, but we do things that work. So if you can look at us, I think it will pay off.

Not only, ask my value or but the direct response marketing in general.

Andrew: What I’m finding is that a lot more software companies and other companies that might turn towards branding in the past. Today are thinking more like the direct response marketers. Because the internet just almost forces you to think that way. You only have a second with the audience on the internet and you want to make sure you get as much impact as possible. And you’re not going to get as much impact, by just showing them a branding message, as you are if you say, ‘Join our list, and give us a chance to build the relationship with you’.

All right let’s go on to the next slide.

Juan: All right. Let’s go to it. How are we doing on time? Are we OK?

Andrew: We got a little bit more.

Juan: OK. Good. Week 3, get more people to my sales page more often.

So one thing that I do that OfficeAutoPilot allows me to is split test my follow up emails. So I don’t see the power point right here. I can open it so I can quote the numbers, and give me a second. But basically I send two emails to with these different split test messages, split test headlines. For example when you see, like the first message, I changed the subject line, my word is more or less the same. The second message though, I changed the subject line, and I get, I want my yesterday’s message, and put the first name. I get instead of 20% click through rate, I get 25% click through rate.

So that message that was 20% better than the B message, on the second message. The third message, again I split test two different headlines there. One get 5.5% click through rates. The other one gets 8.4% click through rates. Thus again, almost 20% better.

Andrew: 5.5% click through rates vs 8.4% click through rates. OK.

Juan: So that means I get the same amount of prospect and more than 20% only in that email are going to my sales letter. So more people see my sales letter, more chances that I have to sell them. So that’s one thing. The other thing that I can do to send more people to my sales letter, is in my follow up sequence longer. I’m amazed that I sign up for a free trial for companies, they never send me an email, never. Or sometimes is, “Here’s your free trial”, and that’s it. Never hear from them any more. And they say, “Oh. I wonder why I don’t sale”. Because you wanted to get married on the first date, it’s impossible. Just be in the relationship. Get them to see you right. That’s a luxury. So that’s something that’s based, I think, in software service company, they really, I mean, if you come to my site, sometimes, you don’t even know that I have something for sale.

Why I would show you something for sale, if you’re not ready to buy. Let me be in the relationship, after I have the relationship, and you know that I’m someone that sales something, because it’s not really accepted, like the insurance guy, the metes friend, or you are the MLM guy that makes friends with you, and suddenly he goes, “Why don’t you come to this meeting or whatever”. I made sure that they know that I’m a company and that I’m here for money and I want to help them also. I won’t tell them the price so that he takes it when they are not ready, doesn’t make any sense.

And then you can create more sales page, different offers, rocket ships, Brahmans. Excuses to contact them. And I put there don’t be arrogant. A lot of people say, I do that amazing thing. Let’s suppose get picky, in your example. They are not some service, I use them. I love them, very simple. Let’s suppose they were very arrogant and they say, “Oh, I’m just signing up, he still don’t see the value in us, so he’s a douche bag”, I don’t care, if he’s right or not, he’s basically lacking in, who hold for developing his business. If they went that way, they’ll never have gotten you as a customer. But they decided to create a new promotion and let you know about the promotion. And you can run a, sometimes it doesn’t have to be that fancy, you can run like a Christmas special. Or you know like a, it doesn’t matter, sometimes I go and, normally for my birthdays, I go and say, ‘Oh, I’m turning 30, I want to celebrate with you with a 30% discount, and next year will be 31% discount’. They are my friends, and it gets sales.

Andrew: That’s what you mean by excuses, you’re just looking for an excuse to connect with them or looking for an excuse to promote to them, looking for an excuse to give them a discount or whatever it takes for them to say, ‘Yes’.

Juan: Yeah. And sometimes you can be blatantly honest like, “My taxes came, I’m screwed, I need more money. But I know you have the chance to buy this brand new list of animal”. And you would say, “Oh, no one will buy”. They do buy, they see you as a person. And even if they don’t, it’s funny, and they will talk about you, and you will be more present in their life. It’s interesting.

So try these type of things, we really encourage you to do these things.

Andrew: All right. Let’s take a look at the next slide. Week number 4 improve sales page conversions.

Juan: OK. So the first thing I would say, please go and read, Influence, the book you can buy at Amazon at I think, $15 or whatever. And again, please read, Influence, because we’re in a marketing business, go and read it. It has a tons of evidence of things that the human brain is ridiculum in a way. If I quote your testimonials, you would buy more. If I make it scarce, you will buy more. If I make it premium, you will buy more. Go and read that book. It’ll give you a lot of ideas and a lot of concepts that are things that work, things that you can speed test, headlines, the other bottom text, the other bottom shape and colors. The guaranteed, if you have a guaranteed or you don’t have a guaranteed, that will make a huge impact. Leaving the first part, after people read the headlines of what you’re all about. Testimonials and then get a word of FTC. And your prices, there’s a lot of people, that they don’t test price.

So do you prefer to convert 1% and $97, or do you prefer to convert 3% at $27? Well, you make more money if you convert 1% at $97. So some people, they don’t do those types of testing. And again, if you’re a company that you’re trying to drive user growth, maybe you want to go cheaper, it doesn’t matter, if you make less money. It depends on the business model, I basically, I need to pay for my advertising, so i need to make the X amount of money I make.

So that will be one thing. Video sells letter, work in the same space instead of carry in a sales page full of video sales letter with a story or both. I like [??], that will work really well. And the other things where you can get idea, is look at infomercials. And again, it will be TCN. These guys do works, they beat brands out of dicing push. Very pretty to me. So look at what they’re doing. There are tests in the infomercial industry that they said, for example, they said, ‘Please call us, we’re waiting for you’. And they changed that for, ‘Busy, call again’. And it increased the conversion rate by 30%. Just changing the phrase on the infomercial.

Andrew: Sorry. The connection was dropped out as you were saying it, so you were saying it’s either “Please call us”, or “If lines are busy, please call back”. And the idea of saying, lines are going to be busy and giving people the message that this is a very active, product, got more customers.

Juan: Correct. So these tiny things can make a huge impact in your bottom line. So let me show you some examples of free money, and this is everyone will wants …

Andrew: Nice screen shot there by the way.

Juan: So what I mean by this….

Andrew: Nice Stock photo. What is this, all right? Just tell me. What are we looking at?

Juan: OK. What I mean by free money is the following. Your advertising spend, you’re spending, right? So anything that increases your conversions without increasing your advertising spend is free money. If you paid for 100 clicks, right, and you get one customer. If you paid for the same 100 clicks and you get two customers, that extra customer is free money. So basically what I’m trying to say here is if you’re not split-testing, you’re kind of an idiot. That would be my rule. [??] So I switched, I changed kind of these two headlines. Again I read the response headlines and blah, blah, blah, but the second one did 54% better with a 98.3% chance of outperforming the original. So with this degree of confidence, if I run this experiment 100 times, 98% of the times I will rewrite. So it’s a good risk to take.

So that means Mindvalley Hispano could be making whatever, let’s say $10,000 a month or $15,000 a month doing like with the same people, same effort, working our asses off as we were. Just because we changed a sentence, you know? When you think about that, the ROI of your time to split-test. It’s huge. Even if you find one after 10, it doesn’t matter, it’s huge. If you don’t have a split-test or two or three in your website, it’s kind of, ‘What are you doing?’ After seeing this over and over again, I think it’s just stupid not to do it. Sometimes I’m guilty of [??] enough.

Andrew: Sometimes what?

Juan: I’m guilty of not doing it enough.

Andrew: Ahh. Guilty of not doing enough, right? We all are.

Juan: So that would be kind of a recommendation. Set up split-tests with [??]. A lot of people, what I’m afraid is, [??] that I quit my Latin business because I was at $6,000 a month and it wasn’t enough, you know? I never have been that, you know, a bigger a company, where we’re 12 now. So it’s why on Earth don’t [??] this. You find one and say $6,000 now, it’s $9,000 or $12,000. Now I can live off this. That means I can quit my job and invest, you know? And sometimes you are one split-test away, one successful split-test away, to be at that point. So why not do it? That I don’t understand and sometimes it maybe it doesn’t have that much popularity, split-testing or it’s a little bit boring because, you know, it’s more mathematics and things like that, but you should do it. Anyone starting their business should split-test their landing page or whatever.

Andrew: Let’s look at the next one.

Juan: So let’s go to the next slide.

Andrew: This is the book I’m reading right now. Predictably Irrational.

Juan: OK. It’s awesome. So here’s the way. I read the book and I say, “OK”. I learned something. They had a concept called decoy pricing. The New York Times did a price test, where they say we want offline, online, or both. If you buy both?

Andrew: I’m sorry, I just read it so it’s fresher in my mind. This is the Economist that did it, but I don’t remember. What was the name of it? What was the pricing called?

Juan: Decoy pricing.

Andrew: Ahh, decoy pricing. Yeah, yeah, right, right.

Juan: So yeah, I’m sorry, the Economist did it. So basically they say we want the offline edition, just the offline edition. Do you want the online edition or do you want both [??] same price? And that increased conversions by a lot. So I learned that in the book and I said, ‘Let me try this on my website.’ I went and set up this thing where you can compare them easily be the same thing. Conversions increased, let me see if I have it here, oh no the next one is the screenshot of the order button. I think this one was 25% to 30%. That means again, if you were selling $100,000 or $1,000,000 by simply setting up this little split-test, now you are at $300,000.

Andrew: Do I have the number next to me? Sorry?

Juan: No. Sorry. It’s 30%, 30% more, it depends on your race, right? And again this worked for us. What I’m telling you, don’t go and set up the same order menu, you know? Just think what works in you industry, but that’s kind of the main idea is that you understand that I read a book. The idea was there. Apply that knowledge and got a positive result.

Andrew: And so this is something I’ve been dying to try too. What you’re saying here. You’re doing almost exactly what the Economist did. You’re saying for $97 you get just the digital version of our product. For $197, you get just the CD version of our product or for $197, you get both the digital and the CD version. So what you’re making people think is it would be stupid not to take this $197 offer that includes both of them together, where ordinarily they . . .

Juan: Correct.

Andrew: . . . might go to $97. And this worked and it increased your conversions and you’re saying if it’s in a book, I now have a place to go and test out the ideas and not just leave the ideas in the book.

Juan: Correct.

Andrew: OK. And I’m repeating it because for some reason our connection now is starting to die. The longer we go with the course, the more the connection withers away, but we have just a handful of slides left, so we can continue.

Juan: Yeah and again it’s not a really good idea on the book. When I receive an idea on [??] a book then I stop everything. I study the [??] so during the week I can diagnose. Here you have the order button, basically what I changed is the text on the order button. One it was ‘Orden la Orda.’ Sorry it’s in Spanish, one in [??] when it was and the order when it was [??] and the orden order was 53% more conversions than my original. So again, free money, you’ve got a website it was making like 10 grand a month, now it’s making 15 grand a month because I changed, not even a sentence, what the order button said. So it’s very impactful when you compound two or three of them.

I can’t hear you.

Andrew: There we go. I keep lowering the mic for the background noise. Can you translate that to English? So what does it say to do now? One button says . . .

Juan: One button says “Order Now” the other one says “Inquire Now” and the other one says, “Try it Now.”

Andrew: So, “Order Now,” “Inquire Now,” and “Try it Now” and the one that got the most is “Order Now.” Wow, I wouldn’t have guessed.

Juan: Yes. Well because the “Try it Now” basically got a lot of clicks, but not the conversion because ‘Try it Now’ seems like it will be free and people then go to the checkout page and they don’t want to. So I think that was the psychology. So if you go to the next slide, basically a free [??]. If you’re not split-testing, really think about how you run an online business because it takes one hour and you will get learnings out of split test. So that would be my recommendation. So be persistent at that stage. Organized, educated, and persistent action.

The compounding effect is what makes this process great. When I started this business, I wanted to make a $1,000 extra a month and it was quickly at $6,000 and now it’s a business with 12 employees. We are doing great. So the compounding is what makes this great. It’s not the first one, it’s not the second one, it’s after six months of you doing this or one year of you doing this, I promise you, you will do a lot better.

Andrew: So you started out trying to do $1,000 a month is what you said?

Juan: Yeah.

Andrew: Wow. Well what a way you’ve come.

Juan: Can we do it with more than four impact areas? A lot of people ask me that and I have no problem. You can compound 10 things, you just do it. I just have a problem with focusing on more than four things or one at a week at a time. And I wouldn’t recommend that because there’s a power in focusing on one or two or three or four metrics and you get all your guys, all your team working on that. So you can do it [??] what makes this great is the compounding effect. So the more areas you compound it’s better, but it gets a little bit messy. If you want to do it in 10 areas, you will probably, you know, I will tell you, ‘OK. Tell me what kind of metrics for the ten areas you would not remember, so you know, now you can [??] in more than four areas but I would not recommend it.

Here is a little story because a lot of people ask, “What about breakthroughs? We are improving our business but we are not getting any major breakthroughs, it is more like [??].” Right? So basically by blueprinting your funnel, you have your metrics so clear that you will come up with many ideas that you would not have come up with if you did not have the blueprint or the metrics so clear.

Let me tell you a very quick story, I was a recruiting consultant for a software company here in Argentina, it was very hard to find developers because if you ask the company how many developers they want to add in the next year, they would say 1,000. And if you look at Universities, you would get 3,000 or 4,000 developers out of Universities. It was [??] so people were competing for that.

So, I started this process, once defined, basically we [??], we called them, we invited them for an interview, then a technical interview, then the offer and then if they accept then they will be employed. I started tweaking 20%, 30%, let us call people, the first thing is let us get another database to call people, what a concept! Now we could double the traffic because we were calling more people. Why don’t we go and get [??] % more conversions, let us tweak the script. A lot of people because they were in a job already, they need to lie to their current job four times to come to the first, second, technical interview and the offer interview, so they needed to lie four times. It was very difficult for us to get people into a room to make them the offer or even interview them because they were on the job. My thinking on how to improve that, I thought, what if we could make the whole process in one afternoon, so what will happen is, first of all, people will come in batches, 30 at a time. The interviewer, instead of explaining the same thing, what the company is about, will explain it to 30 people at a time. There will be 30 there, it creates competition, they see that they are not the only person trying to come here and work, so it creates social pressure.

The technical guys were super happy because instead of interacting with candidates all the time for the technical interview, we were telling them, “Here comes the 30.” Just leave Friday afternoon, now they were not getting interrupted all of the time. When we gave the candidate a cup, eating and a t-shirt, they would go back to their jobs and say, “This interview is the most amazing thing.” So they would call up to get more interviews, to get the cup or whatever, and before the interview was happening only in a room where the candidate spent most of the time waiting for someone, and the company was really cool, media games, Playstations, now we are interviewing people playing Playstation, Ping Pong and things like that. The numbers went crazy but the way that I got the breakthrough was by knowing the funnel and asking questions. How can I improve the call rate 20% when I call someone to set up the interview, and then I got a breakthrough that if I did it all in one day and it was a huge change in the process and now the blueprint is completely different.

Andrew: I see.

Juan: That is how you get to your [??].

Andrew: The connection was dropping a bit so let me sum it up. What I learned from that is that this can be done for anything. It is not just for increasing sales on a webpage or getting more people to buy from your brick and mortar store, but you used it even to help increase recruiting efforts. That is the first thing I got out of it.

The second thing I got out of it is, you are right, a lot of people are going to see this and say ‘20%? I have got a smaller company so 20% is not going to be that meaningful to me.’ Or they might say, ‘I want to go huge. I want to go big or go home.’ And you are saying, ‘Wait, you can make these big breakthroughs if you know where to focus your attention. If your attention is spread out in too many places or if you are not sure where to spread your attention you are going to be ineffective, but if you have these four areas to focus on, you are going to find ways to go beyond the 20% and find those breakthroughs because you now have some place to direct your energy and your creativity.

Juan: Correct, basically, by asking questions of how can I improve this thing. For example, now I’m trying to improve the amount of people that pay for my product. We’ve got leads. Right? I say, “OK. People don’t have credit cards, don’t have debit card.” And now I’m testing how they can pay me with SMS for my products. That could be huge and lead me to a new thing. That came out of asking how can I increase [TD] in my four other things. It’s now that you get your breakthrough by applying the process.

Sometimes, then the breakthrough is so big that you restructure your business, and that blueprint changes completely. So, that’s kind of the thing. So, I think that’s it. Basically, this is, just get working. None of these ideas will make you any money if you don’t apply. Actually, none of your courses, my course, or any courses, will make you any ideas if you don’t apply. And by having [TD] this one, you will have regular meetings and people will say, ‘OK. What are the ideas?’ So, you create a content.

Andrew: By having what? I’m sorry.

Juan: By having this structure in your company, you may create meetings, or, at least, I would think. And your employees will say, ‘OK. What’s this month’s effort? What’s this month’s idea?’ [inaudible]

Andrew: I see. So, they know what to expect. They know where they’re directing their energy. As a whole company you’re working together, because now you know where the energy’s going.

Juan: Correct. And you create a context for yourself as an entrepreneur to not get this ‘shiny object syndrome’ that any new idea is cooler than what you are doing now. You create that context, where you have people pooling you for new ideas to improve your business all the time. So, it has some other measurable organization benefits, not only growing your business two times, doubling your business.

Andrew: So, this is your slide saying thank you to us, but I’ve got to say thank you to you. This has been incredibly helpful. You’ve been generous with the real data, as you can see from slides like this one. That really helps us understand how these ideas apply in the real world. You’ve also given us a series of steps that we can take. You’ve shown us how to outline our business. You’ve shown us how to organize our sales process. This has been fantastic. Let me get your website up on the screen right here, go through your numbers one more time. This is just the one year that you’re willing to show data for. Right?

Juan: Yeah.

Andrew: A year and a half roughly. Congratulations on the success there. Let me speak to the audience. Every time I do one of these courses, and I say, at the end, “Please send me your results”, I get results from people via email. It’s often private, and believe me, I respect your privacy. I will not share your data with anyone if you’re not comfortable sharing it. I understand that you want to try an idea and then use it and keep your results to yourself for a while before you share them with the world. I will respect that, but I’m curious to see your results. I want to see them. So, come back to Mixergy. Let me know how you’ve used these. Let me know what you’re doing with them. Let me know what some of your challenges are too. And go to Mindvalley, and say thank you to Juan. Juan, thank you for doing this course. I hope people get to thank you directly, and show you the appreciation that I know that they’re feeling for the work that you’ve spent and put into this course. Thank you.

Juan: Thank you for having me here, and keep going. [??] For you guys that need ideas, Mixergy premium, it’s awesome. I am a member, and I get a lot of ideas from that. I’m not saying it for anything. Really, it’s an awesome source of information. So, there it is. That’s my direct response marketing.

Andrew: I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you, Juan. Thank you all for watching. Send me your feedback and results.

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