Audio 1 
Systems 
July 16, 2009 

Marlon: 
Okay, this is Marlon Sanders. This is the Ateam call. I’m excited for a lot of reasons today. Number 1 is we’re going to be making very soon improvements to the Ateam call. The good news for you all is a) we’ll be making, I don’t want to say improvement, I want to say enhancement, b) the good news is I’m going to grandfather you in on price at least for X period of time, which will be a very generous period of time. Meaning, likely a year or something like that. I haven’t decided in stone yet but I’m going to be raising the price of this up to $100 a month. The reason I haven’t yet is because I have to have all the cell systems in place. 
   
In fact, we’re going to talk today a little bit about what does it take to sell something like this for $100 a month. It’s not just a super simple task to get $100 a month from anyone. But we’re going to go ahead and begin. 
   
If you need to mute or unmute yourself, you press I if you have background noise to mute yourself, *7 to unmute yourself. But if you want to talk during the call it will be *6. 
   
The topic of today’s call is Systems. I’m excited about this because this is going to change some of your lives, some of you who are on the call right now listening, some who will be listening to this by phone. I know this because systems have changed my life in the past and continue to change my life. This is going to be a very specific call; you’re going to get specific, instantly useable information that you will be able to apply in the next week. From listening to this call today, your life will be changed. You can change your life forever, and I know it sounds like an overstatement, but it really isn’t. 
   
So let me first give you a background, and then I will take specifically what I’m doing with systems now, then we’re going to apply. I’m actually going to give you a system that you can use right away to change your life and your business that you can use right away, immediately. 
   
I got to start in this business back before the World Wide Web. So I’ve been doing this before the Internet. We were marketing back on AOL and CompuServe before anyone really even knew what the Internet was. When my business really took off, I had some people that I hired part-time to work in my home office. One of them was my personal trainer at the gym, one of them was a friend – those things really, really did not work out because I had no idea how to hire anyone. When you did not have ways to easily hire freelance people, like at that point in time I don’t even think elance existed, or if it did, I don’t think anybody knew about it. 
   
So eventually I came to a point where I really need help so I posted on a forum, the Anthony Blake forum which is Internet marketing online, “need help” and Michael Furton (0:25:05) emailed me. I owe a lot to him because he was involved with a company called Internet Marketing Challenge, which was bought by the late great Cory Ruddle. When they bought it they had let go of their customer service person named Lisa. Michael said she was awesome so I hired her and we started creating processes and systems over time that she did for the business. Actually codified those any product that I sell called it’s at operateyourbiz.com; I think I called it the Clone Lisa Program. (25:40) 
   
ut we still have those systems where you could see what those systems were like. After Lisa left, some of the systems that we had in place fell apart, some of them changed because I had different staff with different skills. I’m not happy with the way I ran some of my systems over the past year. 
   
The other day I read a book that re-ignited my passion for systems and reminded me of a lot of things that I used to do then and some of them I just stopped doing for several reasons. The name of the book is Work the System and it is by Sam Carpenter. I believe you can go to workthesystem.com - I’m not sure if this offer is permanent or just kind of like on the website right when I’m recording this call, I believe that if you put in your name and email address currently, at least on that site, that he’ll actually send you a full PDF of the book for free. So if you’re just stone-broke and can’t afford to spit, then you can probably get the free PDF if you make it there fast enough. However, I would recommend to highly buying a used copy off of Amazon or buying the brand new, shining gold cover copy at the bookstore. It’s really a great read. 
   
Now let me tell you what the book is and isn’t. I’m going to tell you how it’s affected me. I’m going to talk about systems. I’m actually going to give you a system that you can use. I’m going to tell you how to get people to operate your systems if you don’t have very much money because that’s the big thing. “Well Marlon, that’s all great but you know I’m new in the business” or “Sorry, I don’t have the money to afford someone to operate the system.” So we’re going to talk about that. 
   
Now what the book is is a story. There’s some content in the book but mostly the book is a story about a guy named Sam Carpenter. Remember, one, there is an awful lot to be learned. I know some of you today on this call are new, and if you’re new on the call I just welcome you. You learn as you go through these calls because there are kind of different concepts built on each other and you get more and more **** (0:28:01) my mindset. So if you’re just brand new to all of this, you may think well that’s a little over my head, but I think you’re going to see in a minute it really isn’t. In fact if you’re new to this it may be more useful to you than just anyone. So just stick with me with this call and you’re going to see as we progress along. 
   
Sam Carpenter tells the story. There’s a lot to learn just listening to his story because one of the great ways that you sell is just to tell a story that people identify with. Where the story always goes like this – you have these problems, you try to solve the problems, nothing worked, you had a black night, it was really, really bad, then you stumbled across this solution, found this beautiful, wonderful solution, and now everything’s great. Now you’re in heaven. So you went from hell to heaven, and you went through this transformation with some magical process, more or less magical, and now you went from hell to heaven. So that’s how a story goes. 
   
So this is Sam’s story. Sam, about 17 years ago, bought an answering machine service called the **** (0:29:11). At that time I think he added about 10 or 11 people, and he started growing and expanding the business. Problem is, in that industry there are lots of turnover - very high staff turnover, people have low-pay, low wages. He really found himself to the point where some weeks he was working literally 100 hours in the week, and his house started breaking down, he couldn’t sleep, he was drinking way, way, way too much caffeine, his body was out of kilter, and he found himself at that black dark night of being one week away from bankruptcy – well, by bankruptcy I say not being able to make employee payroll which, in essence, would put him in bankruptcy. 
   
One week away from that he had this epiphany. The epiphany was that back in the old days, prior to buying the answering machine service, he worked for the electric company. He was the project engineer where he oversaw the systems that made all the electricity happen. And he talks about almost having an out of mind experience – he almost saw himself as being above his whole life and his business and seeing it from this raised perspective, as though he was looking down on his business and his life, but especially his business. 
   
He saw that the business was just a whole lot of systems. The other thing that he saw was that – it was like there were fires that he was putting out all the time but he never took the time to fix the system that was creating the fire to begin with. He saw that the business isn’t one system, it’s a whole bunch of systems and when he started then taking each system, breaking them all down chunk by chunk, piece by piece by piece, and fixing each part of the system, it made this huge impact and then documenting it in a little step-by-step procedure. 
   
Furthermore, what he found was that 99% of things in the world actually go well. It’s not like that you go to pick up your toothbrush this morning to brush your teeth and it’s floating on the ceiling and you had to retrieve it. Gravity is in place; there are a lot of order in place. If you water your lawn, and you put feed on it, you got good soil - the grass grows. Now, if you don’t water it, you don’t put good feed on it, you have really bad soil – that grass didn’t grow, or you have weeds. But these universal laws are in place so the vast majority things go well. 
   
Now, I understand if you’re new you don’t have the business yet – we’ll get to that. But the point of this is that most things went well and he found out that he really, in the systems, he just had to fix this relatively small amount of things to make that particular system go a lot better. 
   
Now there are a couple steps that he talks about that are really critical in understanding this perspective. Number 1 is you got to take a system, break it down into substances, and then break those down into substances. 
   
I’ll give you a practical example of that. Here’s how it was really broken down. He couldn’t sleep, and he was really losing his health. So he had this very thorough blood test done by his doctor and they found out that he had 4 chemicals or hormones basically in his body that were out of alignment - like there was too much cortisol and there were about 4 more of them. So what the doctor did, he just came out with a plan which wasn’t a medication plan, it was like a lifestyle plan. He needed more sleep because that would reduce the cortisol. He needed to actually eliminate the caffeine because that was interfering with his sleep. He had 2 other hormones or things about his blood that were out of whack. 
   
So the point is that health breaks down into subsystems. What you eat, the sleep you get, the amount of rest that you get - you can break your health down into different subsystems; the chemicals in your body, like cortisol levels and so forth. Then you can work on finding what’s the weakest link there and then perfect that little part of the system, improve the overall system, which is what he did. So he improved his health. He eliminated caffeine, he started exercising, he started getting more rest when he eliminated the caffeine, and he started taking more time off the business. 
   
Then as far as the business itself, he managed to make payroll by borrowing money then immediately went to work installing systems in the business – meaning documenting procedures. The very first procedure they documented was depositing the money in the bank because he’d been doing it himself everytime and it was just a real pain in the neck. Well they checked and wrote off the system for that, step-by-step by step-by-step - it was actually like 52 or 54 steps. But he never had to do that again. He never had to write up a system again and he never had to make the bank deposit again since then, and he had checks and balances put in place, controls, the whole entire thing. But he wrote the system out once, worked on it once. These things have to be tweaked over time but basically that system was in place, operating. 
   
Then they went through the rest of his business. They came up with the way to answer the phones where everybody answers the phones the same way. Step by step by step and he found out that he reduced his training time for the employees from 6 weeks to 3 days. He actually needed less staff instead of more because they were operating efficiently which increased his profits. 
   
He changed and documented and created a hiring system so he’s able to hire better quality people. He completely rechanged his rewards systems so that he vastly improved the retention of his employees. His employees are now the highest paid probably in that industry by a factor over a lot of answering machine services like double. 
   
They have a marketing system in place and he’s managed to get customers in spite of the fact that the answering service industry overall is in huge decline. When he got in the business there were like 15,000 companies or something like that, now there are 3,000. So that’s what happened to him. 
   
Now, we had a lot of systems in place for my business but a few of our issues were not bad issues, but you know, a little turnover staff here and there was my case. I had staff turnover and some of our systems – I didn’t have them up to date and documented as well as they needed to be. 
   
So let me tell you the impact this has on my life right now. Then I’m going to give you all a sample system in a little bit which you can use, and talk about how to use it right away, and how to get someone to operate your system if you’re brand new to the business, and what kind of system you might want. Or if you’re established, how this could change or affect your life. 
   
So here’s the first system that I personally wrote out - I wrote out yesterday a system for hiring somebody from oDesk. Now, odesk.com is a website that you go to to hire virtual help. Since people bid around the world you can save an awful lot of money on hiring people for your business, which is very cool and very useful. 
   
I’m going to read you what I wrote out here - it’s going to give you an idea of how you create a system. Then after I give you all these we’ll go through it, then I’ll talk to some of you specifically a little bit more about what you really need to have the systems you want in your business, and how you could really apply this and not just hear this in theory but something that you can do immediately - you’re in this next week to have whatever it is you’re doing run better. That’s what I think makes this powerful - you can have an immediate impact with it. Things will go better this very next week is what I’m saying.    
   
So let’s see here. What I did was I wrote out a system for using oDesk. So here’s the way the system for oDesk goes - you literally just spell things out step-by-step. So, it’s Step 1 what do you do here, Step 2 what do you do here, Step 3 what do you do here. It’s very simple, it’s kind of repetitive and when you think about it, it’s just a little bit boring writing these things out. 
   
The way it applies to you is whatever it is that you have to do, or an ebook to buy for example, you can take what’s in that ebook, write it into a step-by-step procedure and get somebody else to help you with it. You can take in **** (0:39:49) probably for a lot cheaper than you may think. 
   
So here’s how you to post a job on oDesk. 
   
Step 1: Go to odesk.com 
Step 2: Click sign in at the top right and then you list the username and the password 
Step 3: Go to My Jobs, and then post a job 
Step 4: Give the position a title that attracts people. You may want to browse the other job lists things to get ideas **** (0:40:14) 
Step 5: For “Job Visibility” unselect ‘get more candidates;’ the job is public unless you’re specifically inviting someone to bid 
Step 6: Select the appropriate category and sub-category in the drop-down box 
Step 7: List up the 5 skills required; separate them by commas 
Step 8: Type job description being specific as to requirements. **** (0:40:40) specific in detail but not overwhelming complexity; sort out the unsuitable but don’t scare off the ones you want 
Step 9: Select hourly not fixed price unless we’re offering a flat fee 
Step 10: For the work duration, choose one week 
Step 11: The estimated workload  - most jobs start under 10 hours but if it’s obvious that it’s more or that you’re seeking consistent weekly help 
Step 12: Submit 
   
And then I have a sample job description: 
   
Hi, I have a lot of sound files that I need transcribed. The transcription must be formatted, cleaned out to look decently and presentable. 
Skills: Data processing, proofreading, etc. 
   
So that’s the oDesk procedure right there. Now, I’m going to have Tim email this to everybody after the call, and then you all will have it. 
   
Obviously that’s only a 12-step procedure so it’s not like that it’s some huge or elaborate procedure but some of you have never advertised on oDesk. So right there, that saves you an enormous amount of time. 
   
Let me just give you an example. I have run overnight a job that I had Tim follow what I just wrote up (Tim’s my customer support person). He took what I wrote down on oDesk, posted a position on oDesk, and overnight we had people to get some of my ATeam modules transcribed. When I raise the price to $100 a month I’m going to go transcripts. So I need a transcriptionist to do it. So Tim posted a job and I probably had 40 bids here from people to do the transcripts at different prices. One person in the Philippines will do the transcript, clean it up, put it in a nice format for $20 the whole time, just a flat fee. So if it’s an hour-long audio, it’ll cost $20, or probably about $25 or $30 for the Ateam calls because they went a little bit over – I’m guessing $25. 
   
Then there were some other just great people, really wonderful, awesome people who responded. Like one of the people I’ll probably hire for 10 or 20 hours a week because they have a lot of experience doing other things. The great thing about this of course is people are bidding from around the world. If you’re new to this you say, “Well, I don’t really have money to hire someone,” well that’s not really true because there’s somebody here for every price range. 
   
Here’s somebody in the Philippines who does Data Entry for $3.33 an hour which is actually pretty good pay in the Philippines because the average person there makes $50-$100 probably a month. So $3 an hour doesn’t sound like much here but there it’s actually pretty good pay. 
   
Let’s see what else we have here - $3.61 Researcher, Writer, Data Entry. I’m going to contact that person and see how good they can write. Here’s someone $1.11 an hour. So if you’re new to this can you afford a buck an hour. Here’s somebody that does a lot more stuff, can actually do article writing if you need articles written and so forth, we’ll talk about that in a second. 
   
Here’s somebody $2.47 – Proofreader, Virtual Assistant, Transcriptionist. Could you use any of that kind of help? Expert Admin Assistant, Virtual Assistant, HR, Accounting - $6 an hour. I’m going to use that person, that’s not bad at all. 
   
So anyway, you see the value so now I have this process written out even though it’s very simple. I can give this to someone and I can say, “Okay, go hire me a transcriptionist. Go hire me a proofreader, go hire me this or go hire me that,” and I got the process done - that’s it. 
   
So if you’re new to this you say, “Well, Marlon I’m new to this, how’s this going to help me”’ Well a lot of new people they have problems with technical things, they can’t get this or that or the other to work. Well, go on in oDesk and hire help with it. 
   
Article Writing – “Oh God Marlon, I know I should write articles, I don’t want to take the time, or I just hate it.” Well go there and hire one of these people a buck an hour to write articles for you. Maybe you got to pay more to get a really good article writer. I have a friend who does 800 articles a month but that creates an income that’s about $25,000/$30,000/$35,000 a month, possibly more than that because they sell some big tickets. But you can hire article writers on there. This person pays $5 an article to have it written and submitted on ezinearticles.com. 
   
Ebook writing, ebook editing - people are actually getting ebooks for niches written for $100 to $150; get entire ebooks written for $150 each. But I’m a little bit off on that, just talking about some of those. I’m just trying for you to see how you can apply this in your life and your business. 
   
I created an accounting procedure - one of the biggest things that I want is monthly - because I hate numbers - but your accountant will never give you stuff you can manage your stupid business from usually. So I created my own procedure last night for this and it’s a 34-step procedure to take my PayPal statements. You can export your data from PayPal for the month, take that, clean it all up, delete the from and to email columns, the payment column, reference transaction ID columns, description number columns, receipt ID column, completed currency columns, and leave only the 4 columns that matter – the date, subject, balance, gross and net columns. And then by the end of this what they do is they take sales minus refund season chargebacks, then minus commissions, minus salaries, minus expenses, and come up with the net profit for the month figure. I really never take the time to do that. I roughly know but I don’t take the time to do it the way it should be done. 
   
My **** (0:48:20) I don’t really have an employee to sign to. Tim’s busy doing customer service, John’s with PHP, I have a full-time Filipino who does some technical work, a little bit of graphic design, kind of a webmaster. She could do it but it’s not a good use of her time so I’ll take one of these $1, $2, $3 an hour people and have them do this. 
   
Now, question comes up on occasion - is it fair to have them do this? For anyone who thinks that they may be mistreating people or they don’t understand other countries, let me explain. 
   
I have a very good friend in the Philippines who just could not really do Internet Marketing, she just couldn’t. She didn’t like the computer first of all, and it just wasn’t her thing. So she had taken training on being a domestic helper. A lot of Filipinos go to work at other countries because they promise them big money, like in her case $125 a day, and the job was in a dangerous country - I’ll just put it that way. She took the job there and it’s basically forced labor – no breaks, you can’t leave premises, you can’t use the phone. 
   
It’s basically modern day slavery. 12 million people in the world are in slavery. A lot of them are tricked into it by the promise of extremely high income and they get over there and they’re beaten. So my friend has been beaten. Now I’m buying her out, or I’m negotiating this month to buy her contract. 
   
The only reason I tell you that story – I don’t even like to tell things about my personal life – the only reason I’m telling that story is that she had a sales job in the Philippines and was maybe working about 10 or 12 hours a day, earning maybe $50 or $70 for the month - for the whole month. It’s very, very, very difficult for her to get a job. It wasn’t even a good job, it wasn’t even a good sales position but it was a sales position. That’s all she could earn and there’s just not a lot of jobs there. 
   
So there the average family in Makati makes $300 a month - for the whole family. Take all their income combined for the month, your average job there is probably $50 to $75 a month. So $1 an hour, $8 a day - $30 to $40 a month, that’s not real good, I’ll probably pay them a little bit more than that. At $2.40-$2.50 that’s more than what their other family members are making. But if they’re making, say, $3 an hour, $24 a day, that’s very good pay there; $24 a day because in 3 days they earn more than the average monthly wage. I think that $3 an hour though for the Philippines that’s pretty decent. $3 times 8, that’s $24 a day, 5 days a week that’s $125 a week. That’s like $400 or $500 a month, that’s pretty good pay. That’s actually really good pay. 
   
So I’m just going to put this in perspective. These people don’t have jobs, they don’t have a lot of choices and if they’re making $400 or $500 a month, that’s really awesome and even $300 because the whole family’s on $300 so that’s a very good pay. I’m just trying to put it in perspective, that’s all. I just want you to understand the perspective on it. 
   
The person I have, I’m paying pretty decent – the more skilled the person is, the more I’ll pay. Now also understand this, they bid on your job. You put the job up on oDesk, they bid and tell you how much they’re willing to do the job for. They’re saying I’m willing to trade my time for this amount of money. Now, that handles that issue as far as I’m concerned. 
   
Systems in your business – your business is a set of subsystems. So if you’re new let me explain this. First thing you’re going to need is traffic. Traffic is not just “Well, geez, I don’t have any traffic I really don’t know.” What you do is you take the idea of traffic then you break it down into little chunks so you can have steps for each chunk. 
   
For example, the article writing. You take article writing down and it consists of a list of things – coming up with your title for each article, you could create a system for that. My friend has a spreadsheet with titles already in it and a way to substitute words into the spreadsheet so you get like 800 or 1,000 titles for articles on a topic all at once, in just a few minutes. I haven’t actually seen it, but I know I use this spreadsheet, it’s already got titles, it doesn’t take very long to come up with the titles - this is what I know. 
   
So you have your titles for your article, then you have getting somebody to write the articles, then you have checking the articles using copyscape to make sure they’re not pirated articles or something, then you have submitting the articles to whatever directories you want to submit them to. So that’s a little subsystem with some steps in it that you can write out. 
   
Like submitting the articles to ezinearticles.com – that’s a subsystem. So then you write out the steps that it takes to submit the articles to ezinearticles.com. If you have a system to write the titles, you write that out – step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, step 5. So that’s a whole little subsystem there for just getting traffic from articles, or you have your resource box but you really only set that up probably once. 
   
Now, split testing is another thing we do a lot in getting traffic. Sean is my PHP guy, more like my systems personnel creating systems. He’s going to create a little step-by-step checklist for using our split testing software called **** (0:54:51). We step by step by step roll a system process that anyone can take and follow and set up our split test so we can do it correctly, simply, and easily. 
   
Squeeze pages – you got a little system set up for creating your squeeze pages so you’re not doing it from scratch everytime. In the ideal world, you can give yourself step-by-step instructions to a graphic designer and they can make the squeeze page for you. 
   
Now let me ask you this, is this useful to you, or do you see how it’s useful to you, or do you not see how it can help you out? Honestly. Anyone? 
   
Mike: 
It’s actually what I’ve been implementing more and more. 
   
Marlon: 
Oh hi, Mike. I know you’re on top of it because you already have your Filipina going in and everything. We’ll come back to you in a second, Mike, because I want you to share a little bit about what you’ve implemented and how it’s worked for you. For the rest of you on the call, can you see how you can use this, or are you not with us yet? 
   
Nancy: 
This is Nancy and I can see how I can use it because I’m, by nature, sort of a big picture person and I get lost in the details and so the power of just sitting down and writing out – okay, do this first then this – writing down the various parts of this system that I… 
Marlon: 
Now let’s get you started on this today, Nancy. Let me ask you this, what is the weakest link in your business or in your business start-up? What is the weakest link you have? 
   
Nancy: 
My technical abilities. 
   
Marlon: 
Technical abilities to do what? 
   
Nancy: 
Well, I’ve got my blog set up, my newly-cleaned blog, and I want to get my opt-in page but I’ve been having trouble with my email so I went to oDesk and put out a job request and I’ve got somebody working on that to get those emails straightened out because I’ve got… 
   
Marlon: 
Now, if it’s something technical we’re having trouble that has to be fixed then obviously you can’t write out a step-by-step thing because you don’t know how to fix it. But you can write up all the details concerning here’s what’s going wrong, here’s what I want to happen, that kind of thing. Right? 
   
Nancy: 
Right, and that’s exactly what I’ve done. 
   
Marlon: 
But let’s talk about something that you don’t have on oDesk and not done yet but you feel is holding you back, like is it the squeeze page? 

Nancy: 
It could be a squeeze page. Yes, it would be because once I get these technical things so I can put my opt-in box on my blog, then I’ll want a squeeze page for my reports and things like that. 
   
Marlon:
Alright, so here’s what I’m going to do on the squeeze page. 
   
Step 1: Review my list of sample squeeze pages. You have URLs for the samples of what you like. 
Step 2: Here’s the headline to use. Give them the headline. 
Step 3: Here is what the wording will be for the submit button. 
Step 4: Here is where I would like the submit button, the name and email box to be. 
Step 5: You list out everything that you want and you give them, in Step 1, you give them the sample URLs which have sample designs. 
Step 6: Put a link to a privacy policy at the bottom. 
Step 7: Use this logo; if you have a picture of you that you want to use, or a product, or something. 
   
You just spell everything out. So you write all of that out, then you go on oDesk and you hire your designer, or go to 99design.com and post that on 99design.com for people who actually do mock-ups for you - you don’t buy it unless you like the design. 
   
Nancy: 
Okay. 
   
Marlon: 
So that’s how I would do that. Does that help? 
   
Nancy: 
It does help. 
Marlon: 
Could you do that today? 
   
Nancy: 
No, but I could do it tomorrow. 
   
Marlon: 
Tomorrow, could you do that tomorrow? Could you write that out, step-by-step tomorrow? 
   
Nancy: 
Yes. 
   
Marlon: 
Okay. 
   
Who else is on the call? We’ll come back to you, Mike. By the way you all know this but if you speak during the call you’re giving me permission to use **** (1:00:03) sound quality of your voice **** (1:00:04) worldwide without royalty. 
   
Who else is on the call? Do you get this or don’t get it yet? How can it work for you in your business today or tomorrow? A system you could put together today or tomorrow to help you out. Anyone? 
   
Anyone else here want to comment? Does anyone not see this for their business and you want to say, “Hey, I don’t get how this could help me.” 
   
Alright, Mike, tell us how you’ve used this in your business so far and what the result has been. 

Mike: 
Well, I do a ton of blogs so I have a whole checklist of how a blog should be installed – where the guy that does the blog installs with whatever plug-ins, what the settings should be, it walks you through a step-by-step. 
   
Marlon: 
And does your Filipina do that, or you hire someone off oDesk, or who does it? 
   
Mike: 
Yes, that’s my Filipino that does that. Actually, I have 2 people. So what happens is, I buy a domain, the one guy gets the information and he installs the blog and makes all the tweaks into it, the other person gets a list of the keywords and the articles and starts putting the content on it. 
   
Marlon: 
Now are you using PLR articles or are you having them written? 
   
Mike: 
No, she’s writing the articles based on the keyword research. 
   
Marlon: 
Oh, writing articles from scratch? 
   
Mike: 
Yes. 
   
Marlon: 
And how much is it costing you per article? 
   
Mike: 
About $275 a month, and she does 2-3 a day. 
Marlon: 
Okay, and how is her English and how good are the articles? Are you happy with what you’re getting there? 
   
Mike: 
The articles are sufficient for what we’re getting. Occasionally we have trouble with the syntax but the majority of them are of decent enough quality. 
   
Marlon: 
I might post on oDesk for a writer, see what she can come up with - native English speaking writer. You may be able to improve that situation. 
   
Mike: 
But they’re drawing traffic so those are… 
   
Marlon: 
Yeah, it’s in place. At least there’s a system in place, now you can tweak and improve it. And the checklist is working good, in other words, now you don’t have to do that and you used to have to do it? 
   
Mike: 
Yeah, and I’m fuzzy when it comes to how my blogs are set up. 
   
Marlon:
Now, how much time did you used to spend doing that a month? 
   
Mike: 
Quite a bit. I don’t spend outside of buying the domain… 

   
Marlon: 
But how much time did you used to spend? How much time did it used to take you to set those up and everything? Now how much time are you saving by not having to write the articles, or do the setting up of the blogs? 
   
Mike: 
The articles is the big thing. Setting up the blogs I could do in about 40 minutes a pop. 
   
Marlon: 
Okay, but how many of them do you do in a month? 
   
Mike: 
Right now we’re doing between 5 and 8. 
   
Marlon: 
So that’s 5 to 8 hours a month you saved every month? 
   
Mike: 
Yeah, and that’s my counting…. 
   
Marlon: 
…the articles. 
   
Mike: 
I also do it for customers and those will do 3 or 4 or 5, depending on how busy the week is. 
   
Marlon: 
So if you happen to do customers, you’d be spending 4 or 5 hours a week for your customers? 
   
Mike: 
Yeah. 
   
Marlon: 
So that’s 20 hours a month. So that’s pretty significant savings. It’s like 25 hours a month or more that you’re saving on now. 
   
Mike: 
Yeah, not counting the articles. 
   
Marlon: 
Yeah, not counting the articles which is substantial. 
Alright, very good example. Now Mike, I’m going to push your thinking a little bit. What’s the biggest weak spot you currently have, the weakest link in your chain right now, today? 
   
Mike: 
Building the follow up email series, which is what I’ve been working on for the last 3 days primarily. 
   
Marlon: 
Alright, now, that one, depending on those emails is more challenging. Because I’m writing my autoresponder messages myself and I would only hire that out, Mike, if you can find somebody who’d do it better than you at a price you can afford. 
   
Now on Warriors Forum there are people there that really understand Internet Marketing and autoresponders and messages and stuff, and some of the writers on Warriors are reasonably priced. So you may be able to find a copywriter on Warriors who might possibly be able to do a better job than you could. 

Mike: 
Well, what I’ve been doing is actually going through past stuff and setting things up so they go, you know, doing what we talked about 2 weeks ago. 
   
Marlon: 
Yeah, well that’s what I did. It’s kind of like the lazy man’s way but it worked pretty good. It works to take your stuff that works in the past and stick it. But if they’re doing that you could almost hire that out - having someone do that because if you give them the list of stuff, as far as just technically putting it into the autoresponder, someone else could do that. 
   
Mike: 
Yeah, but it’s going through in double checking how well they actually did. 
   
Marlon: 
Well, now, could someone else do that? 
Mike: 
Possibly, but I have a feeling that it would take me longer to…. 
   
Marlon: 
…to write it out. 
   
The ideal scenario is you do stuff that is recurring. Let me give you an example. I talked to my customer service person about this today, Tim. “Tim, what’s the number one sales question that you get?” “Well, it’s what the difference between marketing dashboard and promo dashboard, which one should I get?” “Do we have a template to respond to that?” “No, we don’t have a template.” “Okay, let’s write up our best response and make it a template.’ See, because that’s a recurring thing, it’s a recurring question. 
   
So the systems are really best spent for things that recur. Now, if you got to do this autoresponders, if there’s facets of autoresponder messages formatting or other things that are done on repetitive basis, then having someone that you can work with might be good. 
   
But it’s more than just a mindset. Let me give you an example of what you can do on autoresponders. You can have someone in charge of tracking and tweaking the messages. In other words, you can get an up and coming hungry copywriter and their job after you get the sequence set up is to look at the ad, because you all have ad tracking link on there, is to look at it and make tweaks to the autoresponder messages and just keep tweaking them to try to improve the responses. You’re never going to take the time to do that consistently on a week end and week out basis. So optimize them. 
   
Or you probably won’t, I know I won’t. But if you had it set up as a system and somebody’s got a good copywriter, a decent, up and coming, hungry copywriter, that would be a perfect job for them – “here’s $250 a month, make these messages convert better. Track them.” Does that make sense? 
   
Mike: 
Yeah, that makes sense. Once it’s set up. 
   
Marlon: 
Yeah, once you got it set up then they become in charge of optimizing it. 
   
Does anyone else have something that’s taking up your time each month that’s on a repetitive basis? Does anyone have something like that, either business or personal where you might be able to outsource it? Like balancing your checkbook, doing your business accounting. All of those things are candidates for that. 
   
Does anyone want to respond on this? Or should I start calling names? I’ll call a few names; we’ll get some feedback here. 
   
I’ll also give you a few more ideas on things that I feel you can do because I think sometimes many new people feel like “Well, this doesn’t apply to me.” And no, actually it really does if you really think about it. 
   
Nancy, do you have anything else that you can think of that you need to apply this to? 
   
Nancy: 
Can you ask that question again? 
   
Marlon: 
Can you think of anything else you need to or would want to apply this to? 
   
Nancy: 
The systems and using oDesk? 
   
Marlon: 
Yes, and anything else you need the system for. 
   
Nancy: 
Well, there are a lot of things I will need a system for. 
   
Marlon: 
Okay, give us an example. 
   
Nancy: 
Well, doing the follow up emails – writing emails for my AWeber list. 
   
Marlon: 
Because this comes up again and it is something that I’ve done, like I told Mike, I went there and handpicked stuff out. 
   
Ronald, are you still with us from Alamitos, California? Are you still on, Ronald? If you are on, I’d like to hear your feedback. 
   
Who is in Allentown, Pennsylvania? 
   
Mike: 
That’s Mike. 
   
Marlon: 
Oh, is that you Mike? And Nancy you’re in Ashton, New York City? 
   
Okay, you can outsource the writing but when you’re starting a business it may be hard to afford unless you find an up and coming copywriter, however there are a lot of those in the Warriors Forum in the copywriting sub-forum, and can be worth checking out. 
   
It didn’t take that much time for me to pace the emails into the autoresponder. I would have hired someone to do it if it’s going to take a lot of time, but it really didn’t take me much time to go through there and pace most of them in. The hunting down the successful emails did take longer. 
   
One idea I have as far as getting emails is – Yanik Silver has that old ebook, Autoresponder Magic, that has a whole ton of email sequences in it from different marketers. If you’re starting from scratch and you need ideas, it’s probably a good place to go. 
   
Nancy: 
What was the title? 

   
Marlon: 
It was called Autoresponder Magic, I believe. Just search for Yanik Silver Autoresponders. 
   
Nancy: 
Okay. 
   
Marlon: 
It’s very cheap, if not free. You’d probably find it free nowadays because he wrote it 3 or 4 years ago. But it had like best autoresponder sequences from tons of marketers. It’d be a good place just to get ideas from, if you’re not already on swipe files in your industry, of course you would want to be. 
   
Split testing is one that I consider critical. Now, website optimizers are probably the best thing for you to use for that. It has some pretty good instructions that come with it, it isn’t particularly difficult to use because it has wizards. Split testing means testing one thing versus another. It’s just really a powerful potent. 
   
We’ve just been through a whole lot of split testing and we’ve been working on our upfront new opt-in and then I’m getting ready to roll out the conversion testing which will be for the Ateam calls. We’ll be like the next big thing. I’ll talk in just a second about what I’m creating for that which is bonuses. It’s how you sell something like that. So if you want to sell a membership, it really comes down to the bonuses. 
   
Let me see how many new AWeber opt-ins we have today - we had as many as 360 in one day. I think when I get our back in conversions for the visitor value it’s high, like my target is that we will just get a ton of traffic from affiliates. But you got to get your visitor value really up there, highly competitive with product launches - if you’re in Internet Marketing space. If you’re in any other space, it’s not really that big of a deal. 
   
Let’s see here, so today we have 40 new opt-ins and we’ve been averaging over 100 a day, and that’s just from focusing on it, some of it without doing really anything at all with affiliates. So we’ll be working on that next pitch which I’ll tell you about here in a second, then once we got converting the way I want we’ll roll it out to affiliates. 
   
The way that you sell something – that’s a big ticket and it’s a monthly billing – the way you sell it is with bonuses. It’s kind of tested proven - Dan Kennedy old method – like, you get all these bonuses if you subscribe today. Because what you’ll find is if we just ask people to try a dollar trial, they won’t try it or not in enough numbers that it makes it profitable for you. So you literally have to really come up with some great bonuses for people. 
   
One of my friends, what he does is he just takes bonuses from his other products, which is clever. What I’m personally doing is creating the bonuses, which is why it’s taking more time. In the ideal world I have a writer good enough to create the bonuses, and I think I can find that, or at least create them up to a certain level and then I can take it from there. 
   
Like I had my outsourcer take one of my sales letters and split it up into Power Point slides, like 50 or 60 Power Point slides, for my product dashboard. Now I’m going to take those, now that they’re already in Power Point file text I can take it, fix it up some and then record it as a pitch. And I’ll split test that versus the sales letter. Overall, the video - and it may be a temporary thing - but a video pitch has been performing better than text in recent. This isn’t overall, long term but in recent time it is. So we’re going to test that. But that’s another thing I have in my outsourcer **** (1:16:54). 
   
So here’s what I did, I just took and I went through forums, found hottest topics in some forums, wrote those down to create bonuses from. I took some of my best and most responsive ezine articles that I got the best responses to, took those titles, wrote those down, those will become bonuses. 
   
I took my best, most responded to email and make bonuses out of those. So it’s like the autoresponder idea where you go and you take your best messages from the past, stick them in your autoresponder – same kind of idea. You take things that you can find on forums that are hot topics, even Google Trends, you can use it with Google Trends. In my case I look at WSO if it has done real well, etc. I try to find some commonalities or common elements and we’ll make bonuses out of those. That’s how I got my idea for my bonuses for my $1 trial that I’ll be doing on the membership site. 
   
Now, I want to ask Nancy are you thinking about doing a membership site or no? 
   
Nancy: 
Well, in the long run yes. 
   
Marlon: 
In the long run? Alright. 
   
It’s not easy to sell. The main thing I had to say about the membership site is you normally take 500 people in there and now you just kick back and that’s it. But the average person’s only going to stay 3 to 3.5 months so it’s part of your marketing system, your autoresponder series and it’s a lot of effort actually. It’s probably a whole separate autoresponder series just to keep getting new people in there if that makes sense. 
   
Nancy: 
The whole idea of a membership site is I know that it’s like steady income but having to get enough stuff on there to make it worthwhile for people to stay on the list is just overwhelming for me right now, I have enough to think about so I don’t even go there. 
   
Marlon: 
I can understand that but this is why you do maybe one weekly webinar or one every other week and stick in there. Or like I’m doing calls that are transcribed, and then I’ll be adding in a few things. Look at it this way, Nancy, how long is the average person going to stay. 
   
Nancy: 
Well, you said like 3 ½ months. 
   
Marlon: 
Yeah, I already told you 3 ½ months. So how many months of great content do you need in there? 
   
Nancy: 
3 ½ months worth. 
   
Marlon: 
3 ½ months because you drip it. There’s software like wishlist software is one of them that drips it into the autoresponder. When every a person joins, they start on month one’s content, right? So really, you probably need 6 months in there. 
   
Now after that you can still do content but you really look at it this way. After that, you’re going to get like 2 calls a month on the phone but you want to load up that for 6 months. First you start out with just 3 ½ month-4 months because that covers the bulk of your people and your income right there. At $100 a month, they stay an average of 3 months. That’s $300 per person that you bring on. But you really probably want 6 months in there because some will stay 6 months and then after that some of them will stay longer so you have something for them, like twice a month calls that you transcribe. Some people throw in an annual seminar which is work, right? 
   
Nancy: 
Right. 

Marlon: 
But you can create 3, 4, 5, 6 months of content. Does that seem less overwhelming? 
   
Nancy: 
It seems less overwhelming but from where I am right now, I can’t still fill my brain with anything else right now. 
   
Marlon: 
What about 2 calls a month? 
   
Nancy: 
I could do 2 calls a month. 
   
Marlon: 
Now think about this. If you do the 2 calls a month and you get them transcribed, how many months do you need to have 4 months of content? 
   
If you do 2 calls a month for 4 months, now you get 4 months of content. 
   
Nancy: 
Right, and I have to do that all in advance, before I open the membership? 
   
Marlon: 
No, you’re doing it as you go to start with. 
   
Nancy: 
Oh, I see. Okay, got it. 
   
Marlon: 
But then once you got it you just load it up. But then what you do is as you do calls after that, you double load up the front end. So you take some calls from months 5, or 6, or 7, or 8 and you put some transcripts from those in the first 3 months because that’s when most of the people are going to stay. 
   
Or if you do some free ebooks or you do ezine articles, you stick all your ezine articles in there. You can have a freelancer take your ezine article and turn it into a PDF, stick those in there, really nicely formatted. So we take all my ezine articles now and we turn them into really nicely formatted PDFs to use as a sundry for **** (1:22:49) squeeze pages. 
   
So if you’re doing an ezine article - because your customers are never going to find or read all those ezine articles and then if you have a freelancer turn them into a nicely formatted PDF they’ll never recognize them anyway. It’s just not going to happen because they don’t look the same. So now you stick all those in there, now you’ve got something that’s beefed up and looks pretty nice, maybe throw in a few **** (1:23:20) videos as you go along just on your monthly program. 
   
Now, I haven’t even done the **** (1:23:30) videos yet but it’s something I probably need to do. I’ll need some **** videos in there too. 
   
And you’re right, you got to keep the chunk down. But I think maybe start with 2 calls a month and if that’s too much, do one. Because look at it this way, let’s say people are paying you $20 a month for 1 call a month, or $25 or $30, it’s still paying you to create content. I mean, you’re still being paid to create the content that you need to create anyway, but at least you’re getting paid to do it. Let’s say you only made $500 a call, or $300 a call, it’s still $300 that you didn’t have before that you got paid to create what you have to create anyway. 
   
Nancy: 
Yeah, I see. That makes sense. 

Marlon: 
So how bad is that? At least somebody’s paying you to do the work you needed to do anyway. 
   
Nancy: 
That’s true. 
   
Marlon: 
Even if it’s 10 people at $20 a month, that’s still $200 you didn’t have before and you got paid to do the stuff to create the content for the site that will just be a money machine later on in the future. 
   
Nancy: 
Yeah, that makes sense. 
   
Mike: 
Even your blog posts - I’ve created a pay product that was basically written on my blog. I’ve created 4 or 5 giveaways for squeeze page reports. They were all done on my blogs, so I get contents and then I just repurpose it into a PDF and create a cover and you have a product. 
   
Marlon: 
Yeah. Now, that’s great Mike because that’s still more repurposing of content. You can use it over and over. You can take 10 articles, Nancy, and then record those articles on audio, just read one after the other, nobody’s ever going to recognize that content. Or take the article, have the freelancer stick 10 articles into Power Point slides, chop them up into Power Point slides, now you got 100 slides in the Power Point. Now you go through and record it. 
   
Nancy: 
It all makes sense. 
   
Marlon: 
Still, you have to do that but you could literally remove yourself completely from that process. The freelancers can chop it up and put on Power Point slides; somebody else could record it from the article, they just read the articles as they’re turning the slides. You don’t even have to read it yourself if you really don’t want to read it. 
   
If you got the slides and you got the article to read and it’s got slash points where you turn the slides, how much time is it going to take to record it? It’s the cutting it up, putting it up on the slide, getting the thing…. 
   
Mike: 
Actually, Marlon, if you have the regular Microsoft Power Point, I haven’t tried it with Open Office, I know it will work with Microsoft Power Point, and you take your article and just take it into a text editor and create lines, you can import it all at once. Just change them into title slides and you got your Power Point ready. I do it all the time. 
   
I just started a new blog on PLR and every article I put up there to get it some traction is, I write the article, I create a Power Point, create a podcast, you know pull the audio off as a podcast, submit to the article directories, to the podcast directories, and to the video sites, and put them all together in a single blog post. 
   
I use Edit Plus which is a text editor and all you do is like when you get the period, just hit return so that each sentence is on a separate line, and it’ll create a slide out of each sentence. Or if the sentence is too long, chop the sentence into pieces. I mean I go through the article in about 3 minutes and get it ready to import into Power Point and have 35-40 slides. I’ll do a 400-word article and I’ll put a 3-minute video, a 3-minute podcast, and do the whole thing in an hour. 

   
Marlon: 
Now, do you use Traffic Geyser to extract the audio? Or how do you extract the audio from your video? 
   
Mike: 
**** (1:28:22). You just export it as mp3. 
   
Marlon: 
Oh, I forgot about that. That is like the best trick. 
   
Mike: 
Yeah, just export it as an mp3 and then I use a blog with podpress, or a wordpress blog with podpress and I submit it to all the podcast directories so they’re looking for the feeds. So what I’ve done is I have a blog right now that’s getting about 35 visitors a day that I put up Sunday a week ago. 
   
Marlon: 
Alright, so I have a product for you. This is just an idea of mine. It may just be a lead generator, it would be a great product for a squeeze page, your opt-in rate will be really high. It’s called the Sunday Night Cash Plan: How to put up a blog in one evening and have 35 visitors a day, 7 days later. 
   
Because I did, in fact, I wrote a blog article called Night-time Cash Plan – same concept. So Sunday night cash plan. But it’s the specifics that make that title work. How to put up a blog on a Sunday night and have 35 visitors a day, 7 days later. It’s a great little squeeze page, or bonus, or even a little $25 entry level product. 
   
But that’s great, I didn’t know that, Mike. That’s very good. Do you submit them with Traffic Geyser? 

Mike: 
No I actually used Tube Mogul for that. I’ve seen people having trouble with Traffic Geyser because they overdo it and I’ve seen people lose their YouTube accounts. 
   
Marlon: 
Yeah, but if you use it right it’s good because I have friends who use it but…. 
   
Mike: 
I know lots of people who use it but it’s…. 
   
Marlon: 
Yeah, you got to be smart. Tube Mogul is good. That’s how you submit to the video site, how do you submit to the podcast directories? 
   
Mike: 
I have a piece of software that I have enlisted the podcast directories in it, you just set it up and let it run. 
   
Marlon: 
Really, because see in your product, you could give people that list or something because like ‘I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to submit to the podcast directories.’ Well, I buy some off the shelf commercial software, I think, but I don’t really have anything I could say ‘no, this is the way you should do it.’  
   
So maybe that gave you some ideas, Mike. I think that’s really valuable knowledge you have there and whether you sell it cheaper, whether you package that up as part of your more expensive program, or something. Once you get your results on these things documented, Mike, you’re really putting together a machine there and I like it. 
   
I encourage you to keep documenting your systems on your stuff. Read the book Work the System, I really recommend it. I’m paying my employees to read it, at least I paid Sean and I’ll probably pay Tim. 
   
Keep pushing your systems, getting your results for clients and you’re going to have a really nice, big ticket package coming out at some point when you really get some documented success stories and you really document your systems well, you’ll have a really, really, really nice product to sell. Does that make sense? 
   
Mike: 
Yup, and in a minute here I’ll own that domain. 
   
Marlon: 
Good, go for it. Do it. Make it happen. 
   
Mike: 
Yeah, I just bought sundaynightcashplan. 
   
Marlon: 
Good, I like it. Well, however you use it it’s a great little idea because people can envision just happen to spend Sunday night, do the work once - the pitch works really well. You do the work once and you get traffic over and over and over for days and months, and possibly even years to come as I would state it. And then they get the results in 7 days - this is just going to sell. I know how people think – they want the fast result, they don’t want to have to spend a whole lot of time, right? 
   
So anyway, I’ll go ahead and wrap this up. The book is Work The System, the author is Sam Carpenter. I encourage you to take it and read it because I can’t do justice to it in the period of 1 hour and 15 minutes. Sam has lived this thing and really has an amazing way to explain it and open your eyes to it. You can buy it off at Amazon.com, a used copy cheap. I recommend you buy the nice, shiny, gold copy if it’s still at your bookstore and mark it up thoroughly and read it 3 or 4 times. 
   
It’s a deceptive book because it’s a very simple story and mostly the book is a story with some content in it, and sample systems and so forth that is used in this business. Predominantly, it is a story. The first time I looked into the book I did not read it because I thought, “Oh, this is just like E-Myth and it’s just E-Myth done down.” But I really missed it because the guy lives it, he’s made it happen in his business, and he has different angles and slants than the E-Myth did, and it’s really not just about business, it’s really a way of seeing your whole, entire life. 
   
I’ve already made some changes in the way I handle things on a personal level. I’ve taken some things and broken them down into systems because instead of just putting out fires, or having a problem, you take and you create a system out of it so it doesn’t even happen in the first place. So instead of putting out fires, you just start working more with your systems. 
   
It’s just a powerful way to approach all of your life, not just business. Whether it’s your health, your relationships – just like relationships, take that as an example. It’s one thing to say, “Well, we have relationship problems, etc.” but did you ever have a plan in place to create positive relationship or relationships? An actual plan with actual steps, and an actual objective. Probably not. I bet you can interview 1,000 married couples and I doubt one of them has any kind of a real plan, certainly not written down, to have a happy, positive relationship. 
   
Same thing about health - is there any kind of plan in place or is it kind of just “No, I kind of like eat what I feel like, I’m just going to cross my fingers and hope for the best and occasionally I’ll buy something that’s low fat and I feel pretty good about it.” 
   
It’s just all the difference in the world when you really break things down into systems and start thinking about. So I encourage you to read the book. I encourage you to create systems for your business. 
   
I am going to take the system we created for oDesk and later today, sometime today, we’ll be sending that out to the ATeam members. To the people who will listen to this call in the future, we will make that available as a download to the people listening and calling in. 
   
So, I want to thank those of you who are on the call live today. Thank you for being on the call and participating. I know a lot of people do not have a job schedule and so forth and they can make the calls and some people listen through on the web audio but aren’t actually on the phone where they appear on my live list of people. So for everyone who does hear this in the future and everyone listening live on the web audio, for those of you who didn’t make it live on the call, I appreciate that. I hope this call’s been enormously helpful to all of you. 
   
We’ll be sending you the oDesk procedure. I encourage you to use it. I encourage you to hire people to actually use in your business for things that are repetitive. I encourage you to stop putting out fires and change the system that’s creating the fires or allowing the fires to begin with, and I think that if you do these things, you’re going to find that it makes a dramatic and a virtually immediate impact in your life. I want to encourage you to act on this information within the next 72 hours. Take one thing, one thing, just something, even if it’s small, and create a step-by-step system for it in the next 72 hours. 
   
My name is Marlon Sanders, I am the King of step-by-step Internet Marketing. This is the Ateam call. I want to take all of you for being on it. I will see everyone one this call in 2 weeks. Bye everyone.  
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