The Only Way to Absolutely, Positively De-Glitch Anything
Issue #2037
- WEALTHY: The reason so many flips end up flopping (Justin Ford)
- HEALTHY: Does your location put you at risk for multiple sclerosis? (Jon Herring)
- WISE: an African proverb about testing
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- 7 things you must do before you launch an Internet business (David Cross)
- What every potential employer really wants to know about you (Michael Masterson)
- It’s Good to Know… about the weather
- Add "dyspeptic" to your vocabulary
The Only Three Ways to Grow a Business
Did you know that there are only three ways to grow a business?
1. Increase the number of customers.
2. Increase the average transaction value.
3. Increase the frequency of repurchase.
Find a way to maximize each one, and your business will experience an astonishing rate of growth.
In his "9 Pillars of Business Growth" program, acclaimed consultant Jay Abraham outlines hundreds of proven, frequently unrecognized, and almost totally underutilized ways to grow these three key areas of your business. If you own a business (or would like to), be sure to take a look at Jay’s program.
- Patrick Coffey
Full-Service Wholesaling: How to Go from Making a Living to Making a Fortune in Real Estate
By Justin Ford
Yesterday, at Day Two of Steve Cook’s Flipping Homes Bootcamp in Baltimore, attendees learned the details of a key strategic change he made that multiplied his income more than five-fold and made him a millionaire many times over.
He became a "full-service" wholesaler. Let me explain…
If you’re going to flip a home, there are basically four key components to the transaction:
- Finding the undervalued deal and getting it under contract
- Finding an investor-buyer for the property
- Making sure the investor-buyer has the right financing so he can close on the purchase
- Having the right title company in place in case you’re doing a specialized closing, such as a double close, "subject-to" purchase, or assignment
Most wholesalers and flippers only focus on the first two components. They leave steps three and four to the buyer. And that’s precisely why - in the hands of amateurs - so many flips end up flopping.
The buyer doesn’t get the financing or the title company handles the close incorrectly, causing friction between the various parties. Steve dealt with plenty of problems like these before he realized he could avoid them simply by making sure he controlled every step of the process, from start to finish.
From that point on, once he had an undervalued deal under contract, he would only accept a buyer’s offer if they agreed to use his hard-money lender and his title company. When they said yes, he knew there was very little that could derail the closing.
Steve’s lenders understood the discount at which the property was trading hands. And if there needed to be a double-closing or other special arrangements, they could handle that as well.
These days, Steve no longer has to qualify new buyers as much. That’s because he has built up a network of qualified investor-buyers. The result is that not only does he often buy and sell homes without ever touching the keys, on many occasions, he now flips a home for five-figure profits without even seeing it!
He now knows his target area so well, and he is so well known in his area by sellers and buyers alike, that when a motivated seller calls, Steve immediately knows whether or not he has a deal. And sometimes, often within just 20 minutes, Steve will have one of his buyers on the phone agreeing to purchase the property from him for a $10,000 to $20,000 profit (or more).
The moral of the story is to become what Steve calls a "full-service" wholesaler. In other words, though it’s important to know how to market yourself to find motivated sellers… it’s equally important to begin to build your list of qualified investor-buyers, lenders, and title companies.
Tomorrow, I’ll let you know what Steve has to say about the first part of that equation: the best ways to market yourself to find motivated sellers.
[Ed. Note: For a limited time, you can learn the same secrets Steve Cook is sharing at his Flipping Homes Bootcamp - but at a fraction of the price. Click here to learn more.]
"No one tests the depth of a river with two feet."
African proverb
Testing: The Only Way to Absolutely, Positively De-Glitch Anything
By David Cross
My wife and I are lucky. Our small business has some great clients with whom we work on fun projects doing things we both love. Many of our clients have become trusted friends, and all our clients always pay on time. Or they always used to.
Last month, we noticed almost $23,000 in missing payments. We hadn’t received any checks for weeks. In fact, we hadn’t received any mail for our company for two weeks.
We’d recently moved to a new house (and, hence, a new office). But I’d set up the mail-forwarding in good time, and I’d checked with the USPS to make sure everything was in their system correctly.
What was going on?
My queries to the USPS, to our old post office, to our new post office, and to our new and old letter carriers resulted in the same story: Everything was in the system correctly.
Only after I personally visited our new post office and spoke with the counter clerk did the truth emerge.
I explained the situation to the clerk. There was a moment of silence, followed by "Oh, now, hold on a minute." He disappeared into the back for a few minutes, and when he returned he revealed that there was indeed a problem. Turns out the new letter carrier was returning all our company mail to the senders. He recognized our names but was not aware of the name of our business.
Thankfully, a month later, all appears to be working. We had 20 friends around the country each mail a letter to our business name, and we monitored the time and place each one was mailed and when it arrived.
This is exactly what I should have done before the forwarding of our mail was scheduled to begin. I should have sent some test letters to our personal and business names at the new address. After all, the then-owner knew who we were. So if our test letters were being delivered, he would have informed us that mail was waiting for us. If, on the other hand, our test letters were being returned to the sender, I’d know it… because the sender, in that case, would have been me.
Over the last 20 years of doing business online, I’ve gotten in the habit of testing everything - and I do mean everything - before it goes live to customers or prospects. After our postal fiasco, I kicked myself for forgetting that.
Fortunately, you can learn from my momentary lapse of memory. When you’re starting a new business online, or making changes to your current Internet business, make sure you take the time to test as many aspects of your venture as possible.
I can usually look at any website, shopping cart, automatic payment system, or e-mail promotion and immediately find something that needs fixing or, at a minimum, could be tweaked to improve both a customer’s experience and the business owner’s income.
Last year, for example, I was brought in to give a final look at a website that was ready to go live. I came up with a whopping 87 things that needed fixing, 27 of which were critical or security errors and a further 20 that would have impacted income negatively right from the start. Numbers like these are not uncommon, even for websites produced by seasoned Internet marketers.
And when everything looks correct, that may be the time when testing is more important than ever.
Here are the tests that should always be considered when launching an Internet business:
- Purchase a domain name specifically for the purpose of testing. You can also have your Web developer set up a subdomain ("CNAME"). For example, we used the subdomain "testing.earlytorise" during the testing phase of the ETR website redesign last December. Use that domain or subdomain only for testing. When you are satisfied that it works as a live site, you can switch over to your real domain name with the certainty that the site has been tested thoroughly.
- Have some of your customers test your new website before it goes live. This is the perfect way to get feedback. Ask your testers to give you their responses to the layout, navigation, and usability of the site. If you don’t get customer feedback before your site goes live, you may miss key problems. And don’t count on customers to give you feedback after the site is up and running. Only a few will bother. And, let’s face it, you want customers to respond by spending their money, not by telling you something is broken.
- Place lots of test orders before you launch a shopping cart. Use a real credit card (create fake $1 products if necessary) and check that everything works.
- You should constantly monitor your website. To do so, use a tool like websitepulse.com, which can alert you within moments if your website, shopping cart, etc. becomes unresponsive or unreachable. True "guaranteed 100 percent up time" is expensive to achieve. But knowing when your website is not working will allow you to jump on the problem quickly, greatly minimizing down time.
- Monitor your e-mail campaigns. Tools like deliverymonitor.com will show you how your e-mail campaign is being delivered across 16 major Internet service providers. This will allow you to see where your e-mails are being rejected or classified as "spam."
- Pay attention to your test customers, not your Web designer/developer. If your customers (or you) think something seems quirky and your developer assures you "That’s the way it’s supposed to be," put your foot down. Insist that the developer make it work in a way that suits your customers.
- Measure twice and cut once. Many problems that turn up at the end of website and Internet development projects can be avoided by taking time at the beginning to accurately lay out a plan with your Web developer - a plan that includes exactly why each feature is necessary.
If you take the time to test your site (or any new project, for that matter) you can prevent all sorts of glitches and customer dissatisfaction.
[Ed. Note: Get more profit-building techniques for your own Internet business at our upcoming 5 Days in July Internet Conference. You'll walk in with nothing - no product, no marketing skills, no technical know-how - and you'll walk out with your own online business. If you even think you might be interested in this conference, you must sign-up for the pre-registration, no obligation Hotlist today.]
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Advice to New Graduates: The First and Most Important Secret to Finding a Job
By Michael Masterson
The most important thing you need to realize about getting a job is this: The people who will be hiring you are not really interested in you. They have not been hanging around all their lives waiting for you to finish college and write them a letter.
If they’re not interested in you, then what are they interested in?
I’ll tell you: They’re interested in themselves. And if one of them is the right boss for you, that person is also interested in his business - the problems and the challenges he faces every day. This employer may be in need of an assistant, but he doesn’t care about how wonderful that person is. This boss just wants to know one thing: "Can this person solve my problems?"
To be specific, employers don’t care about your career goals, what you like to do in your spare time, and what organizations you’ve joined. They are used to seeing that kind of information on resumes, and they may even ask you questions about some of those facts during an interview. But they’re doing so only because they’re hoping to discover something more important about you. And that is some version of the answer to "Can this person solve my problems?"
[Ed. Note: This article is an excerpt from Michael Masterson's book Automatic Wealth for Grads… and Anyone Else Just Starting Out, one of Amazon's Top 10 Finance and Investing Books of 2006. The perfect gift for every new graduate you know - maybe for yourself, too.]
Prevent a Lifelong Degenerative Condition With a Little Sunlight
By Jon Herring
I received this e-mail from my stepmother today:
"I have a friend who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis last year. He is Puerto Rican, but he lives in New York City and grew up in Columbus, Ohio. I know that a history of living in cold and wet weather is one of the factors MS patients have in common. Could this be part of the reason, and do you know of any nutritional considerations that might help?"
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease that causes the body’s own immune system to attack healthy tissues - in this case, the myelin sheath that insulates the nerves. My stepmother is correct when she says that where people live plays an important role in the development of the disease. But it has nothing to do with "cold, wet weather." In many cases, it has everything to do with a lack of exposure to the sun and, thus, not enough vitamin D.
Numerous population studies show that the incidence and severity of MS is much higher in regions that receive less sunlight. In one study, researchers examined all deaths from MS in 24 states over a 10-year period. They found that the people who got sun exposure as part of their jobs had the lowest rates of mortality from MS - and that for those who got the most sun exposure, the incidence of death from MS was reduced by as much as 76 percent. Other studies have shown that people who are exposed to a lot of sunlight during childhood have less risk of getting the disease later in life.
The results of these population studies corresponds to a Harvard study of 200,000 nurses which showed that vitamin D had a strong protective effect against MS. The researchers found that the women who got at least 400 IUs of vitamin D per day showed 40 percent less risk of developing MS as compared with those who got less vitamin D.
Vitamin D is profoundly important to your health. And unless you spend some time with your skin exposed to the sun several times a week, it is likely that you are deficient.
Very few foods contain appreciable amounts of this vital nutrient. So if you live in an area where you are unable to get frequent sun exposure, or if you spend most of your time indoors, it is important to supplement with vitamin D. And the 400 IUs in most multi-vitamins is not nearly enough. Aim for 2,000 IUs per day, either from cod liver oil or a vitamin D3 supplement such as this one from Carlson’s.]
It’s Good to Know: About the Weather
There are rivers in the sky. Although they can’t be seen by the naked eye, atmospheric rivers (150- to 300-mile-wide regions of very moist and fast-moving air) cut enormous channels through the sky and play a key role in the planet’s water cycle. For instance, they provide snow and rain - and sometimes cause flooding - in the Western U.S.
(Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
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Word to the Wise: Dyspeptic
Someone who’s "dyspeptic" (dis-PEP-tik) - from the Greek for "bad digestion" - suffers from indigestion. The word is also used to describe someone who is gloomy, pessimistic, and irritable.
Example (as used by Jake Miller in The New York Times): "Is that dyspeptic man scowling because his life tastes sour or because he didn’t want his picture taken?"
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker ... build your self-confidence and intellect ... increase your attractiveness to others ... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's new Words to the Wise CD Library.]
Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007
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