Amish Shah

So the last couple months have been pretty crazy with how many project I took on.  I always told myself never to put myself into that situation again.  I say again, because when I was younger and first starting out on the internet I wanted to do EVERYTHING that I could think of.  And so I did, but no project would really get done 100% and only 1 out of every 10 was really successful.

I knew why too, it was because I just never followed each one through 100%.  They were always half ass projects never finished completely.  I swear if I finished all of those ON time and 100% through, I’d probably be making 5 times as much now. (no joke..seriously).

That is what led me to outsourcing and hiring employees.  But that’s for another blog post.

Anyway, so a couple weeks ago I realized that I have WAY too much going on and I need to figure out a way to organize it all and keep track of everything.  I felt WAY too overwhelmed and my brain was all scattered because in my mind everything was a priority.  But that’s not the case.

Here’s who I managed to fix up this clutter in my head.

1. Start a new Excel spreadsheet - Call is Projects.
2. Column A - Write down ALL your projects that you got going on. Don’t get into details just make a list with a 1 to 5 word descriptive of the project.
3. Column B - write down what the status of each project is. Started, OnGoing, Didn’t Start, etc.
4. Column C - write down how much the project is making you NOW per month
5. Column D - write down each TASK that you need to finish the project or get it to where you want it to be. Make sure the list is thorough, such as “outsource articles, graphics, website, programming, etc.)
6. Column E- write down how much it will COST to get you where you want.
7. Column F - write down your EXPECTED income from the project. (rough estimate)
8. Column G - write down outstanding issues that are in the way.

So now you have a list of ALL your projects, how much you are making and what you have to do to finish each one.  Now you have to prioritize each project.  This is where it can get tricky.  People ask me why not go after the goal and the one that will bring me the most money and then work backwards.  I tend to disagree.

Here’s why.  Because you want to concentrate on what’s making money NOW.  It’s all about the power of NOW. So first things first - sort the spreadsheet by the money your making most on top. Mark all the one’s that are making you the most money to least money numbered in Column H.

Now the sites that are not making ANY money yet, you have to use your judgement on how much it will COST and decide which project is most important to you.  I tend to go by tasks, not exactly costs.  So the more tasks the project has, then the less important it is to me.  I like to keep the big projects for last.

Now here is where the REAL magic come’s in.

By now you’re probably like okay, I made a list and shit. What the fuck do I do now?

Well you made a list of all the projects and tasks you need to do right? Open another sheet in Excel or another Excel file altogether.  Now take ALL the tasks you have to do for your already profitable projects and GROUP them.  So if you have 4 projects that are making money now, and you need to make banners and articles for all of them.  Take the 4 banners you need to make and make a description of the 4 banners you need to make. Then take the 4 articles you need and make a description for the 4 articles you need.

Do this for ALL your tasks.  Be sure to keep your current profitable project seperate from your non profitable projects.

Okay so now you have your PROJECTS organized, YOUR tasks organized, and they listed in most important to least important.  Right?  Step 1 and 2 are done. We’re almost there.

There are two things you can do from here.  Either use OmniFocus (Mac Only) to manage your projects (highly recommended) or put all your projects and tasks in an online project manager such as basecamp.com or 5pmweb.com.  Set deadlines for projects and the tasks that you’ve created and FOLLOW through.  As things come up you can manage them all within these online management system.

If you do not want to use these kind of services you can continue to use Excel to manage these projects and tasks.

Now you take our grouped tasks that are making you money right now and get them outsourced or do them yourself as you prioritized. The reason I like to outsource most of my work is because it allows me to get work done that I don’t really need to do and focus on other things.

After you get your tasks back from the outsourcing company or after you do them, implement them immediately. As you start implementing start knocking off tasks one at a time.

Once you get around to completing 75-80% of the tasks, you can THEN start focusing on projects and tasks that are NOT making you money yet.  I suggest you do not EVEN look at them until you have 75% of the other stuff done.  Otherwise you’ll end up at the same place you started.

Now you can use this for ANYTHING.  It does not have to be projects and tasks you are working on.  You can use it for your personal life, things you want to accomplish, goals, and anything else.

Just make a list of things you want to do, then make a task list, bundle together and see where they cross, and then attack.  So for personal life and goals, everyone has things they want to do but tend never to finish them.  So prioritize these “projects”, make a task list, then attack.  Once you reach about about 90% completion on these tasks then move on.  I say 90% for personal stuff because it’s VERY hard to complete those.

This was a totally unedited stream of consciousness.  I’m sure it’s a bit confusing.  But if you get it you GET IT.

Sometimes things you do for yourself can be combined into business things, and sometimes not.  So be sure to know where you draw the line.

I’ve been using this format for about a month now and have accomplished 4X more in the same amount of time.  Incredible really. Maybe it’ll work for you, maybe it won’t.  But it works for me!

Okay, that’s all for now. I’ll probably add more to this post in another post once I start refining my system.

written by Amish \\ tags: brain clutter, get shit done, getting things done, makey some serious money, project management, projects, task management

So as some of you know, Larry and I work with www.sunfood.com. My biz partner, Larry had initially gone to a retreat in Eden Hot Springs, AZ and met with David Wolfe about a year ago.

We knew that their current website and marketing just sucked and they needed help. We were big fans and wanted to work with them, so we started talking to them and they wanted us to help them. So that’s exactly what we did.

We are HUGE fans of David Wolfe, his movement and Sunfood’s superfoods. David Wolfe is literally on the cutting edge of nutrition and is bringing some of the most powerful superfoods on the planet to you.

Changing the site completely to have a better look and feel along with a easier navigation flow was just part of what we are going to do with Sunfood. We are setting up an affiliate program through Commission Junction and it should ROCK. Check out www.sunfood.com and leave some feedback about the new site!

We got a long road ahead of us to make Sunfood the leader in super nutrition! The new website was the first step!

Speaking of superfoods, I have a GREAT smoothie every morning that has changed my life. It taste delicious and probably has more nutrients than an average person would get in a week. (I’m serious!) I get ALL these ingredients from sunfood.com and whole foods.

The ultimate smoothie recipe below -

First we have to make a base for your smoothie. This basically allows you to put as much healthy shit in you want without it tasting bad! I learned this little secret from Len Foley, the master smoothie maker over at www.thebestdayever.com. (killer site by the way) The smoothie below makes about 4 cups.

Start off with half an inch of water and put it into your vitamix.

Add:

1. Spoon of raw and organic honey
2. Spoon of raw/organic coconut oil
3. Pinch of organic sea salt
4. Handful of organic cashews or organic brazil nuts
5. Two squirts of vanilla stevia

Blend on high until silky smooth. Now you have your base!

Now Add:

1. Half a cup of Organic Frozen Berries (or fresh berries like strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, etc.)
2. 1.5 - 2 cups Coconut water or some kind of nut milk (I prefer coconut water, but I do use nut milk sometimes. Such as vanilla almond milk or hemp milk)
3. 2 to 3 (or more :)) big tablespoons of Cacao Powder
4. 1 - 2 teaspoons of Goji Berry Extract powder
5. Handful of Goji Berries
6. 2 to 3 tablespoons of some kind of seeds (I like Chia seeds the best. But you can use flax seeds)
7. 1 - 3 scoops of SunWarrior Protein
8. 1 - 2 tablespoons of tocotrienols
9. 1-2 tablespoons of SunWarrior activated barley (optional)
10. 1 tablespoon of maca extreme (be careful! :))
11. 1 -2 tablespoons of The Sun is Shining (or spirulina)
12. 1 tablespoon of organic peanut butter (optional)

Blend that all up until smooth and enjoy!

You can basically mix and match ANYTHING you want and be okay. The more you put, the thicker the smoothie will be. As you start making more of them and watching what you put everyday, you’ll get a good idea of what works for you. There is so much you can put into smoothies its incredible. Like I said, once you have your base, you can dump stuff in and it’ll still taste good! The ingredients above are just some of the things I put in my smoothies. Some days I put other stuff and substitute. All depends on what you feel like.

The best part is, they taste GREAT and they make you feel GREAT.

written by Amish \\ tags: coconut oil, david wolfe, Health, organic honey, raw foods, smoothie, sunfood, sunfood nutrition, superfoods, vegan protein

Okay so in my previous posts I was talking about twitter posts and how they can basically make you sales.

I’ve realized that my marketing efforts using my super ninja gangsta techniques.  I’ve basically only told about 4 people of this and we built our Google Goggles twitter list from 0 to 450 in about a week flat.  No we didn’t spam or just request 1,000,000 random people.  These are pure targeted leads that are actually looking for MY product.  Yes, imagine that on twitter!

So out of the 450 people on our list, the day we went live, we posted the TWITTER only purchase link to Google Goggles around 4am (when we finished the final touches on the sales page).  Got two sales within 3 hours.  I went to bed around 7am and woke up around 10ish to realize that we had over 40 sales in 6 hours.  JUST FROM TWITTER.

This was before anyone mailed out for it and even before our own list was mailed for it.

So 40 X $97 = $3,880.  Not too shabby for 6 hours and one twitter post. That’s basically 10% of the total twitter list that actually bought!

Now your probably asking, how the hell did you get 450 targeted followers on twitter so fast?  The answer to that is coming soon.  I will write a short little report on it soon.  Give me a break!  I’ve had a very long week since our launch.  But it will be coming in a week or two.

As far as our email testing and opens and stuff went.  We got incredible open rates and click thru rates.  The sales page converted at around 4.4%. I think that kinda sucks.  But this is a very niche product and it’s basically for PPC people.  That eliminates all the business in a box people and dreamers.  (obviously we had dreamers buy, but can’t do much about that.)  As long as they TAKE ACTION and use the product the way it was meant to be then it’s so worth the money.  I mean I use my own tool everyday!

Which brings me to some of the posts on forums.  People saying our tool is a scam or it’s just a glorified check list.  Well you know what?  Google Goggles is actually built on a REAL algorithm.  We have 11 factors, yes.  But did you know that each one is weighted on a 100 point scale?  Did you know that we take derivatives of certain functions of add together to formulate our prediction?

Well, yeah.  It’s some serious stuff.  We don’t put together tools that are crap.  That’s the bottom line.  Take a look at our videos from the new ppc, look at hexatrack, look at GG.  All REAL products that provide REAL value.

Okay, enough ranting.  Anyway, so yeah - I put my ALL into EVERYTHING I do.  I think that’s what most people would say about me.  Is that I never do anything half ass.

written by Amish \\ tags: business, google gogles, leads, Marketing, me, Pay Per Click, rant, sales, twitter, twitter marketing

man bear pig!

written by Amish

Okay so my new personal/administrative assistant started the other day and she rocks.  We basically hired her to take care of stuff around the house/office.  Yesterday she came with groceries, office depot stuff, organized all my bills, went to the bank for me.

Yes, I am lazy.  I just feel like tasks like that should be handled by someone else.  Especially when I am constantly busy during the day running 4 businesses stuff, it’s good to know that someone will kinda help organize your life.

She is super organized and a great person to work with!

But that’s not all. There’s more! We want to make her part of the company.  Eventually handling some customer service stuff, billing, accounts receivable and all that.  I think back now and saying damn, I should’ve always had one of these.  It’s totally a huge asset because they do the things that take up the most time and are usually odd tasks.

Speaking of making life easier Matt Trainer told me about this new website called Earth Class Mail. This has to be the most brilliant idea ever.  Basically you have one mailing address somwhere in the US.  You send ALL your mail there.  They sort it for you and forward what you want.  But it doesn’t stop there.  They scan EACH envelope that comes in.  You then view it online and select which pieces of mail you want to open.  Then it opens the mail and scans the pages inside and you view that online.

This has to be the CRAZIEST thing ever.  Taking postal mail and turning it digital.  Have a new credit card? No problem, they’ll just forward it to wherever you are IN THE WORLD. Magazines?  Same deal.

This is especially helpful for people like me because its impossible to know where I’m gonna be next week.

Gangsta.  Pure Gangsta.

Anyway, got some stuff to do. Check out this picture I saw yesterday.  I thought these didnt really exist.

written by Amish \\ tags: admin, earth class mail, no skateboarding, personal assistant

This is a follow up to my previous post “Marketing Experiment in Progress”

Update on marketing experiment #1 (email response) -

Okay in my last post I was seeing decent open rates.  Whenever we sent HexaTrack emails it was always around 30%-40% open rate.  So when I was seeing 14% on this latest promotion I was a bit concerned.  It wasn’t the subject lines, because we have used so many random subject lines in our HexaTrack promotions, and they all seemed to do well.

So as of 12:06am PST our open rate for our latest Google Goggles promotion went up to about 20.1%.  That’s what I was shooting for.

However, our click through rate dropped a bit to 60.8%.  That’s not too bad.  But here is where it gets better.

Our conversion rates on the new video optin page is now getting around 45.2%.  That’s killer shit.

All in all, we are averaging about 27.6% opt in rate PER PERSON THAT OPENS THE EMAIL. That’s even more killer shit.

Not just that, but we had a partner email his list today.  He was getting 41% opt-in rates.  That’s pretty crazy!

After this is all done, I will make a video explaining all this stuff and why it’s important.  But basically what we are doing is working and our list is super responsive.  It’s because we give so much damn stuff away for free they love us.  We have been pushing that “free line” for years now.  And now people are starting to get it.  Interesting.

Anyway, as for my second experiment with twitter.

It kinda backfired.  We were trying a couple things to gain more followers, but something went terribly wrong and before we knew it we were following over 800 people.  Ugh.  The way we wanted it to be was for us to follow 3 people and to gain followers.

Obviously twitter is not a place to “game” or do weird things with and “trick”.  Now this is not tricking the system at all.  In fact its probably the ONLY way to get followers that are 100% targeted.  So they are potential buyers.

So before in my previous post I said we had about 50 followers, well now we have almost 100.  So in one day we gained 100 followers in twitter.  Now only if we can keep this up.  We can build a “twitter list” of up to 100 a day. That could be super ninja.

If it works out the way I think it will.  I am going to write an ebook and sell it on clickbank for $97.

haha. Just kidding.  I’ll probably just give it away.  It’s not a big deal to me.  Nothing is really a “secret” in marketing.  It’s just how you think and how you maneuver.  If it work REAL well, then keep it to yourself.  (in my mind that’s anything that makes over $50 a day net)  Isn’t that what you would do?  If it works okay (anything less than $50) then just give it away.  Because if it can make 100 other people that $40 a day, they’ll love you for it. Of course this does depend on what your end motive is for the information.  I mean we gave HexaTrack away for free which makes us money.  But who cares?  All we were doing is leveling the playing field.

Okay, I’m getting off tangent here and need to end this post and go to sleep.

Good night.

written by Amish \\ tags: amish shah, experiment, free line, google goggles, hexatrack, internet marketing, report, the new ppc, twitter

So the header on this new blog is kinda weird eh?  Larry whipped it together for me quickly last night, but it’s basically Manhattan (where I am from and still gotta house around there in Jersey City) and where a I am now (La Jolla, CA).

Oh and a picture of me in the middle hitch hiking all the way from NY to CA.

Okay, not really, but it’s a cool picture right? Looks pretty genuine.  I mean, if I was to look at that picture by itself I would be like who is that loser hitch hiking?!

So ya, I moved out to La Jolla a couple months back (around March) and this place is just beautiful.  Although the weather in May, June, and most of July pretty much sucked (cloudy and shit), it’s just so damn laid back here.

NY was always like go go go, gotta do this, go there, see that person, etc. etc.  Here it’s like okay, wake up, have a healthy smoothie, do some work, relax, eat, surf & mostly just CHILL. Can’t really beat it.  And now the weather is just bonkers (bonkers was a candy right?).

So speaking of La Jolla, Larry Ostrovsky (my partner in crime) came out from Vegas here too.  It’s been great.  Not to mention Matt Trainer (our other partner in crime and ridiculous flash programmer) is out here too.  It’s been great and met a lotta cool people.

So why La Jolla?  That’s an interesting question actually.

When I was about 19  years old in 1999, I used to work for Compaq (which is HP now).  My job was a desktop support guy who used to put together computers and fix them and stuff.  I had to get certified in a software called Peregrine which was basically a desktop/helpdesk/asset management software solution.  Guess where I had to go?  San Diego!

I spent about 3 weeks out here and had the whole rental car, hotel thing going.  So I drove around San Diego and just fell in love with it.  I drove around La Jolla and was like man this place is gangsta.  At the time I thought it was for the super rich and posh.  I remember seeing commercials in the hotel for it like it was some high class place.  Although it’s kinda situated like that, the water and the way it looked “tropical” was what grabbed me.  When you are here it feels like you are not even in the US.  I thought to myself, maybe I will live here one day, when I can afford it.

Anyway, so about 3 years later I switched companies to Campbell Soup and they needed me to get certified too.  So I come back our for a month.  Again, I was like man I wish I could live here.

So here I am, a full 6 years later, after quitting my job and starting my own company.  Doing the bi-coastal thing.  I kinda like it and don’t mind traveling.

Okay, gotta run now. More crack to cook up.

p.s. - i was joking about the crack

written by Amish \\ tags: city, hitch hike, la jolla, new york, surf, traveling