124 – Wealthification Part 7 – Systems

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System – Save you stress, time, energy and money. [Click To Tweet].
You want the minimum possible tools. [Click To Tweet].
Create an automatic system wherever possible. [Click To Tweet].
 

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James Schramko here and welcome back to wealthification.  This is the systems module.

Let‘s talk about some of the best tools that you can use in your business to create some powerful systems.  Systems of course save you stress, time, energy and money and I’ll give you a tip on systems, the simplest thing you can do is put things where you use them.

 
Picking Your Tools

When it comes to tools, you want the minimum possible tools and make sure that you test them and that they are the absolute best tool for the job.  In our business, we have simple criteria; we make sure that our business can’t live without them because if it can, we’ll get rid of the tool. The minimum possible tools mean it’s easier to train on, easier to teach and you have more chance of using it effectively.

 

 

One of my favorite tools is the portable device – the iPad and the iPhone. I also use a Mac Air (see this video about what James uses now) when I travel.

 

 

Having a portable computer allows you to be flexible in the way you do your work. Of course with the kindle format for reading books becoming more popular than physical books, it’s just a matter of time until most content is delivered in a portable format.

 
Brainstorming Tools

For brainstorming I like a simple whiteboard or pen and paper.

It’s pretty hard to beat freehand drawing for memory retention and creativity. I then take a picture of the whiteboard and upload my notes to Evernote.

 
Tools For Storage

The best places to store things for me are Evernote, which stores text and pictures and audio. For all sorts of files, videos, audios and PDFs, we use Dropbox, and you can have Dropbox for teams as well. And we use Amazon S3, which is part of Amazon’s web services, to store all of our content.

 

The best places to store things for me are

• Evernote – stores text and pictures and audio
• Dropbox / Dropbox for teams –  for all sorts of files, videos, audios and PDF’s
• Amazon S3 which is part of Amazon’s web services – to store all of our content

These services have great back-ups so that you can synchronize across all of your devices and you can retrieve lost or accidentally deleted copies if you need to.  There’s no reason to have a blackbox siting in the corner of your business anymore because everything can operate from the cloud online.

 

Set Up Meetings

For online meetings, GoToMeeting is a great platform. It works on both Mac and PC.  It actually has a higher quality viewing than most VOIP-type services because it loads a little piece of software to the device that helps it breakdown the communication to the smallest possible transfer between internet connections.  So this works really well even if you have team members in a place where you have lower internet speed.

 

 

For webinars, the big brother GoToWebinar, is a great solution. You can have up to a thousand people using this platform if you have the appropriate plan.  This is a widely recognized format and quite easy to operate.

 

 

For Accounting

For accounting, you may look at FreshBooks or Xero. Xero is great because:

• Xero actually Feeds from bank accounts and PayPal
• you can generate invoices
• you can assign labels so that you can breakdown all of the different costs by it’s fixed or variable and workout your total revenue and your actual profits in accordance with the wealthification system.

FreshBooks is great as a little starting point for auto billing customers.  If you have a customer where you need to send invoices out even if you need to mail it, FreshBooks can automatically print the invoice and mail it in the old-fashioned mail and it can also email.  It will send you a reminder to let you know when your customers are behind with their billing.

 

Handling Your Emails

For emails, it’s pretty hard to go past Google Apps for Business. This is where you get to use the Gmail functionality under your own domain name and this gives you a very powerful, searchable email system that has massive capacity.  It is really effective.

• It helps you group/lock emails
• It has good spam control
• It’s not clogging up your server

So you can actually rely on this enterprise level of email handling. Again, you’d be crazy to try and run emails from a single computer these days because you’ll lose that ability to be portable.

For list marketing, probably the industry standard is AWeber. It is very well priced, very effective allows most niche market topics.

The up and coming contender is Office AutoPilot.

• It has a more advanced email system
• It allows you to have tags
• It has rules in automation that you can have with AWeber
• It has a small brother called Send Pepper so if you don’t need the full service, then you can just use the smaller version

 

Customer Relationship Management Solution

For CRM, most people are using something like a Salesforce which I haven’t listed here.  It’s very popular but rather large.  You may get a better result using Capsule or the Highrise component from the makers of Basecamp. These are pretty common CRM solutions – which stand for Customer Relationship Management.

 

For Your Shopping Cart

For shopping cart, I like Nanacast, Office AutoPilot or Shopify. Nanacast has been a very robust solution for me.

• It allows you to have your own affiliates
• You can have all sorts of different things happening with your prices
• You can have memberships or single prices
• It integrates with PayPal or with Credit cards
• You can hook it up to just about any email supplier
• It also handles media from Amazon S3

It’s very good.  I consider it like glue that pulls everything together.

Office AutoPilot is a more integrated solution but the cart is a little bit newer for them.

Shopify is an online-based e-commerce solution that might be suitable if you want to have a lot of items and if you don’t really want to be setting up a websites.

For conversion testing, I like Visual Website Optimizer. It is a great system; it combines quite a few functions that you might have to have had in the past such as Crazy Egg for heatmap tracking. Now Visual Website Optimizer offers great A/B split testing and multi variate testing and if you want to go for the full video on your screen watching customers move around your screen then you might want to look at Clicktale which is a terrific conversion tracking software. For me, Visual Website Optimizer does what I needed to do.

 

 

The other conversion testing software that you might want use is Google’s website optimizer. I think Visual Website Optimizer is easier to use.

 

Project Management

For project management, there are a number of solutions and the goal is to keep this as simple as possible.

 

A lot of companies use Basecamp and I found that to be effective.  It’s quite simple.  It’s not overly feature-rich but that’s probably one of the great advantages of it and it’s widely accepted and well-priced.

A new up incomer is Trello which is free and that allows you to move projects according to a can-van system which is the to-do, doing and done.  It’s actually very intuitive and probably a great start if you just have a new team.

Podio is also another integrated solution.  It allows you to join forces with all different people in your team, have a social interaction environment.

My favorite is Google Apps for Business.  We’re using spreadsheets and we’re using Google documents for most of our jobs now.  There’s very few that we need Basecamp for.  Now if you use the same sort of system that I mentioned in project stream for the actions module, you’ll see how I use Google Apps quite effectively.

For surveys, again Google Apps are probably my favorite. You can create a form from a spreadsheet and have the form populate the spreadsheet and you can share the spreadsheet with people in your team and do all sorts of reporting.

 

If you want a stand-alone solution, my best recommendation is Survey Monkey.

• It gives you advanced stability such as a word cloud showing very commonly answered survey results
• It gives you a quick indicator of what the most interesting things are when you have open ended surveys
• It can actually group like phrases

 
My Dashboard

Of course, my dashboard SpeedDash (SpeedDash is available to members of SuperFastBusiness) is my preferred dashboard. I created this dashboard because I didn’t feel there was a good enough one out there.  I tried other solutions but with SpeedDash, you can

• combine analytics
• combine Google tasks
• combine Gmail feeds
• combine RSS feeds
• see website visits
• see Goal conversions
• see times around the world
• have a quick link to the websites you need

So I think SpeedDash is the ultimate dashboard.
 
For Customer Support

For support, I absolutely love Zendesk

• It’s been really easy to use
• It integrates very well with the chat software that we use
• It is a fully hosted solution – meaning that we don’t have to update the server and do all the technical stuff
• From the customer’s point of view, it’s all handled nice and effectively
• It gives you fantastic triggers, automatons and reporting functions
• It’s very well priced

They’re a great solution for customer facing project management.

For websites, we only use WordPress

Because WordPress is loved by Google.  It’s used on a massive proportion of world’s websites.  It’s super easy to use.  It is very easy to find people to work on WordPress for you. We exclusively developed on WordPress for our very own businesses. WordPress is absolutely awesome and it really helps our website get ranked.
 
Chat Software

For our chat solution, we use LiveChat, Inc

 

LiveChat, Inc works really well with Zendesk and you can place it on each one of your websites to get extra conversion metrics.

• It shows where people came from before they came to your site
• It shows what keyword they used
• You can also intercept that customer and you can have conversation with them
• You can put the leave a message tab on the top and the bottom of your website so that they people can easily ask you a question
• You can take them over the line from not being quite sure to being absolutely certain that you’re the right business to deal with

For templates, we build a lot of templates in Google Apps especially spreadsheets.

 

We also make standard operating procedures such as step 1, step 2, step 3 and we put documents into little ‘collection’ folders just like a filing cabinet within Google Apps.

Evernote is a great place for your personal templates if you’ve got a special standard operating procedure that you do and you don’t share with anyone else, then Evernote is the best place to put it.

Basecamp is great because you can setup templates that you can just pull out and activate whenever you have a new job and it will help you for more complicated or more complex jobs.  So Basecamp is a great solution.

For checklists, Google Apps, Evernote and Basecamp will do pretty much the same thing.

 

The Key Is Reporting

For reporting, the key to the whole wealthification system is if you don’t know where you’re up to, you’re not going to grow your business

 

If you use PayPal to receive money, you absolutely must use Putler. It is incredible. It will

• show you your month to date
• show you your daily sales
• show you your top customers
• show you your top selling products
• show you your trending ending up or down
• show you your PayPal balance
• allow you to issue refund straight from the control panel if somebody orders the wrong product
• allow you to search by customer

It’s such an awesome tool.

For just about anyone else, Xero is going to be the perfect reporting tool for your accounting.

Google Apps is great.  You can use spreadsheets to make wealthification charts, to track different business units and work out your revenue and your costs and your profit and the hours spent to obtain that so that you can work out your dollar per hour rate per activity.

Nanacast is terrific for affiliate reporting and sales by product regardless of how they’re paid.

Google analytics is really good to see:

• where your traffic comes from for websites
• what key phrases they used
• what browser people use
• what device they have
• whether your traffic is increasing or decreasing
• how many pages they visit
• how long they stay on your web page

And of course SpeedDash (available to SuperFastBusiness members) pulls Google analytics right into your dashboard so you don’t have to go anywhere to figure this stuff out. If you’re using Google analytics, then SpeedDash brings it to life.
 

 
Final Tip

My final tip is where possible; create a system to handle things automatically. People automation is great but it will continually need attendance.  Software automation is terrific because once you get it setup and it’s working for you, your automated software can be very reliable. That’s where you if can possibly put in automation, perhaps pay a program to make the program you want like what I did with my SpeedDash.  But that is the goal; if you can automate the system at the very minimum, make sure that you make your systems habit and your business will be stronger for it.

Wealthification is just one of the many courses inside SuperFastBusiness.com. Join me inside this Internet Business coaching community so that I can help you profit faster: Click Here
 
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