I have the flu.

Jaime just walked in from her massage appointment and handed me a bouquet of flowers.

I. Love. Her!

I signed onto my MySpace account earlier today. I very rarely go on MySpace anymore, and for some reason I decided to look through old pictures (will leave some at the bottom of this post). It was fun to go through and reminisce, and now I’m really looking forward to visiting home for a few days.

It also makes me happy to have a blog… one day I’ll come back, read all this stuff and feel nostalgic.

Annnyway, here’s some news:

1. I’m famous! And I love Andrew Wee. Find out why and how here.

(Bonus: You get to listen to a 25 year old who sounds like she’s 7! Rock on!)

2. I made some February financial goals. Actually, they were due February 26, which is the day this post will come out… so maybe I’ll meet them by then.

One of the goals was to have all of my credit card debt paid off, and the other was to be making a certain amount of PASSIVE income per month.

Annnnyway, as of right now (a few days before the 26th), I’ve officially paid off 5 of my 6 credit cards. I’ve been cutting them up one at a time, with no intentions of using them again (minus a random charge here and there that I’ll pay off immediately just to keep them active). It’s SUCH a liberating feeling.

As far as passive income - I haven’t met the goal just yet, but I had a fantastic idea yesterday morning (if I do say so myself :)). I emailed a really awesome guy and fast implementer, and we should have the groundwork laid out and orders in by the time this post comes out. I can’t see how I wouldn’t be able to reach my goals after this… and I’m SO looking forward to it.

3. I drove to Vegas this weekend to meet up with a potential project partner for yayFOOD, Steve Clayton. It was a great experience. First of all, he’s just an awesome guy. I had a really fun time talking to him. He used to be a Vice President for a Fortune 500 company, and then decided to quit the corporate world and get into Internet Marketing. It was very interesting to talk to someone with such success in the offline world, and to see how he applies some of his corporate training principles to online.

More important than that though, he’s so fun! He ended up taking Jaime and I to Nine at The Palms for dinner, where we had the most delicious food ever. I seriously didn’t think I was going to eat for days after that meal…

And lastly, we came up with some AMAZING ideas for yayFOOD. That site is going to be ri-di-cu-lous.

I guess that’s it for now. It’s 3:44 in the morning and I still have a few things on my to-do list before I go to bed. I’ll leave you with some of those old pictures.

Jen and I on our “hick” road trip to Memphis…

A picture Nathan Gilder made last year when someone said I reminded them of Yoda…

My first job, back when I was 16 (pre-yayFOOD :))…

When I first met my good friend Alison

Being silly on another road trip with Jen and Alison…

My prom Halloween costume 2 years ago (worked out much better than this year’s costume - a tree)

Some of my friends strategize on what type of blog they want to have. Should it be business? Should it be personal? etc.

I just kind of type whatever’s on my mind and hope for the best.

With that said, I have a weird question. I know at least a few people read this blog (it says so on MyBlogLog :))… so please give me your opinions, guys! I’ve actually asked a lot of people about this specific one, and their responses have been fascinating to me.

(If I don’t get some opinions, I’m just going to start typing random people’s names so they come here via Google Alerts. I’d prefer you just save me the time. :))

And a disclaimer: I’m NOT seeking dating advice… I’ve already made my mind up on the situation. I’m just curious about human psychology, to see what people put up with, how people view honesty, and if I’m just completely deluded (which is fine too. :))

I’ll throw my opinion in here because even though I did it with friends, they all disagreed anyway.

Okay. So I meet a dude a few weeks ago. He’s seemingly really good at life. Successful, intelligent, cute, charming, etc.

(VERY charming actually. At one point he wrote down my favorite book, saying that I seem really intelligent and if I say it’s a good book, he wants to read it. Single guys, note that one. It’s a winner.)

So we talk via text message for a week. That week passes, and he says he’s going to text me next week about getting together for drinks.

I hear from him one time that week, and the text said “Happy Valentine’s Day”. Nothing about drinks.

Okay. So in my mind, I’m thinking the dude’s done with. If you say you’re going to do something… do it. And if you can’t even be honest NOW in the “initial impression” stage, what would happen 3 months from now? It didn’t even occur to me as an option to accept this, to be honest.

The story would have ended here, but somehow this comes up in a conversation with two of my friends. They both say I’m being too harsh. My one friend says she does the same thing as the guy did (says she’ll call and then doesn’t), and the other says there’s no way that would be a dealbreaker to him.

Fascinated, I called some other people. A third friend (who’s also a pickup artist and freaking TEACHES PEOPLE how to pick girls up!!!) said that this is part of the “L.A. Lifestyle”, and I’m going to have to get used to it. He said people make plans here, but you can’t consider them permanent until you get a confirmation call that day.

I asked people outside of L.A. too though, and they also said that I was being too stringent.

In all, I’ve probably talked to about 15 or so people about this (I’m really that interested). I’d say 88% say I’m being too harsh, 10% halfheartedly agree, and one person completely knew what I meant (he also went to Warrior Camp, I wonder if there’s a correlation. :))

Tell me what YOU think please!

Between work and FUN, I’ve been really busy lately. Here’s some things going on in my life…

1. EUROPE!!!! Dude. I’m planning out the different countries that I can go to via Eurail, and I’m SOOOOOO pumped.

Here’s some of the countries the Eurail covers: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland.

Ridiculous right!?

And even more ridiculous - I have not ONE - but TWO friends that want to meet me in London when I get there.

The one person, Tahir Shah, is someone that I just met at Vegas… he’s already found me two copy clients and has offered to drive to London, meet me at the airport, help me with accomodations, and hang out for a few days. I’m going to marry that guy.

And Alex Jeffries... he promises to show me how to party, London-style. He makes big promises, we’ll see if he can live up to them!

(BTW - I totally registered IMPartyGirl.com and InternetMarketingPartyGirl.com after multiple suggestions a week or so ago. They redirect to my blog at the moment. :))

2. I love doing consulting. Sooo much fun. Random, but I just looked over at my to-do list and it was on there.

3. I have the photo shoot for my book soon!!! $#&#%$ I can’t wait! The Woman’s World photo shoot was a BLAST, I can only imagine what this’ll be like.

I have a hair appointment with Los Angeles’ #1 colorist on the 20th (I think this blog post comes out a day after). Those reviews for her are RIDICULOUS… people were calling their appointments with her a “spiritual experience”.

Love it!

4. Everyone always talks about reciprocation and how you need to give first… and I figured I’d share a personal story, because again, I’m seeing something on my to-do list that’s reminding me of it.

A while ago, on The Warrior Forum, I saw some dude offer a $197 sales letter Special Offer to “get his foot in the door”. He ended up giving 2 people in 2 different niches a 100 or so word article, at best… and the articles were almost exactly the same.

I kept watching the thread to see what was happening (the 2 customers and the dude were arguing in there and the guy refused to refund their money), and one of the customers ended up saying something like, “Come on… family man to family man, can you refund my money?”

Something about that made me feel really bad, so I wrote to him and offered to write him a free sales letter. I offered to write the other dude a sales letter too, even though I didn’t feel as bad with him… but I figured I’d be fair.

First interesting part of the story is that while both seemed excited - the family man guy never returned my questionnaire back to me, while the other one did.

So second dude gives me the letter, and it’s in the Forex market. Ugh. I never wrote a Forex letter before, and I slaved over that thing. It was seriously the hardest letter I ever wrote. I know nothing about Forex, it seemed boring, and I had to go research all these sales letters with Forex-language…

Annnnyway, like I said, I just did it because I felt bad for them. But what happened out of it was insane:

a) Turns out this guy’s a #3 seller on Clickbank for one of his products! I had no idea. His expertise is invaluable. I saw he was using a certain script on one of his sites and asked him about it, and it turns out that he had an in-house programming team make it. And…

b) He offered to give me that script for free (it’s normally $10 per sale recouped).

c) He went on to buy Phantom Opt In, another sales letter, and a package of autoresponders. Oh, and…

d) He referred me to another client.

And lastly,

e) That godforsaken letter converts at 40% for his prenotification list! Um, awesome testimonial?

In short… believe the reciprocation stuff. This isn’t the only story I have about it, but it’s one of my favorites.

5) I’m going to Vegas on the 22nd to meet with an INCREDIBLE guy that I was talking to via my Membership Challenge. I ended up writing a piece of copy for him, we were talking… turns out he gets 1000-3000 SALES for a competing product of yayFOOD’s per month via AdWords.

(SALES, not dollars.)

Annnnyway, we’re meeting to talk about project ideas. We’ve already exchanged a trillion ideas together, and we have a plan to completely dominate the weight loss market. And I’m soooo excited about it, because it means I get to help more people.

6) That reminds me of another reciprocation story, but there’s a good business tip included here, so I’ll mention it.

Whenever someone cancels their account on yayFOOD, I ask them a question that’s phrased the same way that Jack Canfield suggests in Success Principles. “What would it take for yayFOOD to get to a “10″ on a 1-10 scale?”

(I then chart the feedback and act appropriately.)

But anyway, when charting the other day, I offered certain people who gave me feedback free lifetime accounts. The one lady was really excited, and told me that “Word of mouth is the best form of promotion, and you have my word that I’ll be telling people about your site.” We talked a little more, and it turns out that the lady works with American Express. Even outside of that - even if she didn’t tell potential people on the phone - she said she works with 200 or so other people that sit down all day and want to know about how to release weight. Innnnnsane!

Alright, this is a long blog post. Again. I’ll leave here.

P.S. - I’m going to breakfast with Jaime soon… at a place where we saw The Rock a few weeks ago. L.A. rocks.

Okay, for the second half of Altitude takeaways from February 12.

(You REALLY need to get your hands on these DVDs!)

1. Although people are INSANELY important (in fact, Bill Gates had said something like, “Take my 20 best people away and Microsoft is nothing.”)… they’re maybe 5% of the results.

95% of your results come from your SYSTEMS. This brings me to an Eben quote that I love.

2. “If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process… you don’t know what you’re doing.”

3. A lot of people get stuck in the minutia and can’t zoom out.

This was a great point for me, and why I decided to do so much outsourcing last week.

4. Short term results are often very different from what long term results are going to be, and that needs to be taken into consideration.

Don’t let variation freak you out… but make sure you chart it. Like a crazed bulldog. (That was one of John Carlton’s power phrases. I love it. ;))

5. Once a system is stable , it’s VERY difficult to change… so keep it moving constantly. If someone gets trained wrong, it’s ridiculously hard to change them.

This is HUUUUGE. Eben mentioned this at the Altitude follow-up too, and I’ve really taken it to heart. He talked about how he tells his team from the start, “I’m going to be changing my mind constantly, so expect it.”

I tell people that I outsource to that as well… so they know from the beginning, and I don’t feel like I’m being as annoying when they know it from the get-go.

(It was also really nice to have the validation that I’m not the only one who wants to try 3827432 different things. :))

That being said, he also mentions that you should identify what you never want to change and what you constantly want to improve. For example, with Wal-Mart, they’ll always be the lowest priced company… but they might want to tweak customer service, customer experience, etc.

6. Character is also a stable system that’s hard to change. Eben told a story about Jack Welch, and how he went golfing with some of his top employees. He saw one of the guys cheat at golf, and fired him that Monday.

7. A win is very dangerous for you and your team. People are cocky and feeling invincible. Be careful. Eben told a story about an older woman who was scheduled to be on the Titanic when it sunk. She saw an ad that said something like, “The Titanic - the ship that even G-d couldn’t sink.”… and so she cancelled her ticket.

Another important point is that most people only associate with success, and disassociate from failure. The classic, “I trained my team to make $700/hr.”, but “They messed up that account.”

8. Tips for creating effective systems…

a) Hook everything up, run it, THEN make guesses about future results.

b) Track results visually - don’t delude yourself any other way.

c) Proactively look for unintended consequences, and EXPECT them.

d) If you want to change a result, look at the SYSTEM, not the SYMPTOM

e) Focus on the strengths, not the weaknesses. I think I might have blogged about this before, but one huge takeaway I got from Joe Polish’s SuperConference was this quote (”If you focus on all your weaknesses instead of your strengths, at the end of the day, all you’ll have is a bunch of strong weaknesses.”)

f) Constantly look for bottlenecks in your system.

Man, I love these Altitude DVDs. I’m taking Frank Kern’s Mass Control course right now too, which is also insanely amazing. Between both of them, I’m getting so many actionable ideas that I’m implementing… and my income has been skyrocketing, and I have MORE time at the end of the day.

When I went on my cross-country road trip, I was a little freaked out about all the expenses. It’s one of the reasons I was sleeping in my car. Now I’m going to EUROPE - which is more expensive, includes $1000 worth of airfare at least, another $1200 for the Eurail, I have no idea of how to get things on the cheap, etc… and I’m not worried at all. That’s not to say I still won’t be conscious (Eben says stars are lean and conservative, anyway ;)) - but the point is - what a paradigm shift.

Geeeez, so much awesome stuff going on! I have SO much to say, but I’m going to write more and post date them after this.

(Have I mentioned how much I love that feature of Wordpress? :) :))

Anyway, got a TON out of this Altitude… even more than last week maybe.

The first part was all about hiring Stars for your team (super-achievers).

Some huge takeaways from that (and by the way, the DVDs have a trillion times more value in them, so if you can get your hands on them, I highly recommend it):

1. Hiring people on emotional bases is VERY damaging. In fact, Eben says that if you like someone a lot when interviewing them… that’s your first red flag.

A lot of people will hire people because they’re like them… which is disastrous, especially for entrepreneurs. If you’re hiring another entrepreneurial type… you’re just asking for a) someone to go and make a competing business, and b) someone to not be around for long.

He also says that you shouldn’t hire someone because you want to help them (family, friends, someone in a bad situation, etc.) He says it’s hard - even for him to this day - but crucial.

His last mistake to avoid is only seeing the good in people. This is one mistake I know I’ve made in the past, but am avidly working on now.

2. He says to surround yourself with stars - star CUSTOMERS, star TEAM MEMBERS, star PARTNERS, and star MENTORS. This is a fantastic point on all accounts.

Tim Ferriss mentioned the customer part in Four Hour Workweek too, and it’s so super-important. It’s SO less stressful to deal with people that are, in my terms, “good at life”.

I had a copy client a while ago who told me he was going to do something small for me… I don’t even remember what it was, maybe return my questionnaire… but he didn’t. Anyway, I called him on it and told him that if he couldn’t keep his word, I didn’t want to work with him. Dude did a COMPLETE 180, and ended up giving me one of my best testimonials ever. And my life was much easier.

Even with yayFOOD… if I get serial complainers, or people who aren’t taking action… I promptly refund their money and peace them out of my site.

And when all’s said and done… I’m one of the happiest people I know.

3 . Finding stars isn’t always easy, because most of them lay low. Eben says most entrepreneurs will never meet a star… because stars only speak “star language” to people that they believe are stars themselves.

4. There’s A, B, and C players. A players are the ones who are the stars… C players are average at best. C players turn A + B players into C players, and are pure toxic. Even having just one C player on your team is insanely dangerous.

Stars, on the other hand… they multiply each other. Two stars together is the equivalent of 3 stars, and 3 are the equivalent of 6.

5. Stars see life differently than other people. They take responsibility for their actions. They have specific aspirations (i.e. they have concrete long term goals if you ask). They’re usually well connected with friends and family. They don’t need to be managed… just led.

Lastly, they’re not “flashy” people (which confirms what I read in Good To Great, about how the CEOs of all the “great” companies were simple people, didn’t like “fancy graphs”, etc.).

6. A great way to test people out is to ask them to take 5 minutes at the end of every day and ask them to report:

a) What they did and the results they got

b) Any problems or challenges they faced

c) Any questions they have

By reading these every day, you “put your finger on the pulse”. It’s harder with knowledge workers to get concrete results (versus assembly line workers, for example, where you can easily account for specific output).

Geeeez, I have tons more pages worth of notes. I’ll post-date the next half for a few days from now.

The next part is on systems anyway, so this is a good time to break off.

I’ve got to say though - these points are HUUUUGE, even if you don’t have a team. I started implementing them and found THREE stars this week. THREE!

One of them is so passionate about yayFOOD that she wanted to work for FREE.

I found another one on a bidding site. I put a project up where someone had to find 100 ultra-specific YouTube videos to put in my video database for yayFOOD. The process is actually quite grueling and obnoxious, and I’d been putting it off for a while.  I asked for people to include 2 sample videos in their bid, and to consider how long it took when they made their delivery length claims. It took me like 20 minutes to find 2 that fit what I needed, which is why I had been putting it off. This person wrote to me with 10 or so different videos and said she’d deliver within 24 hours. And for $50! And she was LOOKING FORWARD TO IT.  I asked her some “Star questions” and come to find out she’s not just “good at life” - she’s AMAZING at life!

The other one is one of the best writers on the Internet, period. And she gave me a week deadline for what she was going to do (a few reports, articles, blog entries), but said she’d probably get it done even sooner because she liked to get things out of the way right away. I totally get that, I’m the same way with my copy clients. It’s AWESOME to find someone who feels the same.

:)

Okay, off to write more blog entries.

P.S. I CAN’T WAIT FOR EUROPE!

I was telling Jaime that I needed some excitement…

So I just booked a one-way ticket to London on March 18th.

Figure I’ll hang out in Europe for a few months.

SO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!^##@^%$#@^$#@(*&

Spain, Italy, everywhere, here I come!!!

As usual, I learned a lot this week.

Some of my best take-aways:

1. I need to use “If-then” statements in copy more often. Eben mentioned this in the DVDs, and Ray Edwards mentioned it at Idea Incubator.

(i.e. “If you need to lose weight, then this letter might be the most important letter you’ve ever read.”

2. Must-must-must upsell and cross-sell more!

3. There’s always an alternate currency… it’s what you’re really selling to the customer. For example, if someone wanted to lose 100 pounds, what would it be worth to them? If $1000… would 10 pounds be worth $100?

If you can help someone lose 50 pounds (worth $500), what can you charge to make the deal a no-brainer? $300?

Another example would be for art. Evan, one of the group members, is an artist. His currency is either the experience that people get when they look at his art… or the reactions of others (he’s going to be talking to more people to find out how they feel.)

You’re supposed to create a currency that appeals to pain and urgency, the irrational passion that your customer is experiencing, etc.

During our group talk about this, I had a huge revelation. All this time I’ve been trying to stay away from branding myself too much on yayFOOD because I wanted to make the business scalable for me to sell later… but as Jaime, Chad, and Evan reminded me - I could still be the face of the product while working on other endeavors later on, I’d just need to include it in the contract. This makes so much sense, but I’d been resisting it for such a long time. I don’t know why. Whenever I tell someone that I lost the 100 pounds, it’s instant credibility - yet I barely advertise it.

My programming team is working on re-programming the site because it was developed in .asp… which means split testing is almost impossible. Grrr. I can’t wait to add more videos and stuff in there.

4.  People don’t want to be told what the answers are - they want to feel as if they’ve discovered them themselves. Make people think they came to the conclusions on their own.

There were lots of awesome takeaways, obviously… those were just some of my favorites.

I decided not to go to Orlando so that I could focus on my February goals, which I think is going to be good… even though it was SO tempting…

Some great things that’ve happened this week:

1. I wrote a letter for someone in the Forex market a few weeks ago, and he just told me that for his pre-notification list, it’s converting at 40%!!

2. I OFFICIALLY HAVE A BED! I’d been sleeping on the floor this entire time… now I wake up, roll over, and still stay on my mattress - as opposed to the computers I’d been knocking into before.

This leads me to the next awesome thing…

3. I drove a U-Haul truck! As I’ve mentioned, I’m not the most stellar driver ever… but I had to pick up my bed (and desk!)… so I pushed myself WAY out of my comfort zone and drove that humongous truck. And I’m alive to tell the story!

4. I did an awesome interview with Andrew Wee the other day… that was actually a lot of fun, I’ll be posting it as soon as he puts it on his blog.

5. Random: I think I blogged before about how negative thoughts have a tributary effect, and how any time you think one negative thing, it’s easy to just keep going?

One way that I’ve learned to combat this is by forcing myself to think of 10 positive things whenever I get in that mindset. Not only does it get me out of my bad mood, but it completely changes my attitude for the day.

6. We had another great Altitude mastermind this week.

I was going to include my notes in this entry, but I’m going to end now instead, write up the Altitude comments, and post-date it for a few days from now. Yay for blog content!

Ohhh… and if anyone wants to be a part of the Mafioso Marketing re-launch with Jason James, email me at rachelrofe at gmail.com! :)        

First of all, I’d like to say that Andrew Wee has officially made my day/week/month/life. Look at his most recent post!

***

I’ve been going to seminars galore lately! First I went to the Altitude follow up, where I met some fantastic people (including Chris Haddad, whose sales letter I never cease to salivate over) and got some incredible insight.

The whole “Altitude” series is monstrously value-packed. Jaime, Chad Morris, Evan Peelle and I have Altitude dates every Tuesday now, where we rotate locations and watch the series.

Just from the first few hours last Tuesday, I got incredible insight. One thing that Eben says to do is *really* figure out what your customer’s biggest fears and frustrations are, what they’re embarassed to admit, and what irrational conversations they’re having in their heads.

So… I did that. I went to a forum and asked people, and got some INCREDIBLE feedback. Despite how much I thought I knew my market (especially since I *was* the market for such a long time), as usual, I was surprised. I highly recommend that you do this in your niches.

Actually, I think I’m going to blog about something else I learned each week from the DVDs… once you learn something, not only is it your mission to share it with others, but you learn it even better.

***

After Altitude, I went to Vegas for the Master’s Seminar. I went with Jaime, Chad, and Evan again… and it was a fantastic time. We mostly partied, but I did get to meet and reconnect with some people, including Brian McElroy and Brian Kosobucki, Jason Moffatt, Jason Henderson (didn’t get to see him enough!), Mike Morgan, Simon Leung, Harris Fellman, Howie Schwartz, Dr. Mike, Tahir Shah, Donna Fox, Donna’s boyfriend Joey (the most amazing human being on the planet), Scott Byers, Ben Mack, Lee Collins, Robin Collins, Amanda… man, it was just awesomeness.

It was Brian McElroy’s birthday on Thursday night, so we made sure he had a good time. He ended up sick the entire next day, which I’m strangely very happy about.

Jaime has to charge her camera, pictures should be coming soon from that.

***

On Thursday, Simon Leung texted me and told me about Idea Incubator, which was being held 47 minutes away. Jaime and I decided to go, and it was a GREAT time.

The seminar was different than most because it was small and intimate… which meant that people could take more time to talk with the speakers. In fact, on Saturday night, there were 9 roundtables, and each speaker spent 20 minutes at each table, answering any question that people could think of.

The speakers there were fantastic. Simon Leung, Alex Mandossian, Matt Bacak, Armand Morin, Michel and Sylvie Fortin, Rory Cohen, Jermaine Griggs, Ray Edwards…. all top top notch people.

I was shocked that Jermaine Griggs actually knew who I was! I had blogged about him before, Google Alerts picked it up, and he remembered. Craziness! Listening to him speak was incredible… you should hear about all the customizations that he does to his programs. Anything’s possible with him!

Alex Mandossian was AMAZING. Totally brilliant, a fantastic teacher, very passionate and insightful, ridiculously dynamic speaker… can’t speak highly enough of him.

Simon has the pictures from that event… here’s one from Stu McLaren’s birthday dinner:

Jaime, Simon, Jermaine Griggs, Brent Coppieters, Jeff France, Faye McLaren, Stu McLaren, Greg France

***

I was scheduled to go to a few other things in Orlando next week… but all these seminars, while fantastic, are taking me away from meeting my February goals, so I might reconsider.

***

Other than that, everything’s great. I’ll include more in the Altitude posts as this one has already gotten quite long.