Listen to what has happened at what I consider the best Social Media management tool and learn how you can use HootSuite to help you make more money, stay engaged with your customer base, and learn from the Secret Sauce that HootSuite is using that has lead them to dominate their market in less than a year.

Enjoy,

Andrew Anderson

Here is a link to sign up for HootSuite and get a free account or you can click on the image above or below. If you are a business, you really should look at signing up for the pro service at only $5.99 per month! It is the only way I use to manage my social media for myself and clients. I am also an affiliate too. Which as you know if you are a regular reader of mine, just how rare this is as I always drink my own Kool Aid.

Click the play button to listen to the interview or download the mp3.

HootSuiteInterview.mp3

Interview With Dave Olson Of HootSuite

Andrew: (Laughter) Yeah, okay. Hello, this is Andrew Anderson and I’ve got Dave with HootSuite on the interview here, and we haven’t spoken in, gosh I think it’s been 8 or 9 months or so. And quite a bit has changed. Um, the one thing that hasn’t changed is I’m still a big fan of HootSuite. I still think it’s the best social media tool that any business can use out there. And, point in fact, I became an affiliate, so I think I’ve sold a couple of subscriptions for you guys and I’m also a paying user of them and as everyone knows, if I don’t like something I won’t talk about it and I will not use it. So, that will set the stage for Dave Olson here and we’ll let you rip. Um, so you guys since we last spoke, um, you’ve surpassed a million users I believe. Is that correct?

Dave: Yeah. You know, it’s been a wild year since we spoke last, and it feels like every week we’re pushing out some exciting announcement and even as equally exciting, we’re finding ourselves in the middle of world affairs and business successes and all sort of stuff. So, it’s a real wild ride. We’re up to about 1.3 million users now and adding at a great pace every day. And it’s also really exciting that these users are coming from all around the world.

Andrew: Wow. Yeah, I hadn’t even thought of that. Um, one of the big things that has gone on, and I mentioned it previously is that you’ve gone to the paid model for your business customers. You still offer the free service, right?

Dave: Yeah. We sure do. In the basic plan which is free is, is really what’s used by 95% or more of our user base. Before we switched over to those premium plans, we looked real carefully at how people use HootSuite, the feature sets, the amount of networks. And we found that people either have a few, you know, maybe their personal Twitter or Facebook maybe LinkedIn. Or else, they have a ton where they’re clearly using it for business use. So, we kind of designed the packages to fit into those buckets. We first made some announcements about it at the end of last summer. Did a little bit of a very slow roll-out so we could really get some feedback from the market. Made some adjustments and finally migrated everyone with a month-long grace period and so on to make that decision and, ah, you know we had–of course, when you first roll out something like that, there’s going to be a few people who have some, maybe have a little bit of frustration…

Andrew: (Laughter) Get bent out of shape.

Dave: Yes, indeed. But for the most part, people were really excited. And the work that we had done building the community was folks like yourself, really paid off ’cause folks were coming out and saying, “Hey, you know, it’s $5.99 a month and look what you get.” And it allows them, I mean, you know, we’ve got to make a living, too, right? So.

Andrew: Yeah. No, it’s a deal. It definitely is. Of all of the roll-out models to the–what did you call it? Freemium or Premium levels?

Dave: Yeah, it’s Premium, yep.

Andrew: Yeah, it’s the best one that I’ve been involved with, you know, as a customer. And it was fairly painless and it wasn’t a mega amount of money. If you can’t afford $5.99, you probably shouldn’t be in business anyway. But if, you know, it was $19.99 though or $29.99, I would have had to think about it a little bit, you know? So.

Dave: Yeah, and there’s certainly some upgrades and we really tried to put into that a-la-carte model so if you wanted to build a team out, well, there’s an additional charge for that. You can opt into some elevated support times if that’s something that’s really important to you. But at the same time, um, you know, that 95% of the people are using our free basic tool and finding everything that they need within that. Um, and even the basic matches up great against any other tool out there by any measure. Um, you know, obviously we take really good care of our entire community–both with adding new features, adding new networks and providing that really top tier customer support. All of those things are so important to us.

Andrew: It is. And I think Gary Vaynerchuk, you know, has talked about it and about the thank you economy about keeping your customers happy. Which you would think it’s common sense. But you guys do a particularly good job of it which is, you know, amazing because I think the norm is really service these days in so many areas.

Dave: Well, it’s interesting because we have this weird role of using HootSuite to promote HootSuite. So it feels a little recursive sometimes. But the same things that I tell people about, you know, you’re out selling widgets, this is what you should do with HootSuite, we do the exact same things in here in-house. We send out hundreds and hundreds of twitters a day, personally following up with people. You know, anyone who follows our Hootwatch account which is kind of our media and backchannel announcement list or else my personal account can see that throughout the day, we’re always finding people who are doing neat things, turn their friends onto the products, writing great blog posts. You know, we really try to amplify the success of our users as, you know, as reflective on the good work that we’re doing.

Andrew: Right, and do you want more followers on your personal thing? Or do you want to keep that quiet?

Dave: No, that’s fine. I, ah, DaveOHoots, and we also have a number of different Twitter handles. Of course, there’s the @HootSuite but another neat thing that we’ve done since we spoke last is we’ve really gone big on this internationalizing–for lack of a better word–where we’ve built out Twitter accounts and we’re providing support and monitoring, at least community building, in several different languages now. Particularly in Japanese and Spanish. We have everything that we’re releasing as far as our case studies and info sheets and marketing materials is going out in Japanese and Spanish as well as English and usually on the same day.

Andrew: Wow, that’s cool. Very cool.

Dave: Yeah, it’s pretty neat. You know I did–I’m sorry to interrupt there–but ah just before the holidays, we did a big announcement in Japan and I was there, skyped in through Skype video chat to a media briefing room back in Tokyo, and I’m there coming in from ah my house with the video cam because we had to coordinate hours and seeing, looking back at all these Japanese reports, they’re in this media briefing room and the next day, seeing us written up in Japanese in these major newspapers in Japan. Ah, we certainly get, we have a lot of fun with that and really savor the opportunity to go there and build. And Japan, in particular, is an under-realized Twitter market. If you ask people what was Twitter’s high watermark of most tweets per second, um, we’ll say, you know, it must have been the Super Bowl or maybe the Oscars the other night. Or even the World Cup football, you know the soccer tournament? None of those are the high watermark. The high watermark of Twitter ever is 4 seconds after midnight on New Year’s Eve in Japan.

Andrew: Really. Wow.

Dave: 6,000 tweets per second. Now, to put that in a relative sense, the high watermark of the Super Bowl was 3,000-4,000 tweets per second. So, you know, at 4,000 tweets per second, Japan crushed that and this is like a whole other tech economy that a lot of folks don’t even realize really exists. And 140 characters in Japanese. That’s like a small novel sometimes.

Andrew: Really. Wow. Um, the–and I’d also heard, and I think this is relative to Facebook, that they have fewer friends but they communicate more with them. Have you guys seen that to be the case? Or is that just something I heard?

Dave: We don’t see near as much activity on Facebook in Japan as we do with Twitter. But we’ve also noted that the big social network in Japan is one called “Mixi”.

Andrew: Really.

Dave: And that has Facebook-like domination. You know where Facebook dominates most markets, Mixi is absolutely the dominant social network in Japan and, as such, we added it to the, we added it to the dashboard so now besides Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Myspace, Ping, etc., now we’ve got a Mixi which is big in Japan and we’ve also added Ning recently, too, which is a little experiment that we’ve been doing with the Ning community. So, we’re really now, we’re trying to branch out and find where those passionate groups of communities where we can tap in and give them something that they really need to help them do their work.

Andrew: Cool. Yeah, so you got Mixi in the mix now. That’s interesting. What’s their user base? Do you happen to know? Or rough estimate off hand?

Dave: Oh, it’s tens of millions.

Andrew: Oh, it is. Wow.

Dave: Yeah, and when we launched that–the blog post–I got a lot of reference linked into some stuff so you can learn more about how social media is developed in Japan. And actually this year at South by Southwest, ah, we’re hosting a panel called “Big in Japan” that kind of, we brought together a few different cross-cultural business people from Japan and North America to talk about how do you localize for Japan? How do you outreach to that market? When do you know it’s the right time to go in there? What are the expectations in the market? ’cause it’s been a fascinating experience for us, for sure.

Andrew: Um-hmm. Well, I wish I was going to be out there this year, but not going to be able to make it. The most–I’m going to go back here. How does it feel to have, you know, as many customers as you do now? Did you guys project this? Was this in your realm of possibility? What was the viewpoint back in April of last year?

Dave: Well, we certainly put a lot of, um, importance on listening to our users and building the tool that we know we can build. And we here have, you know, we have an outstanding team of people who come in with ideas, and we go from idea to execution very rapidly. So, it’s more driven by that if we build the best thing, the thing that we know we can build, then people will come and come on board with it. You know, we’re here using it that too so we know what the people out there want. We listen voraciously to customer feedback. And our development team just doesn’t know the meaning of the word, “Oh, no, I don’t think we can do that.” And they rock stuff out in record time. So, really, we’re so focussed on getting that next integration getting that next release out that that’s kind of our focus. You know, that one-game-at-a-time kind of thing rather than looking at the broad breaststrokes. That said, you know, we’re lead by a real visionary thinker who’s always coming in with some other way to, ah, you know push something amazing out and, you know, that’s some of the examples you mentioned with the affiliate program. The Crowdsource translation program which now Twitter and a few other companies have hopped on board and released very similar programs. Our Hoots with University program. You know, we, we’re always launching something. And it’s really based on that user feedback and where we see a need in the market.

Andrew: Oh, cool. So your focus is on the product and the customers take care of themselves basically. I mean the growth.

Dave: Ah, yeah. I certainly would do things to encourage that along. But, it’s, you know, we don’t do traditional advertising, per se, or now we have a business sales department here that helps that along but did the users kind of take care of themselves? We really put a lot of effort into once people sign up for their account to make sure that they get onboard and really engaged. You know, it can be a little intimidating if you’ve gone right from Twitter web and all of a sudden, you’re looking at HootSuite because there’s a lot of power in there. And it can be like sitting down in a jet plane cockpit of you’ve never seen it before. So, we’ve added a lot of resource to kind of help people get over that learning curve and get up to speed quickly.

Andrew: Gotcha. And then, I guess from a little bit different standpoint having been involved in the startup, you got any advice for other startups out there that are, you know, growing fast or they’ve got a great product and, you know, what you’ve learned with the growth thing that looks like a real hockey stick.

Dave: It does. And it’s not just because we’re Canadian.

Andrew: Yeah, although that doesn’t hurt, huh?

Dave: Really, kind of from a personal standpoint in making sure that, you know, remember why it is that you got into this game and, you know, write down those things and kind of leave messages for yourself to look at six months later so you kind of remember where you came from. Because, you know, it’s not an easy life doing a startup. It’s a lot of late nights and it’s a lot of hustling. There’s a lot of change to get stuff out and get stuff pushed out. So you have to kind of take care of yourself in the sense that remember why you’re doing it. But, from a business standpoint, absolutely take fantastic care of your customers. Make them into your stars. Listen to everything that they have to say. You know, we try to reply back to most everyone and, ah, but we certainly listen in to everyone.

Andrew: So, you guys are in the catbird seat as far as social media goes. Where do you see social media heading? I mean it’s, it’s got a major impact these days on a lot of things, and I’m not sure that people realize just how big it is. But I want to get your take on that.

Dave: Well, I think that very soon, we’re to the point that people stop calling it social media and it’s just media. It’s just–everyone has this, this ability to amplify. So I think that the power of these web tools is just starting to be felt because regular folks, you know, folks who aren’t geeky or early adopters, or whatever, as they’re coming on board and they don’t have preset notions about what these tools can do, I think that’s where you see the really exciting things. I think you’ll see companies engaging with their audiences in a more authentic manner with creative kind of advertising.

Andrew: Right.

Dave: You know, we’ve seen with the Twitter promoted tweets, I think you’ll see a lot of creativity in that space where there’ll be kind of special offers, geo located offers and that kind of thing. With what we saw recently in Egypt, which was a stunning story for us when we came in one day and we saw 7,000% growth in Egyptian signups and traffic in one day.

Andrew: Wow.

Dave: Basically what happened is when Twitter and Facebook were first shut down, word quickly got around that you could still get out to those networks through HootSuite and so for 36 hours, we were the outlet for a lot of this conversation which was amazing for us to watch and something that you could have never possibly predicted.

Andrew: Right.

Dave: So I think the one thing that I can say for the future is that it’s going to be very different than what we’ve seen the last couple years where it’s more, um, people who have the ability to speak to one another in all sorts of different ways. I mean, you know, you and I, we have Twitter and Skype and phones and emails and that kind of thing. But there’s a lot of people who are going skip a lot of those steps and go right to the social media, and they’re going to be able to do amazing things from a business, political, social realm that we can’t even think of.

Andrew: Right. Huh. Yeah, I hadn’t realized that you guys were the outlet for that. You know, imagine that they didn’t report that on the news. Go figure.

Dave: Well, we actually got quite a bit of coverage about it in itself and part of that was, you know, we were so fascinated with what had happened that we released an infographic. We also did an infographic for our million-user threshold where we kind of broke down for social media geeks to see what percentage of messages go out through Twitter versus Facebook versus the other networks in what media and kind of our growth patterns. But we did the same thing for Egypt where we kind of tried to articulate in some way our impact. And it wasn’t to put ourselves in the story but it was, I mean, we couldn’t help but feel an affinity with these people when the tweets started to turn to, “They’re using flags as bandages now.” You know, that’s–and they’re sending these messages out through our tool that’s made by this group of developers and marketers here in a little office in Vancouver and we’re having impact in world affairs. It was a pretty incredible feeling, and we just wanted to share that with the world in the form of this infographic.

Andrew: Gotcha. And then, well I’ll have to put that on the site, too. But you gotta remember, I live under a rock when it comes to news, and I’m also involved in a startup, too. So, I don’t have a lot of free time. (Laughter)

Dave: Yeah, if it hadn’t impacted us so directly, I definitely wouldn’t have been as well informed. And now we’re seeing the same thing in Libya. And so we start seeing the internet as this, ah, as a very heavily wielded political tool in a lot of ways. So, it’s fascinating to watch and I think the next year or two, it’s just going to be wild as the tools evolve and the understanding of what these tools can do moves away from the cynicism or the self-referentialness and becomes more and more mainstream.

Andrew: Right. Um, I guess in, I’d like to get one or two of the newer tools or techniques, you know, that HootSuite can give a business the ability to use now that, and I know it’s come a long way since the interface, you know, 8-9 months ago, um, do you have any high points there that you might, someone that’s new to HootSuite from a business standpoint that might be relevant to them?

Dave: Sure. From a business standpoint, there’s two that jump out at me right away that I think business users would really love. In the last 6 months, there’s been a lot of conversation about influence. I mean, of course, you love all your followers equally. But, from a business standpoint, you want to reach out to the people who have a big reach first and foremost to help amplify your message. So, we’ve integrated Klout into the dashboard. Klout, that’s with a K. They have an algorithm that measures people’s reach and influence based on who follows them, how many times they get re-tweeted, you know, what kind of clicks they get. Basically, their realm of social influence. And then they assign a score to each person. Now, I don’t want the social web to turn into a popularity contest, but it’s a great way that within your HootSuite streams, you set a search stream for, you know, profit coaching or something like that, right? And then you start looking down and you can move a little slider bar across and it’ll drop off all the people who are under that certain level of Klout so you might find the ten people in your network that have high Klout scores that you want to outreach first to with some kind of special offer or to put an advance notice of some message or something like that. Also, on each person’s little popup profile card, you’ll see their Klout score.

Andrew: Okay, yes. Go ahead.

Dave: The second thing that I think is really handy is Retweets. Retweets are obviously a really powerful way to build your network, amplify messages and kind of do a favor back for the people who are in your network. And now we’ve added a way where you can choose which Retweet style you want to use on the fly. So on each tweet, you can choose the old school RT style where you can put in some more notes and add, “Wow, I thought this was a great article” and Retweet, etc. or you can do the new web native style that’s similar to Twitter web and you can choose that on the fly. So whichever one you like, you can choose them, and you don’t have to be stuck with one choice. So, it’s the best of both worlds.

Andrew: Gotcha. And then, one of the other features I like, and I don’t know how long it’s been there–it’s seems like it’s been there forever, but–is the ability to manage conversations you have with individuals and they stack up so you don’t have to go searching for them.

Dave: Yeah. That’s super handy, especially if you’re dealing with a lot of volume and managing like, you know, monitoring brand sentiment for example. You can see well, like why is this person saying this? And at first, it can, you know, be a little disorienting but as you start to expand the conversation and go back to find out where that comment came from, it really puts it in context, and context is everything in understanding what people are feeling.

Andrew: It indeed is. So, I know you’re a busy guy there and I don’t want to take up too much more of your time but anything else you want to throw into the mix?

Dave: Ah, well a couple things that we love to see people doing is if you write a blog post or have some tips about HootSuite that you’re sharing with your audience, let us know, and we’ll include your blog post in our user-created tutorials, give you a nice link back, and share your news and share your site with our audience. Ditto with any kind of media articles. We round those up and put them in news roundups. WE also tweet them out over a HootWatch. So, there’s a couple fun things if you want to engage with us a little bit more. And if we see you doing neat stuff and helping other people out–learn about HootSuite–we might even send you a HootKit which is a little envelope of stickers and pins and tattoos and other cool treats.

Andrew: Okay. Well, that’s cool. And then what’s the best way to just go to the–is there any particular Twitter name that they should follow to do this? How do they get in touch with you guys?

Dave: Well, just check out the blog, and it will give you all of the hints and clues and stuff. But if anyone has any questions, DaveOHoots is a great way to get started. If you have Help questions specifically though, go right to HootSuite_Help and we’ve got some fantastic technicians always all day long that just answer any questions via Twitter. So we’re definitely eating our own dog food and I tell you what, it’s pretty tasty.

Andrew: (Laughter) That’s pretty good. Yeah, you know, and any of the business owners out there that aren’t using HootSuite, I can’t recommend enough and for all the reasons that you just said, Dave. Plus, there’s tons more that once you get used to it–which won’t take very long, you know, within 5 minutes–you should be up and running on most of the, you know, some of the really good features on there and then, you know, you can always dive into it. But, you know, it’s the only way that I could even imagine managing, you know, all of the Twitter accounts we have and keep sane at the same time.

Dave: Well, all these folks out there who are going to sign up for your business account, I encourage you to do it through Andrew’s affiliate link.

Andrew: Well there you go. Thanks for the plug!

Dave: Let’s get this guy some beer money. Right?

Andrew: There you go. So, I’ll have to check and see what the sales are. But, yeah, maybe I could go buy a beer here soon and if not, maybe I’ll buy you one next time up in Vancouver. So, alright, well Dave, thank you very much. Thanks. This is an interview with Dave Olson at HootSuite–the best social media product out there for business that I can think of for sure. So, thanks a bunch for chatting with me, and we’ll get this up on the blog here and hopefully a couple people will read it and start using HootSuite and make their life a lot easier.

Dave: Sounds great, Andrew. It’s a pleasure to chat with you again.

Andrew: Okay, take care. Bye-bye. And that’s it.

An interview with the author of the new book “Personality Language” Marilyne Woodsmall

(OK, I threw in the part about finding the love of your life but it is possible   )

I did this interview when this book first came out and I see that there a few people have picked on just how valuable this really is and are starting to teach it. But, why not get it from the Horse’s mouth so to speak instead.

Get comfortable and take a listen to an interview I did with the author of the new book Personality Language. Listen in as we discuss how using Personality Language can dramatically boost your profits.

This is a totally new way to reach not only new customers, but get a lot more sales from your existing customers.

I hope to have more chats with her about this mind-blowing new way to communicate with your customers and increase your profits.

We talk about how Personality Language and you will find out why you want to layout all of your Blog posts, Sales Letters, and Information Products this way if you want to have the most success with them and become profitable.

Marilyne Woodsmall and Wyatt Woodsmall, who are Human Success Modelers wrote this as a primer to introduce this new way of thinking.

While you may not have ever heard of them before, I can bet that you have heard of, or seen on TV, or on the Internet, or read the books of some of the many people that either one or both of them have coached. People like Anthony “Tony” Robbins, Eben Pagan of Internet Marketing fame (if you have never heard of him before, under the pen name David DeAngelo who sells over $20,000,000 of Dating eBooks and Advice on the Internet every year and doesn’t even have a published “real book”) , Joe Polish of Piranha Marketing, world-class Marketer and Joint Venture specialist extraordinaire, and finally a host of Olympic Athletes and Coaches that brought home oodles of Medals, and quite a few other people that you have heard or seen as well.

Again the Woodsmall’s don’t go out of their way to mention them as they don’t like to talk about the people that they have worked or are working with all that much. It is just the way they operate, and I can respect that.

The only reason that I bring these people up is help you give some weight to what I am about to share with you. The folks that I mentioned have used what they learned from Marilyne and Wyatt to help make themselves tens of millions of dollars and to achieve success at a world class level that very few people are ever able to obtain.

Part of what those individuals did to obtain those ultra-high levels of success was to Leverage, with a capital L, what Marilyne and Wyatt gave to them to propel themselves to higher levels of success faster than they could have done on their own.

Now imagine if you had access to that same type of information that you could use to Leverage yourself to those ultra-high levels of success and profitability? Now you can.

Take a listen and let me know what you think.

Press the play button and find out how to improve your sales with Personality Language.

1.mp3

Or you can download it here Marilyne Woodsmall Interview.

Click below on the book cover to order the book and type in 21 to get a $5.00 discount. I can’t recommend this book enough. It is a game changer. I will also be posting other interviews with Marilyne and Wyatt as soon I can talk them into giving up more information.

Even if you don’t buy the book, go and sign up for their newsletter at www.PersonalityLanguage.com as it is well worth it.

Here is a picture of Glenn and Tim Ferriss and Tim’s Launch of The 4-Hour Body which just made #1 on the New York Time’s best seller list. That is Glenn on the right and Tim Ferriss on the left of course.  I am following Tim’s book and it is awesome by the way. Lost about 10 pounds of fat and gained over 5 pounds of muscle in a little over one week.

Hope you enjoy the Interview. There is some great information in here. Just click on the arrow below to get started or you can download the MP3 for later.

Here is a link to Download the MP3 of the Interview Here.

Here is a link to Glenn’s Non-Profit  Inner Flame

Here is the transcript of the Interview.

Andrew Anderson: … Andrew Anderson and I have the pleasure today to interview a gentleman from across the pond in the UK, named Glenn Bridges. Glenn, how are you doing today?

Glenn Bridges: I’m doing exceptionally well. Andrew, after a couple of minor hiccups, I’m doing very well.

Andrew Anderson: Yeah. The subject for today’s interview is basically how a good website can give you a competitive edge even against the largest of multinational companies. And we wanna go over some of the things that you should and shouldn’t do to make sure that your website is useful, that you could actually make money and be profitable from which I would dare to say that most people want to do that. Although by some of the websites you and I have discussed recently, you’ve got to wonder that if they’re not trying to drive people away at times. Glenn, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are, and what you want, etc, etc,?

Glenn Bridges: Well, I’ve had a very interesting couple of years. The quick answer to that is I left college at 18 after studying English Language and Literature Music. Music technology, IT in Psychology, and decided I didn’t wanna go down the typical route of going to university. It just didn’t appeal to me. And I also didn’t wanna get a job. So I did, I fell into kind of like the passion and interest of mine, which I set up as a business. And at that time it was called… what was it called? Right Now, that’s what it was called. And I say that because we shortly changed the name to something called interflame. And the premise was, we would work with young people, helping them get access to personal __ of materials by running courses, some of the stuff that I’ve had access to and have helped me to make amazing changes in my life. Other things like, becoming an LP practitioner and one of those Tony Robbins courses, and lots of other __ around that and spent some thousands of thousands of pounds in my early teens. That sort of stuff

So we set up and again, everyone was saying it was gonna fail and telling us the experts in the area you know, those sorts of ducks that like to peck at you and tell you that you’re…

Andrew Anderson: There’s certainly a big flock of those out there.

Glenn Bridges: Yeah, yeah. And very often, their opinion is just their opinion. And it’s nothing more than that. So we took the lonely road if you will and went against the grain and set something up which has been incredibly successful. It’s been running for over two years now. Just recently, we won a National awarded over 8000 organizations that work with the people. We came number one. And we had some pretty big sponsors. __ Global Companies sponsored us. People like nationwide. She’s a banker in the UK if anyone is listening outside of here as well as ____, you can Google. As well as a number of very successful entrepreneurs, adventurous mountaineers. And basically, how I kind of got on to this interesting area, I might find it fascinating on a website design optimization, online marketing. Whatever you wanna talk about. What we’re basically talking about is how you create something which people like and love and when exchanged the value of the cash is because I realized that to do what I want to do, I need to be earning an income from elsewhere which wasn’t reliant on the hours I put into things. And let’s start with what we call, The 4-Hour Work Week, which I absolutely love. I’m a huge, huge fan of Tim Ferriss. And…

Andrew Anderson: And I wanna interject. That’s how we actually end up meeting because we were both fans of it.

Glenn Bridges: Absolutely. Yes. It was very ___ wasn’t it, Andrew?

Andrew Anderson: Yes, it was.

Glenn Bridges: It was… I supposed you left and I actually thought ___. He’s not gonna reply or he’s not gonna be interested but I thought I might give it a go.

Andrew Anderson: Lo and behold, here we are.

Glenn Bridges: it’s a good lesson to anyone out there that you should always never put the books and the barriers inside your own head before actually giving it a go.

Basically, I started with a product which was then an information product which was about helping, it’s all about ____ and how, what you needed, some of the legal stuff that you needed to create digital products and physical products. And I got that because I was working with some __ entrepreneurs at the time. I was studying them and modeling them. And this time I was getting all the information from them when I was building a web map which we eventually took to Google and show them and say, this is what we want to do. And we went for eleven rounds of investment and saw eleven different investors. And unfortunately, we ended up pulling on it just because the space became so competitive and we were really, our USP had really kind of fallen out of it. So we decided the best thing to do was actually to…

Andrew Anderson: Can you stop a minute? Can you explain what a USP is?

Glenn Bridges: Oh, sorry Andrew. A Unique Selling Proposition. Or basically… sorry, I apologize there.

Andrew Anderson: We just had a lot of people that don’t have any idea what a USP is. And it’s basically the thing that’s gonna make you money and make you stand out in the market. What do you say?

Glenn Bridges: I’d say, yeah. It’s the single point of difference. And we went from proposition that we weren’t gonna be better than everyone else. We’re gonna be just different and I think that’s what I learned about marketing is, you don’t have to be the fastest, quickest, cheapest. And in fact, that’s not always a good thing. In fact, a lot of times that you ___ value what you’re doing by kind of trying to keep up with that constant rat race. Coz there’s always someone that will sacrifice cheaper profit margins. There’s always somebody that will just focus on being faster than you. Or is if you don’t ___, you’ll be different. And we basically lost our point of difference. And so, we decided it’s best to do other things. And I started to come back to some of the stuff I’ve been following up on. I’ve always had a lot of people pitching me products and ideas and business models. And it’s just kind of a never-ending thing. I mean, you must get tired all the time Andrew with kind of what your connections and what you do.

Andrew Anderson: Yes.

Glenn Bridges: I can imagine.

Andrew Anderson: There’s a bazillion out there but very few that are actually worthwhile.

Glenn Bridges: Yeah, there are. And for me, it’s a very worthwhile in terms of just products that I’m so passionate about or so believe in so much. That’s why I’m so lucky about this stuff ______ I really, really believe in what it sets out to achieve and I’m passionate about kind of helping people to do that. So the 4-hour work has kind of been my single biggest kind of success in the sense of helping me to create passive income and develop that and learn about the lifestyle design of things and developing the lifestyle that you want to create. But also, it’s been my biggest pain because what Tim talks about is very achievable but through some of the chores and the mediums and the strategies that he suggests, it actually __ people to spend a lot more money, time and be a lot more frustrated about the way they go about things.

Andrew Anderson: Can I stop you for one second? For those of you who aren’t familiar with Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Work Week, basically what his theory or what he has people put in practice is that you set up a business so that runs virtually and that you spend no more than four hours a week actually “working.” How’s that for a synopsis?

Glenn Bridges: That’s pretty much it. He goes on to say that The 4-Hour Work Week is kind of non-existing because very often he works more than that but then some weeks, he won’t work at all, even for months. But yeah, it’s pretty much, it’s the idea here of having a low input, low time input business, which you get maximum cash out. You can leverage that difference. So, minimum time in, maximum cash out. And he has a very systematic way of going about creating products and strategies for selling them. And I think everyone should read it coz it’s the most brilliant ten thousand fee overview into getting started online, whether you’re gonna bring an existing business online or whether you want to create your first business online or you wanna sell one of those products, or you wanna create your own products, it’s the best one to go to. And I know people that have developed their own products and just started on the 4-Hour Work Week. I know people who have taken existing ____ businesses online. I think The 4-Hour Work Week, alongside with Dr. Robert Cialdini’s influence, is the two most essential books that people should read if they wanna get started online. Would you agree, Andrew?

Andrew Anderson: Yeah. I could throw a couple more in but I’ll put them at the end of the interview. I do wanna go through some of the meat and potatoes. So you’ve been frustrated basically, from our previous conversations in actually following through and doing what Tim Ferriss says because it’s really easy to talk about in theory, but when you start getting into it, I know there’s technical hurdles and all kinds of other things that people run into especially if they’re not technically savvy.

Glenn Bridges: Absolutely. The single biggest assumption I made was incorrect. I though the hardest part of it would be creating the products. Actually, what I’ve realized is that the products are the easiest part. And in fact, Andrew, one of the things that we’ll be doing, I’ll be running later on this month or this January is actually a webinar on product creation strategies. Creating a product is so easy. And if you don’t wanna create one, you can sell someone else’s. There’s so many ways to go about doing that. The single biggest difficult part of it is the technical side of things. And the single biggest part is trying to get actually everything set up online to go into rock and roll. That’s what I’ve found. And that’s what I’m speaking to so many 4-hour weekers, people that are building an online business. That’s what I know they found as well. So that’s what I was kind of point out to people in the book is, putting in labels is a process of doing things. But things have moved on quite a bit. The book was written in, was it 2007?

Andrew Anderson: 2007 was the first version, yeah. And I totally agree. Things have dramatically changed.

Glenn Bridges: Yeah. And I think it’s just frustrating coz Tim says, do this, this. Very specific, clear actions. And that’s brilliant, brilliant that he’s provided that but the problem is with that is actually, a lot of those methods are outdated and you can’t go __ in the same way.

Andrew Anderson: Nope, you can’t. Let’s go into some specifics that people may not hear again. I don’t wanna get them, I love people that aren’t technically savvy and I’m sure we’ve got a lot of listeners around the block for a while. But let’s go, why don’t we go through three or four things that people can go do today to improve their website to make more money, to make them happier, and etc, etc. so why don’t we dive into that? What would you say the five key things are that people need to do with a website? Or to look out for.

Glenn Bridges: Wow. That’s a good thing. I mean, it’s a difficult question to answer coz it depends what people are doing and what market they’re in, and what angle they come out. They create their own products so the people’s products, it’s a different one to start with. But I think the first single biggest thing that you… there’s a couple of things. I think I’ll start with, the first thing I’d start with is you really need to have it very, very clear in your mind what benefit you’re adding to somebody who’s gonna buy this product. What value are you offering? You need to be very clear about how that relates to people’s emotions and the benefits and the solutions that you’re providing. So the question I’d like to ask is, what is it that if I imagine my mind going forward once this person has bought, used, or continues to use his product, when is the very end of that experience? If they, once they’ve completed that program or once they bought that, they’ve gone through that bottle or to the bottom of that box, what have they done? What is gonna be the end result that you are going to deliver? Or is at least you hope or wants to deliver to the best of your ability. What’s the end result? And how can you sell it to someone? So I think it’s really about getting clear because once you have that, I think if you really know in your heart of hearts what that thing is, you can really acutely describe it to someone than putting on a website. It’s actually very easy because you can provide a video of you doing it or a clip of the end result. Or you can provide a reading, like cutting and pasting message in your headline. So I’d say that’s the number one thing you gotta get started.

The number two, second thing is definitely has to be credibility and trust because this stuff if sort of going on unconsciously. This stuff is happening without you really knowing about it and it’s like, I think you’ve __ a couple of times, Andrew. You have to accumulate people’s trust because if you think of any relationship and your ability to persuade or influence someone whether it was a sales process or a coaching environment, or that was with your loved one, within a work environment, whether that was in any environment, people only change or people only make, take an action that you want them to do, or they want to take when they trust who they think they’re buying that from. So I think you need to do that. And to do that, I think it’s important that you have a good looking site design with good graphics and a good layout because that, first of all shows you’ve made an investment in your business and people wanna buy something they see that they’ve made an investment. The example I give to many people was, if I turned up in a pair of, if you turned up to a Ferrari showroom and you’re gonna buy that car that you wanted to buy your whole life, and I turned up in ripped jeans and a greasy t-shirt, you’d be suspicious. You’d be fearful. You’d be wondering what was up with the situation.

Andrew Anderson: If I was the buyer.

Glenn Bridges: Yeah, if you were the buyer. Right. Because you’re expecting this, not only to appear the perfect car you’re buying but an experience which is full of pride, excitement depending on your own perspective on these things. You’d be going with those emotions. And so, once you have that, if you complete ___, it’d be… some of you might be thinking, something’s wrong here. So that’s what you have to get across with good site layout, good graphics and having those sorts of things in place.

Andrew Anderson: Let’s stop there because I don’t think people will, we’re throwing that term out there but I don’t think most people know what that is. And so, let me throw a couple of things out there and I know we’re on agreement on this.

Good site layout means that, hey, it’s centered in the screen, it doesn’t have ugly colors. Would that be one of them?

Glenn Bridges: Yeah. Absolutely.

Andrew Anderson: Also… and I know you just had this experience and if you wanna throw the name in there, you can now. But not being able to contact the site owner to ask them questions, phone number, easy email address, maybe instant messaging, etc, etc.

Glenn Bridges: I wanna see personally any site that is doing sales by phone. I wanna see the number in the top right hand corner or somewhere accessible like that on every page consistently. I do not want to search for that. So many people do not. I wanna give this example coz it’s really irritated me and I hate it. And I want people to learn from it.

I recently just booked a hotel in London at an event I’m speaking this weekend where I’m gonna be sharing with people more of this content. And I went to book into the hotel and they’ve been organized. They’ve been really lovely. That, hey, Glenn. We’re really glad you’re coming to town. We’re really grateful you gonna take some time out. One of the things I’ve done for you is I’ve set you up for that really nice, big chunky discount off of your room. So the last __, he’s given me a bigger room and he’s given me ___. All we need to do is call the hotel. So that seems like a pretty __proposition for anybody, right? You’d think.

Andrew Anderson: You would think. Yes.

Glenn Bridges: You’d think. So anyway, I go into this site. And first of all, I __ into Google, like most people do. If you haven’t heard of Google, you’re in for a treat. So I put in and nothing came out. And I had to search through that to like listing 8 or 9 or whatever. And I managed to find it. So __ the page, got park in, get to them. I search on the site. I’m __ at the site for five, seven, eight minutes. Now, if by that time, if you haven’t got normally what you want at a website, that person would be that they won’t hang around that long unless they’re absolutely desperate for what you’ve got to offer and your site seems to have an inkling there provided. People just don’t do that. So anyway, I managed to find it. And it had a contact us button, which was at the bottom of the page. And the page was pretty long, not too long for the __ site but pretty long. And it was about a size font 7. So it’s a tiny font in light gray against a light gray button in the bottom right hand corner. Now, that’s somebody who screams accessibility, right Andrew?

Andrew Anderson: Yes, yes.

Glenn Bridges: So I clicked on it. I go through and they’ve got international numbers. Haven’t got UK number, haven’t got even the number for the specific hotel I want to go into. And then they have the drop down file with the classic, you’re gonna love this, Andrew coz I know it’s something you mentioned on your blog __21.com a few times, is I have to scroll through the listing of every country starting from Afghanistan all through the UK.

Andrew Anderson: Lots of customers coming from Afghanistan, I’m sure.

Glenn Bridges: Of course. And I’m full ___ from Afghanistan all the time. And so, I scroll through, by the way I’m on a co.uk site so they could have it set up to a co.uk site to go through to UK. But anyway, I call the number. They’ve got three numbers. I called all the three numbers, didn’t get anything. I had to call through to the USA. They gave me another number. So I called the USA on my personal phone. It cost my mobile phone, it cost me __ so my home phone _____. I have to call back coz that number didn’t work. And finally, the USA managed to route me through to the UK. I then spent five minutes with the phone ringing. I have to get through to somebody who takes my sale and finally gets through.

Andrew Anderson: How long did this take you?

Glenn Bridges: This actually took me an hour and a half today.

Andrew Anderson: What’s the website again? Is it park…?

Glenn Bridges: I think it’s parkinn.co.uk. I can’t bring it up. I actually…

Andrew Anderson: Yeah, go ahead.

Glenn Bridges: It’s parkinn.co.uk. And you wanna find…

Andrew Anderson: Yeah, this is a great example. So you can see what not to do. And I think that’s as important as finding out what to do. I would venture to say this is probably causing them tens of thousands of dollars every month. Coz I’m sure that it’s more than a couple of pounds per evening to stay there.

Glenn Bridges: Absolutely. I mean, it’s _____ but it’s pretty pricey which we’re really glad to get a good chunk of change of it. But you know, it’s just simple things like that. One of the things that… I got a friend that runs a security company. She sold her company. But they’ve got a number of websites. And the first thing you get them to do is just put the number in big red text in big font in the right hand corner. It’s just simple stuff like that because if you’re taking phone orders, make it accessible to people. For me, I’m just sort of, I come from a strategy that I want to make money.

Andrew Anderson: Yeah, what’s up with that?

Glenn Bridges: What’s up with that?

Andrew Anderson: You’re pretty radical. For sure, people are really gonna get that concept though.

Glenn Bridges: I’m not sure, Andrew. It’s a hard pill to swallow. And one of the things that I just scream at people is, make it easy for people to contact you. In fact, one of the other things I’d say on coming back to this applying things is, the third thing, which I most see for people online is they put loads of call to actions on a splash page. And the splash page is nothing more than the page you land on, you can see within your browser from wherever destination you come from, whether that’s Google, or you clicked on an ad, or you can send a link in an email or you’re going on Facebook. Whatever. And they fill the page with call to actions and that’s just basically a __.it’s just basically an action that you want someone to take. So it’s like a button or a link to click or fill a form ___ there or whatever. Something that you want someone to do. So they have loads of buttons and they have loads of like opt-in forms and have loads of advertisements going crazy around the site. They have multiple ___ but then, when it comes to contacts, they have ___. They have like a contact us in email. And we said Andrew, it’s about making it successful and easy for your customers so you got at least __ which is phone if you’re gonna do phone orders. Or at least you got like a customer service line if it’s appropriate for your business. It’s not always necessary but it’s great to have. Email addresses, multiple email addresses so you can have __ to organize. If it’s possible, IM, instant messenger. You got a lot of this text boxes pop up and you can talk to someone…

Andrew Anderson: And there’s free services for that now that make it so easy it’s not even funny. And also Skype numbers too. I think you and I agree on that. If you don’t know what Skype is, you need to get on it. Now or yesterday if you wanna be on business. Right now, we’re doing this call on Skype and there are 23,573,232 people online using Skype right now. So if you wonder how, whether it’s acceptable or what it is. And you’re in London in the UK and I’m in the United States and this conversation is being recorded on it and it sounds crystal clear.

Glenn Bridges: It does. It does.

Andrew Anderson: And it’s free. It is free.

Glenn Bridges: Absolutely. And in fact, Andrew, I looked at my phone bill just this month, my mobile phone, my cellphone and I realized that I had, I called maybe five or four numbers and those were all girls. They were all girls.

Andrew Anderson: Clients, of course.

Glenn Bridges: Yeah, of course. Coz that’s proper market research when you understand who you’re calling. And I realized that do 95, 97% of what I do on Skype. And it is the best way to do it because for those people using it, you can do what is called a screenshot so you can basically show other people what you see on your screen and they could do the same. And you’ve got a choice, it’s not like you could remain privy to her. You can show it to her but if you want to, it can make things so much easier. And you got the web at hand. It’s just so helpful.

Andrew Anderson: It is. And you can do video calls too.

Glenn Bridges: Yes, absolutely.

Andrew Anderson: I guess we probably… I’m sure we talked for a couple of hours on this. What other salient points I mean, other than just making it… and it’s obviously not obvious because I would say, 90% of the sites do not have the contact information correctly and they don’t give you the ability to purchase either. You should be able to, you wanna buy it, you should be able to, from the very first page within one or two clicks, you should be able to figure out how to buy whatever it is that you’re selling.

Glenn Bridges: Absolutely. I think you’re right on that, Andrew in terms of it. I think to be honest, there’s so many, the elements that we could really pick upon. There’s a couple of, ones I’m really keen of the moment, I’m telling everybody about and you’re probably tired or hearing it but for me, I’m really sick of people constantly having their social media stuff, clogging up the website because most of the time you are, people struggle to generate traffic. They struggle to get traffic to their site. It’s an issue for a lot of people. And if you don’t struggle with it, you always want more of it. It’s more targeted and you want it to stay longer on your site and do all these different things with it. And traffic by the way is just people that are searching for your site or coming to your site and going around it. Visitors or users, these are people that __ are looking at your site. Now, we always put effort into it. And then, immediately like I say, people on the splash page, the first thing they __ upon, this huge big buttons that say, follow me on Twitter, become a friend on Facebook, __ my fan page and look at my LinkdIn profile. And by the way, have you looked at my YouTube channel? And have you looked at my Friendster? And they have this huge list. And so what you’re doing, is you’re just taking, you attempt to get people to your site only to send them back up to some other site and it just to me seems strikingly obvious that you would not do that. So I would say, when you do this stuff, be conscious of where you’re placing it. I personally think that the best place to put your social media stuff is on the page, on the bottom of what’s called a footer, at the bottom of your page or to sort of in the middle way down on the right hand side of your site. I think somewhere those two places are good. You got blog posts, have it at the end of the post. _ they’ve completed the action. They’ve read the blog or they’ve clicked through that link, then get them to share it. Don’t send them off. I think that, for me it’s ___. Sorry?

Andrew Anderson: A peeve, apparently.

Glenn Bridges: Yeah, I know. I get passionate about it. I’m just, for me, it’s so strikingly ___ is that people put so much time into it and then they just fall down. The final thing I guess I’ll just say is, the video is not utilized enough.

Andrew Anderson: And that’s amazing. When I… I truly agree with you on that.

Glenn Bridges: It doesn’t always have to be you either.

Andrew Anderson: It could be just screenshots.

Glenn Bridges: Absolutely. One of the things we did with a __ site and we need to do some work on that. I say and listen, my business partner is very kind of closed about wanting to do anything with it coz he’s got very specific ideas. But I need to _____. One of the things we have definitely done with it is work on the first part page of the site and you actually see a video from those people from UK ____ Rachel __. She’s a very successful and famous entrepreneur in the UK. And she’s telling us, she’s on the front video for three minutes telling us how great Interflame is and how she’s involved with what she does. And if there’s any doubt in anyone’s mind about who we’re doing with, we’ve got __ by associations that is incredibly cool and successful entrepreneur. And I didn’t have to sit in front of the camera. I didn’t have to do that. She’s done it all for us. She really sells the site. So simple things like that could make a huge difference.

Andrew Anderson: I wanna bring up, perhaps for the last point here something for people who are following the 4-Hour Work Week or even people who are starting their business, and it was the fact that a lot of people, and I’ve ran into this. I know you and I, you have well have as well the fact that they have a great product or service and then they go through when they get their website up and it doesn’t get the sales that they think that they expect. And they think it’s the product or the service when the point in fact, it’s the website that sucks. It’s not the product or service. And it’s such a key component in being successful in business because let’s face this, as Bill Gates said, if you’re not online, you’re not in business these days. And that’s, it’s becoming more and more true everyday. So can you kind of address that and give us the whole wrap up on it?

Glenn Bridges: Wow, yeah. You’re dead on. In fact, I was just with ___ Andrew which is with somebody who we worked with. ___ called Sean who has just got his products launching in for the ___ market. And got these big guys, these heavyweights ___ really quickly and do some ridiculous stuff. Just type it __to YouTube. It’s fun to watch. And he is a perfect example because he said to me, my product hasn’t really selled any. Sold one or two. And it was really exciting. One sale. But the system was not growing. And what not. And just really doubting his own product. And what I see is so many people that have really good, great business ideas and products and models. It’s not always the product but the business that they wanted to do is fantastic. But the way they deliver it, they doubt what they’re doing because… the way I look at it, marketing is just communication and influence. You’re communicating an idea and then there’s a side of that which you’re influencing people to basically say, to make it easier for them to buy stuff coz they’ve made up a decision in their mind to wanna buy this. So they’ve got a problem and then you’re just using your own influence to persuade them why you have the best opportunity to solve that problem. And there’s just so many peel that are stuck. If you don’t believe me, just go on to the 4-Hour ­__ form, and just look at how many people say what you think of my site. What do you think of my product? What do you think of this? I’ve not seen many sales. And you look at them. And what they’ve got is, they’ve got a good market, they’ve got a good product but the vehicle they’re using to test them is failing. And in fact, I was on a conference call with ____ a month or two ago before the book launch of his new book, The 4-Hour Buddy. And people were saying, why do so many people fail with their ­­­____? And he said it was __ down to testing. He said it was all about the testing in the sense that people have good products in most cases but they weren’t able to communicate that and get that across. And he didn’t say it was the vehicle they were using but I believe he was hinting at it. And in my experience, it is down to that. And I know you had exactly the same…

Andrew Anderson: It’s the website. Website will make you or break you. And I wanna throw something else out there and maybe you’ll agree with me. I have never seen a super, super successful business run on a free website. It just will not happen. And if you are successful, if you get your act together and get together a good website, you can be five, ten, a hundred times more successful and get more sales by having a well put together website.

Glenn Bridges: It comes back to the ___ idea I gave earlier that whether you are selling something or if you want someone to do anything. If they see that it’s a free site and they can see that little logo at the bottom that says, this is a free website built by X or they know it because they’ve used it. It’s such a popular, well-known, free brand, people just don’t want to put any energy into it. And people, the way I look at it is that, people like you to make decisions for them because it takes so much energy and thought process to make a decision that most people are terrible at making them. If you have the entrepreneur mindset, you’re only very good and quick and fast at doing that. But some people would do and they just want you to present something that is well put together and takes away all of their objections and just say, hey, this is what I’ve got to offer. Now, if you put a doubt in someone’s mind and say, hey, here’s my product for fifty pounds or fifty dollars, or five dollars or five hundred dollars. And then they see you’ve got a free site? Well, that puts a doubt because if you’re making money, why would you not pay for that site? And if it’s not a good enough ___, why is it not invested? You don’t believe in your product? Is it not valued? Does it not sell? All these doubts __ someone and the thing is, and I’m sure you’d agree with me, Andrew is that this stuff happens so quickly in such an unconscious level that people, they are putting these sites together, they don’t even think about it. I think all that is just nothing when in fact, it’s happening in your customer’s mind and something that they’re not even aware of. They cannot even describe it to you. They just get an uneasy feeling. Some people will. Some people will say, I didn’t buy from your site because it’s a free site. Most of the time, the people will go, I don’t know. I just had this uncomfortable feeling. Or I just didn’t want to. I went to this other site and I used it there. So you can’t be using free sites. And to be honest with you, with the stuff that’s coming along, you can get a site out there that’s rocking it and doing really well and pumps out cash day in, day out.

Andrew Anderson: Yeah. And if people were gonna do that and I mean, as far as the baseline goes, there’s a bunch of different types of sites and I don’t wanna confuse people but there’s Joomla, and ___, and WordPress. If you’re gonna do anything out there, wouldn’t you agree that WordPress is the only option for people these days or the smart option that’s the least expensive?

Glenn Bridges: Yeah, absolutely. I think I’ve signed up to about in the past two years, thirteen or fifteen different services both paid and free. And that probably doesn’t sound a lot to most people. It might be a huge amount to some people but I’ve pretty much used all of them just to see what’s available. And WordPress has to be where it’s at. It’s moved, for anyone who says it was just a blogging platform, it’s not. It’s CMS. It’s a Content Management System. Everybody __ will tell you that. Everybody that’s running successful businesses online will tell you that. The people that will tell you it’s a blogging system and not CMS, are the people not making money with it. So just ignore that. Coz I hate that. Oh, it’s just a blogging ___. No, it’s not. It’s CMS. It’s Content. And what ___ is it’s a content management system and that’s any content that you want to put online, you wanna manage it. And sorry to tear away a little, Andrew but I think a lot of people, I see this as a pitfall for a lot of people is that, they don’t have their own concept management system and they just like have a website designer or they outsource it. And to any time they wanna make even the smallest of changes, they just wanna __ that to you ___ or put an exclamation mark in. they have to then pay someone or they have to get on the phone or have to email someone to update it. And if you’ve ever done that, that is just a pain. It’s just a drain.

Andrew Anderson: And you know what? When we agreed to do this interview, we should’ve set up a page where they can get more information on this. But I think maybe we can use the one page that you’re gonna use this weekend at your speaking event. Do you think it’s a good idea to give that out or should we do something else? And we’re not trying to sell you anything here. Just wanna give you the benefit of the experience that Glenn has and get them on the webinar that you’re gonna put in this January.

Glenn Bridges: Absolutely. Absolutely. We got some webinars coming up. Actually, a series of webinars. We got two or three lined up, Andrew. And that’s gonna be covering stuff like, how you built a successful profit website, how you generate traffic and all that sort of different things to it. We can definitely do that.

Andrew Anderson: Why don’t you go ahead and give them the URL and then I’ll do it in American accent in case they can’t understand the wonderful accent you have.

Glenn Bridges: Oh, you put me on the spot now coz I need to find that URL.

Andrew Anderson: It is www… And if you don’t know that by now, ___ you really should be on this call. But it’s launch as in launch a rocket and then brain as in what’s inside your head. Launchbrain.com/private. So it’s launchbrain.com/private. And there’s a sign up form, just put your email in there and we’ll send you out the info for the upcoming webinars. And there’ll be tons of free content in there. This is not gonna be a sales fest at all. I’m just sick and tired of a lot of the gurus out there that they con people into signing up for something and it ends up becoming nothing but a pitch fest and there’s no real value there. And I’m just sick of it. We’ve got the chance to really change people’s lives. Just the information that you and I talked about today, I don’t really see it being spoken about on the web anywhere. And it’s a shame because it can really make a difference from someone being successful, following their dreams, and having a wonderful life and not. It’s pretty serious stuff.

Glenn Bridges: It is. I’d really encourage everyone just to go to that website. Thanks for remembering what it is. There’s so many websites __ of my head, it’s important to ____ there. I think you’re absolutely right, Andrew. It’s provided there the event I’m going to and I’m speaking at tomorrow.

Andrew Anderson: And today is what, December 10^th so that everybody knows. So that’ll be December 11^th, 2010, right?

Glenn Bridges: Yep. Absolutely. ____ in the future. Hello, future ___. We know I’m providing an hour and plus web content for free and then no pitch, I’m not selling a single thing and then we’re throwing in some webinar for you just because it’s important to get this out there. I think you’re right, Andrew. There are so many people that are, I don’t see them talking about it. And sometimes that concerns me coz I think, well, am I missing something? The fact that no one talks about it, I think that there’s so many people that are profiting off of people’s ignorance. And there are website builders out there that are ___ they can just put something out there and send it and hope it works. And there’s that good old phrase goes, you don’t know what you don’t know. And you don’t know that.

Andrew Anderson: Where are you speaking tomorrow?

Glenn Bridges: I’m speaking at the Entrepreneur’s Boot Camp Xmas Bash. That’s the most snappiest name I’ve come across.

Andrew Anderson: Wow. Ok.

Glenn Bridges: I’m gonna ___.

Andrew Anderson: And where is it?

Glenn Bridges: It’s at ___.

Andrew Anderson: Don’t try and call them.

Glenn Bridges: You don’t really ever wanna come to this man. Don’t do it.

Andrew Anderson: You wanna come to the event but you may not wanna stay there. And then what time does it start?

Glenn Bridges: It started today at nine. And it runs for about nine till six daily. Starts today, tomorrow and on Sunday. So they got some people speaking but you’ve definitely heard of people like Reed ___, _____, Johnny G., Nick James, the list goes on. There’s about thirty…

Andrew Anderson: Glenn Bridges?

Glenn Bridges: Oh, yeah. And you definitely know who I am now.

Andrew Anderson: What time are you speaking again or where is it. I ___ to repeat it.

Glenn Bridges: I’m speaking at 6 pm tomorrow.

Andrew Anderson: So everyone’s got a chance to stop off a pint before they come see you. And that’s a civil time.

Glenn Bridges: It is. It’s a civil time. And I’m gonna be at the bar afterwards with my gorgeous girlfriend, Amy and a couple of her friends. So if you wanna come along and join me, I’d love to buy you a non-alcoholic beverage.

Andrew Anderson: Glenn, listen. I really appreciate the interview. This is long overdue. And we’ll have to pop off and do a couple more on this because it just got my mind going and on so many different fronts on this. And the basics are just too hard to find and there’s no reason for, because it’s just simple. Not that making money online is super duper easy, but it’s not as hard as everyone makes it out to be either.

Glenn Bridges: And the most important thing is, if you’re not covering those basics, just ___ stuff you’ve learned, you’re sabotaging yourself from the start. So it’s important out there for fundamentals.

Andrew Anderson: Yep. You’re shooting yourself in the foot. I know you gotta go get ready. Glenn, I appreciate the interview here. And hopefully everyone else got some content out of it. We’ll do another one shortly. And break a leg tomorrow on your presentation. I’m sure there will be some great stuff. And everyone, listen to this. If you can get a chance to… Now, this is in London, correct?

Glenn Bridges: This is in London, yes.

Andrew Anderson: I forgot to put it out there. It’s in London, England, December 11^th at the park in which you can’t call but Glenn will be speaking at 6 pm London time. And go check him out and afterwards he will buy you a non-alcoholic beverage if you’re nice to him. And what is really smart, I would buy him an alcoholic beverage and pump his brain because you’re not gonna be able to pay him enough to get the information that he’s got stuck in __ that we haven’t even gone over yet. Thanks a lot. I appreciate this and we’ll chat with you soon.

Glenn Bridges: Thank you so much, Andrew. And best luck to everyone on the call.

Andrew Anderson: Thank you. Bye.

Glenn Bridges: Bye.

I did this interview when this book first came out and I see that there a few people have picked on just how valuable this really is and are starting to teach it.  But, why not get it from the Horse’s mouth so to speak instead.

Get comfortable and take a listen to an interview I did with the author of the new book Personality Language.  Listen in as we discuss how using Personality Language can dramatically boost your profits.

This is a totally new way to reach not only new customers, but get a lot more sales from your existing customers.

I hope to have more chats with her about this mind-blowing new way to communicate with your customers and increase your profits.

We talk about how Personality Language and you will find out why you want to layout all of your Blog posts, Sales Letters, and Information Products this way if you want to have the most success with them and become profitable.

Marilyne Woodsmall and Wyatt Woodsmall, who are Human Success Modelers  wrote  this as a primer to introduce this new way of thinking.

While you may not have ever heard of them before, I can bet that you have heard of, or seen on TV, or on the Internet, or read the books of some of the many people that either one or both of them have coached.  People like Anthony “Tony” Robbins, Eben Pagan of Internet Marketing fame (if you have never heard of him before, under the pen name David DeAngelo who sells over $20,000,000 of Dating eBooks and Advice on the Internet every year and doesn’t even have a published “real book”) , Joe Polish of Piranha Marketing, world-class Marketer and Joint Venture specialist extraordinaire, and finally a host of Olympic Athletes and Coaches that brought home oodles of Medals, and quite a few other people that you have heard or seen as well.

Again the Woodsmall’s don’t go out of their way to mention them as they don’t like to talk about the people that they have worked or are working with all that much. It is just the way they operate, and I can respect that.

The only reason that I bring these people up is help you give some weight to what I am about to share with you.  The folks that I mentioned have used what they learned from Marilyne and Wyatt to help make themselves tens of millions of dollars and to achieve success at a world class level that very few people are ever able to obtain.

Part of what those individuals did to obtain those ultra-high levels of success was to Leverage, with a capital L, what Marilyne and Wyatt gave to them to propel themselves to higher levels of success faster than they could have done on their own.

Now imagine if you had access to that same type of information that you could use to Leverage yourself to those ultra-high levels of success and profitability?  Now you can.

Take a listen and let me know what you think.

Press the play button and find out how to improve your sales with Personality Language.

1.mp3

Or you can download it here Marilyne Woodsmall Interview.

Click below on the book cover to order the book and type in 21 to get a $5.00 discount.  I can’t recommend this book enough.  It is a game changer.  I will also be posting other interviews with Marilyne and Wyatt as soon I can talk them into giving up more information.

Even if you don’t buy the book, go and sign up for their newsletter at www.PersonalityLanguage.com as it is well worth it.

This is an interview that I just did with Dave Olson over at HootSuite which is one of the best tools you can use for Social Media and your business.

They just released a team collaboration tool to manage a Businesses Social Media that frankly, just totally rocks and you need to get it.  I allows you to have several people use your Social Media and collaborate while limiting permissions.

Below the interview, I have  a video showing you what it can do.

If you are using not using this great Social Media tool (and it is free) and your competition is, at least you will now know why you are losing your customers to the them!    I am sure the blog will get hammered so be patient while the audio loads!

You can download the interview here in MP3 format.

Below is a raw transcript of the interview.  I wanted to get this posted ASAP.   HootSuite really gets it unlike so many companies out there.  Keep an eye on them for sure and go get HootSuite for criminy sakes.  Here is a link,  HootSuite.

Hope you enjoy this!

Cheers,

Interview of Dave Olson with HootSuite by Andrew Anderson.

AA is for Andrew and DO is for Dave of course.

A.A: I’ve got Dave with HootSuite on the line here, and of course this is Andrew Andersen. Dave, you want to introduce yourself and let everybody know who you are and what you do?

D.O: Yup. My name’s Dave Olson, and I work for HootSuite as the community director. I oversee all the marketing and support related task as well as spend a lot of time out just spreading the message to our passionate user-base.

A.A: I happen to be one of those passionate users, which is why we’re having this conversation today. I’ve noticed that you’ve got a really cool product that is honing in on businesses, which really need to use Twitter, and I’m just gonna kinda let you go off on your riff and tell us about HootSuite, and tell us why you think Twitter is good, and go for it.

D.O: What HootSuite tries to excel in is using Twitter and other social media platforms within groups – It’s all about the teams for us. And really, from the very first iteration, HootSuite was built to solve the problem of how do you manage multiple Twitter accounts with multiple editors. It kinda came out of that agency background. But as we built this product, we’ve listened to users and really saw where the future trends are leading, which is more social networks – people don’t just hang out on one. It’s not either or with Facebook and Twitter, it’s both in most cases, especially so in marketing. But now we’ve taken it a step further to create a context of owner and team members. Which allow groups to control their different social networks at a very granular level where they can have owners, advanced team members, and basic team members – they can all be created ad hoc so you can create a group around a topic, a project, a client account. All without revealing confidential password information which is really great especially considering the transitory nature of a lot of work environments where you might have interns or people moving on, people changing jobs, changing departments, and so on.

A.A: Right. And the value of that account is becoming higher and higher as more people depend on it too.

D.O: Oh, absolutely. We find, by listening to what people are talking about out there – and I spend a lot of time on the road talking to agencies and enterprises, and consultants and so on – they really think of HootSuite as a destination. This is their dashboard that they open up first thing in the day, even before their email, to listen to the pulse of what people are saying about their pertinent brand names out there. It’s tremendously important, and I would say, to businesses who aren’t using Twitter yet, even more so that talking to the people, it’s even more important to be listening to what people are talking about right now about. They’re talking about your brand even if you’re not listening. If you’re not involved in the conversation, you’re not getting in front of potential PR disasters, and you’re not out there prospecting and gaining more customers by being out there, listening to the people, and responding and reacting to their comments. [00:02:58] your own company, but certainly your competitors as well

A.A: And it can if you’re out in front of it, and I just wanna give a real brief example: I had made a Twitter comment, I’d used a product that I wasn’t happy with. They’re well known, I don’t wanna mention them in here. I made a Tweet about it, and I wasn’t being mean about it, I’ve learned never to do that because I have problems too, and I don’t know any company that has these issues but they had seen the Tweet, I had the CEO and their VP of marketing get a hold of me within 15 or 20 minutes of that and take care of the problem. I was amazed. And I’m not sure if that could have happened without Twitter and everything else

D.O: No certainly not, and I think where Twitter is really powerful is in its limitations. The whole ‘It has to be a short message’ allows you to digest these little dim sum sized morsels really quickly and respond and react to them. When sending an email, which just gets lost in the shuffle and people write an email and there’ll be 6 different topics in there – so it’s like “Oh geeze, I can’t respond to all of this”. But if you can fit something into 140 characters, usually it can be answered in a fairly straightforward manner. So it kinda creates this back channel into the offices all around the world of these people who [00:04:15] are very difficult to get a hold of.

A.A: Right. You’ve nailed it ‘round the head. What happens is it’s the ultimate in direct marketing. You have to be very precise, as you said, to get your message out there so that it’s understandable.

D.O: Yeah, and I think direct marketing sometimes has this connotation that it’s very indirect, it’s kind of spreading the message too far and wide. Now with Twitter by setting up a listening column and HootSuite for example, where you can listen for everyone talking about llama feed because you’re in the llama feed business, And every time you see someone saying ‘I have to go feed my llama’, or something to that effect, you can be chiming into them saying “Hey, I’m interested in your llama’s too. [00:04:56]. How many do you have?” When it comes time for feed, they’re more likely to contact you. Although I don’t know what the shipping cost is for llama feed across the country, so I should probably come up with a better example – maybe fly fishing.

A.A: It doesn’t matter what it is though. It doesn’t have to be a world away. That conversation could be taking place right in your community, and you would never know about it without twitter.

D.O: Yeah, absolutely. People do forget about the power of – and you see this a lot with tweetups and such where it’s local people. People that might be working just down the street from each other, or hanging out at the same coffee shop, all of a sudden are able to build relationships because they have this Twitter tool, this social media tool sort of bridging that divide of awkwardness that sometimes is between we human beings.

A.A: Yeah, absolutely. It’s obviously added a few zero’s to your guy’s bottom line. It can do that for anyone else too. I know it has in mine, in my consulting business, and everything else that I do. It’s absolutely added a complete zero to our profit this year.

D.O: Bear in mind too that HootSuite is a free tool. While there’s a premium version of the mobile versions for both Android and iPhone at $299. There’s also free versions for Android, iPhones, there’s the web version which is free, enjoy it. And there’s also three flavors of standalone applications that a lot of people don’t realize. People that are accustomed to using a standalone Twitter or social media tool, and they prefer that rather than running it in the web. There’s some versions that you can run it as a standalone application too, and at this point there’s no cost for any of those.

A.A: And $2.99, you don’t mean $299, right?

D.O: No, no. Although if you do want to pay $299, we’ll make sure that we spend the money to feed the developers tasty beverages on a Friday.

A.A: Ok. You’re talking about 2 dollars and 99 cents.

D.O: That’s correct.

A.A: Ok. Just wanted to make that clear for everyone else. What’s amazing Dave is, and we had this in our brief, previous conversation – I don’t know what your numbers are as far as penetration of people actually using Twitter for their businesses. But in my own experience in dealing with clients, I would say it’s really less than 3-4%, if that high, are really using it to their full advantage. It’s kind of amazing.

D.O: Yeah well a lot of companies get on and they don’t think of it holistically involved in their whole marketing and outreach in public media relations strategy. They think of social media as the red headed stepchild that’s sort of stuck in the corner. Sometimes within companies, they sort of randomly assign someone to manage this stuff. But really, this is just another tool in your marketing tool kit and once people start understanding the power of listening and talking in almost real time. It gets over that ‘Oh this is just a fad’ phase real quick if they do it right. The problem is a lot of people sign up for an account, they’re just using Twitter Web and they’re spending their time thinking about what to write rather than how to listen. When they do write, it’s talking about something like – maybe sending out a coupon offer, and they’re talking about themselves, when really you have to be out there building relationships which means talking about what other people are interested in. It’s not about being transparent; it’s about being translucent and sharing the interesting bits about you and your company.

A.A: Very well put. You guys definitely have a handle on it. It’s a powerful medium and I think that if a lot of companies would spend half the money that they spend on PR and advertising, and put in a social media like Twitter and everything else, they would get 10x return they’re getting now.

D.O: [00:08:46] return with spending 10% of the money. When I talk to people who are heavily invested in this kind of traditional advertising forms. I’m like how many people converted because of that billboard ad, or how many people converted because of that radio ad? And those numbers are really hard to quantify, whereas using Twitter and using HootSuite specifically with our onboard statistics, you can see immediately what Twitters generated clicks, how many clicks there where, where the people came from, and kind of the long tail of that – well there was a whole bunch here in the first couple hours, but look at that, it kept on going for another week. How many people re-tweeted that message – it’s real easy to find out. You can very quickly and efficiently generate metrics to justify the success and adjust your campaigns to fine tune them based on what you find is really working and what your audience is responding to. With a billboard once it’s up there, you can’t go in the next day and say “what we meant to do is”- you can’t do that.

A.A: Absolutely. As you said, you can track the links. If you set up your link to specifically deal with those people that were coming in from Twitter and the other social media, you can further leverage that as well and measure it. It just takes a little bit of common sense to get that put together.

D.O: Yeah, and if there’s some analytic stat geeks listening out there, they probably have discovered our custom URL parameters. It’s one of those features that we added, that we’re really excited about. This maybe 2-5% of our total user base understands or cares what this is. But this allows you to attach a whole bunch of information to your shortened URL that will tell you specifically what campaign, where it was sent from, who send it, and so on, so you can really slice and dice and compare – well what kind of conversions did we get from Twitter messaging as compared to Facebook messaging as compared to Myspace messaging, and you can slice and dice those statistics by campaign, which is a great way to turn in reports to your client. Or else for your internal use to hone your tactics. It’s a really powerful tool.

A.A: Can I rephrase what you just said? What he basically just said was “It’s gonna help you make more money”.

D.O: Yes. And spend less money to make more money.

A.A: Exactly.

D.O: And spend more time chilling out because rather than experimenting over and over and over again, you figure out real quick which platforms are working for you, which time of day is the best time to send messages out. You’re not caught in a spiral. You can adjust each campaign very specifically and very deliberately.

A.A: Very well said Dave. I know that you’re in on a tight schedule now. Do you guys track those metrics that you just spoke about? And do you guys have some ideas for that? You don’t have to give me all the information now, maybe perhaps we can talk again because I’m sure the audience is gonna be interested in this.

D.O: In other words, do we eat our own dog food?

A.A: Yes.

D.O: Absolutely. Like this morning when our new release came out, I had everything staged from yesterday to blog posts and the releases, and the videos and all the stuff goes out at a certain time. All of us here in the office, the developers included, released it, because it’s kind of a big deal, they’ll be able to keep an eye on all the conversation and all the chatter going on about HootSuite. Various terms about it, certainly we look at what people are clicking through, where people are coming from, and so on. Mostly the main thing that we look at is the sentiment. Who’s excited about it. Who’s talking about it. Who’s sharing it with their networks. What people are writing about it. We know about that kind of stuff in real time because we pay very close attention to it.

A.A: Good deal. As far as I can tell and as far as my use, it is the best social media product that I know from a business standpoint. And that’s why I wanted to talk to you guys, and I wanted to get the word out there. Great job on the new release there, it’s a fantastic tool. Everybody that’s listening or reading this definitely needs to go and get it. And the price is right, Dave.

D.O: The price is indeed right. And if anyone out there has ideas for features that they’d like to see added to HootSuite, we have a feedback channel: feedback.hootsuite.com

You can go there and put in your ideas for new features. Plus you’re allocated a handful of votes so you can go apply to other features that other uses have suggested that you’d really like to see on HootSuite as well. It’s another tool we use to pay attention to what the community cares about and where the passion is. I encourage you to use those tools.

If you need a little help getting started, check our help desk. There’s all sorts of ways to get in touch with us to get a helping hand to get you rolling with this tool.

A.A: I can attest that HootSuite is very responsive. I’m definitely impressed.

D.O: We try our best anyway.

A.A: Dave listen, I really appreciate you taking the time to have this chat. I know it’s gonna help a lot of people get their act together with social media, and hopefully get a bunch more users for an absolutely fantastic product that I can’t say enough about.

D.O: Appreciate the call and to all the HootSuite users out there, we truly appreciate your support of our product. And to all that aren’t out there using it, give it a try and I think you’ll be pretty happy.

A.A: Alright, thanks a lot Dave.

D.O: Bye for now.

A.A: Bye.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Cheers again,

What did you do good today? What are you thankful for?

Click Here to download an MP3 of this post.

Have you ever gone through the day where you feel like you are running behind the 8 Ball and it feels as if someone is pushing you in the back making you about trip and to top it off, you are busy as all get out yet, at the end of the day it seems like nothing got done or at least got done as well as it should have?

Well, would you like to find a cure for those days?  If so, I am going to share one with you right now.  While I have picked up basically this same cure or technique if you will from several people including Napoleon Hill and others, what reminded me of this more recently is listening to a guy named Dan Kuschel.

While you may not have heard of him before, these questions are what drives his whole $60 Million dollar business on helping clients answer virtually these same 3 questions that I am about to share with you.

1. What am I grateful for (OK, I use thankful)

2. What have I done well today (OK, I is use do good. It is a take off on a Texas saying, What do you know good? Texas talk for how are you doing and don’t tell me any negative BS)

3. What am I happy about

As Entrepreneurs and business men and women it is far too easy to fall in the trap of running 3 miles a minute and always being concerned about what did not get done, what needs to get done, and what you did not do right.

Well, do yourself a favor and stop for a few minutes and I would like you to do something that may seem kind of out there, but I guarantee that it will make things go smoother for you and can add to your profits. And this can happen rather quickly.

Because you can have all of the tools and everything set in place for your business, but unless you get your inner game right, you will not recognize or you will blow one opportunity after another until you do.

OK, while this system is pretty simple, I am willing to bet you are not doing this on a daily basis right now are you?  Oh yea, I forgot to tell you that this is not going to cost you a dime.

What you need to do is to write down or type out the things that you did good today or did well today.  You are not allowed to say “nothing” either, nor anything negative.  Seriously, spend some time and write down the things that you did well.

Next thing I want you to do is write down what you are thankful for.  I don’t know about you, but I am thankful that I woke up breathing this morning.  A whole heck of a lot of people didn’t.

I am thankful that I live in the US and not in about a million other places around this big world.  I am thankful for the fact that I can make a living typing this on my bedroom floor and finishing it up at the kitchen table.  I mean how freakin cool is that. Seriously!

Just think, 30 years ago being able to do this was only a pipe dream in a few techies and Science Fiction writers minds.

You can come up with some doozies yourself.  Spend 10 minutes writing these things down.  Stop and do this now and then come back here.

If you are like me, you are going to want to keep reading but really, stop and do this and come back here.  Just to give you a little incentive. I am going to write the rest of this in a white font.  To read it you will have to highlight it with your mouse.

OK, well, it was worth a shot. I tried it and it was too hard to read   I would probably have highlighted it right away as well.   For those of you that did those two exercises I want you to spend a few minutes and take a look at all of the items you wrote or typed.

I don’t know about you, but this kind of puts a different perspective on things doesn’t it?

We have a tendency to let things that did not go well overwhelm the things that worked out just fine.  Now here is where it can get as woo woo as you like.

First off this exercise is going to give your subconscious mind something positive to chew on instead of negative.  And since that puppy is always thinking about something 24/7 anyway, you might as well take control of it. Most people never do and this can give you a huge edge.

Then there are many, many people out there that are convinced that once you learn how to be thankful for the things that you do have, the Universe will bless you with more.

And even though I did not put this on the the list as it were. After this, you need to include a list of what am I happy about today?  This one could even be the most powerful one of the bunch.

What a lot of people never realize is that Happiness is a choice, not a destination.  I dare you to chew on that one for a few minutes.

Are you going to choose to be Happy today and tomorrow and the next day?  If so, you more than likely will be putting more money in your pocket.  Not to mention you will be more likely to attract more cool people into your life that can help you. I mean who really wants to hang around a grumpy negative one?

As I mentioned before, try it. It really does work. Whatever you ascribe it to, I have seen this technique work numerous times without fail with some amazing results.

I will leave you with these two questions.

What do you have to lose by trying the technique for a week or better yet, 30 days?

What are going to do good for yourself today?

Cheers,

Andrew Anderson

I have made a recording of George Washington’s original Thanksgiving proclamation and also Thanksgiving wishes from me.

I have also included the transcript below.

Cheers,

Andrew Anderson

Happy Thanksgiving!

Washington  you can download it as an MP3 here.

George Washington’s 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation

Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me to “recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:”

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquility, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enable to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand, at the city of New York, the 3d day of October, A.D. 1789.

G. Washington (his actual signature)

Shortly after the Thanksgiving Proclamation was written, it was lost for 130 years. The original document was written in long hand by William Jackson, secretary to the President, and was then signed by George Washington. It was probably misplaced or mixed in with some private papers when the US capitol moved from New York to Washington, D.C. The original manuscript was not placed in the National Archives until 1921 when Dr. J. C. Fitzpatrick, assistant chief of the manuscripts division of the Library of Congress found the proclamation at an auction sale being held at an art gallery in New York. Dr Fitzpatrick purchased the document for $300.00 for the Library of Congress, in which it now resides. It was the first official presidential proclamation issued in the United States.