Understanding Invoice Terms Example for Public Relations

Invoice terms example for Public Relations

[Music] whenever you get into a new business is extremely important that you understand all of the terms that the people use when operating in that specific space that's why we chose to start the paper call masterclass by reviewing a glossary of terms not only for paper calls specifically but also general business terms so that you have a handle on everything you need to know to have a conversation with the players in the space I wrote these loss or results the top of my head and so I'm telling you this because I want you to understand how important it is to actually know this material and to be able to use it in a conversation when you're working with people people in this industry will judge you by how you communicate specifically so it's very important that you understand not only pay per call terms but sound like a business person when you're having these conversations with people I've done this list in alphabetical order and so we're going to start from the beginning and go all the way through to the end and I chose to wrote up write out all the terms for you so that you can read along while I read them back to you so hopefully that your comprehension will be increased third party a third party is a company or other entity that is a service provider or partner but not wholly owned by yourself or whoever you're talking with for instance we use a third party CRM to track our sales data and that means that someone else makes that CRM but we use it so it's a third party ACH automated Clearing House an electronic funds transfer system in the United States designed for bulk batch processing and payments typically used by companies for sending large volumes of regular payments to vendors this form of transfer is not immediate and can be recalled and I think that's important to understand because most people think an ACH deposit is permanent but it absolutely is not most ACH transfers can be charged back for a period of 60 days so you always need to be careful when accepting an ACH payment from someone that's not a completely trusted party or artificial intelligence the ability of a computer to mimic human cognitive skills such as learning and understanding openly most people that are claiming their company is using artificial intelligence are absolutely full of the vast majority of technology out there right now is simply a machine learning model that does very simple tasks to mimic human behavior however most most of these companies don't actually have artificial intelligence and it's a really big buzzword that's used all over the place right now analytics the process of collecting interpreting and communicating meaningful patterns and actual insights from data that means we're going to take a bunch of data wherever we get it from and we're going to crunch it and figure out conclusions from that data we're going to figure out why that data is meaningful and important so that we can use it inside of our businesses for instance we're going to look at call logs in this course and we run analytics on those call logs to figure out where there are problems and we can make improvements analytics is very powerful thing and you're going to absolutely need to learn how to use analytics to push your business forward a ovie or average order value the average value per order over a period of time like a week or a month this statistic is used when planning for future sales or working with partners that are performance based and so basically we're going to take months worth of sales and look at how much volume was done in dollar amounts to maybe a thousand dollars and we did a hundred sales and so the average order value is ten dollars per set ap Accounts Payable this is the department responsible for paying bills and sending payments to clients vendors and partners so if you're working with someone and they owe you money you're most likely going to have to deal with their accounts payable Department to get them to pay you API is an application program interface and that's a set of protocols and tools for building software applications so for instance ring ba has an API and that allows our right applications programs and other pieces of software that integrate and interact with our platform to achieve a desired result and so you could make an application that pulls your reporting data or maybe you can make an application that controls where your calls go depending on specific information or maybe you want to integrate with our ping tree API which allows real-time bidding for calls as you're generating them and selling them to other parties they are accounts receivable this is the department responsible for making sure all funds owed to the company are received and so if you owe a company money you best believe you're going to hear from their accounts receivables Department because they're going to want to collect those funds arbitrage is a business practice that involves taking advantage of a price difference between two markets and so this is a term that's used a lot media buying it essentially means that you're going to go out and buy clicks for 50 bucks and those clicks may or may not turn into a hundred dollars worth of convergence and so what you're doing is arbitrage in the difference between costs and payout to achieve a profit and that's in the best case scenario a lot of media buying ends up in a loss and that's not an arbitrage that's just the loss ar-are is annual recurring revenue and that's a measure of how much recurring revenue a business can expect every year typically used by companies that sells software subscriptions and services and so basically what we do is quantify the amount of sales we have on a monthly basis and convert that into annual revenue so if you did a hundred thousand dollars last month in sales you could say that you're doing 1.2 million dollars in annual reoccurring revenue asset something that holds value or generates a profit on behalf of yourself or your business or it can also be a human asset which is called a cultivated relationship where value can be extracted and so in the terms of what we're talking about in this masterclass an asset can be something like a website or a Facebook page or a list of phone numbers or something that has value intrinsic to you that you can use to create revenue for your business and generate a problem attrition rate the rate customers cancel their reoccurring billing or abandon a product and/or service so if you have a product that has a monthly fee to it which a lot of pay per call buyers do the attrition rate is the number of customers that cancel that product or service on a monthly basis and then you quantify that into a percentage and you want to calculate that for every single one of your traffic sources or every single one of your publishers to find out which customers last the longest and cancel the lease b2b business to business this is what a business sells to another business directly b2b campaigns are typically harder but are also typically larger have higher commissions and so when you're selling to someone who's a business owner typically they want to spend more money or the products and services that they're looking for cost a lot more and so a b2b sale is typically worth a lot more than a b2c sale so b2c is business to consumer and this is one of business sells directly to a consumer so maybe they're selling auto insurance or maybe it's a restaurant or literally anything that's sold to a consumer is a business to consumer set bi-weekly payments these are payments that are made every two weeks typically payments made on a bi-weekly basis are made as bi-weekly net 7 which means the funds do for those two weeks will be paid seven days after the closing of the billing period so you have two weeks worth of commissions and you're paid that those commissions seven days after the close of that two-week period so you're getting paid twice a month but there's a seven day delay on each of those payments big data this is the process of working with large and complex data sets with the goal of finding meaningful patterns so similar to analytics big data is for crunching huge amounts of data so maybe you have millions and millions of clicks that you've received through a tracking platform over a period of time you're going to do some big day to work crunch all those numbers and figure out where there are patterns inside of your data so that you can take those patterns and then monetize them in unique ways brand the overall perception of a company in the eyes of consumers or their specific customers some brands don't sell the consumers but they're absolutely brands and so if you think about brands on a global scale companies like coca-cola or Google or Dell have created an amazing worldwide brand and this is your goal whatever building a company is to do a lot of printing to make sure that people know who your company is and they have a good solid feeling whenever they see your logo or interact with someone from your company or one of your products brokering this is a business practice that facilitates the transaction between a buyer and seller in exchange for a commission and so basically a broker as someone who wants to buy something and also knows someone who wants to sell something and they facilitate that transfer and take a margin in the middle and so maybe they buy for $10 sell for $15 they keep five dollars and that's a broker and so whatever working in the paper call space you want to get rid of the brokers and get as direct as possible with your buyers if you have the capital to do so because whenever you're direct with the buyer you typically make more money and so brokers don't necessarily add a lot of value they do business development they facilitate payments but in general they're just trying to make some profit without necessarily doing a whole lot of work business intelligence these are the strategies and tools that a company uses for analyzing business information and so whenever you're running a business you might have as much business intelligence as possible and that can be intelligence and information on the market you're working in the type of campaigns you're running traffic sources you're working with you just want as much information as possible about the niche that you're working in so that you can have competitive advantage over other people typically the more you know in business the better off you're going to be and if your competitors know less than you you're doing a really good job and you can leverage that information for competitive advantage and put your company in a better situation than your competitors cash flow the flow of revenue into your business on a monthly basis and that doesn't mean profit it just means the amount of money that's flowing into your business on a monthly basis and so if some people are going to brag about having a ton of cash flow but cash flow is essentially a vanity metric it doesn't mean a whole lot in reality the most important thing to your business should always be profit without question a chargeback this is what happens when someone disputes a billing transaction the return of funds to a consumer initiated by the issuing bank of the instrument used by a consumer to settle a debt that's a complicated that's a complicated definition for a chargeback essentially is when a consumer is not happy they call their bank cancel a transaction and the company that sold the product or service is on the hook for that you can dispute a chargeback a lot of companies do the sometimes hard to win but it's very important that you understand that anytime you'd upset the credit card there's a risk that someone will charge back the transaction and you'll lose money from it so that's why fraud controls are very very important and later in this course we'll talk more specifically about these types of situations churn rate this is the rate in which users leave the platform or service and so if you sell a service that has monthly billing component say like auto insurance your churn rate would be the percentage rate of users that leave you on a monthly basis out of your portfolio and so if you have a 10% churn rate on a monthly basis 10% of all your customers are leaving you for whatever reason talks these are your cost of goods sold and this is the final cost of your product when they arrive to you as finished goods so if you take into account all the manufacturing costs for all of the infrastructure costs of the call center for instance all the management cost shipping if it's a physical product telecommunication services if you're a call center just every single cost that's required to actually complete a sale that's your cost of goods sold so in paper call a lot of companies selling over the phone don't necessarily sell a physical product so their cost of goods sold are going to include their phone bill their labor of people answering the phone their telephones their breakage of equipment their taxes and everything required to keep employees in place to answer those phones and a laundry list of other off that drive into their cost of goods sold collaboration when two or more parties work together to realize a goal and a lot of people in the online marketing space called collaborations a JV or a joint venture it just means two people or organization are working together to come up with something of value to people that people will purchase collections is the process of pursuing payment for outstanding debts so very simply if you don't pay your bill chances are you're gonna get sent to collections and then you can understand this sermon intimately because people like to be paid Commission compensation based on performance typically for selling a good or a service on behalf of the company and if we're talking about pay per call specifically it's a commission earned for every single qualified phone call that someone answers the phone for it meets all the conversion criteria so if you have a phone call go to a call center maybe they're on the phone for 20 minutes they qualifies as a commissionable call you're going to receive your payout for that call and that's your raw commission contracts are a formal agreement between two or more companies that's enforceable by law at least in the United States if you enter a contract with somebody they have a way to enforce that contract if you don't meet the obligations that's what the legal systems for and I will say this that it is always extremely important to have a contract or an IO which is an insertion or order a very simple contract between you and everyone you're working with whether it's a pay per call network or a direct buyer or your business partner or a service provider or contractor an employee it doesn't matter in business every single party that you're working with you should have a contract with you should have an agreement with them and it should be in writing and the reason for that so everyone understands with the terms of your agreement are there's no questions whatsoever there's no confusion and everyone feels comfortable and if something happens and there is a dispute when working with someone you can go back to that contract and review it together and say look this is what we agreed to and it's much easier to have a business relationship there that doesn't end in a negative manner when you have a contract okay my dad always used to say to me that an honest man will give you a contract without question and he's absolutely right if you ask someone for a contract and they don't want to give it to you that's a really shady thing even if you know them well and so just always get a contract and cover your bases CRM is customer relationship management this is the software to manage consumed information and the sales process so at Rainbow we use the CRM to manage our sales process and that just means that all of our business development people log into their CRM they keep track of all their data and their deals and their contacts in there and that allows us to have a centralized resources keep track of everything that's moving through our business on a daily basis so as your business grows you're going to want to look into a CRM so that you can keep track of your team performance metrics partner information customer information you name it you want to keep track of everything and that's what a CRM is for a DBA that's doing business app and that's a government registration of a brand or a trade name that someone's operating under so to do business in the United States and many other countries you need to have a legal DBA you need to register your business with the government so you can open bank accounts and so you can legally transact business in whatever country you're operating in now also Google has some very interesting rules with call-only apps and they require a legal DBA to actually accept phone calls so you're going to want to learn how to file a DBA you can do it in your home state you can do it at the county level it's usually pretty cheap sometimes it's cheap is 10 bucks to get a DBA and so it's a very simple process you're gonna want to have one of these is an absolute bare minimum if you're getting into business an e-check this is an electronic transfer of money from one bank account to another you need to be a little bit careful with these especially if you're accepting each X's payments from consumers or people who owe you a sizable amount of money because each X like normal checks can absolutely bounce and they can be charged back and so there's risk associated with accepting and each other feedback this is the process of reviewing inputs and their corresponding outputs with the goal of improving performance so you get feedback from your customers you get feedback from your business partners you get feedback from your employees get feedback from your wife you get feedback from everyone you possibly can and then you've you that information and then you make changes to the way you're operating so that you can improve just about everything in your life frankly gdpr this is the general data protection regulation for Europe and this rate this is the regulation for simplifying data privacy laws in the EU and protecting consumers with severe penalties for non-compliance the gdpr has absolutely ridiculous penalties that you violated so if you're operating in Europe if you're taking phone calls in Europe or you have websites in Europe or just about doing anything that involves consumer data in Europe you need to understand the GDP our Google it you can read it it's like 118 pages long but there's a lot of great summaries on the internet with this information in it but you should at least understand the problems you can run into and the things you have to complete if you're going to operate in Europe this is not optional it can be very dangerous for the success of your business if you're not complying going direct the process of learning who an advertiser is and cutting out the middleman or broker and the value chain for instance if you're working with an advertiser at an affiliate Network and you go direct you would cut off the affiliate Network and then work directly with the advertiser now you should be aware that this typically comes with higher payouts and more profit margin but also carry significant more payables risk because most upstanding affiliate networks pay their affiliates even if the advertisers don't pay their invoice if you go direct to an advertiser where you do not have an affiliate network in the mail guaranteeing your path and so affiliate networks usually always pay faster than advertisers to barring some of the financial risk in the trap the transaction so by going direct you will most likely have to wait longer for your PIN and so I'm a big advocate of cutting out networks and brokers and situation because it raises your profit margin allows you to spend more money on acquiring users and that gives you a competitive advantage but it is more dangerous you are going to have to have more cash capital and you're really going to have to look into the buyers on the other to transact just because the paper call network or an affiliate network is working with an advertiser or a buyer does not necessarily mean they're a good one or they pay their bills on time so you always want to make sure that you know who you're doing business with they have checked their references talk to them and start slow so you don't end up in a situation where you have a really big invoice especially if it's your first one and then they just decide not to pay gross margin this is your revenue minus the cost of goods and advertising costs cut that gross margin is your revenue minus the cost of goods and advertising costs this is a really bad sentence cut here in gross margin revenue minus the cost of goods and advertising costs leaves your gross profit or gross margin so what we're going to do is we're going to take our revenue which let's say it's a thousand dollars and our advertising costs which were five hundred dollars and so our gross margin would be fifty percent or five hundred dollars gross revenue this is the total of all funds that come into your business during a specific period of time so if you did ten thousand dollars in sales this week your gross revenue this week is ten thousand dollars Home Services these are businesses that provide services to homeowners plain and simple and the reason it's in here is because this is an absolutely huge vertical for pay per call HR human resources this is the management of staff with an end goal of maximizing employee productivity satisfaction and performance and so I say employee satisfaction because it's important that if you have employees they're satisfied fulfilled love their job to work really hard for you a lot of HR departments are there to protect the company and specifically to worry about the company and not be employees but that's a different type of organization than I run so I don't truly understand how to build an HR department like that that's me as a toxic HR department so for the most part your leaders and people in your HR department should be maximizing employee productivity and maximizing employee satisfaction which leads to incredibly good employee performance incentive alignment this is when the goals and objectives between two businesses are in alignment with each other in a collaborative way when incentives align the likelihood for a win-win situation is hot for instance if you're working with a paper call network and they get a payout bump from their advertiser and they give you a payout because you're sending really good-quality traffic and share some of that win with you that's a win-win that means your incentives aligned and that's a really business relationship when you want the exact same thing as your partner that means your incentive to lie now when your incentives don't align when someone wants to do something that's good for them and not good for you that can be a dangerous situation you want to watch out for that in business and always make sure that everyone you're working with has their incentives aligned with what your goals are in corporation this is the process setting up an independent business entity and in the United States these can include seaports escorts LLC's and LPS limited partnerships all these different entity types are just different ways that you can optimize your tax structure and liability and so I highly recommend that you talk to an accountant and the lawyer before you go and incorporate not necessarily to do the work for you I think with or just googling the process yourself setting up a company is a very easy thing cost maybe one hundred two hundred dollars depending on which state you want to incorporate in but I highly recommend talking to an attorney and a lawyer first even if you have to pay them so that you can figure out which one of these entity types is absolutely best for what you want to accomplish an independent agent that's a third party that acts on their own behalf and so that could be a contractor an independent sales person for someone that works on their own behalf that isn't a w-2 employee of your company maybe they work part time maybe they weren't full-time they work independently and a lot of people in the performance marketing space especially on the sales type side are independent agents insurance a guarantee of compensation for a specified loss or damage in return for a payment of a premium and so when you get insurance you're simply paying someone monthly so that if something really bad happens to you you're covered and you don't have to worry about taking a giant hit insurance is also one of the largest verticals in the paper a call space and it's where of a lot of our clients make a lot of money there's essentially endless opportunity in the insurance space so it's a really good space to think about if you have some background in it or you understand it well to get started in pay per call invoice this is a bill sent from one party to another for money due and so anytime someone owes you money you should be sending them an invoice if they don't pay the invoice or they don't pay their bill this is a paper trail that you have so if you have to go to collect from them or go to court you have proof that you told them they owe you money for your contractual terms you sent it to them and it makes collecting that money a lot easier if you don't send out invoices because you're lazy or you don't know how to do it you can run into problems if you need to collect money because you need to show that you were communicating and you sent a bill to the customer okay it's super easy to do this you can Google free invoice generator takes like two minutes to generate an invoice just don't be lazy and make sure you send out all of your invoices to do all your paperwork jurisdiction the official power our authority to make specific decisions in a particular region or industry also used another way to say a country we have entities in a few jurisdictions or we do business in a few jurisdictions a lot of Americans don't really use this term a lot of foreigners do and so if they're like yeah I'm working in a few jurisdictions maybe they're running paper call campaigns in the United States and Germany and Japan I have no idea it just can be anywhere and it is essentially a country or a specific area that you're operating it KPI key performance indicator client KPI is a single metric used to measure and evaluate the performance and effectiveness of an organization a process or a business activity so if you're running a call center you have all sorts of kpi's you have KPIs for employee performance you have KPIs for conversion rate revenue all sorts of things and so a KPI can be anything but you want to understand what the KPIs are for the specific business you're trying to run so if you're gonna be a pay per call affiliate you need to understand the KPIs for that you know what a click costs where your conversion rate and what all the other kpi's are around what you're doing don't worry we're going to dive into those later in this program legal anything that's permitted are required by law and also the department that manages contracts and legal requests inside an organization so if someone says yes and the contracts legal they just me consented to their legal department liabilities this is the amount of outstanding payables and debt your organization has in any given period of time so if you're working with a whole bunch of advertisers and you owe them $50,000 you have $50,000 and accounts payable liabilities just the amount of money that you owe to other people for services that they've rendered to you licensed agents these can be any call center agent that requires some type of formal licensing through a governmental body or other institution so in the insurance face for instance certain activities require you to have a license by the government to sell insurance or in the mortgage space if you're going to be actually originating you're issuing a loan and your call centers involved with that you do need to have your mortgage license to be able to do it so licensed agents are a cool thing they actually give people of government a government pass to have basically a monopoly so if you don't have this license everyone else cannot participate in your business and so these types of government licensing are in place to create a wall around an industry and protect it and so anytime that an industry has government licensing involved you've probably conducted there's going to be a high transaction value a high profit margin and it's going to be a good business to operate in because it requires extra work to get that licensing at any time extra work is required it leads out a lot of people from participating in the space because yes and you may be surprised a lot of people in business pretty lazy and they don't want to do a lot extra work and so anytime you're willing to work for gain more information learn new things get licensed to new industries it provides competitive advantage for you that keeps other people out of your space local a business that operates in a specific and usually small geographic region so if you're talking about local buyers that could be someone that is working in the Chicago suburbs maybe they're not even in Chicago they're just a bunch of smaller suburbs on the outskirts it's just a way of defining a small geographic region and when you're working in a local region as opposed to a big profit margins are typically higher because less people are operating there that means that there's less competition and more opportunity and the only downside to working in the local space is there's typically less volume because there's less people doesn't mean it's not worth it but again it just means you're gonna have to put in more work to get the job done I love servicing local areas in business because the margins are higher and a lot of people just don't want to deal with it and so that to me it's a really big opportunity and we're going to be talking about how to build a local network of buyers inside of this course later in it and that's what I think is one of the most profitable ways to get into the paper call space LTV this is the lifetime value of a customer so the average value of the user after their know no longer a customer for instance the LTV of the user that spending ten dollars per month for six months is $60 if they do not risk your subscription after that six months so basically you're taking an average of all your customers how much they pay you per month and then how many months they're with you to figure out their lifetime value and then that allows you to organize your marketing in such a way that it's profitable so if you don't understand your lifetime value and you're billing people on a monthly basis you can't accurately drive your marketing campaigns if you're selling a product and you make 10 bucks a month maybe it costs you $25 to acquire that customer if you don't know your lifetime value is you could potentially be losing money for every customer you acquire mail forwarding service this is a mail service that's like an independent post-office box these businesses are not run by the government and typically provide other services like mail forwarding email notification when mail arrives scanning and shredding of mail and a whole bunch more stuff so if you're an affiliate looking to get to the paper call space right now and you're at home or you're young like a lot of the affiliates I know and you sit in your parents basement right now well guess what you're going to need you're going to need a mail for servus you have a legitimate address for your company you probably don't want that at your house you know what your parents getting a whole bunch of mail at your house then you have to deal with it these things are also extremely convenience if you travel a lot they'll scan all your mail and for you to email you copies of it they'll for it wherever it needs to go it's a really great way to have a business address without actually going out and getting an office also if you're going to send the email you have to have an address inside that email on the footer because of the can-spam act and so you probably don't want to use your home address if you're at home or maybe even your office address depending and so these mail forwarding services are absolutely fantastic for that they're cheap they're easy they're convenient and I highly recommend finding one there's there's hundreds of them out there margin this is the amount of money in the transaction that's considered proper for instance if you sell something for a hundred bucks you cost us 50 you have a 50% profit margin and your your profit is $50 so to calculate your margin in dollars you simply subtract your cost from your revenue to calculate your margin as a percent divided the dollar margin by the gross so if you want to know what your profit margin is on this example you're going to divide 50 by a hundred and you're going to get 50% 0.5 it's that simple and you're going to be able to want to do these transactions off the top of your head you're going to want to be able to calculate this very very quickly because you're constantly going to be reviewing statistics and internet marketing and your goal and reviewing those statistics is to understand what your profit margin is because if you spend $100 and only make 50 in gross revenue that's loss you need to be prepared to calculate these margins so that you can make sure you don't lose money a merchant processor this is a business that processes credit card transactions or other types of financial transactions on behalf of the business mr r this is your monthly reoccurring revenue if you sell a product or service that has a monthly fee so it's a measure of how much recurring revenue a business can expect every single typically used by companies that sell software subscriptions or services like insurance companies or ring but for instance anyone that charges things on a monthly basis you can use mr to calculate it and it's important to understand what your monthly reoccurring revenue is so that you have an idea of how your business is functioning if that is something you self negotiation this is the very important process of coming to an agreement over terms between two parties that are entering into a mutually beneficial relationship so we have a whole section on negotiation in this course but real quick negotiation is extremely important under no circumstances should you ever accept someone's first offer the first offer is almost never the best offer now some people do like to give their best offer the first time but you need to understand who those people are and you'll learn over time that some people just don't want to deal with negotiation and they do other people as their partners and so they just make solid offers the first time but that's pretty rare and even if you're dealing with those people you can always still try and negotiate maybe they tell you know maybe they tell you yes but in no circumstance of business should you not at least attempt to negotiate if you're dealing with real business people they will not be offended if you try to negotiate with them so something needs to get really used to and if you're not if you're a person that doesn't do well with conflict negotiation is not necessarily conflict and you're gonna have to learn how to overcome that otherwise you're going to be at a significant disadvantage when working with just about everybody because everything in business is negotiation net margin net margin is the revenue minus the cost of goods advertising or any other overhead required to run your business so you take the cost of goods sold all the other expenses subtracted from your revenue and then you have your next margin your actual profit partner a net payment like net 7 or net 15 these are payment terms where one party will pay a specific number of days after a set pay period for instance monthly net 7 payment terms means that whatever amount is due at the end of the month it will be paid 7 days after the closing of that billing period so if you have your January revenue you're gonna be paid that on February 7th assuming it's net 7 or depending on if there's a weekend in there payments don't typically go out on weekends great companies pay people before and early though a lot of them end up ending late if there's a weekend in there and you should expect that you should never run your business so that you're expecting a single payment on a specific day and if that payment doesn't arrive your business falls over okay you should always assume that companies will pay a little bit later than they're supposed to that doesn't mean they always will so great companies pay on time every time without question but the correct way to view your payment terms is just to assume that people are going to pay you late so that you have enough capital that you're never gonna run into any issues especially in the affiliate and paper call spaces net revenue this is the amount of money left over after you take the gross revenue and subtract all the costs of doing business essentially the same thing as net margin non-payment burn or getting burned the term that is used quite a bit in our industry money owed to a business that has not been paid and I cannot stress this enough guys make sure you know who you're doing business with have references asking the ring but communities if anyone's done business with the people you want to do business with do your own research if you do not do your research you prepay someone someone owes you money and they don't pay you're probably not going to be able to collect it if the amounts small if you're talking a couple thousand dollars it's too expensive to sue people over a couple thousand dollars to see people get burned all the time and it's their fault the information you're looking for is available on the Internet references we'll tell you how it is to business with people you just need to take the time to not be lazy and make sure you're working with good business partners MPs for Net Promoter Score net promoters this is a method of determining how loyal customers are to a product to brand and so it's a survey that goes out you ask people how satisfied they are in the generated Net Promoter Score an NPS score when you're working with the call center these terms may be thrown around because NPS scores are tied to specific agents and so a lot of call centers keep an NPS score in an agent to see how good the agent is or in general overall on their traffic streams so if you're a publisher and you're sending calls to a buyer and they do an NPS scores specifically on your traffic they're going to be able to compare your NPS scores to other traffic sources NPS scores to determine how quality the consumers you're driving off and this is a great metric to look at make changes to a campaign and then increase quality and you know a lot of pay per call networks don't keep track of this type of stuff a lot of buyers don't either but the really good ones do and when you find the ones that do it's important that you get this information because the higher quality your traffic is better your calls are the more negotiating power you have with them desk for higher pass onboarding this is the process of introducing and familiarizing and employee your client with the company's products or services and so when you're working with another company and they talk about their onboarding process for a new partner they're just simply talking about the process you have to go through to start working with them operating expenses these are the expenses are required to run a business not including the cost to your goods or advertising okay this should simply be overhead what what your costs are to keep the lights on the internet on the rent pay your employees taxes insurance all the stuff you need when you're running the business and you don't need all those things at first but as it grows these things become you add all those together and there your operating expenses opportunity cost when running a business you have to be careful and precise about your time allocation opportunity costs the cost of your time and energy focused on one task when it could be focused on another for instance if you're spending three hours a day making banners for your advertising campaign instead of doing business development you can outsource that function to someone else cheaply reclaiming those three hours the time you spend missing out on opportunities because you are too busy is the opportunity cost and the more successful you become the more you realize that your most valuable asset is not money it's not your skills it's not your material possessions and resources it is simply your time and so you become very sensitive to opportunity cost and as you grow it's important to think about this throughout your entire life you know what's the opportunity cost to spending six hours watching Netflix when you're trying to start a business well that's six hours you could be hustling while your competition is sleeping and so or or doing something else and so it's very important that you start to value your time as an asset and once you understand what the value of your time is then you will be able to deploy it better outsourcing this is the process of finding labor sources outside of your home country or maybe in your home country typically avoiding tax liabilities and government requirements the global labor force also works at a market rate and is cheaper than labor in first world countries so websites like upward for instance are amazing for outsourcing you don't have to pay people taxes you don't have to worry about their payroll tax you don't have to worry about keeping them on staff there's really no law whatsoever you can fire them any time you want wherever most people are it's typically typically cheaper than hiring someone in the United States now you get what you pay for and sometimes outsourcing is not a good way to do things for instance with rainbow we decided when we started the company we would never outsource an engineer we would only hire senior engineers that come from big companies and have a ton of experience no one directly out of college and definitely no one overseas in third-world countries without the education or the know how to actually build software and so for us that's an incredibly expensive process but again it allows us to build the world's most sophisticated call tracking software so there's pros and cons however if you need to have some banners done for your advertising campaigns you need someone to do some web research to fill out a spreadsheet just about anyone on earth can do that if they have some basic skills those are the type of things that you should be outsourcing so you get your time back and so if you think about it how much money be made well if you make a hundred grand a year you simply divide that by 52 weeks a year five days eight hours a day if you're working a nine-to-five maybe 16 hours a day if you're hustling real hard you figure out what your time is worth and then if you're making $50 an hour you shouldn't be doing processes that you can outsource for $6 an hour it's just simply a math equation and so it goes back to opportunity cost and this is something that you absolutely need to think about especially as you grow your business now I do want to say that times it's just faster and easier to do things yourself for instance I'll occasionally edit a website or write a little code or maybe change a banner or maybe even edit a little video in the paper caller show if it's just going to take me 30 seconds as opposed to finding someone to do it giving them instructions sending all the files if it's a real quick thing that's okay to do yourself and sometimes it's super convenient so these are the pros and cons of outsourcing and are important to weigh when you're thinking about your opportunity cost payables this is the amount of money owed from your organization to clients and vendors of any given period of time so it's the amount of money that you owe to other people for services they've rendered came in terms what are the terms this is the criteria that must be met in order to receive payment or the criteria that has to be met as and pay someone else so what are your payment terms maybe their monthly not seven maybe their weekly net seven maybe their net 60 or maybe payment terms means that you'll only be paid if you said calls from specific geographic regions or cause to meet specific quality quality requirements above or a payout bump is asking an affiliate network or pay per call network or affiliate manager to bump your payout when you want more money for a conversion you should always ask your affiliate managers to raise or bump your payouts for any campaigns you plan to run for long periods of time or that have substantial volume okay affiliate managers will typically bump up any payout when asked without much resistance but they won't do it unless you ask they guarantee you know if the loop is gonna hit you up be like hey your traffic's awesome let me give you more money for no reason no they're gonna let you run the campaign they're gonna leave your payout exactly the same and then you keep sending traffic the only reason you're gonna hear from that is that you dial the traffic back or there's an issue and if you don't hear from them after a few days or a week and there aren't any issues you should hit them up and immediately tell them hey I see you like my traffic looks like it's good quality haven't heard from you listen I need a payoff up and we'll talk more about that in the negotiation section but you should absolutely positively always ask for a payoff on every single campaign you run ever when you're doing online marketing no exceptions always ask worst case scenario they tell you no and if they tell you no tell em how you need it anyways don't give up be relentless keep asking for it because they have margin they can give it to you it's not hard for them to do it and typically an affiliate manager doesn't even need to go ask their boss to do it and so you need to take advantage of that information and get yourself more money you're the one doing all the work anyways if you're an affiliate PCI compliance PCI DSS these are the payment card industry data security standards these are a set of standards that were created to increase your controls around credit cardholder data to reduce credit card fraud and essentially they mean you can't store payment data it all has to be encrypted you need to use a vault and so if you're selling a product or service and you're accepting credit cards you either need to work with a company that's doing PCI compliance for you or you need to understand PCI compliance reason this is in here is you'll hear PCI compliance thrown around I'm talking to call centers because call center is taking credit cards over the phone a very high risk for banks and so you're going to hear these terms thrown around if you're ever working with the buyer that accepts credit cards over the bump platform fees these are the costs associated with using any type of software platform so if you're a ring bit customer our platform fees may be a monthly fee may be usage for minutes or phone numbers but is just the fees that we charge so when someone says what are your platform fees or what are the platform fees you just know they're the cost associated with using some type of software platform a pl box is a post office box this is a mail box set up to receive mail at a government post office that can be used for personal or business uses they don't look like an office they say Keo box on them if a company won't accept the Pio Box address you need to get one of those mail forwarding addresses we talked about earlier but a lot of businesses run out of a PA box so you don't have to your home address if you were top PR this is public relations and that's using the press to distribute information about your business driving customers and name recognition okay PR is not a marketing plan unless you have the background and are extremely experienced I want to repeat that press and public relations is not a marketing plan if you're running a business or you want to build a business unless you know exactly what you're doing and you're highly skilled and public relations you should not be thinking that press is a business plan if you watch Shark Tank people say yeah I got all this press it was in the news it's great well the news doesn't work for you and the moment they don't care anymore is the moment your marketing dries up so you cannot rely on PR to actually drive sales in a business unless you're an extremely good professional okay today's meeting of cycles runs in periods of hours not days and it is complicated to hold their attention long enough to get repeated exposure and that's why in this class you'll notice that later on we have lessons on all sorts of marketing online marketing offline marketing television marketing radio marketing but you will not hear anything about public relations beyond this point simply because you can't control the output so don't waste your time on the input prepaid this is the practice of paying for a service or product before receiving or using it and so if you're working with a call center and you've built up a reputation as an affiliate that directs quality calls in a paper call fashion especially if that call center of business is overseas you're gonna want to receive a prepayment you want to be prepaid for the phone calls so that if they receive those calls and decide they don't want to pay you you're not left holding the bag sometimes if you're working with a new call center they want to assess quality I'm a big advocate of sending you know maybe 10 or 15 free calls you set up the campaign in ring Bay you divert a few phone calls for that new call center it's nice and easy to do it's entirely automated you put a cap on it give them some free calls builds goodwill it makes them happy they can assess your quality and then you demand the free payment but either way get your payment first if you're working directly with a buyer whenever possible paper call networks are not going to prepay you unless you already have an incredibly awesome reputation to the industry and they're trying to earn your business from somebody else so make sure they working with highly reputable paper comm networks cuz they're gonna pay you after receiving the calls privacy this is the right to withhold or provide personal information privacy is a big deal data privacy is a big deal if you are collecting consumer data you want to make sure that you're handling it with care you don't have any issues with that data you want to make sure you know exactly where it's going and exactly how it's being used for and so you want to keep consumer data private you don't want to give your employees access to all your customer data you want to keep everything siloed so you don't have any issues profit this is the money left over when all business expenses has been paid profit is the reason we're in this guys we're here to make money and profit is that money you make when you have a business that's running efficiently rates this is the cost of using a product or service so for instance when you're talking about ring bow we have telecom rates per minute rates per phone number rates it's just the cost associated with using a specific product or service receivables this is the amount of money due to your organization at any given period of time and so it's all the money that's owed to you from all the people that owe you money those are your receivables registered agent this is a responsible party registered with the government office responsible for receiving communication about a corporate entity so if you don't have your own office and you want to open up a company you can hire a registered agent who will make sure all the mail from the government comes to their office and everything is taken care of for you and so registered agents are amazing I highly recommend that you use one if you open up a company especially if you don't know what you're doing they're not that expensive some of them are a hundred dollars a year and it's just super super cheap way to make sure you have a legitimate address and that all your paperwork is headed to the right place and you get all your government notices retention this is the ability to retain servers over a specific period of time when you're talking about your retention talking about how long customers stay with you or maybe employees employee retention is exactly the same thing how long does an employee stay with you after they start and so retention is a really good metric especially in the call center world talking about retaining your customers and retaining your employees both typically have high turnover in the call center revenue this is the gross amount of money that you receive whenever criteria is met so whenever your company has money coming in that's your revenue a rep share which is revenue share is when revenue is jeanna generated from a sale and split between two parties based on the total volume spent for instance if you received 10 percent revenue share when it for whatever products you stole on a website when you sell $100 worth of goods you receive a 10 percent 10 dollar commission excuse me and so in the pay per call world there are absolutely revenue share campaigns happens a lot in the legal space and that means you drive calls and when they actually sell something you get a percentage of what soul instead of a flat rate and so you bear all the risk in a rep share but you can make a lot more money that way if you work in specific verticals ROI that's your return on investment a marketing campaigns main purpose is to generate profit for a company client product or service being promoted it's important to calculate their profit regularly throughout the process and monitor at an ongoing basis by determining the campaigns are alive or the return on investment and so basically what we're trying to do here is see if I spend a hundred bucks did I make more than a hundred dollars all right that's my return on investment return on investment can be negative - in business nothing is for sure and you should always be prepared to lose a little bit of money every now and again failure is part of the process and so ROI can be calculated by subtracting your app advertising costs from the gross revenue and dividing the difference by the original advertising cost and multiplying it by 100 for the percentage ROI and so basically if you have $100 in advertising costs and you did a hundred and fifty dollars in revenue you get fifty dollars in profit and then you divide that out multiplied by 100 and your return on investment is 50% SAS SAS is software-as-a-service and this is a business model for software companies that charge customers on a reoccurring basis for access to their technology ring ba is the SAS platform we take care of absolutely everything for you you don't have to worry about installing software uptime nothing we take care of all of it and we host it you don't have to worry about anything but running your business and that's the beauty behind software as a service Siva is the single euro payments area and this is an initiative of the European Union for integrating payments and simplifying bank transfers in Europe so if you're working in Europe and you sell a product or service you can accept FIFA or SEPA Direct Debit and this is very similar to an ACH in the United States but you should also be very careful to see the transaction be easily charged back it is not permanent like a wire transfer it's a way to accept funds a lot of companies pay out commissions in cephus over in Europe company will pay you commissions and sefa but you want to make sure that you have your agreements in place so you never get any chargebacks service real simply is the business practice of providing specialized work in exchange for a payment so I do a service for you you give me money for that service it's how business works slack this is a cloud-based tool for communicating and collaborating with teams it's an awesome tool it's actually the only thing that's up on my screen right now is slack you get lots of notifications in it you can do integrations with it it's really amazing for pulling things together in your business and it's super easy to integrate with so when you start having a bunch of different systems in place you want to aggregate all your data get notifications for things slack is an amazing way to do it highly recommended all of our engineering teams and sales teams use slack for all Rimba notifications SMB this is a small to medium business so established businesses that are limited in scope and resources due to their size and requirements so small to medium business be a dentist's office a tow truck driver a single guy or it could be maybe some of that owns for LASIK centers but basically a small to medium size business not a fortune 500 not a global grand regional businesses or local businesses qualify as small to medium business spread this is another term for margin so if I spend $100 on clicks and I make a hundred and fifty dollars in commission my spread is 50 bucks and so a lot of people just say they're spread as opposed to their profit or their margins just another term for a start-up is a hipster term for a newly established business and so typically a startup was going to have some type of outside funding or working very fast to grow their business but it is essentially just a business tax liability the amount of money you owe to a government for taxes during a specific taxable period of time so if you run a business and you have a profit that's a great thing but you have tax liability of oh the government money for the profits you made so I will assert that it's extremely important that you have an accountant and someone to take care of all your taxes a lot of affiliates and new people that get into the online advertising space do not take the time to do this and I highly recommend that you get some advice you find yourself an attorney you find yourself an accountant maybe you don't use them immediately but you develop that relationship so you can ask questions and then you pay your taxes okay just do it be an adult pay your taxes contribute to society make sure you have no issues I've seen far too many affiliates not take care of this and then they end up in a bad situation don't do that save your money pay your taxes get professional vice tradeshow this is an event for businesses and individuals involved in a particular industry to network and so I will tell you this I have made tens of millions of dollars simply by showing up at trade shows my business partners I met at trade shows my best friends I met a trade shows the vast majority of business I've conducted in my entire life is from trade shows and the people I needed them it allows you to shake people's hands show them that you're real show them that you're serious and create relationships and when you create a relationship with someone by showing up in a trade show they're willing to take a risk on you so if you're new and you're trying to get into the paper crawl space you don't have any connections you don't have a lot of traffic maybe you have nothing and you're just curious and you're listening to me ramble because you want to understand how to start a business in this space the first thing you should figure out how to do it's get to a trade show ok I'll be at the trade show you can come up to me I work the booth every single time with my team it's that easy did you show up at the trade show shake my hand talk to me ask questions and that goes for all the paper call networks they're all there all the service providers are there the ton of other affiliates are there we pay for a lot of networking events we pay for parties bring Bo through to parties if the last trade show to get people together and connect them so that they can do business with each other and so I'm telling you right now if you have not been to an industry trade show it will change the path of your professional career it will change the trajectory of your business and so if you want to get into a business maybe it's not paper at all and you're listening to this you decide you want to work in lawn care ok or the cigar industry there's a trade show for it and your ass should be going to that trade show so you can meet all the players in the space develop those relationships and ask lots of questions because very rarely can you get the smartest people from an industry all in the same room willing to talk to you and teach you for basically free and so I challenge you if you haven't been doing industry trade show and you ask take business seriously you should be there I want you to find me on these marketing trade shows I want to become to me say Adam I came to the trade show because you told me to come to the trade show and I'm gonna say to you that's amazing how can I help you grow your business today and guess what we'll do we'll talk about that and maybe we'll make some introductions maybe we'll solve some problems that you need maybe you'll get that piece of advice that takes your business to the next level but you will never know unless you show up and so if you get anything out of th