A Better Way to Outsource

I'm going to make this quick. I stopped using Elance for recurring tasks that I was hiring people to do. Yes, I'll use Elance again for specific one-off tasks, but not for stuff that is done regularly.

The Better Option: Hire Your Own Full Time Employees.
I'm now hiring people from the Philippines on a full time basis. Here's why:

• They speak and write in very good English
• They are hard working and want to do online work
• They typically have their own PC and a good Internet connection
• They can work while I am sleeping, and vice-versa, so things get done faster
• They are highly educated (often college degrees, etc)
• They are very computer savvy

I got started doing this because of what I learned from an amazing one-hour audio recording that I listened to a couple of months ago.

It totally changed my thinking on outsourcing forever. Prices? You can hire someone for as little as $200 per month, perhaps up to $400-500 per month depending on the skills you need.

Yes, I'm serious.

Go grab the audio recording that changed my thinking forever.

Get it now, seriously.

Testing graphical pop-ups for opt-in forms

I'm not artistic in the least. I have no idea how to make things look pretty. Yet I use aweber to manage my opt-in subscriptions from my website visitors, and it's important to have something better than a butt ugly opt-in form.

Lately I've been using the "lightbox" effect in aweber. For those of you who don't already know this, the lightbox effect allows you to drop a line of code into your main page, and then when visitors come to the page a popup fades gently onto the screen. It fades out the rest of the page and is usually not blocked by popup blockers. You can control how long of a delay there is between the visitor arriving and the popup coming into view.

So - here I am with these butt ugly opt-in forms and I'm wondering how to fix it. The solution? I hired a graphic designer on elance.

I ended up paying $50 to have 3 completely new forms designed for me, for use on 3 separate websites.

Everyone was bidding $50 per form. I got one guy who agreed to do all 3 for $50. When I sent him my requirements, he came back with finished work in about 30 minutes. I was completely blown away. So this guy was far cheaper than other bidders, but still is earning a very good wage on an hourly basis. I'm happy, he's happy and I now have found a a new (and very reliable) graphics guy that I can use on projects.

Here are a few tips for making nice opt-in forms in aweber.

1. Decide on the size of the popup that you are using. I use 520x400 for reasons I'll explain below.
   
2. Break the popup into two virtual chunks. I'm using 250-300 for the top and the remaining 100-150 for the bottom.
3. Hire a graphic designer to create the image that will fill the top "chunk". Tell him to make it 500 wide. Ask him to tell you the background color that he uses, because you'll need to submit that background color (HTML code) into the aweber form design tool.
4. Make sure he understands that the border of his image (the image he creates for you) must fade into that background colour. This is because the bottom "chunk" of your form will be one consistent color. Aweber does not give you a way to put HTML design into the bottom chunk.
5. What goes in the bottom chunk? The email field, name field (or other), and the submit button. that's it. Nothing fancy about it.

Ok why did I say to make your form 20 pixels wider than the graphic that you get made? Because it seems aweber automatically puts a little border around your graphic. This means that you'll get ugly scroll bars showing up if your form is exactly as wide as your image. So add 20 pixels extra (i.e. 520 wide instead of 500) and you'll be all set.

Split Test Your Opt-In Form

Make sure that you split test your new form against your old form. If you don't have an old form then just get your graphics guy to create two variants for you, with different text. Then create a split test in aweber (fully automatic) and monitor the results.

Aside from split testing the pop-up itself, also split test the time delay used to launch the popup. This is important. In my early test I notice that immediate popups (for my niche) are getting a better responce than a 5 second delay. But I will also be testing a 30 second delay, and a 45 second delay. Test test test ...

If you have not yet started outsourcing your work, you are crazy. I'm reinvesting a lot of my profits by hiring people on elance. It's very effective.

Update on elance

Ok - I have now hired two people on elance with great success. The first guy, "John" is finding websites for me related to my niche market, and then he emails the website owner a form letter that I pre-wrote. He just inserts their name and he copies me on the emails. I have him using a gmail account that is setup so that the sender looks like me (it shows up in the other person's inbox as coming from my domain directly).

John sent out 350 emails within a 20 hour block of time. Cost to me: $60. Unreal. I had dozens of website owners reply to me asking me to get a copy of my material to review, and several of them have become affiliates. This is the power of outsourcing.

Another elancer (unnamed), has been setting up online profiles for me at various websites that allow me to leave backlinks. I purchase a set of PDF documents each month with 80 links in them, and I give them to this elancer. I just don't have the time to do it myself. It would probably take me 10 hours to complete. I pay $48 for 80 website profiles every month. It's unreal how effective these folks are. Not everything is perfect from day one but if you are nice and provide friendly feedback, they will listen and correct their actions.

FYI, for the backlinking, I have moved from position 33 to position 13 as a result of these backlinks. Next month I expect to be on the first page of google.

This time around, elance is working out very well for me. I'm sure the ROI is absolutely massive.

Get a Great Microphone for Audio Porjects

This post was prompted because I was watching a video earlier where a guy was trying to sell his ebook + video series. He must have used something horrible to create the audio. When I decided to create my own audio course for parents, I talked to a trusted friend. He recommended the Snowball microphone. I did my online research and what I learned in these reviews was consistent with what my friend advised. I bought the Blue Snowball USB mic and have been *really* happy with it. For under $100 you will have audio that sounds truly professional. If you are going to do business online, you NEED audio (and hopefully video). If you want to come across as professional, the sound needs to be good quality. Get this mic.

The Outsourcing: Great Start!

So my assistant in India is now emailing all of the website owners that he found for me. In my last post I described how I'm outsourcing affiliate recruitment. I wrote a form letter to send to website owners and I gave my new virtual admin the gmail account login info to use. So it looks like I'm sending emails even though it's not me. I wrote the message and I don't feel back about outsourcing the mechanical part of finding sites and sending the message.

I'm logged into my account and I can see the emails that my admin is sending (because he copies me on every email). It's exciting. I'm paying peanuts for this (I think I'll pay him extra), and it's like having magic happen. Every minute I refresh my email list and I see he's sent out more messages. This guy is a machine.

Of course now I have to get back to *real* work. Watching him do his job is not very productive. But it is exciting to see results in the beginning.

Outsource Whatever You Can - Use Elance!

When you are building an online business it is important to stay focused on what you are great at. Time is precious, and other people are certainly capable of doing many of the tasks that you'd otherwise do yourself. Time is finite. Outsourcing matters.

I tried Elance once, with little success simply because I did a bad job of defining the requirements, and I did a bad job of making sure the candidate's feedback (and prior jobs) matched up with what I was looking for.

Today I'm back in the game. My product is related to the parenting market and there are thousands of websites on the planet that might want to promote it. The hard part is finding them and telling them about your product / affiliate program.

Enter Elance.

I posted a job describing my simple requirements. Search the Web for parenting-related sites where the owner looks more like an individual, not a large corporation. Mommy blogs, small web stores, consultants, etc. If the site has an opt-in form then I know they have a list they can email about my product. If they advertise other ClickBank products, then they'll be familiar with how mine is sold and how the affiliate program works.

I got 6 proposals in the first day. Hourly rates ranged from $3 to $8. I picked a guy named John, located in India. He had great feedback and seemed to understand what I was after. He had even done similar jobs (I read the prior postings) and he had delivered good results.

I funded him for 2 hours of "test work". His assignment was to find me relevant websites and put the URL + contact name/email in a spreadsheet. One day later he gave me a spreadsheet with 40 URLs, about 35 of which looked pretty good to me.

So I've now funded him for another 8 hours with instructions to email a template letter to all of the website owners, inviting them to be my affiliate. He should copy me on all emails. The mechanical part of sending emails is easy. My worry was that he wouldn't be able to identify the type of sites I was after. But he did well, so I am looking forward to his next 8 hours of work.

If this goes well then I've just solved my biggest problem - which is to recruit a few hundred people to promote my product.

If you are reading this and are an online entrepreneur (or offline, for that matter), you should go sign up for Elance. It is free, using it is free, and the benefits it will have on your life are enormous. Just go do it now.

The importance of tracking customer questions

This past week I've had a flurry of orders from customers, and these orders were driven by affiliates who emailed their lists about my product. Huge order volume. It's very exciting. But I have had a bunch of emails from customers.

The most popular questions I am getting are:

• "My download link expired and I haven't downloaded it yet. I need your help"
• "I downloaded it but I can't find it on my computer - please help"
• "I want to buy your program but I don't have a credit card, what can I do?"
• "I need these shipped to me but never entered my shipping address on the order form. Can you ship them to me?"

All of these questions are easily resolved, but it amazes me how many people don't realize I'm selling MP3 downloads, not physical CDs. It amazes me that customers buy a program and then do NOT download it right away (they email me several days later).

There are so many types of questions that I'm being asked. In the first few months my strategy is to deal with all of these questions personally. Afterwards, I'll write a detailed FAQ that will be sent to all customers as a link, contained within their "thank you" email. I'll show them how to make CDs by using iTunes, I'll tell them what to do if their download expires before they get around to using it, I'll tell them how to find the download on their computer, etc.

But the most important lesson here is to SAVE these emails from customers. They are important questions that I need to access later when building up a more detailed FAQ.

Use Wordpress for your site

I wanted to write a quick post to say what a lot of other people are already saying. I am using WordPress for my websites because it is easy to use, there are millions of people ready to do whatever I hire them to do (who understand WordPress) and there are a ton of useful plugins.

WordPress makes creating a website a cinch.

My use of WordPress involves:

• In all instances I set it up to have a "static" home page, and this is the sales letter
• I hire a graphics guy to do a great job making a header image and product images
• I use plugins for SEO, Google Analytics
• I use DLGuard to sell digital products.
• I use several page templates for squeeze pages, sales pages, blogs, etc. I learned how to make my own template just by editing text files for existing templates

WordPress is quite simply the only way to go for starting an online business. That's my opinion.

How to automate delivery of digital products to your customer

Hi Folks,

Ever since I started doing business online I have noticed that many of the typical problems that I've overcome, or questions I've asked (and learned the answers to), are repeated over and over in online forums.

One of the most common questions is "how do I sell digital products to my customers".

There are many ways around this, and may of them are third party solutions where you host your file somewhere else (not your website).

I prefer having control over my process. I use a product called DLGuard by Sam Stephens out of Australia. This guy has competitors, but his support is world class (I've emailed him for several minor things over the last year and he solved every problem and anwered every question perfectly. He rocks. No wonder everyone loves this guy in the Internet Marketing world).

Here is how DLGuard works:

1) You install it on your web host. The installer is dead-easy to use on any Windows PC (if yo uuse Mac, just use a PC for the install and go back to your Mac).

2) You do a brief setup that takes all but a few minutes

3) You login to DLGuard and start adding products. It supports ClickBank, PayPal, and all the major online vendors. So no matter how you sell your stuff, DLGuard works for you.

4) On your sales page, you paste the code that DLGuard gives you (product-specific) and this creates the "buy now" button, and takes the customer throught the entire sale process and download.

Some features that I absolutely LOVE.

• I can add "bonus" products. Say I have product A and product B. I want to be able to sell both of them, but if product A is purchased, I want the customer to have free access to product B ... no problem. I tell DLGuard that product B is a free bonus when product A is sold. This means that customers can still buy B separately. Beautiful!
• I can add "free" products. I might want to give away a PDF document as a lead generator. DLGuard supports this.
• I can add coupon codes so I can offer sale prices to my customers
• You can sell digital products from other websites that you run and manage all of the downloads through DLGuard on your "primary" website. This is an awesome feature.
  

There are so many benefits of using this software.

What does it cost? $127. Seriously, this is ultra-cheap for the value you get and the world-class support that Sam provides. Your risk is zero because it has a 60-day money back guarantee if it doesn't do what you expect (but it does!). Honestly, if you are serious about running an online business then you are nuts if you don't get a tool like this. After reading "The Four Hour Work Week", I knew I had to use something like this.

This was the best money I spent so far on my online business.

Now go checkout DLGuard's website, see the screenshots, read more about it and decide if it looks right for you. Just do it! Life won't wait for you.