Turn Leads into Customers ... Eventually

This week I ran a successful experiment. I made money from it, and I think it's easily duplicated (by me, down the road, or by anyone with a product and a list).

To set up the discussion, you need to understand that I sell an audio book, in the parenting niche, on Clickbank. I have loads of customers, but I also have loads of "leads" ... people who signed up for my freebie audio lesson but never pulled the trigger.

You also need to know that I've gotten smarter at using my Autoresponder (I use Aweber). I used to have no customer list. Duh. Now I have a customer list where I automatically move customers onto that list, and get them off the prospect list. This way, when I want to send out a promotion, I don't bug my existing customers.

So here's what I did this week. I took a product in the fitness niche (one that I know is really good) and I recommended it through a Blog posting. I told my readers that if they buy through my link, I'll make money from their purchase, and that I'll give them a copy of my audio course for free as a bonus.

Important: I sent that blog posting ONLY to leads that were at least 60 days old, because this way I was not interfering with my affiliates, and their ability to earn a commission from leads. It is not cool to rip off your affiliates, so never EVER do this to new leads. In the case of Clickbank, the affiliate cookie lasts 60 days, so I filtered my list to include only those leads who signed up 61 days ago or more.

So to recap, the idea was to give leads a way to get my course for free, provided they bought something else.

Here's the implementation and timing.

• On Wednesday I wrote up the blog post and published it. Then I emailed a short email to my leads pointing to the blog post. The blog post clearly said the deal was good until Sunday. So that gave people about 4 days to take action.
• On Thursday I sent an email only to those folks who did not open my first email. This capability is available through Aweber.
  
• On Sunday I sent a reminder email to ALL leads, saying "today is the last day to take advantage of the free offer".

What happened? I made some sales on Wednesday and Thursday. But Sunday was a much bigger day. It seems the scarcity principle really does get people to take action.

Just don't use fake scarcity. That's not cool. Scarcity must be real or you look like a real jerk (in my opinion).

My Filipinio Team is Driving Traffic

Here's an update on my last few outsourcing posts.

I have two people working for me full time in the Philippines. One girl is a content writer, and she is quite familiar with SEO, blog posting, etc. She writes articles that go on a few of my blogs. The other guy does other tasks that I need him to do, aside from writing (his English isn't good enough to write content).

Right now, this is is the workflow that I'm using to stay out of the way, yet reap the rewards.

1) My writer writes articles and uploads them to the project management software that I get access to for free by using this awesome service. She simply lets me know, every day, how many articles she's written.

2) My writer then submits them to my blogs. This doesn't take her long since it's really easy. I just set her up as an author on my WordPress blogs.

3) Once Google indexes the article on my blog, my other guy will submit it to Ezine Articles.com and the resource box will point to my blog, or my main domain, or inner pages of my website. We vary it.

4) Once EZA accepts the article, we modify the resource box again so that we can include a link to the EZA URL, then the guy submits the articles to a slew of other article directories. This way we get more backlinks to the site, and to the original EZA submission (boosting it's rankings in the search engines).

Right now we're using manual submission of articles, but I think we'll switch over to ArticleBot at a minimum. Otherwise we may try out Unique Article Wizard. Have any of you tried either of those?

Productivity-wise, I'm getting about 4 good quality articles per day from my writer. I expect that she'll be doing at least this many if not 5-6 as she gets to know the niche market even better.

Seriously folks - you can't afford not to go hire someone (or a team) to help you expand your business. Here's what I recommend: Go get this audio that explains how to outsource. It's life changing.

Progress Update on my New Content Writer

In my last post, I described how I hired a content writer out of the Philippines for what I expect to be a fantastic return on investment. Here's where you should go to learn how to outsource.

My writer has been working with me for 2 days. In that time, she has written 6 articles for me. You might be thinking to yourself, "Hey, 6 articles should take only one day!"

Sure, that's true. But here's the best part. She has been helping my other worker (who speaks less English) with his tasks. She understands SEO, blogs, wordpress, and other tools that he doesn't yet understand. She is on his time zone, and she's connected to him with Skype. So not only is she writing articles, she's training my other employee for me in an effective manner.

Even if you were to completely ignore the help that she's providing to my other worker, these articles are costing me $2.65 each at the rate of 3 per day. I'm only counting work days (M-F), not weekends. That's pretty good.

How is the quality? To me, the gold standard is what I have been getting from an American writer that I hired for other jobs. His articles were really easy to read and keyword optimized. He made zero grammar or spelling errors. So let's call that a 10 out of 10. He charged me 4 cents per word, so the average article ran me $18.

My new writer from the Philippines is easily an 8 out of 10. Easily. And I'm convinced she can become a 9 with some small training.

Why?

• She writes fluent English, with zero spelling errors
• I find only a few minor grammar mistakes per article (3-4), and I can literally fix them in under 5 minutes per article.
• She isn't doing perfect keyword optimization yet, but I haven't explicitly asked for this. Given her obvious intelligence, she will easily improve this.
• Her articles are useful and interesting. That's pretty important if you ask me!
  

The beauty of having 2 people working with me is that one can write fantastic content, while the other can do keyword research to figure out what to write about, he can also go post the articles to article directories, do social bookmarking, etc. They don't feel like they are alone because they are in the same time zone.

Just this morning I went online at 6:30am while having breakfast. They were both on Skype having a text conversation with each other to work out some minor problems. I joined the conversation to answer a few questions and then I went on with my day. Wonderful!

Should you hire someone?

If you are running an online business that involves content creation and mechanical tasks such as article submission, bookmarking, blog setup, etc .. the YES you absolutely should.

Can you afford it? Beginners ... you may not feel "ready" to take this step, but let me pass on some basic advice. You simply CAN NOT grow your business if you try to do everything yourself. You'll plateau. If you are making only $20 per day you can easily afford to get a full time employee in the Philippines. If you are not yet making even that small amount, consider what you are otherwise spending $200-300 per month doing. Spending it on beer? Too many dinners at restaurants? Wasted money at Starbucks when you can make better coffee at home? FIND a way to get the extra cash and get some help to grow your business. You'll be glad you did.

Outsourcing: I've Just Hired A Content Writer with Perfect English for $350 per month

I hope this helps someone. For a while now I've been struggling to find the time to produce great content for my online businesses because there have always been so many other things that need my attention.

I already have one full time employee in the Philippines, as described in this post. but he's not a content guy. He's a guy that will be doing keyword research, link building, article submission, and other mechanical tasks.

I decided to hire a 2nd person exclusively to produce content. I started the process literally 2 days ago and just pulled the trigger on a hire tonight.

The woman that I hired is also a Filipino and the writing sample she sent me was impressive. Of course you always wonder, "Did she really write all of it, or was it edited by a native English speaker?".

So I did a Skype chat with her. I purposefully did *not* speak by voice because I wanted to see how she communicated in text form. After all, that's how she'll have to work.

For a full 45 minutes we chatted by Skype. I made more typos than she did, and I didn't notice a single grammar mistake. Wow.

I hired her. $350 per month full time. I know I could have hired someone for less, but it's just not worth it to my business to nickel and dime people.

I the idea of doing this excites you, then you need to get over to this site RIGHT NOW so that you can download John's free 60-minute education on outsourcing. It's amazing. He has taught me so much. Seriously.