Doing Business Online

Do The Work - Free and Awesome Looking Book for Kindle

2011-04-11T07:03:00.001-07:00

Hey guys,

I just wanted to make sure you know that you can get this new book about marketing and growing a business for free until April 20th.

I was told about this by a fellow marketer who I really admire (Andre Chaperon) and I've already pre-ordered the Kindle version on my iPad.

You don't need to own a Kindle to get a Kindle book. If you have an iPad, iPhone, or even just a PC/Mac you can get an app that lets you read Kindle books on those devices.

Grab the freebie while you can. It looks like it's going to be a great book published by Seth Godin's "The Domino Project".

Here's the link to Amazon's Kindle edition.

Lessons from Recently Doubling my Conversion

2011-03-14T18:26:00.000-07:00

I've been dying to type up this post to you all because over the last two months I've made some significant time investments in one of my websites and it's yielded me a much higher conversion rate. In fact more than double.

Doing this involved regular sales copy AND a video sales letter which I'll explain lower down.

Nothing that I did is rocket science. But it did take work. What I'm going to do here is share what I did and give you a couple of recommendations for (very cheap and free) tools that I used to make it happen.

The first thing I did was totally re-write my sales letter. I felt that I had gained more insight into my customers wants, needs, problems and questions over the last year so I figured a sales letter re-write would help me boost conversion.

But how to know for sure?

I used two tools. The first is a free tool called Google Website Optimizer. This takes care of something called "Split Testing". If you know what that is skip this next section.

What is Split Testing?

I'll stick to the basics here, which is called "A/B Testing". Basically you create two landing pages that are different in some way. My difference was the sales letter text. You send 50% of the traffic to each version of the page and you measure conversion rates of each. You determine a winner through statistical analysis.

[End of explanation on that …]

So how do you do it?

First, go get an account setup for free at Google Website Optimizer.

Next, follow the instructions they give you for creating a new experiment and telling Google your two test page URLs, and finally the "conversion" URL. This would be your Thank You page (or your download page).

Google will give you some code to paste onto your two test pages and your thank you page. You can either do this yourself or you can have it done automatically on Wordpress with a very cheap plugin that I bought and LOVE.

When the experiment is running you don't need to do anything. Google drops a cookie on the PC of each viewer and tracks conversions (and the page that drove the conversion) automatically.

When I re-wrote my sales letter I patiently waited. I worked on other "stuff" while my experiment ran on autopilot. After a few weeks Google gave me the green light that my new page was converting 115% better!

Yes, it was the "holy crap" moment I was hoping for. It felt AWESOME to know that my hard work paid off. But without Google Website Optimizer I would be clueless as to how to get this done.

WORDPRESS USERS READ THIS

The plugin that I used was built by a great guy named Eric Transue. I bought it as a WSO a long time ago and finally started making a habit of using it. He recently put it up on ClickBank. It's like $27 and is really easy to use, which is why I love it.

I had previously tried at least two other plugins that did a bad job of interfacing with Google Website Optimizer. His works perfectly.

Here's where you can get it. This is my affiliate link, but if you want to look in the CB marketplace you can easily find his product which is called:

Wordpress Split Test Optimizer Plugin

(Yes, the testimonial that you see on his site is from me and I gave it to him without him asking. I like to do that with awesome stuff that I buy).

Ok. End of WP stuff. Back to the Story …

After I had doubled my conversion rate by re-writing my sales letter I wanted to FINALLY get around to trying one of those sales videos where the controls are hidden and the video just plays.

You know the ones I mean? Mike Geary uses this on TruthAboutAbs, and Ryan Deiss uses these on everything he does. They have those magic "buy" buttons that appear right at the moment they want you to know about their product?

Well, I made one of those videos and started testing it against my new sales letter. Currently as I write this email the test is ongoing, but the video is beating my re-written sales page by a nice margin, so it feels like I have another winner.

Anyway, the darn sales video actually took me two weeks to create. I had to analyze other people's sales videos, figure out the elements to them, and then figure out how to make it look good, record the video, upload it to my site, etc. Then I had to figure out how to hide the buttons.

I could have saved myself a lot of time by just buying the tools I needed in the first place.

TIME SAVER FOR MAKING YOUR VIDEO

First of all, there is a very good and very CHEAP product that I bought which breaks down the steps to making a video sales letter. It's also $27 (one time fee) and has a very simple customer login area where you can access the training. The vendor takes you through the proven steps to drafting and then recording a really good video sales letter.

I bought this 3/4 way through my 2 week project. If I had bought it sooner, I would have finished faster. Besides, this is ideal training to share with your employees in the Philippines! They can make these scripts / presentations for you and even hire you a voice over artist if you don't want to record the script yourself. Super easy stuff.

Video Salesletter Guru

AWESOME TOOL FOR UPLOADING AND MANAGING VIDEO:

Once I had my video recorded, I was frustrated by how hard it was (for me) to hide the controls and get it to look good.

I ended up buying something called Easy Video Player (EVP). I read some very heated threads on WarriorForum and as a result of my homework I paid $200 for the "commercial" version but the $77 non-commercial version will be fine for most people. At the end of this post I'll explain one thing that annoyed me, but it was minor to solve.

EVP has some incredible features such as the ability to hide controls, the ability to put opt-in forms RIGHT INSIDE your video and also to do the magic "buy now" button that shows up when you want it to show up. I'm just scratching the surface of what this thing can do. It also supports Amazon S3, which I've started to use because video requires bandwidth and I didn't want to risk crashing my server on Bluehost.

Easy Video Player

CONCLUSION:

It took me a lot of hard work to implement split testing and my new video sales letter. But not because the actual implementation steps were hard. They were not once I knew what tools to use. But creating my new sales pitch did take a lot of time and you can't really avoid that.

If there's anything I can get you to do it would be to focus on adding value to your business where you KNOW you are the best person for the job and you'll get high ROI for your time.

Then buy the tools you need to speed up the rest of the "stuff" such as split testing and hosting awesome "magical" video on your site (locally or using S3).

If anyone has ANY questions about any of this please comment. I'll answer you to the best of my ability. It was a hassle to learn everything that I had to learn to do this myself, so I hope I've saved you some time by explaining the process to you.

P.S. I said I'd tell you about one thing that bugged me about Easy Video Player. It's a forced continuity offer. When you buy the player you get automatically signed up to a $37 mastermind group. The first month is free, of course, as always. But I had to complete my registration in order to cancel that portion of my purchase which took me about 10 minutes of time. That bugged me. My advice, do NOT EVER do that to your customers. They will hate you for it.

P.P.S. I've started to get my Filipinos involved in doing videos (and video marketing) for me. I'm considering making a bonus training module on this that I would give to everyone who takes my replace myself bonus. Does this interest you? What are your biggest questions on video?

I've Created a Bonus for ReplaceMyself members

2010-07-23T12:59:00.000-07:00

After months of writing my own outsourcing tips, I've decided to compile many of them into a bonus package. If you are interested in learning how to outsource effectively, then you know I'm a big believer in John Jonas' outsourcing training. To encourage you to sign up (even if you just give it a try for one month), you'll get my bonus package.

Get all the details here:

Replace Myself Bonus Package

also you can read my Replace Myself Review.

Outsourcing: Selling on Amazon

2010-06-22T10:10:00.000-07:00

Today I wanted to whip up a quick post to explain one of the business models I've been experimenting with. And it is WORKING today, meaning that I'm making money with this model.

What I'm doing is:

Almost 100% outsourced
Scalable
Pretty easy to just pick a niche market and run with it
Requires almost no investment other than a domain, and outsourcing expenses

As I said in the title, I'm talking about selling on Amazon. Let me break down the process for you a bit so you can understand the details of what I'm doing (or should I say ... what I'm having my workers do for me).

The Strategy

The way to make money by selling on Amazon is to create product reviews that get seen by people who are ALREADY looking for products that you are promoting. By writing reviews and establishing backlinks to these reviews, you will start to get free organic traffic from the search engines. People will read your reviews, click through to Amazon, and order the product. It's very simple, but I've got a few ideas to help you make this even more effective.

The Simple WorkFlow

Pick a niche market on Amazon
Find a suitable domain name
Setup WordPress
Write product reviews
Write articles about the niche and submit them to article directories

Ok so let's break down each step with a bit more detail. Especially the promotion aspect at the end.

Pick a Niche Market

Don't over-complicate this. Just think about "stuff" that you would like to have your writer write about. Backyard sheds? Office chairs? Sewing machines? iPod docking stations? Toys for kids? It hardly matters but I do have some non-scientific advice.

Focus on stuff that you believe will be around for a while. Digital cameras and other techy stuff goes obsolete fast. I prefer to write one review and have it last for a long time. I like low-tech stuff for this reason.
Focus on stuff that is expensive. Amazon pays 4%-6% commission. But the conversion rate is very good, much better than clickbank products, or other digital goods. People trust Amazon. Add in a bunch of lower cost items to get your sales numbers up because you need to sell about 7 items per month to get your commission up to 6%. This makes a 50% difference to your income so it's worth doing!

Pick a Suitable Domain Name

So now that you've got your niche market, simply look for a domain. I follow these rules of thumb: 1) Keep it short; 2) Stick with dot com; 3) Keep it low key; 4) One hyphen in the name is totally fine.

If I was promoting backyard sheds, I would try to get backyardsheds.com first. Then I'd look at backyard-sheds.com. Before making a decision simply punch in your keyword into the Google keyword tool. Select "phrase match" instead of "broad match" and sort by volume. You might find that "backyard shed" is the wrong phrase. Maybe it should be "garden shed". I don't know! But Google will tell you. Also realize that Amazon gives things category names and they probably did some research when picking the category name. So just copy amazon. If they go with "backyard" then you should do the same.

When I first started doing this, I picked the niche and the domain name. Now I get my workers to take a first stab at it and I review their work before buying the domain or agreeing on the niche. But outsourcing this step helps save me time and they bring in good ideas.

Setup WordPress

Simple as can be. Get your outsourcer to set up WordPress using Fantastico or SimpleScripts. This is dead easy. I'm not going to spend any time on the installation, but here are a few points about the blog itself:

Use the THESIS theme. It's really easy to use, looks "ok", which is the point. You don't want your blog to look uber-professional. You want a "plain Jane" look. You want it to look like it was written without the intention of of "selling" stuff to people.
Post reviews as "pages" and not "posts".
Create a SIMPLE text widget in the sidebar. Use the headline "Our Reviews" and then list all of the product reviews you've done in the sidebar. That way they are all visible to anyone who comes across a blog post or page.
Get unique content by using the Unique Article Wizard Plugin for your blog. This will allow you to have related topics automatically posted to your blog and can help bring in traffic. You can then convert that traffic through the sidebar, and through the next plugin I'll recommend.
Get the WWSGD plugin (What Would Seth Godin Do). Configure the plugin to show at the top or bottom of "posts only" (not pages). Set it up so that it puts out a key message to blog readers along the lines of this: "Hey, Thanks for visiting. If you need a new Backyard Shed we absolutely LOVE this model here. Have a look at our review". This message will now show up to every blog reader for every article, and you can promote your favorite product using this plugin. If you use the THESIS theme then start a paragraph tag and put class="alert" within the P tag. This way whatever you write shows up in a nice yellow box.

Write Product Reviews

The actual product review should be simple to do and a full-time outsourcer should be able to do about 8-10 per day. The goal is to launch each website with about 20 reviews to start. This way you can decide which sites are successful, and go back to re-invest more time in creating more reviews.

Here is how I write reviews:

The Title of the review should include the product's full name. Remember that the title of your post will become an extension of the URL, and it sits inside an H1 tag, so it matters a LOT for on-page SEO. If the product is called the Super Deluxe Wooden Garden Shed then your title should be something like "Super Deluxe Wooden Garden Shed: Our Review and Customer Opinions".

Using a long title is better. Using the word "review" and "customer opinions" is better than using just one or the other. You don't know what people will type into Google so give yourself a shot at more traffic by using more relevant keywords to the potential buyer of the product.

The body of the review might look like this:

Product name: Super Deluxe Wooden Garden Shed
Best Price: $xx (over at Amazon) **use your real affiliate link**

About the Super Deluxe Wooden Garden Shed

Write some cool stuff here about the shed. Talk about it's size, what it is made out of and why it will last for a long time. Does it have a lot of shelf space? Make this 2 or 3 paragraphs.

Put PICTURES within the post. You can grab them straight from Amazon.com. Just save them as JPG and upload them to WordPress. Make sure they are clickable with your affiliate link! Don't miss this part.

Now at the bottom of the review put another heading:

What Other Customers Say About the Super Deluxe Wooden Garden Shed

"Paraphrase some customer comments here. Just take the short and important parts of various customer reviews" - Amazon customer

"Maybe include another review comment here. That's why we like to pick products with great reviews and lots of positive comments" - Amazon customer

Now we put another big yellow box to draw attention. use class="alert" within the Thesis theme to create this yellow box.

I would say something like: "Find out what other customers are saying and learn about free shipping over at the Amazon.com website" (make "amazon.com website" an active link)

Promote the Website with Articles

The final step to make money is to make sure you get traffic. Your content will already get you some traffic but you want to make sure you have links pointing to your root domain AND to each specific product review.

What I do is create a "resource box file". I start with one basic box like this:

"Learn more about backyard sheds at our website which reviews backyard sheds. You might want to check out our super shed review"

(the use of bold is there to show you where you'd make live links pointing to your root website and to specific product reviews.

So you create one resource box for EACH review. If you have 20 reviews, you make a file with 20 resource boxes.

Next, you have your outsources write a series of articles about your niche market. If your market is backyard sheds, you might write about "How to pick the best backyard shed for your property". It might be "Five Tips to Maintaining a Backyard Shed". Doesn't matter!

At the end of each article include ONE of your resource boxes. Submit to EZA and submit to your own blog. Do this until every resource box has been used so that you have links going to each individual product review using appropriate anchor text.

If you want to put this strategy on steroids, use Unique Article Wizard (UAW). I subscribed to this service because it was recommended to me and I'm really happy with it. I noticed an immediate spike in organic traffic as soon as we started submitting articles to UAW.

UAW costs $67 per month, but it is well worth it considering you can use it in an unlimited manner. Customers have to agree not to disclose how the system works, but I can share with you some facts. First - you write an article just as you normally would. Second, you go through a few hoops to add new elements to the article so that unique copies can get submitted to article directories. Third, the system can make use of your resource box file as I described earlier. This is a MAJOR advantage over any other article service.

Outsourcing and the Economics

The process of building Amazon review sites is easy to do and easily outsourced. I will skip any analysis of fixed costs such as web hosting and article services because I assume you'd use those no matter what you do online. Outsourcing simply adds more opportunity to USE those things you're paying for.

Say you hire one person to work for you full time. The typical rate I'm finding for Filipinos who write good english is $300 per month. For that you're getting a typical 40 hour work week.

It will typically take about one week to build an Amazon review site. I am counting on the following breakdown: 1) Blog setup is very fast, it takes about 2 hours if your worker creates a "recipe" to follow and does the same thing each time; 2) Reviews will take about an hour each assuming proper time is spent adding pictures, making active affiliate links, etc. So to create the site should take about three days. Then promotion will take another two days where your writer will write as many articles as he or she can in that remaining two days.

In one week you have created and promoted one site. Rinse and repeat. If we round down, then there are 4 weeks in a month. Cost to buy 4 domains = $40. Salary = $300. Total cost is $340. Cost per website is a mere $85

Now ask yourself this important question: If you follow this business model do you think it's reasonable to expect to sell 3-4 products over the lifetime of the site? Obviously I think the answer is yes, which is why I'm executing on this business model. I lauched one amazon review site two weeks ago. We've done bare bones promotion and the site has already sold over $1700 in product. At a 6% commission that works out to $102, meaning that the site has already become profitable after paying for the cost to build it (salary to my workers). There are zero ongoing costs to run this website. Whatever it produces in income is 100% gross margin.

My short term plan is to build 20 such websites. I expect 10-12 will be "successful" meaning that they bring in regular income every month, and the rest will probably either be total failures (unlikely) or simply breakeven over the course of the year and be inconsequential to my income. You'll have a hard time losing money using this method.

So here's what you need to do:

1) Hire someone by using ReplaceMyself - an awesome service.

2) Start setting up blogs with reviews.

3) Get the Unique Article Wizard to accelerate your promotion.

4) Get the Unique Article Wizard Plugin for to bring fresh / unique content to your blog.

5) Use the WWSGD plugin to promote your reviews from visitors that come to the blog.

Now go make money.

Awesome Result with WordPress Freelance Designer

2010-06-19T06:03:00.000-07:00

Over the last few weeks I decided that I wanted to make a dramatic change to the way one of my main sales pages looked. I had another website as a "model" in mind, and I needed to have my wordpress theme modified to match it.

I was using the FlexSqueeze theme and I wanted to stick with this theme, but totally change the navigation tabs, and build a custom template. I had NO idea how to do this. I also wanted a new graphical header for my site because the sizing would be different.

I posted the job on Elance. I knew this would take a skilled CSS/PHP/Wordpress guy no more than a day (full time) to do. I expected a price under $200.

I got Elance bids from $255 up to $450. I thought they were all charging too much.

So that got me thinking - how about I post it to OnlineJobs.ph instead? Normally I use that site to hire employees. I hire people who work for me regularly, full time. Not freelancers. But I decided to look for a freelancer this one time to see what happened.

I ended up hiring a guy named Franz from the Philippines. He did an AWESOME job on my project including the template, and a new graphical header. He quoted a price that was VERY reasonable and I ended up paying him 40% extra because he did such a good job within such a short period of time.

I told him that if I liked his work I'd help him find more clients. I can say I'm MORE than happy to recommend him. He communicates well, asks the right questions, does great work and listens to what you ask. I'll be hiring him again for other projects.

Here's his website:
http://www.zaf101creations.com

BTW I have access to OnlineJobs.ph because I'm a member of John Jonas' outsourcing system, which I've been absolutely thrilled with.

Unique Article Wizard Review

2010-05-18T12:59:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone,

A few weeks ago I took the plunge and signed up for Unique Article Wizard, a service from a company called Allegretto Publishing, owned by Dr. Noel Swanson.

I signed up on the advice of John Jonas, from ReplaceMyself.com after having a short email dialog with him about exactly why I should use it.

Why Unique Article Wizard
Basically, I emailed John to say "Is it really as great as you make it sound". He wrote back to me essentially telling me that Unique Article Wizard (UAW) is really the way that article marketing was meant to be done. He said it's article marketing done RIGHT.

That was enough to get me to sign up. Heck, it's not like I can't cancel if I'm unhappy and you'll never get anywhere if you are not willing to test stuff out, especially stuff that has been recommended to you by successful people.

So I signed up. I learned how to use "the wizard". All I can say is that I'm absolutely amazed with the quality of this product. They seem to have thought of everything. It's incredibly easy to learn, there are a TON of helpful videos, and they send you regular training material via autoresponder (which I simply forward to my Filipino employees).

Here's what I love best about Unique Article Wizard

I know that a unique version of the article will go out to each directory
I can get a unique version of my article at the click of a button and submit it to EZA, and other directories manually (ones that it doesn't submit to)
I can have a wide variety of anchor text used in the resource box, which is really important to helping your rankings
The wizard submits articles every day at a frequency you specify (the default is 50 submissions per day, which means it is usually finished in one week). This gives your link building some natural feel and flow. This is good.
It works! We're doing some initial testing right now and I've already noticed some long tail keyword rankings have improved quite a lot. If you write a few short articles and use specific long tail keywords in your resource box you will very likely see an improvement in traffic to your website (from those keywords) quickly.

What's NOT to like about Unique Article Wizard
Simply put - it takes more work. But this extra work has upside. Let me explain. I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement when I joined the service (as does everyone - done via the browser), so I can't tell you exactly how it works ... but here's something to think about.

Say I told you that you had to dig one hole every day and that you'd get paid a certain amount of money. It would take you an hour to dig the hole.

Now say I told you that if you dug 3 holes per day, you'd be able to earn 10x the income (or maybe more). The second and third hole you dug would take less time than the first. So your total time investment might be 2x compared to digging just one hole.

Would you do it? Of course you would ... or at least you'd pay someone else to do it for you! That, in simple terms, is the power of Unique Article Wizard.

Seriously ... it's worth using this service.

As far as outsourcing goes, I have two employees who are writing articles and submitting them directly into the Wizard on my behalf. I get them to send me their work, but I don't read everything (I simply don't have time). We're now submitting multiple articles into the wizard every day and I think it's an incredible benefit to my business.

Here's where you can go find out more

The "Magic Device" LiveScribe Pen

2010-05-08T09:57:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone,

As an Internet Marketer I am really interested in learning as much as I can to get better at outsourcing parts of my business. Lately, John Reese started his pre-launch videos for Outsource Force, which I expect will be a training program at $2k, when all is said and done.

Anyway, if I wasn't already a happy member of John Jonas' awesome program, I'd probably seriously consider John's thing.

So - I watched Video #2 last night and it was pretty awesome. John showed off a "magic device" that he uses to help him communicate ideas. I thought for sure he'd be talking about Jing software. But he wasn't.

Instead he was talking about the Livescribe 4 GB Pulse Smartpen. This thing is incredible! I ordered one online immediately (because of something else I already knew).

Here's the scoop: The pen actually writes on regular paper with regular ink. But you can record (as a video) everything that you write in digital format, and it also records audio and synchronizes the audio to what you are writing.

Imagine that you are trying to explain to your article writer how you want him to create links in resource boxes that point to your website, and to your EZA articles, using your focus keywords. You could simply make a little diagram on paper, talk as you write, and send the "PenCast" to your outsourcer.

Why I was convinced: I have a good friend who has one of these pens and he talks about how much he loves it. I had NO IDEA it would do video, I thought it was just for making PDFs of whatever you write, which seemed less interesting. But the video / audio sync stuff really sold me on it, so I bought one.

I can't wait for it to arrive! The article marketing example I mentioned above will be my very first application for the device.

You can get the Livescribe 4 GB Pulse Smartpen at Amazon.

Boosting Conversion with Google Website Optimizer

2010-05-03T17:13:00.000-07:00

For the last few months I've known with conviction that I needed to start doing more formal split testing. I've been hacking it by running a test, manually counting up my results, changing a variable, running it again, and comparing the results. Doing this takes WAY too much time and requires more organization than I have available :)

So today I finally figured out how to use Google Website Optimizer. Eventually I am sure I'll be doing multi-variate testing. But for now I'm just doing simple A/B testing.

What caused me to hesitate was that I didn't know how to implement it in WordPress, so I just had that learning curve to get over. Turns out it was pretty easy.

First, I took a squeeze page I already had and I copied it into another page in wordpress. I then changed the headline so it only had one difference from my control page.

Then I told Google Website optimizer that these two pages were my "control" and "variation" URLs. Google then gave me some code to paste on each page. Here is where there was some slight problem because the "control" page requires some code in the header of the page. In WordPress, usually the header is the same on all pages, so if I pasted the code into the header for the control page it would be present for ALL pages (including the variation page).

So ... I used the "templates" feature in WordPress. I simply made a copy of my main template, added the code to that page, and assigned that new template to my control page. Problem solved. The rest of the code could go in the body of the page, so it was unique for every page (not shared among pages like the header).

So now I've got an A/B test running and I'm thrilled with how easy this is. Google will tell me the winner in a few days after I have statistically valid levels of traffic on which to base a conclusion. I'm sending all my PPC traffic to these test pages so that I don't mess around with affiliate traffic. When I have a winner, I'll just set that as my new control and run another test.

Outsourcing will also help here ... I just realized I can add a member to my Adwords account, so I'll simply get one of my outsourcers to handle the testing and I'll throw in my test ideas. I already got him to do the Google Website Optimizer tutorials, so we're making progress here.

Here's what I recommend to people in terms of outsourcing.

Article Outsourcing Experience (This made me very happy)

2010-04-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

Over the last couple of months I've been having my outsourcing team build some new websites, and we needed to move on to the promotional aspect (getting traffic).

My main content writer is a woman from the Philippines. She's pretty good when she spell checks and proof reads her own work. But I had fallen into the trap of editing a lot of her work and I think that resulted in her seeing me as a "safety net".

Truth is - my goal is to NOT even have to read the stuff that she writes, perhaps other than a cursory skim of the content. After all, this has nothing to do with my primary online business (where I am the ONLY content writer), and I don't even want my own name on these other projects.

So I was spending too much time reading her articles and editing them to my standards and my "style" of writing. That was a clear mistake. I was doing this because the articles were going to get put into my EzineArticles account and I didn't want to risk my account.

The solution was really simple after I stopped to re-evaluate my way of doing things. I simply had her setup a new EzineArticles account for her to submit articles to. Now she is fully aware that I'm not proof reading them for her, but I have full visibility into the account. I'm also not taking any "risk" with my existing account.

Here's the result: We submitted the first 10 articles immediately. As you know, with EZA, you can't submit more than 10 articles at first. Well, I'm happy to say that of the 10 articles she submitted every single one was approved and the account was upgraded to Platinum instantly.

I read what she submitted. The articles were totally fine. Were they works of art? Of course not, but they were useful, grammatically correct, and they do their job of creating backlinks to our new websites.

If you are wondering about the cost per article, it's about $3 each. She's typically producing about 5 articles per day, and there are 22 average work days in a month.

I hired her from OnlineJobs.ph and I used John Jonas' program to learn how to hire people and train them. I also created a lot of my own training for my own specific needs. It's VERY easy to do and totally worth doing. In fact, you can't afford NOT to do this stuff if you want to succeed in online marketing.

Here's a post where you can get a free audio interview discussing outsourcing.

Review of Mass Outsource by Tyrone Shum

2010-04-08T18:18:00.000-07:00

Well today I had a chance to checkout another outsourcing program from a competitor to John Jonas. The guy is Tyrone Shum, from Australia. The name of the progam is Mass Outsource Mastermind.

I'm a (happy) customer of John Jonas and a member of ReplaceMyself, so I was curious what Tyrone would bring to the table.

First, let's look at the pricing. He's charging a similar price of just under $100 per month for access to a series of training modules. They get drip-fed to you weekly to keep you interested in staying on board for the program. Where he's a bit different is that after 6 months your payments STOP. You get perpetual access to his mastermind site even though you aren't paying any more.

People might not realize this but John Jonas offers a "Pro Outsourcer" package also that involves a one time fee of $697 and grants you perpetual access to his system. This is presented as a one time offer after you do your initial sign-up. This is what I bought (no recurring fees, ever). So the way I see it, Tryone is essentially matching John here.

Tyrone's videos are pretty good - everything is well explained. But that said, I feel that the content is essentially a duplication of what is inside of Replace Myself. I don't know enough about Tyrone to tell if he's "the real deal" or not. But I feel I know enough about John Jonas to say that he certainly *is* the real deal. So content-wise, I think the scale tips more towards John here.

John offers members access to MyProjectPlans.com, which is online project management software. Tyrone has come up with another website that does the exact same thing, using the exact same software (so I'm assuming it is available as something that can be licensed, or perhaps it is open source software). So he's matching John here.

Finally, let's consider how you can use Tyrone's system to hire workers. His video describes a good method for using OnlineJobs.ph to hire employees. This is where it gets a bit weird. OnlineJobs.ph is actually John Jonas' site. Unless you are a member of ReplaceMyself.com you are supposed to be paying about $50 per month for access to it. Tyrone is giving his members a way to login to the site using his own account. If I was considering purchasing this program I'd be a bit worried that John Jonas will cut off his account (and therefore cut off all of the members of Mass Outsource). That is, unless he's struck a deal with John to allow this. It's not clear to me what the reality is.

My personal preference would be to go with John's program - but I will say that Tyrone's content is pretty good, he communicates well, and he's probably done a bit better job organizing the content and providing tools such as a user forum (which I would like to see John ad). But I'm nervous about promoting Tyrone's program given OnlineJobs.ph issue I mentioned above.

Anyway - no matter what you think is the better program to use, I do encourage you to use SOME system. I like what John has, but I also will point out to you that Tyrone is giving away a series of 10 videos which provide some good content.

Here's a link to John's system
Here's a link to Tyrone's system.

Getting more qualified job candidates with less effort

2010-04-06T17:27:00.001-07:00

This post is about how I'm using video to recruit candidates. I learned how to outsource to the Philippines by using John Jonas' lessons.

I've decided to hire yet another writer, and based on my past experience in using OnlineJobs.ph I found that it was highly useful to actually post a job rather than to simply filter through resumes. I find that the people who reply to the job postings are usually very keen, so it saves time having them come to me.

That said, I get a LOT of replies to my job postings that are one-liners such as, "I'd like to apply for this job, here is my resume at OnlineJobs.ph". I'm not interested in spending the time to look through everyone's resume, decide whether or not I need to contact them to send me a sample of their writing, confirm with them what their availability is, etc. That's a lot of work.

So here's what I started doing just with this last posting: I put a basic job posting up that says, "I need amazing writers to work online for me. Get the full details at this link: http://the-link.com"

The link that I give them is a video presentation that I whipped together with Apple Keynote (could also be Powerpoint). I export Keynote to a flash file, but I could have also used Jing to do a screen capture for free.

In the presentation, I talk about what kind of writer I want, and I tell the candidates exactly what they need to send me in order to apply. I ask for desired salary, number of hours per week, writing samples that have been written and edited by them (and only them), and a few other basics.

If people reply with a one-line email, it gets deleted. No exceptions. They obviously don't know how to follow instructions or don't care to take the time.

About half of the replies I've been getting are from people who DID watch the video, and I already have 3 solid writing candidates who have impressed me with their English skills.

Not too shabby. I like the new method. When I originally joined "Replace Myself" it came with free access to OnlineJobs.ph - and I never thought I'd be coming back to make so much use of this job site. Great resource!

If you have questions post a comment. I'll be happy to do more posts answering them to the best of my ability.

A new hire to do article re-writing

2010-03-29T18:21:00.001-07:00

This past weekend I decided to take on a new hire in the Philippines. Basically, I had a job posting up on OnlineJobs.ph a while ago and I never took down the post after hiring my full time candidate. I got an email from a young guy who seemed keen to work, had decent english, and wanted to work part time. He wanted me to "test him out" by giving him a writing task.

I never ask anyone to do "free work", but I do often ask candidates to write me something about themselves, or about a hobby they enjoy, in order to test their writing. It's stuff that is obviously not useful on my websites (so it doesn't come off as me asking for free work). Anyway, since the guy offered, I figured "what the heck". I asked him to write about a hobby he enjoys.

Tip - it may be obvious, but I find that Filipinos are often casual writers when it comes to spelling and grammar, even when applying for jobs. Make sure you tell them that you want them to be meticulous about checking the work before sending it to you.

Anyway, this young man did a good enough job. I wouldn't want him ghost writing for me yet, but he's certainly good enough to do re-writes on my original articles so I can submit them to other high PR article directories like Buzzle.com

I can also easily have him setup a Mini-Net and write articles. The trick is that as long as he can write basic stuff, he can then always LEARN the other stuff such as setting up blogs, doing directory submission, forum posting, keyword research, etc.

ALWAYS focus on hiring people who have decent english. Then the rest is much easier.

My challenge will be to load this guy up with a lot of stuff he can do when I don't give him other specific tasks. Mini-net and article re-writes are a perfect "perpetual" task.

I figure each re-write he does for me is going to cost me about $1. Seriously. That's it. Why not give it a shot?

Here's where I learned how to outsource.

Hiring People who Write Great English

2010-02-26T09:34:00.000-08:00

Over the past week I've been doing quite a lot of recruitment for my online businesses. I intended to hire a new full time employee to be a content writer. But, since one of my other employees had to resign due to a personal situation, I needed to fill two spots.

I use OnlineJobs.ph to do my hiring. I have free access to this site for life because I became a "pro outsourcer" through John Jonas' system. This system is called ReplaceMyself.com and you have to select the one-time offer upsell to become a pro-outsourcer. This gives you perpetual access to the job site (and other stuff) for no monthly fee. Here's a direct link to the offer.

Anyway, using OnlineJobs.ph is fantastic, but time consuming. You have two options. You can either manually search people's resumes and email the candidates that you want to connect with. Or, you can put a job posting up on the site and have people contact you.

Here are some tips that I learned while recruiting this time around:

Job postings are effective. You'll get a lot of resumes sent to you.
Be really clear what the main skill set is that you want. I said "English writing with awesome grammar and spelling". I got lots of qualified people.
Ask for writing samples in your job post. Otherwise everyone will send you their resume, which is not what you want.
Ask people to send you a link to their blog, if they have one. Bloggers who are active are good candidates, and you'll be able to see their writing style
Don't be afraid to ask them to write you a *quick* sample. Don't ask for free work - that is rude. But asking for them to demonstrate their capabilities is fine. I would recommend you ask for a 2-3 paragraph email on a particular topic. Pick something insanely silly so that they can't possibly plagiarize. For example, you could say, "Pretend that you've just invented transparent aluminum. It's like glass, only lighter and stronger. Write me a 2-3 paragraph explanation of all the things that this new material would be great for. Have fun with it and do your best to submit something with proper spelling and grammar"
DO chat with them over skype. I recommend using a text chat to see how fast they type and how well they communicate with text. Then, as a follow-up, use voice.

In case you're wondering what the "going rate" is for workers these days, I found 2 great candidates. The full time people are about $250-300 to start, but I expect to pay them more over time. The part time people are about $150ish.

Personally I think I might get more "bang for the buck" with a part time person because it's easier to be productive for 4 hours a day rather than 8.

We'll see how it goes.

Awesome Free Outsourcing Tutorial

2010-02-11T06:26:00.000-08:00

I got my hands on an incredible audio (phone) interview with John Jonas. In this audio he explains exactly how he outsources his online business activities to people in the Philippines for a very low cost (about $350 per month on average).

I *know* this is achievable because I'm one of John's customers and I'm doing exactly this same thing.

List to the audio and then go get his program. It's awesome. Either way, the audio is totally free, no strings attached, and you'll get an incredible education.

Get more outsourcing information from John at this link.

Let me also provide you with this additional insight. You can get his system for a recurring monthly fee, and you can cancel anytime after you learn what you need. But, what I did is to take his "pro outsourcer" package. Yes I actually paid $697 to get this, but the benefit is *lifetime access* to the resumes, project management software and a lot of other great bonus material that is making me money. To get the "upsell", just subscribe and you'll get presented with a one-time offer. I highly recommend you get the pro package.

Beyond being a better value, the pro package kinda forces you to get off your ass and make use of the system. You'll be very committed to USING this stuff after you plunk down that kind of money. I know that's what happened for me.

Don't Fix Your Outsourcer's Mistakes For Them

2010-02-08T05:54:00.001-08:00

Just a quick thought to share with everyone today. I know that, often, it seems like YOU can do something far better than your outsourcer. And you feel that way because you probably ARE better at doing it. Installing WordPress, picking domains, finding information, doing research, etc.

Yes, you know your business better than the outsourcer you hired, and you can do it better. But you know you're supposed to outsource, so you give your guys some work, and it comes back in a way that is not 100% acceptable to you.

What now?

Simply show them how to correct course. Don't go and fix their work for them! It's a lot like raising kids. If you always make your child's bed and fix them breakfast, they'll never learn to do it themselves. Let them do it, and show them how to improve. Keep reinforcing the message with positive feedback. Be nice.

One of my guys had a real problem with communication. He'd send me short emails that were not clear enough for me to understand. I simply told him, over and over, to be *much* more specific with things.

Before I smartened up, I tried to guess at what he was asking and answer all possible variations. Then I realized I was training him to keep giving me crappy emails with crappy explanations.

I changed course and started simply replying with the following "Can you please be a lot more specific, because I do not understand what you are saying here. What, specifically, is the problem with the XYZ project?"

This worked like a charm.

So, if you want to train your guys to do GREAT work for you, don't fix their mistakes. Show them how to fix their own mistakes.

Whatever you do, just make sure that you are outsourcing. I highly recommend hiring people in the Philippines. This is the resource I am using, and it's awesome.

Sick of having VAs write articles? Focus on other content ideas!

2010-02-02T12:57:00.000-08:00

I'm the type of person who constantly thinks about the happiness of others. So when I assign a task to my content writer, and I think it's too repetitive, I worry that she'll get bored. Not only do I want her to be happy, but I want her to be effective.

So I don't want her to simply crank out articles all day long on the same topic. That would drive anyone crazy!

Recently I gave my writer a task to craft an e-book that I'll offer as a free bonus to my customers. I picked a topic for the e-book that I thought would fit well within the interests of my market.

My guess is that it will take about 2 weeks of labor for her to brainstorm ideas, write them up, format the book, add photos, and turn it into a finished PDF. That's my guess, but we shall see how fast it really goes.

If I give her projects like this every so often, it will keep her more interested in the job, and therefore happier. That's what I want. It will also give me great bonus material for my customers, which should drive more sales.

Another idea I'd like to implement is to have her write some kind of super-interesting stuff that will get noticed. Nothing to sell ... but something that would be link-bait. Imagine how many incoming links we could get if I can have her research something that is HIGHLY interesting, and put together a fantastic article on the subject? Social bookmarket it a few times and watch it go viral.

Maybe the first attempt won't work. Maybe the second attempt won't work either ... but if we get even ONE hit out of a few tries, we'll get so many incoming links it will make it all worthwhile.

That's the power of outsourcing (at least in theory!).

Outsourcing: Communicate with your VAs by Voice!

2010-02-02T12:50:00.000-08:00

I've been working with my 2 Filipino employees for a while now and I have one very simple observation. Unless you have a very smooth process running, using a lot of back-and-forth email will waste time. Same with using IM via Skype, MSN Messenger, whatever.

Use voice.

I use Skype to talk to my Filipinos. They all seem to have Skype and they are online when they work. When I have a 10 minute conversation with them, I often discover that there was some kind of misunderstanding on how to do a task that I'd never have understood without talking. IM chats take WAY too long.

So, get on the (skype) phone! Ask your VA if they have a microphone. If they do not, consider going to Best Buy and grabbing a cheap mic, and mail it to them. Or send them an extra $15 and tell them to go buy one. It's worth every penny.

Turn Leads into Customers ... Eventually

2010-01-10T17:44:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-08T07:30:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-06T05:28:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-03T17:44:00.000-08:00

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.

A Better Way to Outsource

2009-12-24T11:00:00.000-08:00

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

2009-06-26T05:51:00.000-07:00

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.

Decide on the size of the popup that you are using. I use 520x400 for reasons I'll explain below.
Break the popup into two virtual chunks. I'm using 250-300 for the top and the remaining 100-150 for the bottom.
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.
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.
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

2009-05-15T05:34:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-28T09:43:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-04-23T10:15:00.001-07:00

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!

2009-04-22T12:02:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-20T07:54:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-09T06:29:00.001-07:00

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.