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.

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.