Matt Lloyd s OPT Formula

Transcription

1 Matt Lloyd s OPT Formula Module 3: Laying the foundations The main outsourcing sites Best outsourcing for coding Best outsourcing for design Best outsourcing for content Virtual Assistant firms Alternative Places to hire Different Countries to outsource Solo freelancers Vs. Firms Converting knowledge into action Welcome to module three of The OPT Formula. In this module, here s what we re going to be covering. First off, I m going to show you all the main outsourcing sites available to you. There are literally hundreds of outsourcing sites available on the net but there are a small handful of the bigger ones and those are the ones that I m going to recommend for you. We re going to look at the best outsourcing sites for coding. for example, if you want to get a WordPress blog done or you want to get a website made up or a shopping cart installed, I m going to show you the best ones for that. We re going to look at the best outsourcing sites for design. For example, if you want to get a logo done or if you have a product and you wanted to get a 3D virtual cover done, things like that. And then we re going to look at the best outsourcing sites for content. Content, in my opinion, is one of the first things you want to outsource because especially if you re trying to get traffic from SEO, from search engine optimization, you really do need to be turning out the content. And if you re doing that all by yourself, it is very time-consuming but there s lots of different sites you can outsource articles and things like that too and they re surprisingly affordable. We re going to look at virtual assistant firms so if you want to hire your own virtual assistant. I m going to talk about some alternative places to hire that you might not have

2 thought of but often, the best talent; it won t actually come from the outsourcing sites. It will actually come from these alternative places. We re going to look at the different countries you can outsource to and in particular, we re going to focus on India and the Philippines. Those are two of the biggest outsourcing countries besides China obviously but I ve had quite a bit of experience in both of these two so I m going to talk about the main differences there. And we re going to look at this whole debate of, Should you hire a solo freelancer or should you hire someone from a company or a firm? And then of course we re going to finish off with the action steps. The main outsourcing sites: now most people have heard of, Elance.com. Elance has got to be one of the biggest outsourcing sites in the net and I ve probably spent maybe around $6000 on different jobs on Elance in the past two years. I ve had mixed results. What you ll find is that many of the providers on Elance are going to be based in India so we re going to talk about that later. You can find some really good talent on Elance but like any of these sites, you just have to look and you have to go through the selection criteria which we re going to talk about in the next module and you ve got to really find the best people because to be honest, most of the people who apply for your jobs, like literally 80 percent, would just be a waste of time. In most cases, they won t even read your job description. So you really just have to know how to pick out the 20 percent who are actually good talent and we re going to look at that a little bit later. There s GetAFreelancer.com. I ve used that site before. It s quite good. odesk.com: now, odesk, for me, it s actually my favorite and I probably spent about $4000 on jobs on odesk. What I like about odesk is that it s very, very user-friendly. It has got a very user-friendly site. Elance have actually just updated their site so they re quite similar to odesk now. But I just like odesk because especially for me, I tend to hire a lot of people in the Philippines and I found that odesk is one of the best places for finding Filipinos. There s also Guru.com. I posted jobs there and I ve had pretty good results and there s vworker.com. Now, vworker used to actually be called Rent a Coder. So if you hear people talking about Rent a Coder, it s actually called vworker.com. This is a great place to find talent especially for coding but I will warn you it has got one of the worst interfaces out of any of these sites. Whoever is doing the site, the user side, honestly

3 needs to be fired because they ve got really great talent but it s a very hard site to use. So it does take a little bit to get used to. Now there s also ScriptLance which is also great for coding. Design Outpost, OutsourceXP.com. I haven t used that much myself and there s also MTurk or MechanicalTurk.com. Now, Mechanical Turks is actually owned by Amazon. I haven t used it myself but I have a lot of friends who have used it and they ve said it s really great. So you definitely want to have a look at that one too. Coding: so before I go through these ones, let me just define what I mean by coding. For example, let s say that you had a WordPress blog and you wanted to get it customized. For example, you wanted to add some functionality to it. Let s say you wanted to turn it into a membership site where people join as members and they were paying you month after month like a continuity business. Something like that, that would fall under coding. So you would use one of these sites for that. I probably should have added Elance.com to this list as well but there s CodeLance.com. There s GetACoder.com, ScriptLance.com, vworker. I ve actually got ScriptLance there twice. But like I was saying, this is where you would get things like WordPress done, if you wanted to get your own shopping cart installed. So once you start selling your own products and you want to upgrade from just using a PayPal button or something simple like that and you want to have something a little bit more sophisticated like your own sales funnel with upsells and things like that, well then, that would fall under ecommerce and you would want a programmer or someone who s experienced with coding. So, for these sort of roles, you are going to pay a little bit more.

4 There are several main categories of coding. There s HTML. That s the most simplest. So all programmers, they should know HTML. That s basically the first language they re going to learn. Then there s PHP. PHP is a little bit more sophisticated. I recommend you get a good PHP programmer if you re going to have shopping carts, things like that and there are quite a few different languages out there but they really all just fall under coding. And in the next module when we go through actually placing specific jobs, we ll talk a little bit more about that. But these sites are a good starting place. Design: So when I talk about design, I m referring to logos, also designs of websites such as your WordPress blog, things like that. And also, if you are selling your own products, it s really, really, really important that you always have a virtual 3D image of the product you re selling because when people are buying products online, even if you re selling a digital product and it doesn t come in the mail, you still want to have a virtual ecover of it. So it looks as if it s real and then of course you just have a disclaimer that it s a virtual product. But when people can actually see what they re about to get after they type in their credit card details, it really helps. It really helps with conversions. But it s very, very important that if you are going to get virtual covers done, in my opinion, this is one area where you don t want to be too cheap. Because in the past, what I found is you always get what you pay for. You can go to a site like Elance and hire someone in India to do a job for you and maybe do it for under $30 but chances are, it s going to look very terrible. It s going to look very cheap and you can have a really great sales letter or a great sales video that gets someone very excited and gets them in the buying state and then when they see a cheap graphic, it just ruins the whole thing. So this is one area where you do want to perhaps spend a little bit more.

5 Now my favorite site for getting logos done is 99designs.com. 99designs.com, here s how it works. You go to that site and in the next module, I ll actually go and show you some examples but you basically describe what you want and then it s like a competition. You will have designers from all over the world and they will actually submit their designs. This is before you ve even paid them. They just submit their designs and it s like a competition. And at the end of the week, you ll actually get to choose which one is the best design and then that person will get paid the money that you paid 99designs. So it s around $250, I believe, to get a good logo made up. I think that s around the minimum. So you pay 99designs the $250 and then the actual job description, you have designers and they will compete to win the prize. And you can pick who s the winner and the other great thing about it is you can actually give feedback as they re submitting their designs. So if you see a designer and you like it but there s just one small change, you can tell the designer in the comment section, you know, hey, that s a great design but you can make it even better if you just change this. So the great thing about 99designs is as long as you re giving feedback and you re offering the minimum award, right, or even better, you re offering slightly more as an incentive for people to compete, as long as you do that, 99 percent of the time, you re going to get a good logo that is exactly what you want because you re telling people what you want as they do it. Now there s also crowdspring.com. I haven t used crowdspring myself too much. I ve used it once but it s basically the same deal as 99designs. So, you might want to try that one out as well. There s also a DesignCrowd.com. That s actually a forum, I believe, and you can find quite a few designers there. There s also this great little site called PSD2HTML.com. Now PSD is the filename for Photoshop files. So if someone designs a logo in Photoshop or if they do some sorts of design in Photoshop, these files are in PSD format. Now, obviously, that s not good enough for a website. In order to have a website, it has got to be HTML or some sort of coding language that normal websites are made up of. So you can actually get a designer to design your website in Photoshop and save it as a PSD file even if the designer knows nothing about websites. So they do the design. They send you the PSD files and then you go to this website PSD2HTML.com and they will actually convert it into an actual real live website for you. So that s a really great little website and prices start at around $159. There s also Coroflot.com. I haven t used it myself but again, I ve got a lot of friends who ve said it s a really, really great website so you might want to check that one out too.

6 There s Outsource-Website-Design.com, WebDesigners123.com and also Worth1000.com, which I believe is very similar to 99designs.com. So I just want to give you quite a few choices here so you can go through and have a look. Personally, if I had to recommend my favorite two, I would say the 99designs.com or crowdspring.com. I think they re great places to start. Now here s a big tip. When it comes to design, what you have to realize is let s say that you re in a Western country. For example, if you re in America or Australia and you want a design that s a Western design, if you go to a country in Asia, so if you go to India or the Philippines or something like that and you hire someone to do your design there, well then, in general, okay, I m generalizing here but in general, the designs you re going to get probably aren t going to look very Western. They re not exactly going to match your taste if you re in a Western country in general. Obviously there are exceptions. So, to be honest, whenever I have outsourced design to a country like India, I haven t been very happy with the result. That s just my experience. So when it comes to design, I usually go to somewhere like the US and I do pay a little bit more but usually, the designs are exactly what I want. They suit my taste. Obviously, it depends what your taste is but that s just the tip I ve found.

7 Content: Now, this is where I have quite a bit of experience so I can give you quite a few different sites to use here. So when it comes to content, like I said before, this is for if say let s say that you have a blog and one of your main strategies for traffic is you want to get ranked in the search engines so you re talking about SEO. Now if you re doing all of your content by yourself, it can be very time-consuming and it really depends on the value of your time. So we talked about in module one working out what your hourly rate currently is and what you want it to be after finding your target and your income. So you really got to make a judgment call here. Let s say your time is worth $20 an hour if you re just getting started and let s say that you can write a decent article in one hour so you can research a topic and you can turn out 400 words in one hour so that just costs you $20 for one article. Now, it really wouldn t make sense for you to actually write that article if you can find people who are willing to do it for $5 per article and are doing a level of quality that maybe it s not quite as good as yours but it almost is. So it really wouldn t make sense for you to spend all your time writing articles. This is why I recommend this is one of the first places that you want to start outsourcing. If you haven t done much outsourcing before, this is a great place to do your first outsourcing jobs. So, the first site I m going to recommend is this one called ContentDivas.com. And I should just say at this point, all of these links will be in the bonus report for this module. So you definitely don t need to write them down. I have had articles from ContentDivas.com and I ve been very happy with their result which is very good quality but It is a little bit pricier. There s also 99centarticles.com. Now 99centarticles, the prices start off at around $4.50 per article, I believe. That was about what I paid last time and obviously with any of these sites, the more quantity you order, the cheaper it s going to be. So with the 99centarticles, I believe the starting package is around 25 articles and I guess you would be paying around $125 for that. That s about what I paid last time. So, if you have a blog and you know you re going to be spending a lot of money on it in the coming year, it might be better to just go and get a large batch of articles done like maybe 40 or 50 at one time if you can afford it because you will save that way. I highly recommend 99centarticles and sometimes, you are going to get articles by the writers on the team that isn t quite as good as the usual standard. So just be prepared for that. But most of the articles you get will be quite good.

8 And if you do get really good articles, well then, the next time you order from them, you can actually tell them. Just tell them that you would like the same writer who did your last batch of articles to do this batch. That s just a little tip. Now there s another site called Textbroker.com. This is really good as well. Now, prices depending on the level of quality starts off at around $4.80 for a 400-word article and it can go right up to $26.80 for one article. Now you might be thinking that $26 is a lot to spend for an article and it really depends on your objectives. Let me give you an example. Let s say you have a blog and I ll just tell you from a personal website I have. There s a new website I m working on right now called MLMTipsandAdvice.com.au and it s obviously in the MLM niche and what I m doing is I m targeting MLM companies so companies like Avon, Amway, all of those MLM companies. There are literally hundreds of them and I m going to be spending a lot of money on that blog. So if you go and check that out, MLMTipsandAdvice.com.au, it s still brand new right now but by the time you go and look at it, it should have a lot of content.

9 So the way that we re setting that up is we have a main page for each MLM company. For example, we might have a page on Amway and then what we re doing is we re going to the Google Keyword Tool. So if you go to Google and type in Google Keyword Tool, you ll find that in spot number one. We re searching for the most highly trafficked keywords around the company. So the primary keyword for each company would be the company name like Amway or like Avon. And then we have around 10 other keywords related to that primary company name. For example Amway in Australia, Amway compensation plan, Amway MLM and what we re doing is we re picking the 10 keywords around that company that had the most traffic and then we re writing articles on those two. But each company has its main article. So for those main articles, for the company that gets the most traffic, I m paying a little bit more for those articles. I m paying something like $15 for a 500-word article because those articles on the blog, they re going to get the most traffic. But then all the keywords around that company like Amway in Australia or Amway MLM, for those articles, I m paying a lot less, maybe only $4 or $5 because they re not as important and they re not getting as much traffic. So that s where you would sometimes spend a little bit more and sometimes a little bit less. It depends on how important that keyword is going to be in your content strategy. If it s going to be getting a lot of traffic, if that s your aim, then it is worth paying a little bit more because if you get a really cheap article, well then, you might be getting words but it s not very readable. People will land on your blog or they ll land on your article or wherever. They ll start to read and, you know, you can get away with paying $2 per article but chances are, it s a terrible article and they re going to read two lines and then they re going to leave and that defeats the whole purpose. So I just want to stress that. Sometimes, it is worth paying a little bit more. That s really important if you are writing articles and your main strategy is getting traffic from the search engines and SEO. It s really; really important that the people you hire to write your articles understand SEO. So they understand keyword density and things like that. So with the Amway example, if I was trying to get ranked for Amway, it s important that the person writing that article mentions the keyword Amway a set number of times in that article. This is what we would call keyword density. We might have a keyword density of three or four percent which means that for every 100 words in that article, the keyword Amway is mentioned three or four times. So that would be

10 for someone who understands SEO and if that s your main strategy, it s important that your writer understands that. So there s a great site for SEO writers and it s called SEOContentWriters.com. Three hundred words for around $6. And 700 words for around $14. QualityOnlineContent.com, it s a little bit cheaper so only around $3 per article. ArticlesandBeyond.com, a little bit more. There s HaveWriters.com which is a little bit pricier. ArticleAuthors.net: Now this one little site, ArticleAuthors.net, they can also do things like ebook creation. So, for example, if you re just getting started in your online business and you want to get your first product done, you could actually outsource the writing of your first ebook. You can actually pay someone else to do it. Now if you are going to outsource an ebook or something like that and you re going to hire a ghostwriter, my personal advice is you do pay a little bit more. Because if you re selling an ebook, let s say you re selling it for $50, it is important that it s actually a decent product, you know, and it s not just a few cheap articles put together. So, for that sort of work, you do want to pay a little bit more. So if you had to pay $500 or even $1000 for a very decent ebook, in my opinion, it would be worth it. It s just going to make it a lot easier for you to get testimonials and to feel comfortable asking people for money for your product. It really helps if you have a quality product. Another SEO article writing service is SEOArticleWritingPros.com. Again, they are a little bit pricier but if you want quality, again, you have to sometimes pay for it and then there s also ZipWriters.com. Now for the pricier article writing services, I just wanted to show you a few. There s ArticleAlley.com that start at around $40 per article so this is starting to get a little bit more expensive. If you re just a start-up and you re just getting started, well then, this probably wouldn t be where you would want to start. But if you currently have a blog and it s getting a lot of traffic but it has got a very high bounce rate which means people are coming to your blog and then they re leaving in seconds because it s really bad or terrible content, well then in that case, if you re already getting traffic, then this is where you might want to invest in some high quality articles. So there s quite a few there you can see, Online-Writing-Jobs.com, WriterLance.com. Most of these I ve used myself and I ve had good results and if I haven t used them myself, I ve got friends who have used them so basically all the links you see here are fairly decent.

11 Now one big tip: It s really important that when you do get your articles done, that it is unique content. I mean you can go and hire someone to write articles for you for maybe $2 per article but really what they re doing is they re basically just copying from different parts of the internet and you don t want to do that. For the first reason, obviously it s not really ethical to go and copy someone else s work and then the second reason is there s a big debate in SEO about whether unique content and unoriginal content affects your search engine rankings. So a lot of people in SEO say that if you copy someone else s content or if you have duplicate content, then the search engines will penalize you and some people say that s true. Other people say it s not. I just prefer to be on the safe side so that s the other reason why, you know, I m pretty strict about who I hire for my articles and I want a 100 percent unique content every time. Now what you want to do is when you hire out your articles, usually they will tell you if they re going to write unique content and often they will say that all of our content will pass Copyscape. Now Copyscape.com, it s a great tool. It s completely free and the way it works is you can actually go to it and you can put in your website address and you can see if any other website on the internet is copying your content or has very similar content. So this is a great way to protect yourself from other people who might want to copy your content and also, if you get an article done, you can actually go and you can see if it passes Copyscape. And if it doesn t, well, Copyscape will tell you the websites it s copied from and then in that case, you can go back to the people who did your article. And you can say, Hey, you know, what s going on? You said this was original but it s clearly not. Now there is also the option to upgrade with Copyscape and for around $4.95 per month, you can get this thing called Copysentry alerts and you can install that on your website. So for under $5 per month at every week, it will actually scan the internet and basically see if anyone else is copying you or if your articles have been copied from somewhere else. So if you are going to be doing a lot of articles, you know, if you re doing a few every single week or more, then that could be worth investing in just to make sure your content is original. Now, virtual assistant firms; hiring your first virtual assistant is really important, you know, if your business is at the stage where you re starting to get sales and things are really starting to happen but you re finding that you can t focus on the important activities in your business like increasing sales or doing the marketing. And instead, more and more of your time is being taken up by admin jobs like checking , responding to , you know, customer service, everything like that.

12 And more and more of your time have been taken up in those tasks and it s affecting you growing your business. Remember in module one, we talked about how in your business, you re either swimming forward or you re treading water. And when you re treading water, you re staying in the same place and sure you can do it for a short amount of time and you re not going to notice the effects but eventually, you ll drown. Your business will come to a halt because you always need to be growing the business. So what happens is as you spend more and more time in admin, that s really going to put a restriction on you growing your business. That s why one of the first roles you want to outsource for is a virtual assistant. So I wanted to show you some virtual assistant firms and a lot of these are based in India. And what actually happens is you can hire someone and they basically become your fulltime virtual assistant and they will do all of those little jobs that you ask them to do and you would be amazed at just the number of jobs that they can do for you. The first one that I m going to recommend is GetFriday.com that I ve actually used. They are a little bit pricier so I believe I was paying somewhere from $800 to $1000 per month for my own full time assistant in India. I ll just give you an example of some of the jobs I have them do. For example, I had to travel overseas so I actually had them go and look at all the different prices for plane tickets, arranged all of my accommodation, everything like that. I actually put

13 that in their hands and they got that job done. So that s just one of the things you can outsource because it s just designed to make your life easier. There s also AskSunday.com, which is very similar. I think they just kind of copied Get Friday. There s AgentsofValue.com, BPOVIA.com, VirtualAssistant.org. You can see quite a few of these. I even included this one here VirtualDatingAssistance.com. Believe it or not, you can actually outsource your dating. They actually will go and set up dates with the dating websites. So I just wanted to show you that because like I said, this is all about freeing up your time so you can focus on what s important. In module one, we talked about how most online entrepreneurs, use 95 percent of their time or even more on nonproductive tasks. They re literally wasting most of the time that they re at their computer. What this is all about is freeing up your time and just making everything much simpler. If you ve ever felt like you just have a thousand different things pulling you in all of these different directions and you can t focus on one thing at a time, that s when you know that you need to get a virtual assistant and it really helps. There s also YourManInIndia.com. I ve heard very good things about them, MicroWorkers.com and also DoMyStuff.com. So, out of all of these, GetFriday.com, like I said I have used them and had a pretty good experience. I now have my virtual assistant in the Philippines which is a little bit cheaper but just as good. Now, we are going to talk about alternative places to hire. When most people think of outsourcing, they naturally think of all the different outsourcing sites online. To be honest, the best people I have on my team didn t come from the outsourcing sites. I actually found them in various alternative places. What you have to realize is that as CEO of your business, you always have to be on the lookout for talent and you ll soon realize, that the sort of team that you have has a bigger impact on the success of your business than anything else. If you haven t realized that yet, you soon will when you hire the wrong people. I can tell you, I ve had mistakes that have cost me thousands and thousands of dollars and weeks and weeks of my time when I ve hired the wrong people. If you hire the wrong person, they could do real damage to your business but if you hire a star, they can really take you to the next level. So you always have to be on the lookout for the cream of the crop. You re looking for the 20 percent of employees who get 80 percent of things done. It s a minority but you have to be on the lookout for them.

14 A lot of these people cannot be found on the outsourcing sites. The best people are usually already working for someone else. So you just have to be looking out for them. So I wanted to give you an example. You might have seen that with a number of my products and perhaps even at the very start of this video you re watching now, there was that fancy Flash introduction where you would have seen a logo and that s animated. Now to get something like that done, you can pay anywhere from maybe $50 up to several hundred dollars or even more. Now, I generally prefer to spend a little bit more on those sort of things because I m also going to use them in the marketing videos to sell my courses and my programs and like I said with the virtual 3D covers, it s often worth paying a little bit more for presentation. If you have cheap presentation, it can really dampen sales. So for things like that, I generally pay a little bit more. The guy who does all of my Flash intros, he s charging somewhere around $300 and upwards just to do one of those short maybe 10-second intros because they do take a little bit of time to put together. However, the guy I have doing mine, he only charges me around $100 and I ll tell you the story behind that. Last year, I was actually at an internet marketing conference in Las Vegas and I actually won this award for this particular company. So this guy saw me on stage getting an award and that night, we were in the bar and someone introduced us and we started talking. And he had this talent for doing Flash intros and he was looking at launching a company but he wanted to get some good testimonials. And because I was starting to get some exposure, he had seen me win this award, we kind of worked out a deal where he would continue to do Flash intros for each of my products every single month at a discount of only $100 and in exchange, I would do testimonials and if anyone asked where I got my Flash intros done, I would simply recommend him. So that s how I was able to get them at a much, much cheaper rate. So whenever you go to internet marketing conferences or seminars or anything like that, just always be on the lookout for this sort of people and often you can work out specific terms where you get it at a much cheaper rate. Another example I wanted to tell you about another event that I was at. It was a small business meet-up here in Perth and I went along to it and I met this guy who does SEO. Now I m not an SEO expert. That s not really something I get into. I prefer to say more with the copywriting, the sales funnels, and things like that.

15 So I m not really into SEO but I knew that it s a great traffic strategy to have for number one, it s free and number two, and it s quite reliable. So I wanted an SEO expert on my team. But with SEO, the thing is, there s no really set criteria for determining who knows what they re talking about and who doesn t. A lot of people will tell you that they understand SEO and when in fact they don t. So there are a lot of different levels of skill when it comes to SEO. So I meet this guy and we start talking and what he wasn t really good at was the marketing side so writing copy, things like that. But he was very good at the SEO. So we started talking to each other and I actually started to promote a product a few months later and I was promoting this product and one of my strategies was to try and get my bonus blog. It was a blog where I offered someone a bonus if they bought through my affiliate link. One of my strategies was to get this bonus blog ranked for particular keywords related around this product. So when people went searching for which affiliate offered the best bonus, there I was. So I said to this guy, you know, Would you help me out and just let me know how much you want me to pay you? And he actually did it for free because by that stage, we had built up a relationship. So we were now friends and he actually helped me out for free. And then shortly after that, I got offered a position on the team of a particular guru in my niche that has done something like $10 million in sales by the age of 26. So he s a very big name in our industry. I get offered a position on his team and then about a month later, this guy actually asked me if I knew an SEO expert and of course I recommended my friend. Now right at this point in time, they re negotiating but if my friend, the SEO expert, if he gets the role, it s going to be worth to him around $40,000 or $50,000 a year. So that s just an example of meeting people in everyday situations and often you can be very flexible about the terms where if they help you, you somehow help them and it s not just about the money. There s other ways you can pay your people besides money. For example, testimonials, things like that. Now one more example; when I first got started in my online business around maybe three years ago, I literally had no clue what I was doing. I didn t even know what a domain was. It took me about a month to figure out how an auto responder works. So I really had no clue.

16 So I need to learn a little bit about how to get a website online. So one of the first things I did was I went down to my local university which I was a student at the time before I dropped out and I actually posted a job on the student notice board. And I actually found a student who was from Iran and he was over here in Australia studying and he was a master s student in computer science so he had been studying for, around five or six years I believe and he knew quite a lot. He was very versatile and I started off paying him, around $15 cash per hour which is about average here in Australia and because we actually became friends, the rate was actually reduced down to $10 per hour at his request later on. So it wasn t exactly like a big deal of money. Now that s a little bit more than what you would pay if you outsource to India or the Philippines for ten or fifteen dollars an hour. However, it s really, really good when you can have someone sitting next to you and you can sort of see what they re doing and you can explain exactly what you want. One of the biggest complaints about outsourcing overseas is that sometimes, it s a little bit hard to communicate exactly what you want so you end up paying for something and then you get something entirely different. At least that s what happens when you don t know how to describe exactly what you want properly. But don t worry. We re going to talk about that in the next module so we re going to make sure that 99 percent of the time, you get exactly what you want. But three years ago, I didn t really know that, so it was a little bit hard to outsource overseas. I had this guy and we would just meet up for maybe two or three hours a day, maybe five days a week and he would help me do things like set up a WordPress blog. He would help me integrate the autoresponder into the site, things like that and I m not saying to you that you should learn all of those technical things. Personally, I think you should outsource most of it. However, it does help if you have a basic understanding of how things work because when you are outsourcing, if you have a basic idea of what it s going to cost, it just makes everything a lot easier. Also when you re explaining exactly what you want, it does help if you have some basic understanding. So I m really thankful for that experience of, you know, hiring a university student just for a few hours a day and just for a few months just to get me started. And that gave me a very strong foundation to grow my online business. Now the next example is your own list. If you currently have your own list of say over a few hundred people at least and you ve got people who have been following you for a number of months, so they ve been reading your s, maybe even buying your products or buying

17 based on your recommendations, often, you would be surprised at the talent on your list. And the great thing is they have to know quite a bit about your business. They have been getting your s. They have seen your products. They know what niche you re in so they have to know quite a lot and they can often be very good people to add to your team. In just a moment, I m going to show you an example of Ryan Deiss doing that. There s another site called Fiverr.com. This site is a little gem. It s amazing what you can find that people are willing to do for $5 but you can get some really good things done. And then of course there s Craigslist.com. Often if you use a site like Craigslist, you can hire people from Western countries such as the US and you can often get very cheap rates because a lot of people, a lot of the talent that you re going to hire, sometimes they are going to be out of work and in those times, they re willing to work for much, much less. I ll give you an example; there was a guy who was an expert in Infusionsoft which is the ecommerce platform that I use to sell my products and his normal rate, he was based in the US, was $60 per hour but he really knew what he was talking about.

18 However, I checked his background on this particular outsourcing site and I noticed that at certain times in the past, he had worked for as low as $20 per hour and when I asked him about that, he just explained that that was the time where he really needed the work. So the great thing about Craigslist and sites like that is you can find these people and if they really do want the work, often they would do it at a much cheaper rate than normal. Last of all, there are forums. Forums are a great place finding really enthusiastic people. Because I mean, who are the people who like to hang out on forums? If you have a forum and it s all about internet marketing, often the most active members, they really love that topic that the forum is about. So, if it s an internet marketing forum, often you ll find the most passionate internet marketers on the forum and those are usually the best people to join your team especially if they really love what they do. So let s have a look. This is an from Ryan Deiss. Ryan Deiss, has got a list of several hundred thousand people in the internet marketing niche and as you can see here, I just

19 wanted to show you this just so you could get an example what it would look like. The subject line, so he sent this out to his entire list is Job Opening. I m hiring copywriters. Hi, Ryan Deiss here. Want to change your career in 2011? I currently have three positions open for junior copywriter trainees. Now, for this position, you must relocate to live and work in Austin, Texas at my office with my staff every day. Now Ryan Deiss, because he has got such a large list, he can afford to do this. You know, if he only had a list of maybe a thousand people, well then, finding someone to relocate might be a big deal. But because he has got a large list, he can do this. And also because he s quite wellknown in the internet marketing niche, a lot of people would see this as a big opportunity so they would be willing to relocate. Now notice what he says here. You would be part of my team and learn copywriting direct from the best in the business. So it s not just about what he wants. He s also talking about what he can offer someone. You would create sales letters, video scripts and autoresponder series. As a trainee, you would start at a really crappy salary of $600 per week. Now again, because he s quite wellknown in this niche, he can get away with this because there s a lot of people who might be able to charge $2000 a week for their copywriting skills and they might be willing to drop that down to $600 a week just for an opportunity to work in a team that does millions and millions of dollars a year. Just for the opportunity to learn. Once you ve earned your wings as a real copywriter, 90 days to six months, you would be raised to $42K per year plus points on your sales letters. So there s some element of performance here. They re getting a base salary of 42 grand per year plus potential, you know, if they can write good copy. I like to pay people over $100K per year at a minimum once they are making me money. Just notice the language here though. He s making it very clear that this is for someone who s going to get results. If you re not going to get results, well then the wages or the salary won t be very good. So this is a great way to hire people. You know, you pay them a base salary and then you also leave some room in it for results. I also offer profit sharing, full medical, et cetera after a 90-day probationary period. Now just one more example before I go on. Right this point in time, I mentioned before when I m working with a certain guru in the online network marketing niche who has done something like 10 million in sales by the age of 26 and I m managing his Facebook pay per click account and obviously, one of the main reasons I m doing that is it s a huge opportunity.

20 I can potentially get a joint venture partner here if I build this relationship with someone who has a list of well over 200,000 people. So this is someone that would be really great to have as a joint venture partner but it s also to learn from someone who has built a successful multimillion dollar business. And this is going to sound quite arrogant but I ll say it anyway. I m really, really good at this internet marketing stuff. I literally live and breathe it all day everyday and I ve been doing it for three years now pretty much nonstop. So I can offer a lot. If I join a team, I can really help them build their business because I know what I m talking about. And with what I m getting right now from this guy, I could probably get a lot more if I focused 100 percent of my time on my own business. However, I m willing to actually offer my services at a big discount because of the opportunity for one, to learn from this guy and for two, possibly down the track to get a really, really good joint venture partner. So the reason I m telling you that is as you build up your brand and you start to become more well-known and you build a bigger business, you will be able to get some really good talent for a much cheaper rate because they will be willing to work for you and with you for other things besides money. For example, to learn from you and like I said, to possibly become a joint venture partner with you. So that s one of the benefits of building a successful business. The more successful you get, actually the easier it gets sometimes to find really good talent. So this is the same from Ryan Deiss. He has got here how to apply. This is very important. Make it very clear what they have to do and I love this. He has got, Sell me this toy.

21 And if you click on this link, it s actually a little toy. It s like a remote control helicopter. What I love about this is it s a strange task. But it actually weeds out maybe 90 percent of the people who would apply who are just wasting his time because to do this task, it s going to take the person or the copywriter several hours at a minimum. They have to sell this little helicopter toy to him. They have to write minimum of 500 words and most of the people who are half-decent copywriters and they re on Ryan Deiss list, they re going to know that they re competing against, who knows, maybe hundreds of other fairly decent copywriters. So they re only going to enter this little contest if they think they have a good chance of winning. That is if they re actually decent copywriters. So what you can do and in next module, we re going to talk about this a little bit more, but what you can do is you can have a trial task like this and it just allows you to weed out most of the people who are going to waste your time and just saves you a lot of time in interviewing. You can actually get a sample of their work and see if they re half-decent before you actually take the interview to the next stage. So it s a great little strategy. And again, as you build up your brand and you become a more desirable business to work for, you can afford to be a little bit bolder in what you ask people to do as a trial task. You see, if Ryan Deiss was just getting started and he only had a few hundred people on his list, well then, he probably couldn t get away with this because at that stage, he doesn t really have much to offer. No one really knows who he is or what his business is about or level that it s at. But again as you build your business, you can do things like this. Okay. Okay. He has got here a little template and then he says, Then me, and he has got his address, With your sales letter attached. You can add any other information you want in your , pics, videos, other writing samples, et cetera. Good luck and I look forward to meeting you. So that s just a great example of hiring from your list. If you have a list, it s definitely something you want to try out. Fiverr.com; this little site will be a game changer for you. It s like I said before, it s amazing what people are willing to do for $5. So I wanted to show you some examples. I wanted to show you what you can get done. This guy here, look at this. He s willing to rewrite any article under 500 words, make it SEO-friendly and guarantee it passes Copyscape, that site we talked about before, for $5.

22 So that means that you could go and get an article, a very good article, and maybe pay $10 for that article and then this guy would rewrite the whole thing. So it s a fairly decent offer for $5. And he understands SEO which is even more important. And this one is also great. I will turn your article into a video for $5. So, if you wanted to make video marketing part of your strategy, you can actually outsource your articles. Let s say you were getting 10 articles per week. You could actually have this person for $50 per week produce 10 videos for you as well. So it s just another traffic source but it s very cheap, only $5. I imagine they would do this with Camtasia and it would just be the text and the music but still, you know, it s fairly decent. It s probably not as good as if you did the video yourself but still, it s a good product, I think, for $5. Let s have a look at what else. This is really great. If you re on a budget, you can actually get an ecover done for $5 and I think that s just amazing. I paid up to $700 before to get the graphics done for my ecovers for one product and I probably paid a little bit too much in that case. But in this case, this guy is willing to do it for $5.

23 Now, obviously don t expect really great quality but if you are on a budget and you are just getting started, well then, it s better to have something rather than nothing, even if it looks very cheap like this. And I imagine that if you got a job done by this guy and you paid him $5, you could probably go back and you could probably offer maybe $50 and get a really, really good job done. But it s just a great place to start. This person is willing to do a banner ad for $5 and again, I paid over $100 for a set of banner ads before so very cheap. This person is willing to do a complete package design ecover so not just an ebook cover but if you have a multimedia course where you have ebooks, audios, videos, things like that and you want to get everything arranged just like this, this guy is willing to do it for $5. Okay. Fluffybunny is willing to spin any article up to 700 words to read as a new article for your website for $5. This is bordering on some people who might not want to do this. But you can actually find a lot of people in Fiverr who will do a testimonial, a video testimonial for your product for $5. Now if you are going to do this, I suggest that you actually get them to see your product first and maybe pay them a little bit more if they have to take their time to actually go through your product. But that way, they re at least giving a real testimonial for your product. I imagine that you could hire people here to give fake testimonials for your product where they haven t even watched it but I probably wouldn t suggest that because you could get into trouble for that.

24 However, if you are just getting started, you have your first product but you don t really have a list to promote it to yet so it s a little bit hard to get testimonials, well then you could actually come to Fiverr. And like I said, just pay them a little bit more to go through your product and give an honest testimonial. Just tell them that, you know, if they don t like it or if there s something about it that they re not happy with, they can even mention that in the testimonial. Obviously, you know, as long as they re saying that most of it is pretty good. But that would be a great place to get testimonials done and again, like I keep on saying, make sure they actually go through the product. And the last one, I will submit your article to 1500 article directories for $5 which is that s not bad. So you can pay someone maybe $4 or $5 for a half-decent article. You can get it submitted all over the internet to 1500 different article directories for $5. That s not much at all. So, I suggest you go to Fiverr.com and just browse through it and you will find there are different jobs that people are willing to do in all kinds of different roles. You have programmers, designers, literally anything you can imagine almost. People are willing to do these jobs for $5. And often the reason why you re doing it is not to get a job done for $5. Instead it s just to see what sort of work they do and if they do good work, well then you can offer them a more fulltime position. And a lot of these people, the only reason they re willing to do it for $5 is to get a customer or a client. That s the honest reason why most of them are doing it. Most of them are probably losing money when you take into account their time but they re doing it to show what level of work they can deliver and if they can do good work, well then, by all means, offer them a position on your team or at least try them out on a trial basis. Forums: Like I said before, forums are a great place to get really enthusiastic people in any little niche. For example, I m in the network marketing niche. That s one of the niches that I m in and there s a forum called BetterNetworker.com which I haven t put on this list but it s specifically for online network marketers.