Matt Lloyd s OPT Formula

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 email, responding to email, you know, customer service, everything like that.

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

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.

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.

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 email auto responder works. So I really had no clue.

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 email 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 emails, maybe even buying your products or buying

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 emails. 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.

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 email 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

wanted to show you this email 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 email 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.

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 email 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.

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 email me, and he has got his email address, With your sales letter attached. You can add any other information you want in your email, 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.

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.

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.

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.

So if I wanted to hire someone who really knows the industry I m in, that s probably where I would look because most people I hire, they re an outsider to my industry so they re not really going to know all the little details. And sure they can learn but it is going to take some time. The great thing about forums is that you can find industry insiders to whatever little niche that you re in. The other great thing about it is you can actually find a user on a forum and often you can see every little thread or every little post that they ve ever done and you can get a sense for who they are. For example, you can see whether they re the sort of person who perhaps stirs up trouble on forums. They might be a really negative person and that will come across in what they write. So you could perhaps screen those people out. But on the other side of that, you can see who the really great people are so you can see who the really helpful people are. You can see who the people are who really know their stuff so they really know the topic that will come across in their writing and if you find someone like that, then all you need to do is send them a message. And first off, usually what I do is I will compliment them on something. So if they did a great thread on the forum, I will compliment them on it and I will ask them maybe a little bit about their background. You know what sort of business they have or what sort of work they do if they re a freelancer. Just find out about them and then I will just go from

there. I will ask them if they re open to perhaps working on this project I have. They ll do the project and if they do a good job, I might offer them a position on my team. The other great reason I recommend forums is for one particular role and that s for copywriting. Now in internet marketing, whatever you re selling, it s really, really important that when it comes to copy, you don t be cheap. So the last thing you would ever do is if you had your product, you wouldn t go to India and pay someone $50 to write a sales letter. Chances are, for $50 you re going to get what you pay for. It s not going to make any sales and you re basically pouring $50 down the drain. When it comes to writing copy, that s one area where you will pay a premium for and the best copywriters in the world, they charge really high rates and that s because with the power of their pen, they can basically get people to take out credit cards, sign checks and everything like that. Just as an example, someone like Dan Kennedy. So Dan Kennedy, he s someone I ve learned a lot from. He has been in the direct response marketing business for decades and he s a really good copywriter. Someone like Dan Kennedy, he can charge some companies up to $70,000 for a sales letter plus royalties on the sales that his letter produces. So, obviously in that example, you know, if you were a multimillion dollar business, you might be able to afford to hire someone like that. But in that case, you re going to get a really good piece of copy or a really good sales letter. Now if you re just getting started, obviously you can t afford to do something like that but you can find some really good copywriters for some half-decent prices, okay, on forums. Now my favorite internet marketing forum of them all is the WarriorForum.com. So if you re not a member of the WarriorForum.com, there s a lot of knowledge on that forum and you can find some really good talent.

On all of these forums, they will have a section where you can actually hire people or you can post your job or you can find out about what certain services different people offer on the forum. You can actually scan through them and you can see which ones you might be interested in or not. But the Warrior Forum, they have a section called Warriors for Hire and most of the people in the Warriors for Hire section; they will offer big discounts for the first job. And again, the reason why they re doing that is just to get a client first. They want to get a client, do some really great work and then if the client is happy, they will usually enter into a longer term contract. But the Warrior Forum, it s a great place. Let s say you wanted to hire someone to handle your SEO, well then, yes you could look on the Warrior Forum but you might even go to a forum that s specifically for SEO professionals. You might even get a higher caliber of SEO experts on forums that are specifically for SEO. So there s one here called Forums.SEOChat.com. I ve looked on that forum and there are definitely people there who know more about SEO than someone like I would ever know but you can find some really good talent there. ewealth.com, that s more for affiliate marketing. HighRankings.com/Forum, again, that s a great place to find SEO experts. And there s also this one, Affiliate-Marketing-Forums.5StarAffiliatePrograms.com. It s a very lively forum so you might want to check that out too. My favorite would be WarriorForum.com but my second favorite would be this one, Forums.DigitalPoint.com. So there are a lot of great internet marketers on that forum. That s definitely a place where you want to go and look.

So I m not just talking about hiring a copywriter here. I m talking about hiring people for lots and lots of different roles in your online business. If you are hiring people to do your ecovers; In my opinion, you re much better off going to a forum like the Warrior Forum to find someone who does that specifically. The first time I ever got ecovers done, I actually went to sites like Elance.com and I tried to hire designers who normally do logos and they don t necessarily specialize in doing 3D ecovers. You know, for internet marketing products, for digital products. So often, the work I would get back wouldn t be that great and I think when it comes to jobs like that, you re better off hiring a specialist, someone who does it all day everyday and is really, really good at it and those people or those businesses are likely to advertise in internet marketing forums because I understand that their main target market are people like us, internet marketers. There s also InternetMarketingForums.net. So you really want to check out all of these forums. I would start off with Warrior Forum and Digital Point. But just browse through all the different services that are available and you can find some really great talent there. Different countries to outsource to: The main ones I ve listed here are United States. You re really going to pay a premium if you want to outsource to the United States. It is going to be a lot more expensive than third world countries but there are some jobs where personally, I prefer to hire in the United States. So jobs like setting up an ecommerce shopping cart or something like that. Like if I m selling my own product and I want to have a shopping cart and an upsell sequence in place, for a job like that, I m willing to pay a lot more and just go to the United States and find an expert in the ecommerce platform that I m using because I learned the hard way that if you try and be too cheap on jobs like that, then you can hire people who don t really know what they re talking about. And when it comes to shopping carts and things like that where you re dealing with customers credit cards is one area where you can t afford to have too many mistakes. The first time I did that, I actually had my shopping cart set up and I had it set up by a team in India and I was paying $7 per hour and they were trying to learn how to use Infusionsoft which was what I was using for the shopping carts. And because they didn t have a lot of experience in it, they set up the billing the wrong way. So it was either billing the customer too much or too less and it ended up costing me around $3000. So I would have been much, much better off finding an expert in Infusionsoft which was what I was using from the United States and paying maybe $20 or $30 per hour.

And that s on the cheaper end in the United States because usually for jobs like that, they re not exactly big, big jobs so usually, they re small jobs. It s just worth paying a little bit more. So the United States, that s what I recommend you go there for, for jobs like that that are really, really important and you really need a specialist who you can communicate well with. Now this whole program, because I m in a Western country, I m assuming that you re in a Western country too. So when I say things like, you know, you want someone you can communicate with, I hope I don t sound like I m being racist or anything like that. I m not. I m just saying that if you are in a Western country and you do find it easier to communicate with other people who understand Western culture, well then, for really, really important jobs, it is worth paying a little bit more and just going to a Western country in my experience. In China, you can get some really, really cheap rates. So you can actually get down to as low as 50 cents per hour. I ve even heard of lower and usually up to around $4 per hour. Now if you want to get a specialist in any of these third world countries, you are going to have to pay a little bit more. So if you wanted to get an expert in ecommerce or PHP programming or something like that where there s a little bit more training involved, well then, that s where you might pay $10 per hour or $15 per hour, a little bit more. It s going to be a lot, lot cheaper than what you would pay by going to the United States or something like that. So there s China. Obviously the level of English is going to vary a lot. So you ll find some people in China who have great English that you can outsource to and you ll find other people who can barely speak a word of English who will apply for your jobs. So if you re speaking English and you re hiring for a role where you have to communicate a lot, it s important that the people speak your language. So that s really important. So there s China. To be honest, I haven t had a lot of experience hiring to China. My main experience has been hiring to the Philippines and also India. And lately, it has been more and more to the Philippines. So I m going to talk about those two in more detail in just a moment. There s also Bangladesh. I ve had a few people from Bangladesh. In my experience, it has been quite similar to the people I found in India and there s also Romania. Romania is often really praised for having great programmers. Now I don t mean to generalize here but I know a lot of internet marketers and they get a lot of their programming done in Romania. Now, depending on the role you hire for, I believe that the average starting rate is around $8 to $10 per hour.

So it s starting to get at the intermediate range. It s not really cheap but for those roles like programming where there s a little bit more skill involved, well then $8 per hour, that s fine by me. I m willing to pay $8 per hour for programmers. Let s start off with India. The first thing you have to realize is that when you hire in India, there s a really strict adherence to hierarchies in their country in general and what you re going to find is that most people in India, they will address you as sir or madam no matter what. And there s a common mistake made that when you go to these outsourcing sites like Elance and you post your job and you have maybe 20 or 30 people apply, when I first did that, about two or three years ago, I had a lot of people in India apply and they would write dear sir and when I read that, I assumed that they hadn t even read my job post which had my name at the bottom so I wouldn t really pay much attention to them. What I realized later when I got to know what I was talking about a little bit more, I just realized that that s just how it is. Rarely are they going to address you by your first name in the job application. So if they say dear sir or dear madam, sometimes it s not because they haven t read your job description. It s just the way it is. It s their custom over there. But if they say something like dear sir dash madam, that s usually a warning sign. That usually tells you that they haven t really bothered to read the job description because they haven t even figured out, you know, whether you re male or female. Now in the next module, I m going to teach you a little trick that you can do, that you can add to your job descriptions to screen out the 80 percent of applicants who don t even bother to read your job description in the first place. I will show you that in the next module. So, that s the first thing. So if they call you sir, madam or even boss, just let them do that because for one, if you try and tell them that no, you don t need to do that, often, what I found is they feel a little bit uncomfortable, okay, calling you by your first name. It s just customary over there to have hierarchies in place. So if they re working for you, just let them call you sir or madam. It s what they usually want to do. Now I ve got here it s a yes culture. This is what I ve found and I ve learned the hard way. Often, and again, I am going to generalize here so I apologize if I offend anyone but this is just from my own experience these past few years. Whenever you ask, Can you do this role? or Can you do this job? 99 percent of the time, they re going to say yes. I ve just found that a lot of teams in India, they will say, Yes, sir, Yes madam. We can do it, even if they can t. It just seems to me it s a yes culture because for one, I guess they don t want to let you down and for two, they re really hungry for the work. It s a very entrepreneurial place I found.

So they really want the work and they ll say yes to things that perhaps they probably shouldn t say yes to. So I gave you the example before of when I had a team in India, I asked them, Can you set up this shopping cart using Infusionsoft? And of course, I got, Yes, yes. Yes, sir. It s easy. We can easily do that. And I found out over the next few weeks that in fact, they couldn t really do it properly. So just be a little bit careful there. Make sure that they actually have experience in what you re asking them to do and they really can do it. Now, in general, work is high priority over there. They do work very hard. Recently, I had the experience of another team in India and my primary guy who was doing my programming, he just told me one day he can t work tomorrow. And I said, Oh, why not? He said, Oh, I ve got a wedding. Okay. He was working right up to the day before his wedding and I found that amusing. It just seems to me that work is very high priority over there. So, fairly hard workers I ve found. India is definitely a relationship-based culture. Often, what I find is that trust is really, really important with teams in India. It s really important that they feel like you trust them. That s often a comment I would have. When sometimes I would ask when things aren t getting done, they would often comment back to me. They would say something like, Sir, we don t feel like you trust us. You have to trust us more. So trust is really important. And I ve often been able to have teams in India do a trial task for me before I even outlay anything, before I even pay so I can see what level of quality they do and many of the teams in India are willing to do a trial task because they do have a high level of trust in general. So, the great thing is often when you are hiring to India, you can find out what level of quality they can do by giving them a one or two-hour trial task and then you can see what they come up with. Average work week, usually around six days a week, Monday to Saturday and work hours often start much later than in many Western countries. So I found that most teams I ve outsourced to in India, they usually start at around 12:00 PM at their time, 12:00 PM and they do work until a little bit later, usually to 8:00 PM. And in general, often they will stay back a little bit more if there s work to be done. Now the best place to hire people in India seems to be Elance.com. Elance has a ton of people in India who you can select from. It seems to me that most of the people on Elance are specifically from India so it s really easy to find people in India on that site. The subject regarding average wages really depends on the job but you ll find that people in India will be willing to start off at around $4 per hour. You can actually hire someone who has a university master s degree in computer science for around $15 per hour.

When you think about that, that s actually pretty good because you can get someone who s highly qualified and really knows what they re talking about, and its only for $15 per hour. Philippines: More and more, you re starting to hear in the internet marketing community it s not really just starting. I mean, it has been going on for a number of years now but everyone is raving about the Philippines as a place to outsource to. And I must admit I caught on a little bit later. I was hiring primarily to India myself and then in the past few months, I ve started moving a lot of my work to the Philippines and I ve been very happy with it. So, it seems to me that the hype is actually true. The Philippines is a great place to outsource to. Now, this is quite funny. This slide that you see in front of you, I actually outsourced to my assistant in the Philippines. So her name is Christine and I asked her, Christine, can you tell us people in Western countries what the normal customs are in Filipino culture? And then you have to be aware of these because if you are in a Western country like Australia or America or wherever, Canada, United Kingdom, often we re not really familiar with these different cultural norms in other countries. And in some of these countries especially the Philippines, it s a very polite culture where sometimes, they re going to be a little bit reluctant to tell you these things. And what can end up happening is that if you ignore these normal cultural norms, you can actually offend them. So it s really important that you understand or at least you have a basic idea of what the cultural norms are. So let s go through them. The first one is that it s considered normal that when you have someone in the Philippines and they ve been working for you for one year, within the 13th month is where you actually pay them but they don t work. They get that as like a bonus month, a holiday. When they get to that point, they ve worked for you for 12 months, in the 13th month, you pay them the full salary and they actually have that as a holiday. That s considered a cultural norm which is so it s important. What I like to do is when I hire someone from the Philippines; I don t really want to have to worry about all these things. So I just tell them, look, I understand that it s normal over there [when you have your 13th month as a paid holiday. What I want you to do is when we get to that stage, tell me about it. And don t worry about sounding too forward or anything like that. Please just be open with me and just tell me anything like that. So I will leave that up to you to tell me.

That s usually what I like to do so I don t have to worry about remembering. The other thing, Filipinos are very, very status conscious so they will use formal titles and it s quite funny. The first time this happens, it s quite a strange experience. The first time I hired my virtual assistant in the Philippines, she kept on calling me sir and we were having a conversation on Skype and literally at the end of every little comment or every instant message, she would address me as sir. And it was almost as if I was royalty or something like that. And at first, it was quite funny and then, I started to feel a little bit uncomfortable with it and I just said to her, look, you don t need to call me sir if you don t want to. You can just call me Matt or just call me by my first name. And she actually wrote back, No, sir. If you don t mind, I would prefer it. It s my way of showing respect. So my advice to you is just let them. If they want to call you sir or ma am or madam, just let them do it because it s really part of the culture. They ve very respectful of status and things like that. So just let that go. And I will admit it does help your ego a little bit when you have people calling you sir all day. It s quite a funny experience but just let them do that. There may be several minutes of small talk before getting down to business so usually in the mornings when I have my assistant in the Philippines, she ll message me and say, Good morning, sir. Usually, we ll just chat a little bit. I ll say, How are you? et cetera, things like that. Courtesy is very important. And also what I found is that sometimes, it is a little bit hard to get someone on the Philippines I m generalizing here but it s a little bit hard to get them on the phone because sometimes, like I said, they re very conscious of status. Sometimes, it s almost as if they re a little bit shy on the phone. So usually, what I found is they re much, much more comfortable with just using instant messaging. For example, Skype or G Talk so just typing in communication. Often, they re much more comfortable with that. If you do get them on the phone, it s really important that you don t ever raise your voice or things like that. That can really destroy the relationship. So just be a little bit careful with that. The last point she made was holidays are holidays so very important that when it comes to holidays like the 13th month and especially Christmas, that s time off. So they expect not to work during holidays. Really, really important that, you know, let them have holidays, things like that of course.

Now, this is a top point to take a note. Sometimes, your Filipino workers, they will feel like that telling the truth, it might embarrass or offend so often, he or she will often beat around the bush. So, sometimes, if they can t do something, if you give them a task which they don t have the right training on and they feel like they can t do it, they will feel a little bit embarrassed by that. And often, people complain that when they hire people in the Philippines, sometimes they leave and they stop all communication. For example, if you hire a virtual assistant, a lot of internet marketers will have the experience of they ll have a Filipino virtual assistant working for them for a number of months and then suddenly, they will go quiet and there will be no more communication. And the internet marketer complains about that. Usually, the only reason that happens is because the virtual assistant in the Philippines came across a task that they couldn t do and they felt a little bit embarrassed by it. So it s really, really important that when you hire someone from the Philippines, you be very upfront with them and just tell them that, look, if there s anything that you can t do or if there s a task that you have questions about, please be very open with me. Just tell me if there s something that you need help with or something like that. The other reason I love going to the Philippines is English is the main language there. So they usually have a very good understanding of Western culture and that s really important for jobs like article writing where, you know, if you re writing for a Western audience, well then, straight away, the Western audience, they can tell whether the writer is from an English speaking country or from a country that has English as a second language. For example, if you go to India and you hire them to do your content, in general, it s often very obvious that the person writing that article has English as a second language. Whereas in the Philippines, you re going to get all different levels of people who speak English but the best ones, they actually write really, really well for a Western audience. Right now, I have my content writer who s doing articles for $3.50 per article and on average, she says it takes her around two hours per day to write one article. But they re really good articles. They re really good. It s as if someone in Australia or America or a Western country had written those articles. So, that s one of the reasons I love going to the Philippines. Generally, the level of English, it s very, very high. Now, standard office hours, 8:00 to 5:00 PM and they usually take a one-hour lunch break. And that s usually paid time so you just add that in and I mean at $2 per hour, just don t be too

cheap with when you are paying someone $2 per hour especially if you re in a Western country. What you have to realize is that often the people in the Philippines, it s a little bit hard to get work there. They really love the idea of working for someone overseas. It s a little bit prestigious and I mean if you re only paying $2 for their lunch hour, that s really not much. You re going to keep them happy. You re providing them with a good job and you re going to get a very loyal and an honest worker. Now also, the last thing, before you hire someone from the Philippines, often, they really want to know that they have a fulltime position. So you don t offer them a part-time role. In general, they don t really like part-time roles. What they prefer is a fulltime position. They feel more secure having a fulltime role. So often, they will want to talk about a contract and that means is you perhaps use an outsourcing site like odesk.com. And then you just do the contract in that and we re going to look at that in the next module. But they just want to know that they have security and they would rather not just do a job that s only going to take a few days. They re looking in general for a more fulltime position. You want to make that very clear that when you are hiring people from the Philippines that you are hiring for a fulltime role. A decent starting salary for a college graduate in computer engineering is $220 per month. It s very cheap. So think about that. That s $55 per week and let s says they re working five days per week. I mean, that s not much at all. It s $10 per day. It s really not much at all. Now, if you really want to hire someone who s really, really good and they understand programming, things like that, then you can go right up to $800 per month. But I will say this. If you are hiring someone from the Philippines for $800 per month, for that price, you would get some really, really good talent. You would possibly get someone who knows all about ecommerce and everything like that. So $800 per month would be quite a lot and you should be able to get someone really good for that but usually, you would start off at around $200 per month, about that level. Now in general, don t expect them to have too much experience. If you re hiring someone at $200 per month, don t expect them to be an expert in programming. Instead, you re going to have to do a lot of the training yourself. And the way that you re going to do that is by making a training video and showing them exactly what you want them to do. Now we are going to cover that in a later module, module six, I believe. I m going to show you how to do training videos and everything like that.

But this is just a very important point. Often, when people go to the Philippines and they try and hire their first virtual assistant, they will write in the job description all the different things or all the different skills that they need to have and it just doesn t work that way in general. In most cases, you are going to have to do some training. However, from my own experience, I found that they are a very quick study. They learn very quickly and, you know, you show them once and they can basically do the role forever after that. I ll give you an example. Right now, I have a client who s spending over $1000 a day on Facebook pay per click ads and I m managing the whole entire campaign. And believe it or not, my assistant Christine who s working for $2 per hour is doing that whole campaign. And I m getting a percentage of that $1000 per day. Now, of course, she s not writing the ads or anything like that. I m writing the ads and I m telling her the pages to target the ads at but when it comes to manually submitting the ads, which is a task that takes a lot of time but it doesn t really require a lot of skill with good instructions, she actually does that. It frees me up of around three hours per day where I don t have to do that. I simply tell her exactly what I want and the way I do that is in a Google doc which we re going to look at in a later module when we look at tools. But she s able to do that and the way that worked is I simply made a training video. It took about 20 minutes to make and I show that to her once and then after that, she did a few ads, made a few minor mistakes which I corrected and then after that, everything she has done has virtually been flawless. Every time she submits ads, it s usually exactly what I want. Okay. Let s talk about the places where you can go to hire people in the Philippines. There s a site called JobStreet.com. Now this is actually, from what I ve been told, the biggest outsourcing site in the Philippines and I believe it is quite expensive to use. You have to get a subscription to it. The two main sites that most people talk about are OnlineJobs.ph and also BestJobs.ph so these are sites specifically for the Philippines. There s another one called PhilippinesOutsourcingCorp.com. There s TaskUs.com and also a really good place okay, before I tell you this, there s even another place odesk. Go to odesk.com. Most of my assistants in the Philippines have come from odesk.com so that s also a great place. But the other place I wanted to tell you about is Craigslist but don t just go to the US version of Craigslist or anything like that. Go to the actual Philippines version of Craigslist and you might even want to pick out the city. So in this case, I ve got Manila. I think that s the capital of the Philippines but actually pick out the city and then just post your job there.

What I found is that there s no real main site for hiring people in the Philippines. There s no real outsourcing sites specifically for the Philippines that is really, really good. Most of these sites were okay but you do have to do a little bit of hunting around so that s why I recommend sites like Craigslist.com. So it is a little bit harder to find people but I think it s more than worth it. And the last one I want to recommend is LinkedIn.com. So if you don t know, LinkedIn is basically like Facebook for professionals and the great thing is you can actually see resumes of other people and they can see yours and it s really, really good to find people in the Philippines. So, simply get an account at LinkedIn and just use the search function and type in something like Filipino virtual assistant or outsource and you ll be able to find people. And the great thing is you can actually read their resume and they can actually read about your business too so it s not as if you re two strangers trying to figure each other s business out. It s not really like that. They can see what you re about. You can see what they re about. You can even see references, things like that. So, LinkedIn, it s a great place to find talent. Now, the big question is between the Philippines versus India. This is a big debate. India has got to be one of the main outsourcing countries in the planet. I think it would probably have more activity than China although that s debatable but there s a big debate especially in internet marketing about which country in general is better, the Philippines versus India. Most internet marketers who have tried them both, and I m talking like 9 out of 10, will say the Philippines and after having tried both myself, I would have to agree. Philippines in my opinion is a good place to start. Here are the reasons. Number one, it s an English speaking country. So that really, really helps. I found that a lot of the places that you hire in India, you re going to get a wide variety of different levels of English. Some will have great English and others won t. But often, it s not the primary language. In many regions, it s not. In some places, it is but in other places, it s not. Whereas in the Philippines, English, it really is the primary language. They also have their own language but I just find that the general level of English, it s really, really high. And it just really helps for jobs like I said before like writing articles or any job that involves writing. It really helps when you re writing to an English speaking audience if the actual writer themselves, they understand the Western cultural nuances, things like that. Also, the Philippines, they have a large pool of young, well-educated employees. So you will find lots of university-educated professionals with very good English.

Philippines is the most Westernized country in Asia. The Americans, I ve got here, only officially stopped governing the Philippines in the 1940s. So, a lot of the cultural challenges that you have in places like China and India, you don t really have in the Philippines. Last of all, it s very, very affordable. So if you re just getting started in outsourcing and you ve been a little bit reluctant up until this point, you can hire your first virtual assistant for less than $2 per hour. Really I don t know too many people who can use the excuse of not being able to afford outsourcing when it s only $2 per hour. So it s very, very cheap. Now some further tips for hiring in the Philippines. This is what I like to do. I require daily communication so I make that very clear with anyone I hire. I tell them that I want updates every single day just to keep that communication live and rarely do I do it on the phone or on the Skype phone system either. Mostly, it s done with either emails or instant messaging whether that s on Skype of G Talk or whatever. But rarely do I actually get on the phone because when you do get on the phone, it is a little bit time-consuming. So I just prefer to have updates from them on Skype and things like that. And there are three questions that you want to have them answer at the end of everyday. Now these three questions, before I tell you what they are, the person who taught me this was Eben Pagan. So I think I might have mentioned Eben before but Eben, he runs a business where it does $20 million or $25 million per year in the dating niche. He s a very successful information marketer. But what s interesting about Eben s business is that he has a virtual staff of around 80 or 85 people, I believe, and it has probably grown since then. So it s quite a big team but it s completely 100 percent virtual which means that they are not onsite. It s not like the 80 people meet with him and to say mostly every day. They re spread out all over the world. And as you can imagine, that s going to have some challenges. So what he says is that whenever he hires someone new, he tells them that at the end of every single day, he would like them to send him a five-minute email, 10 minutes at most and answer three questions. The first question is, What did you do today? This is very important because when they actually have to tell you what they got done that day, you can actually see straight away whether they are the sort of employee who s going to waste time and take three hours to do something that should only take 30 minutes. So this is about holding people accountable. So you re actually focused on getting results and they re actually getting stuff done. So it s a very important question to ask. When they actually have to report what they got done, they re not going to want to waste time because they know that you re going to find out straight away. So it s a very important question.

Number two, What problems or challenges did you run into? Again, this is really important when you hire someone and they re brand new because they re not going to know your business like you do. And it s very easy for us to assume that when we hire people, they re going to catch on very quickly as to what our business is about. But you have to think about it from their perspective. It s a brand new business so they re learning about all of your websites, you know, all the ways that you like to see things done so it s all completely new to them. So chances are, there is going to be a little bit of a learning curve there and they are going to have some challenges and some problems. So it s really important that you encourage them to ask because when they don t ask, that s when the problems, they can turn into catastrophes. You know, they can get a lot bigger. So that s a very important question to ask. Lastly, what can I help you with? So find out is there something they need help with to perform their role more efficiently. For example, they might tell you that, you know, it would be really great if you hired someone else to do this other little job to help them achieve what you hired them for. So those are the three questions, really important. What did you do today? What problems or challenges did you have? And lastly, what can I help you with? Especially when you re hiring in the Philippines, this is what I found and I said this before but I ll say it again. Often if they can t do something, people in the Philippines in general, they can feel unworthy. They can feel a little bit bad like they don t exactly deserve what you re paying them when they can t do something. And often in Western countries, we see this and it comes across as shyness. So there s this little term. They get shy and this is usually what happens. When they have a challenge and they can t do it and they feel bad about asking you to explain it more, often, they can suddenly disappear and when they do disappear, usually it s because of this. Because in general, what you ll find is that the Filipino workers are more loyal than any other worker. They are great, great workers, very loyal to you. Really are. So if they do disappear, usually, there s a reason behind it. What you want to do in that case is just tell them. Just send them an email. Just say, Hey, what happened? You know, did you find the last task a little bit difficult or was there some sort of problem you had with it? Just let me know. And then often, they ll come back. But it s just very important that you understand this.

Now, the second or the last big debate that people usually have is, Should you go for the solo freelancer, okay, so someone who s just working by themselves or should you go for a firm? And there are pros and cons for each. One of the disadvantages of hiring someone who s a solo freelancer who just works by themselves is if you become too dependent on them. So you teach them all of your business and they ve been working for you for six months and they know your business like the back of their hand. And they re very, very important in your business. If something goes wrong with them like they get sick or they decide that they no longer want to work for you or they have some sort of personal problems and they disappear one day, it s dangerous to have a single point of failure in your business. And I ve been there myself. I made that mistake many times where I ve hired someone and they really become familiar with how my business works and we ve gone through a lot of training and then one day, they ve just disappeared and it s very, very frustrating when that happens. So that s the big disadvantage about hiring a solo freelancer. It can be a little bit risky. What you can do to get around that or to minimize that is whenever you have someone complete a task in your business, it s really important that just ask them to actually write down the process of what they did. For example, let s say that you hired someone and their role was to write articles and then to add them to your WordPress blog. So you made a quick 10-minute video showing them how to do that or you might have explained that over Skype how to do that. Once they know how to do it, the first thing that you tell them to do or that you ask them to do is to actually write out. Just take an hour or two hours and write out all the steps on how to complete that task. And then send it to you. And you actually keep that in a folder on your desktop or you keep that in your Google Docs folder which we ll talk about in a later module. Because in that point, in that case, if they ever decide that they can t work for you anymore or something go wrong and you need to replace them, now it s much, much easier to train someone new because you have standardized procedures on how everything gets done. So your new person, they ll be able to read the instructions and they ll be able to pick it up much, much faster. That s also why it s important to have training videos because in that case, if you have a generic training video where you don t mention any names, well then, whenever someone joins your team, you can just give them the training video.

You don t actually have to get on the phone and try and explain things to them again. That s a very bad way of doing it because it s just very time-consuming. It s just important that you standardize the procedures and then that will offset the risk of having a solo freelancer. Now when it comes to firms, the good thing about a firm is that with the group structure that they have, you re going to have a pool of talent and you will have lots of people on the team who specialize in different roles. For example, I ve hired firms in India before and, you know, they might have a team of 10 people and they might have some people who specialize in design, other people who specialize in PHP coding and others who specialize in something entirely different. When you hire a solo freelancer, very rarely are they going to have, you know, the skills to do every single little task but if you hire a team, that saves you having to go and look for lots and lots of people for lots and lots of different roles. A good team, they ll have a team of people with lots of different skills so whenever you have a new job come up, they can usually find someone in their team to do it. So it s really up to you which one you choose. To be honest, for me, for virtual assistants, I prefer to use a solo freelancer rather than a firm. That s just my experience. So right now, my virtual assistant is in the Philippines and I m very, very happy with what I m getting there and the other benefit of using a solo freelancer is that generally, they re cheaper because when you hire a team, they often have overheads and things like that. You know, they have to pay for the office building, the computer stations, everything like that. So usually, everything is much more expensive but individuals are usually cheaper. So you just have to weigh up the pros and the cons there. Okay. So, converting knowledge into action. What I would like you to do is at this stage, before we go on to module four where I m going to show you how to actually write job descriptions and we re actually going to go to the different outsourcing sites and I m going to take you through the process, before we get to that stage, just go through all the different outsourcing sites we talked about here and choose the right ones for you. For example, if you have a job and it s related to design such as a logo, then go through all of those different outsourcing sites in the design category like 99designs.com and choose a small handful of the ones you re going to focus on. I don t recommend you go and post the same job to 10 or 20 different outsourcing sites because that just gets way too complicated. What I recommend you do is just pick three or four and just focus on those.

So choose which ones you re going to focus on and even create accounts. So become members of them so when we do get to the next module, you can just go log in and you can post a job description. And you might even want to watch their training where they show you how to do it. Even though we ll talk about it in the next module, they can still just fill you in on the gaps. Last of all, I highly recommend if you haven t already, hire your own virtual assistant from the Philippines even if it s only part-time. Even if you ve never hired anyone before, just go and do it because it s a very liberating experience when you suddenly have someone and they can take care of all those little jobs that were taking up 40 or 50 percent of your time and that don t make money for your business. So all of those little jobs that don t require a lot of skill but are very time-consuming, those are all things that you can offload to your virtual assistant. And just by doing this, you will see it just frees you up so much. It just allows you to focus on what s important versus what takes a lot of time but doesn t move your business forward. So guys, that s it for module three and I will see you in module four.