5/6/2009
- Outsourcing Case Study - Lisa Schwartz
So often I have people ask me questions that I don’t have answers to:
- “What kind of person do I hire first?”
- “How long does it take them to get up to speed?”
- “What do I have them do for me?”
The other day I got an email from Lisa Schwartz that hinted towards her having a great experience that answers these questions.
I got on skype with her and recorded the call.
Get Flash to see this player.
Here are the answers to the questions above:
- “How long does it take someone to get up to speed?”
- She has been at this for 6 weeks and has had 6 sites built in that time. She expects to be building 2-3 sites per day within the next few weeks
- “What kind of person do I hire first?”
- She hired a “blog builder.” Someone to get everything up and running.
- Then she hired an “SEO” person. Someone to promote the blogs (your blog builder could do this themselves)
- Then she got a “VA.” Someone to do everything else that’s required.
- “What do I have them do for me?”
- Build Blogs
- Research
- SEO
- Video marketing
- Article marketing
- Social Bookmarking
- Social Networking
- Phone calls
- Reporting/Tracking
- …
Then, notice some other general business items she talks about:
- She understands her business model very well. Please think about this for yourself. If you don’t understand your business model VERY well, go back and learn more before continuing.
- She is working on just one thing. She’s doing it very well. She’s not chasing bright shiny objects (the latest and greatest launch)
- She synthesized all the info from all the things she’s learned and is using it all in this business. Remember, you’re running a BUSINESS here. There will be set-backs. Work through them!
Training for all of what her GUYS are doing for her is available inside ReplaceMyself.com.She’s using Joel Petersons Mini Site Formula which I reviewed here.
4/29/2009
- How I Do Niche Research
During the years of running my online business I’ve come across a lot of different ways of doing online research.
Lots of the info out there is pretty dumb.
Dumb…meaning…it’s just not info that will help you know what’s good and what’s bad.
Dumb…meaning…what they’re telling you XYZ means, just isn’t true.
Dumb…meaning…”this does not help me pick a niche!”
Dumb…meaning…”I will never do this because there’s nothing at all scientific about what you’re teaching me! and it’s too time consuming and there’s no way in the world I could have someone else do this for me.”So I’ve developed my own way of doing niche research.
- it’s very scientific
- the numbers are super meaningful
- it’s easily outsourced (just give them this video!)
- you will uncover GOLD using it
Here it is for you:
Get Flash to see this player.
Here are some myths you’ll hear people say:
- Use overture to find keywords
- Look at the number of results returned by google to find how competitive a niche is. For example:
(this tells you nothing!)
I use this method when:
- searching for new niches to enter (I create lots of spreadsheets on lots of different topics)
- researching within a single niche to find out what keywords I should target
- researching a market someone has brought to me as a “gazillion” dollar idea
I outsource all of my research.
UPDATE: I had someone tell me that what I said about the PPC ads isn’t clear. I’ll explain.
In general, lots of PPC ads means there’s quite a bit of money to be made in that niche.
If I want to run PPC ads for that niche, then having lots of PPC ads is not good. It means it’s very competitive and probably very expensive. I might want to run PPC ads if I KNOW I’m entering a niche but the pagerank is high and I can’t compete with SEO.
On the other hand, if I discover a niche that has lots and lots of ads, but the pagerank is low, that means that the niche is very profitable (lots of ads = lots of money to be made) and that I don’t have to compete with the high bid prices due to the amount of ads. The low PR means that I can do SEO, get my site to the top, and get the traffic for free. In this case, the “lots of ads” is an invitation to me to enter that niche because it means the niche is profitable.
4/23/2009
- What Training (and time) Will Do For Your Employees
Yesterday I got a PDF document back from my GUYS:
The Top 7 ROI Activities Your VA Can Do
I asked them to write it. I’m going to add it as a bonus in ReplaceMyself.com. They would know the best ROI activities better than I would…they’re the ones who do the work and who check it’s effectiveness.
Here’s the real kicker. This is why I created ReplaceMyself.com in the first place.
They sent me the 2nd draft. Along with it one of my GUYS said:
Sir,
I think we should add your affiliate links into the PDF for all the tools you’re recommending they use.
What do you think?
[name]So, he’s actually looking out for me and my business. He actually wants me to succeed and make money.
The crazy thing is that after the first draft, I had thought “I should put affiliate links into this…but I don’t want to go find them…so nevermind.”
HE DID IT FOR ME!!!
Talk about replacing myself!
After Giving your GUYS my training, this is what you should expect from your GUYS too.
This is why outsourcing to the Philippines is soooo different than anywhere else in the world.
DISCLAIMER: The GUY who said this to me has been with me for 3 years. That’s why the title of this post has “(and time)” included in it. It takes both time and training for someone to understand your business as well as he understands mine.
4/22/2009
- What I do VS. What actually gets done
Here’s what I’ve done for the past 24 hours:
- Checked my email
- Talked with my partner Dan
- Wrote a blog post
- Wrote 2 emails to be sent to my mailing lists
- Used jing to make an explanation video
- Played golf
- Chatted with a few of my GUYS in the Philippines
- Ate dinner, played with my kids, practiced more golf in my backyard, …
- Read a book (it was only 130 pages)
- Slept
- Ate, got ready, played with my kids, went to the LDS temple
- Had a meeting with someone who wanted help
- Played Golf
- And am now writing this blog post (it’s 11:56am)
Here’s what actually got done in the past 24 hours:
- Email got filtered, checked, and responded to
- 2 domains got bought
- A squeeze page, sales page, and website got put up
- An autoresponder series got put into aweber, along with sales emails getting inserted into them
- The 90 minute call I did a few weeks ago with ReplaceMyself.com members got partially transcribed
- 2 blog posts got done on my affiliate sites
- A new test version of one of my sites got created…I haven’t seen it yet, I just heard it’s done
- My golf game improved
- One of my GUYS learned a ton about the inner workings of wordpress while creating a new theme for me
All of these things were done by my GUYS in the Philippines. 100% without me (except for the golf and email).
Hiring GUYS in the Philippines is the way to go if you work from home and actually want to be productive in your business.
Hiring GUYS in the Philippines is NOT optional.
4/8/2009
- How Outsourcing Should Work For You
I have people ask me ALL THE TIME what my Guys do for me, and how effective it is to have them.
I recently had a great example, that I hope will illustrate why YOU need to have GUYS in the Philippines.
Keep in mind as you read this that my GUYS have been through my “mini net creation” training that’s available as a ReplaceMyself.com member.
Here’s how it should work:
We recently launched a new product.
I sent an email to one of my GUYS asking him to put together a marketing/traffic plan for the site.
He sent me a plan. I asked for more detail on the “Mini-Net” he wants to create.
Here’s what he sent me.
Here are the 3 diagrams he sent me:
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
If you don’t understand what’s going on with the Mini-Nets and the diagrams, GREAT THAT’S THE POINT! I (You) don’t have to understand exactly what’s going on. As long as my GUY does, the work will get done, I’ll get traffic, I’ll get to the top of the search engines. Simple!
In fact, when he sent me this email, I replied to him saying “Great, go implement it.” without even looking at the diagrams first. I knew it would be good. I trust him. He’s had my training on how to do this.
This is how Outsourcing should work for you. If this isn’t what your experience is like, you need to be a member of ReplaceMyself.com. It’s designed to make you smarter, not harder.
3/27/2009
- Outsourcing Online Research
At the end of this post you can download a little windows app that will significantly improve your ability to do online niche research.
However, before I give you that, I need to tell you how I got the app. This post is really about the experience you should have when outsourcing to the Philippines.
I recently wanted to run a bunch of keywords through the MSN Commercial Intent Tool. It tells you how likely a person is to buy something when they search for a particular keyword (it’s great for researching niches). With this knowledge, you can know ahead of time whether you should enter a niche or not, because you will know how likely people are to buy stuff in that niche.
I wanted to run about 10 million keywords through the tool.
So, I sent this task to a programmer of mine in the Philippines.
For over a month he worked on it with no success. I wasn’t too happy about that.
When I talked to him about it, it turned out it’s really difficult to get the data from the tool the way I asked him to.
I told him to “figure it out.”
So he did.
He went and learned C# (a programming language) and created a windows application to gather the data.
So, this guy is a PHP programmer, but in order to complete the task I had given him he went out and learned a new programming language and completed the task in the next week!
This is the kind of experience I have every day in outsourcing to the Philippines. In their culture, they want to do whatever it takes to make you happy. This is the kind of experience you should have.
Now, here’s the app he created to help automate doing online business research
2/25/2009
- Simple Things To Outsource
I’m always looking for things that are easy to outsource.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one as simple as this.
Inside ReplaceMyself.com I give people a “Business-in-a-box” that lets the guy they hire get started doing simple affiliate marketing without any intervention on the customer’s part.
All you have to do is say “Go do this” (like Dion did) and it gets done. Simple.
A friend of mine has made it even easier.
See, my business-in-a-box is based around the game of numbers. If you put up enough campaigns, you’re GOING to find some that are profitable. If you’re not the one putting up the campaigns, it actually gets done, and you make money.
What Letian is doing is he took the numbers out of the process. I interviewed him about it. Listen to this:
Get Flash to see this player.
After Letian agreed to do this interview with me, I got him to give some of what he’s doing away for free.
Click here to get Letians free profitable campaigns
(I think he has only given this away to his personal list before)With that he’s also giving away access to Top Secret Automatic Money program, plus video editing training (here’s how I did it, I wish I had his training).
This is one of the easiest things I’ve ever seen for giving something to your Filippino to have him make you money with very (VERY) little effort on your part.
2/20/2009
- Designing Your Business Around Your Lifestyle
One of the most important things I see in starting an internet business is designing your business around your lifestyle.
Maybe not around the lifestyle you currently have, but around the lifestyle you want to have.
If you design your business around your lifestyle, it makes making decisions in your business much easier (”should I do this? Does it fit my lifestyle? No! Ok, decision made.”)
I did a 50 minute interview with Sterling and Jay from Internet Business Mastery specifically about lifestyle design.
They have the #1 podcast on iTunes for the keywords “Internet Business” and “Internet Marketing”. If you ask me, that right there tells you that they know what they’re doing.
On the call they touched on:
- Getting a podcast to the top of iTunes
- Using your business as a vehicle for accomplishing your goals
- How to avoid creating a 2nd job for yourself
- Why MONEY can’t be your ultimate goal
- Why outsourcing has to be part of your business
- Why your job is wholesaling your time
- Turning your life’s passion into a business
- Building rabid buyers who come back time and time again
- Creating Systems in your business so you don’t have to work IN your business
Listen to (or Download) the call here:
Get Flash to see this player.
To get started designing your lifestyle, get Jay and Sterlings 3 Pillars Mini-Course FREE Audio.
Once you understand outsourcing redefined, all of this becomes very, very possible.
2/13/2009
- The Best Way To Make Money Online
It is my humble but accurate opinion (to take a page from Rick Butts playbook) that what Adam and Alen teach at jonasblog.com/npc is the best way to make money online.
I think it’s the best model, that fits well with outsourcing, is hard to fail at, is scalable, easy to understand, exceptionally well explained, and answers people’s questions better than anything I’ve ever seen online! (whew…yes, that was a long, run-on sentence).
In watching some of their material in their membership site (using myspeed to watch the videos at 3x), one video in particular really stood out to me. It was like:
“Hey, this is it! This is the formula. This is what works! and it’s explained SOOOO well.”So I asked them to let me use the video and publish it outside their site.
The demonstration Adam gives on the whiteboard is really good, yet sooooo many people miss it.For your enjoyment:
Get Flash to see this player.
If you follow this formula, it’s really hard to not succeed at making money online.
Here’s the interview I did with Adam about his business
For more info, watch their 5-part mini course.
2/12/2009
- Successfully living the 4-hour workweek through outsourcing
Living the 4-Hour Workweek lifestyle isn’t difficult…
It just takes implementation
I met Dion Riccardo at Jeff Mills Outsourcing Workshop last weekend in Minneapolis.He told me he was there for 2 reasons:
- To thank me for changing his life
- To hear me speak again
(I’m not doing this to brag…I’m posting this so you’ll see that this is really real)
I get emails from people like Dion almost every day. I got Dion on video…so he’s now famous:
[media:dion-riccardo-testimonial.flv]
A couple of notes from what Dion said:
- What he heard at the workshop was the same thing you’ll hear on ReplaceMyself.com
- His guy that made him $300 did it with the “Business-in-a-box” that everyone gets when they join ReplaceMyself.com. Dion told me: “I don’t even know what the guy’s doing…I just gave him the business-in-a-box and said ‘Do this!’ and he’s making me money. That stuff really works!”
He’s living the four hour workweek because he has other people doing his work for him.
It’s not that hard to live this lifestyle…it’s just a matter of implementing the things you know you should…like outsourcing everything
2/4/2009
- Social Media is Garbage!!!
Social media is garbage…for most people, for most businesses!
Most of it can’t be outsourced…or can it???
Ok, so let me explain.
For a long time we’ve been hearing “You’ve gotta be on Myspace”, “You’ve got to be on Facebook”, “You’ve got to be on Twitter”, “You’ve got to get onto Digg”, …
B.S.
People say “This is where all the people are!”.
I don’t care where all the people are! I care where all the buyers are!
In your business, you should too!
And the fact is, all the buyers are on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ebay!
Even if they’re on twitter, when they’re looking to buy something, they’re on Google and Ebay! Period!I use all the social media sites. Every one of them. But not for networking!
Michelle Macphearson just wrote an awesome free report called the Social Media Myth that talks about all this stuff.
In my opinion, this is the best thing that has ever been written for most small business owners when it comes to dealing with social media (it’s not super entertaining, but it certainly covers what you need to know).
In fact, she describes EXACTLY how I use all these sites. (SEO!)
For most people, it’s all just a huge waste of time (you’re off goofing around when you should be focusing on making sales, you justify using twitter because people said “it’s good for your business”), and you use it as a crutch/time waster to avoid make sales in your business).
Now, I’m not saying there’s not a place for twitter, facebook, myspace, [insert your favorite time waster here]. There is. But if you’re not using the right way for your business, you’re just wasting your time.
Here’s Michelle’s Social Media Myth report. Please read this before wasting your time trying to “get thousands of leads out of twitter!”.
I know…now let the flames begin telling me how wrong I am. But before you do, please tell me how much *MONEY* you’ve made from social media sites (I don’t want to hear about the job you got because of it, or how many lifelong friends you’ve made because of it, or how you have a great lead because of it, or about how many sales you’ll make in the future from all the wasted time now, I want to hear about $$$).
The other thing I love about what Michelle says is that it can easily, easily, easily be outsourced. Zero time spent by me!
Living the Four Hour Workweek!—–
Update: today I noticed this on the homepage of Omniture, the absolute best web analytics company:
1/15/2009
- An Automated Online Business Model
It has been a long time since I’ve been as excited about something as I was when Adam showed me what he’s doing in his online business.
People show me their products all the time.
Cool…ok…”it doesn’t solve my customers problems.” (that’s my thought most of the time).
Adam’s is totally different. It solves people’s problem of “what actually works online, and how do I do it correctly.”
It answers people’s question (that I get asked almost every day):
What works online to make money, and what niche should I do it in?In this video Adam shares his entire business model of how he writes, publishes, and sells ebooks to niche markets.
THIS is what works!
In it he reveals some things I’ve never heard people teach so well in my life:
- How to pick a niche (this is going to blow you away)
- How to get a 100 page ebook written for $100 (better quality book than he had been paying $1500 for)
- How to spend 30 minutes to have a sales page that converts
- How to get tons of free traffic
- How he outsources 98% of this
It’s a half hour video interview that you won’t regret watching!
[media:adam-short-john-jonas-video-interview.flv]
Crazy! Crazy! Crazy!
Tell me how you’re implementing this, or how to improve on it, or how it helped you in the comments!
Having trouble viewing the video?
Download video part 1
Download video part 2
Download video part 3
7/30/2008
- How and Why You Should Replace Yourself And Work The 17-Hour Workweek
Why everything you know about
outsourcing is dead wrong!
And how I redefined outsourcing
to make myself $2253/hour.
And why the way you’re currently doing outsourcing
is preventing you from making $100,000++ online
In the next 30 minutes I’m going to help you redefine outsourcing so you can replace yourself like I did.I will show you how to structure your business so other people run it for you and you make all this cash.
For the first time in history, I’m going to tell you exactly how you can do this, and for dirt cheap with this revolutionary, ingenious outsourcing method.
While I don’t truly live the 4-Hour Workweek, I do live about the 17 hour workweek.How?
I’ve replaced myself.
Overseas.
[media:Costa Rica Testimonials - Clip 010.avi.flv]
(Ollan came to my seminar in Costa Rica) If you haven’t done it yet, it will happen eventually. It’s only a matter of time and choice and which side you’re on*.
- Time: you understand this
- Choice: whether you chose to replace yourself, or whether someone else chooses to replace you (meaning…you just lost your job)
- Which side you’re on: if you’re the one replacing yourself and training your replacement (because you make money from it) or if your boss is replacing you, and you’re training them to make money for someone else.
Get Flash to see this player.
Outsourcing isn’t about Walmart anymore. It’s about knowledge. It’s about being a knowledge worker. It’s about the world economy and what your time is worth.
It’s not all about big business like you always hear. For me it’s about how I can take advantage of inefficiencies in the world economy to make myself money.It’s about how I make $2253 per hour by having other people do my work for me.
It’s about how most people invest in the stock market, hoping to make 8% per year (this year they all lost money).
Over the past few years I’ve invested my money in 6 Filipino workers and made 4047% return on my money.If outsourcing isn’t a good thing for you (if the word has a negative connotation for you), you had better turn it into a good thing really quickly (especially if you’re working for yourself or trying to work for yourself) and get on the right side of it (the one doing the outsourcing). Otherwise you’re losing ground every day.
Over the past year I’ve had so many questions about this that I’ve decided to do a phone call teaching everything I know about how to be on the good side of outsourcing, and how and why you should replace yourself (Hint: It’s how I live the 4-hour workweek lifestyle…and how you can too).
I recorded the call and it’s available at ReplaceMyself.com
Get Flash to see this player.
On the call I will literally teach you everything I can. I’ll be teaching:
- Where to hire people.
- When to hire people.
- Why it’s cheaper than you think.
- Why you had such a bad experience outsourcing last time you tried.
- How to find people to hire.
- How to pay them (you never thought you’d have a hard time paying someone…).
- What kinds of employment contracts I use.
- How to make them more productive for you.
- What tools I use to train them.
- What things I have them do for me.
- How you can get things done that you know you should be doing, but you aren’t. (imagine actually having everything done and not having something to work on sometimes…I do).
- How to implement everything you learn about, but don’t implement
The call will be FREE to everyone.
This isn’t a get rich quick scheme!!!
This is my method for outsourcing everything I possibly can, for pennies on the dollar, and at the same time automating my entire business (and life for that matter), so I can live the lifestyle of my dreams.
Get Flash to see this player.
There are 2 ways to outsource:
- The old way
- The new way
The old way is using elance.com, odesk.com, getafreelancer.com, scriptlance.com, rentacoder.com, or any other website where you put up a project one time and hire someone to do it. This is what prevents online businesses from growing to 6 or 7 figure incomes.
The new way is with redefined outsourcing and how I replaced myself with permanent, full-time people, for less than $300/month.
This call is for you if:
- you ever do anything repetitive at work
- you do any sort of business online (whether you’re profitable or not)
- you blog
- you do marketing
- you do SEO or PPC
- you’re a programmer
- you do sales
- you have a boss
- you get the idea…
(*I understand that not everything or everyone can or should be outsourced, but those situations are few and far between!)
Click here to get the FREE recorded call NOW!
Get Flash to see this player.
10/15/2007
- Outsourcing For The Small Business, Part 3
Obviously I’m in favor of outsourcing a lot of things to people who work exclusively for you. I outsource SEO, Writing, Article submitting, programming, small random tasks, manual tasks, web maintenance, reporting, adwords, …
But, there are a lot of things that don’t require a full time person. They require someone else to do it for you every once in a while. Here’s how I outsource some of these things:
Graphics: I get graphics done a few different ways. One, I have a designer who does contract work. He’s reasonably priced (most designers aren’t) and is pretty good. I don’t mention who he is because then he’ll get too busy to work for me anymore.
Recently I’ve also been using the “Contests” feature at sitepoint.com. There you can let other people compete for your work where you say I’m willing to pay $XXX for “Such and Such” to be done and then you get a bunch (or a few) people doing different designs for you and you get to pick the best one. Similar to the logo concept developed at logoworks, but here 1) you get to name your own price, 2) you get as many people as you want submitting designs, and 3) you can have any sort of graphics done.
Basically, you can have multiple people compete for your job ahead of time without having to pay anything up front. If you’re not happy with any of them, you don’t pay anything. If you like multiple ones, select more than one as the winner.
Simple, effective, outsourced.
Copywriting: I hate writing copy. I hate everything about it. Sales copy is worse because it matters. If I have to write sales copy for a business, that business stops and doesn’t get done. So, I always find someone else to do the copywriting. I’ve used quite a few different services, none of which I’m happy with, so I’m going to tell you what they are and then ask for your feedback.
I’ve done copywriting projects on elance. The problem with this is that you never know how good of copy you’re going to get. If it’s sales copy, you might get something good, you might get pure garbage. You can read someone’s feedback, but it doesn’t always mean it’s going to work out.
I’ve used Copywriting Club once before. It sounds like a great solution to this problem, but the one time I used it, I bought the silver package, then was told that I was getting “platinum” level copy because one of the owners wrote it for me, and then I sent over 1000 clicks to the sales page and it never converted a single time. This was in a market I had researched and tested and the copy totally sucked. I should probably test it again, but the one time I used it I wasn’t very happy.
I’ve used a few individual contractor copywriters also. The problem with this is it’s expensive. You can pay $45,000 for a single sales page. Yes, you’re likely to make that back, but that’s a lot of money for sales copy. There are quite a few people out there who will do this for between $4000 and $10,000. Ask around to people you know. You don’t necessarily need the best copywriter (depending on your business). If you can test and tweak and manipulate the copy then you can outsource it to “someone” and just get it done.
My brain is kind of fried right now so that’s all I can think of. As I come up with more things I outsource outside of full time employees I’ll post them. Feel free to comment with any suggestions.
9/23/2007
- Outsourcing For Small Business - Part 2
Everyone talks about oursourcing overseas. Here’s my take on what, when, why, where, and how to do it (for a small business):
What: Oursource your programming, your SEO, your Adwords, your repetitive tasks, your email, link building for your site, article writing, content creation, script writing (small automation), graphics, shopping, domain renewals, research, gift buying, …
Basically, anything that you do that someone else could do, outsource it.When: My experience has been that outsourcing (overseas) is good in 2 circumstances:
- When you know nothing about the thing you’re outsourcing
- When you’re really good at the thing you’re outsourcing
When you know nothing about what you’re outsourcing, then the results won’t be disappointing to you because you couldn’t have done it better yourself. Or, you couldn’t have done it at all yourself so it doesn’t matter how well or poorly it gets done, at least it got done.
A couple of examples of this for me are graphic design and content creation. I have zero graphics skills. I couldn’t design something and make it look good if my life depended on it. I know nothing about it except to say “I like it” or “I think it’s terrible.” In this case, I outsource it every time. Another example is content creation (like articles, copy, reviews). I hate doing it. I’m terrible at writing anything. I don’t care how the writing gets done, as long as it gets done because if it’s up to me to do it, it simply won’t get done.Both of these are important pieces of my business that I outsource. I know nothing about them.
I suggest you outsource whatever you can that you’re already really good at. For me, this entails link building, adwords, market research, programming, …
I like to outsource these things because I know I can give proper instructions for them and I know it’s going to get done correctly because I can verify it afterwards. I know I can write a spec for a programming project and it will get done how I want it because I understand programming (if you don’t understand programming, you’re going to go through a much more painful process of developing software than I go through).
I know I can outsource link building for my websites because I already understand the methods and concepts and I can accurately describe them to someone else.
I can outsource Adwords to someone because after they’re done setting things up and letting it run for a bit, I know I can go and look at the work and find problems and have them fix them. I can also teach how to do it correctly.My point isn’t to tell you what I’m good at. It’s to demonstrate that you should and can outsource what you’re good at.
My point is also that you should NOT outsource stuff that you’re mediocre at. If you know a little about adwords, and you outsource it to someone who knows less than you, you can’t very well fix their mistakes or improve upon what they did. The end result is that it gets done more poorly than if you did it yourself. It ends up hurting you and costing you a bunch of money.
If you just know a little about link building, and you hire someone else to do it, and they know less than you, they probably don’t understand that if you build links too quickly it will likely hurt you in the search engines. Then they go out and do a bunch of link spamming and all of a sudden your site is doing worse than it was before because neither you nor the person you hired knew what they were doing.
So, my suggestion for when to outsource is either when you know nothing or when you’re an expert.
If you’re not good at what you’re outsourcing, get good at it (or at least read a good ebook about it). That way you’ll have some guidelines from someone who is an expert instead of just turning it over to someone who knows nothing.
Why: Outsource because it lets you do something else.
Because outsourcing frees your brain to think about other things (just like the GTD philosophy says). Because it free up your time and brain power to work on/think about the things that will make you the most amount of money.If you know nothing about whatever it is you’re outsourcing, letting someone else do it at least gets it done. For me, there are certain things that I know I should do, but that I hate. Those things never get done. If I outsource it, it gets done. If I didn’t outsource it, my business stops.
If I have something on my todo list that has been there for a long time, I know it’s something I don’t want to do. If I send it overseas, it gets done quickly.
The other reason (besides “it gets done”) is so that you can get good at something else while you’re not doing what you would have otherwise been doing. The more you get good at, the more you can outsource. The more you outsource, the more time you have. The more time you have, the more things you can get good at and more things you can outsource. Then you get to spend time with your family.
We allMost people don’t have enough time in a day to do all the things they know they should be doing. They spend their time bogged down on things that are somewhat important, but that they feel “have” to get done. Things that will make them very little money.
If you outsource those things that “have” to get done, you’ll find out that all of a sudden there’s enough time in every day to get the things done you want to get done. All of a sudden you have time to try out all the cool tools you’ve heard about. You have time to implement new strategies. You have the ability to execute on a new business that you couldn’t have done before, because you were too busy answering support email or setting up adwords campaigns or writing articles. You have the ability to delegate new tasks that you don’t want to do (or hate doing, or aren’t good at doing) and they still get done.Outsource work so that you can concentrate on the things that make you money.
Where: There are only 2 options that I’m going to talk about:
- Philippines
- India
I’m not even going to talk about India because I don’t know anything about it except that John Bresee once told me that “When someone in India says Yes. to something you said, it means Yes, I heard you say something. not Yes, I understood what you said.” I also know that a friend of mine pays between $15-$30/hour for his programmers in India. If you’re paying that much, why not just hire someone here in the US?
I outsource basically everything to the Philippines.
Why?- They speak good english.
- They’re smart.
- They’re good workers.
- They’re good at following instructions.
- They’re good programmers.
- They’re polite (they call me “sir”, which was a little weird at first…but I got used to it)
- They’re cheaper than in India.
I hire my people through Agents Of Value. Danny (the owner) is a good guy who is willing to work with his customers. He’s done a good job of recruiting and maintaining employees.
Through them you can hire programmers, webmasters, writers, personal assistants, … Basically anyone you could hire here, you can hire there. They’re almost all college graduates.
Depending on your needs, my suggestion is that you hire a webmaster (Remember, I’m writing this to small online business owners). There are a few reasons for this:
- Most people who ask me for help with this want someone technical. (hence the recommendation for a webmaster)
- Once you have a webmaster you can have them do other things for you like write content, create websites, buy/maintain your domains, monitor your email, build links, …
- If you don’t hire a webmaster (someone with some technical knowledge) you’re going to want them to do stuff they have no clue how to do and then you are stuck.
If you do any sort of software development, I would also highly suggest hiring programmers through them. They’re good at recruiting experienced programmers. If you think about the cost of getting a program developed here vs overseas, you’re looking at basically a 5x cost increase. I have a friend here who just paid $5000 for some software development. It took them 10 months to do the work, but that’s only because 9 out of those 10 they weren’t doing anything. If he would have taken my advice to hire someone in the Philippines, he could have paid $5000 for 8 months of development work and could have launched his product 4 months ago, and been way ahead on development. I’ve learned that once a piece of software is started, if you EVER sell it, it will ALWAYS need to be developed. If it doesn’t get developed, it dies. If you pay people here to develop it, you’re going to pay them $75-$100 per hour to continuously develop it (compared to $5-15 per hour overseas).
I have another friend who just got 2 quotes for developing his website:
- Firm based in the US: $10,000
- Firm base in the Philippines: $500
If the firm in the Philippines does it wrong, who cares. Pay them to do it again. If the firm in the US does it wrong, you’re in bad shape.
My initial hesitation to hiring a programmer was that I wouldn’t have enough work to keep a programmer busy full time. I found out after hiring someone that it was pretty easy to keep them busy more than full time.
What I didn’t realize would happen in hiring someone else to do programming for me was that it freed my mind from the binds of programming. Programming is consuming. It’s difficult. If you’re a programmer, and you understand some marketing, letting someone else do the programming for you and you concentrating on the marketing will do wonders for your business.
How: Start small.
Hire someone and have them start doing something for you that you don’t like to do. Even if you don’t use all their time, it’s still worth it to just get started and to have the experience of turning something over to someone else. I have 2 friends who are sharing a webmaster. They share the costs and share the time. It’s a good way to start if you don’t want to make a full commitment with a webmaster/programmer.
For teaching and training, you can give them the ebooks you’ve bought and have them read them. You can create a video of what you do to accomplish the task using camtasia studio or jing, an alternative to camtasia. It’s pretty easy to record a video with instructions and give it to someone and say “do this.” If you have more detailed instructions, spend an hour and record yourself talking about whatever it is you want done. Basement Ventures has a free conference calling system that will let you record the call. If you need to record instructions, call in to your conference call line by yourself and record yourself talking for an hour and send your employee the mp3. Easy instructions.
Teaching someone to do what you do initially seems like a daunting task. However, if the person is overseas and costing you $4/hour, you can let them figure stuff out on their own. Then the next time you won’t have to teach them as much.
After you get comfortable with them doing things for you, give them more to do. At some point you’ll need a way to keep track of what they do for you (agents of value is really good at having them send you a daily report of what they worked on that day). I suggest using Basecamp or RememberTheMilk, an online task management system. RTM allows you to create recurring tasks so you can have them do stuff at certain intervals.
Using Google Spreadsheets is a great way to share information back and forth (like for market research, or for analyzing web stats).
At this point I’ve done a brain dump of what I’ve done to oursource overseas. I’m sure I’ve left a bunch of stuff out and not answered a bunch of questions you have. Feel free to ask me (either comment or email me).
Next time I’ll cover other ways to outsource things (elance, mechanical turk, sitepoint contests) like graphics, small tasks, and article writing.
9/14/2007
- Outsourcing For Small Business - Part 1
I decided that it would be helpful if I wrote some stuff about outsourcing. It’s a question I get asked often enough so I’ve decided to write a series about it.
First things first: I’m not an expert on outsourcing.
I have done quite a bit of it, and I’m learning more, but I’m not the “expert” in this field.
Almost all outsourcing talk you hear about is for big companies who hire 300 people in India. That info pertains (and is helpful) to about .0001% of the workforce. Worthless to people like me (or you who are reading my blog). If you’re looking to outsource 300 employees, go talk to an expert.
Second: I will write about online business. I hope that what I write here will be helpful to all the people who work for themselves, running small businesses, online. After all, that’s what I do. I run businesses online.
In writing about this, I’m going to cover what I know about
- automation
- hiring workers overseas (how, when, why, what for)
- hiring people for one-off projects
- outsourcing programming
- outsourcing graphics work
- outsourcing SEO
- outsourcing content generation
- outsourcing your email
- outsourcing support
- outsourcing to a partner
Automation
1. If you haven’t read The 4-Hour Workweek you really need to read it. It explains the reason why I automate stuff. I don’t do it just so I can get more done (that’s part of the reason). I do it so I can spend more time with my family. You need to figure out why you’re outsourcing/automating stuff or else you’ll always just fill in the time you save with other stuff, and you’ll never feel like you got anywhere.
2. Sometimes things are better automated by a human than by a computer. Not all automation has to be done by a computer. Computers aren’t very good yet at understanding language and creating content. They’re also not very good at joining the right affiliate programs, or at managing an adwords account.
Things that can’t be automated well by a computer should be automated by a human. And, as Ferris says, there’s a whole anxious, educated, well mannered workforce overseas willing to do what people in the USA aren’t willing to do….and they’re good at it.
The goal of automation is to free you up to do what is most important. Note that I didn’t say that you should be doing what you’re best at. I’m best at programming but I rarely do it anymore. Marketing is much more important and I’m reasonably good at it. So, I automate/outsource programming and I work on marketing.
If you haven’t yet started automating, you should start by making a list of things you do that could possibly be automated either by software or by a human. Things like checking on your adwords account, doing research, buying flowers for your wife, wading through email, creating web content, blogging, programming, suport, reporting, etc. Make a list of things. You’ll be surprised at how long the list gets if you force yourself to think about what you do.
After you’ve made the list, you’re ready to start doing things to automate/outsource your work. Until you’ve made that list, it’s hard to justify the expense of hiring someone else and sometimes it’s hard to see where exactly you need help.
My point with this was just for you to realize that automation can be done by a human, and needs to be done for you to live life, not for you to work harder elsewhere (at least…that’s what I believe).
Next time I’ll talk about hiring people overseas…because that’s really what you want me to talk about.
[tags]outsourcing, automation, web outsourcing[/tags]
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