Check out these videos of actual customers of Replace Myself. It’s very cool of them to have provided these testimonials. I think that by watching some of them you’ll gain some insight into exactly what they got out of the system, and from outsourcing in general.

I hope these help you understand the importance of outsourcing. Now you need to go take ACTION.

Start here.

From a marketing perspective, I often like to see what people are putting on YouTube. Sometimes it gives me good ideas. Anyway, I found this video review of ReplaceMyself.com on YouTube. It’s short, and seems fairly well balanced (not just all good stuff).

My thoughts: He says that the training provided inside of ReplaceMyself is “weak”. I disagree with this. I think the training is actually very solid. Maybe he thinks it is weak because it is broken down into many steps. For example, on the training in sales copywriting, John basically provides about a dozen or more things that he wants your workers to go through. They could be PDF documents, audio lessons, or videos. Keep in mind this fits into the 80 / 20 rule. He is not creating novels or DVD courses to train your workers. He is giving them the knowledge that will allow them to get 80% of the job done, and enough knowledge to go out and LEARN the rest.

The free audio: Obviously the free audio mentioned in the video is the one that John offers when you opt-in to his mailing list. It’s a great audio, and worth getting.

The training is a big time saver, in my opinion. I only wish he gave people more of the advanced hiring techniques that I’ve come to learn. But that’s why I created a bonus package as an affiliate

I wanted to share something that I’ve learned over the last few months, and I think it’s important.

Generally speaking, you’ll have better success if you hire someone on a full time basis as compared to hiring them part time.

I can’t say I know exactly why, and my sample size is not massive here, but I know that John Jonas gives out the same advice, as do many others who outsource to the Philippines.

I suspect it has to do with the fact that part time employees have other top priorities in life. Often I’ve had students work for me and they would turn in awesome work, only to flake out when school assignments got in the way. They just didn’t really seem to value the job, or NEED the job. It was nice to make money working for me part time, but not essential to their life.

The pattern is obvious. At first they are gung-ho to work. They deliver good work and pay attention to training material. Then they start delivering less work and reporting in less often. Eventually they don’t work out and you either arrange a new (less hours) agreement, or you let them go.

This has happened to me with a total of 3 part time employees so far, and ALL of them had been doing good work, and I would have kept them. I treated them very well, I looked for ways to work with them around their schedules, but it was obvious that the work was simply not high enough priority.

My full time people have ALL been substantially better. It’s very clear that they value their jobs more. So my advice is to hire people full time whenever possible.

If you can’t afford a full time person, it’s best to split their time with a fellow internet marketer friend. This is better than hiring someone part time.

If you must hire someone part time I would make it very clear that you want them to hold regular (defined) hours. Avoid having someone who just works 20 hours per week as it fits their changing schedule. I can promise you that this arrangement will fail. Get someone who can commit to 4 hours per day between 5-9pm, for example. That will be much easier to manage because you’ll expect daily communication from them at the end of their workday.

Bottom line – full time is better than part time, but if you do go part time make sure you establish some very similar rules about daily communication to improve your odds. I did not do this with my part time workers, and I’m sure it contributed to the failure of these relationships.

Hope that helps!

Make sure to read my Replace Myself Review

Hi everyone,

Today I’m taking a look at the new sales copywriting module that John Jonas put together for members of ReplaceMyself.com. When I joined the system, this module was not yet created, so new customers get even more content than I got. I had to add this to my package separately.

Anyway, if you know John’s philosophy at all, you know that he wants to provide training material that you can give to your outsourced employee so that they can learn how to do many of the tasks that you would otherwise have to do.

Sales copywriting is definitely one where I’d like to get my writers to do more work for me. But I didn’t really know how to train them on it. My thinking is that they don’t need to do a perfect job either. They need to do a good job to get the project started, and then I can critique the work, or do some minor edits to the sales copy. But I need them to understand the principles of copy, and the principles of making a sales page.

John’s training includes:

• “Copy that Sells” pdf
• “Promotional Emails that Sell” pdf
• Michael Fortin Interview (audio)
• Joe Vitale 1 (audio)
• Joe Vitale 2 (audio)
• Conversion secrets
• Killer mini-sites
• Blair Warren Sales Copy Training

He also provides an immense list of good examples of sales pages and squeeze pages. I’m pretty confident that when I give this training to any of my writers, they’ll be able to write much better copy. I’m also pretty sure than any of my guys who do HTML will be able to mirror the examples John gives in the examples section.

This training looks solid.

You can get access to it all at his website (replacemyself.com) but make sure you take advantage of my bonus offer first.

I wanted to discuss the synergy that comes from using outsourced article writers in combination with article marketing tools such as Unique Article Wizard. Before I go through a specific example, let me make something very clear to readers.

You absolutely must be willing to invest money in a project in order to generate a return on that investment.

For example, hiring a writer typically costs $300 or more per month (full time). Paying for a service such as Unique Article Wizard costs about $67 per month. When you have even one full time writer on your staff, the cost of a service such as UAW amounts to a 22% premium over and above the monthly salary for your writer. If you have two writers then we’re talking about a 10% premium.

Will your writers be able to bring you at least 10% or 20% more results if they use a service like UAW? The answer is a resounding “yes”.

My Example:

I recently wrote a product review for a $3000 item sold via Amazon. I wanted to get ranked for the product name, or for “product name review”. This would drive organic traffic and hopefully sales.

Because I actually own the product in question and I’m a passionate user, I wrote the review myself. Then I whipped off a quick article to submit to UAW.

I checked my organic rankings the next day, before any of the articles had gone out (there is about a 24 hour delay before UAW approves articles and submits them to sites). My review had been indexed, but I was showing up around 50-60 in the Google Results. That was not going to bring in ANY traffic at all! This review was for a popular item, and there was healthy competition. But I knew my review had potential to get ranked because I made it high quality, used keywords in headlines in several places, etc. Basically I did the necessary on page SEO steps.

It has now been about 2 weeks. I notice traffic to that review page has spiked up. So I checked to see where I rank. Big difference.

After 2 weeks my review is ranked #6 for “product name review” and #11 for “product name”.

(Update – after another 3 weeks my rankings moved to #4 and #7 for the same phrases with no new work)

The product name is a 3-word phrase, so not some uber-long-tail thing either. This is exactly what people will type into Google when they want information on this brand of product.

So let’s summarize what we’ve learned here.

1. I wrote a good quality review for a product that I know sells well.
2. I wrote ONE article set for UAW and submitted it to the wizard.
3. Two weeks later my rankings skyrocketed for the relevant keywords.

I’m confident that if I write another couple of articles with backlinks pointing to my review, I’ll crack the top 5 results for both keyword phrases.

So how do you make money?

First, you hire a writer who can do quality product reviews. Someone who you can teach to go out and actually gather up useful information for readers. You post those reviews to a WordPress website.

Second, you have that same writer come up with several good quality articles that link back to your review. You submit those articles to EZA, and the usual places, but also to UAW. You set those articles to get posted at a rate of 20-50 per day, and you submit one every week for a month.

If you do this for several expensive products at Amazon.com you’ll surely make a tidy profit. And this is a strategy that is massively scalable over and over again. Pick a niche that you feel good about, pick good quality products, write good quality reviews, and don’t be pushy when you “sell the click”. Just show people where to go get more information (at Amazon). Let Amazon close the sale.

This is an easy strategy, and completely easy to outsource using ReplaceMyself and UAW.

For more information about outsourcing, please read my review of Replace Myself, and make sure you look at the bonus I’m offering.

I tend to follow a lot of discussion forums where people ask about outsourcing, When it comes to hiring your own VA I’m a believer that you should hire your own dedicated employees. Ideally, you should cross-train your workers so that if one was to leave, another can pick up the important work.

Anyway, I often see people asking about how much it costs, and if it is really reasonable to get a full time worker for the kind of salaries that are mentioned in people’s advertisements. For example, John Jonas talks about how you can get someone for $250, or $350 per month. John Reese, in his Outsource Force videos, talked about getting someone for about $3 per hour. Is this realistic?

The short answer is yes.

If you look for employees over at OnlineJobs.ph you’ll see that people put their salary expectations in their profile. These are in Philippine Pesos, on a monthly basis. So if someone asks for 15,000P per month, and there are 46 Pesos per US dollar, then they are asking for $326 US per month. This is very typical.

Here’s what I have noticed:

• Young workers will often work for less, just as you’d expect. I’ve seen young people asking for only $100 per month full time. Not often, but it does happen. If you snag someone at that level you should look to raise them quickly so they are happy. You can’t live well on $100 per month even in the Philippines.
• $300 is very typical for people with some online experience, but maybe 1-2 years. You should be able to find people at that level who are trainable, dependable, and write good English. You can actually find very solid English writing for that price. But again, as you teach them more skills, you should give them raises.
• If you need a part time employee to do graphics, web work, or other skills that do not involve precisely written English, you can get that easily. You should pro-rate the salary accordingly so if you need 20 hours per week, you can typically arrange for $150 per month.

John Jonas’ “Replace Myself” system gets you free access to OnlineJobs.ph, which is where I hire most of my workers. I actually prefer it to BestJobs.ph right now.

Before you get a membership, make sure you read my review, and also check out the bonus package that I’m offering.

Replace Myself now has 13 training modules

I joined Replace Myself several months ago when there were only 11 training modules. I paid $697 to become a permanent member using the “pro outsourcer” upsell that they offer at the time of purchase. I’m really happy I did this because I have no recurring monthly fees. I noticed that they’ve now added two new training modules, so the total is now 13.

Sales Copywriting

This module is all about training your employees to write sales copy for you. I haven’t tried to train my guys on this yet but I think it’s an incredibly useful idea and something I want to train them on. My experience in outsourcing to the Philippines suggests that their English skills are good, but they typically don’t understand sales copy unless they’ve been trained on it in the past. I think that if you train your workers they could write a lot of great copy for landing pages, squeeze pages and autoresponder messages. I also think that having this understanding would help them to do a better job on things like product reviews and resource boxes when article marketing.

High PR Link Building

This modules also looks interesting because it’s about getting QUALITY links to your page, from high pagerank sites. Everyone could use more of this. I don’t know what methods John is teaching here because I haven’t bought the modules yet, but I plan to get both of them.

Price update on Replace Myself Membership

The monthly price stays at $97, but the pro outsourcer package now costs $797, which is $100 more than what I paid. I think this is a pretty good deal still because you’re getting 13 training modules (which would cost $1300 on their own). If you were to stay a member for 8 months this whole things pays for itself. Besides, I am betting you’ll love it so much you’ll become an affiliate, and promote it to other people you know. You’ll have your membership paid for (with commissions) in no time.

That’s exactly what happened to me, and what prompted me to put together a quality bonus for Replace Myself members who join through my link.

Be sure to read my Replace Myself Review as well.

A lot of people are curious just what is taught with respect to John Jonas outsourcing methods. As a customer of his Replace Myself service, and an active outsourcer, I can certainly help answer that question.

First of all, John teaches people to outsource in order to free their time.. If you haven’t yet read the book “The Four Hour Work Week” then it would be worth your while to order a copy
over at amazon.com and read it cover to cover immediately. It will massively change they way you think about time, life, money, jobs, etc. It was life changing for me and I’m sure it will be for you. For many of us, this is where it all begins. John Jonas outsourcing methods are based upon the concepts taught in that book. Best $13 you’ll ever spend. The “in a nutshell” version of the book is that you do not want to make a linear trade between time and money. 40 hours per week should not translate directly into $x per year income. Instead, you want to make the income completely independent of your time. The only way to do that is to own a business, but not spend your time IN the business. Spend it ON the business. Have other people do lots of your work.

John will advise you to outsource to the Philippines. There are specific reasons for this, and I have to say that after experiencing this myself – he is right. The Philippines is an incredible place to get work done for you. The workers don’t cost very much by our standards here in North America, and they do great work.

He recommends you hire full time employees. The theory on this is simple. You want your own guys working for you full time, forever. Basically you want to treat your business like a business with employees who have jobs. This way they develop skill in YOUR business, and re-invest that skill in making you more money. In an alternative setup you might to to elance or Odesk and hire a freelancer. That freelancer would do something for you, you would hand-hold them to get it right, and they’d move on (along with their new education) to a new job and you’d have to repeat the teaching to someone else next time. It’s better to train someone, pay them well, build up trust, and hand over everything to them to do. Give them login details to websites, give them access to tools that you purchased, train them, work together, build a relationship with them, etc.

He offers you awesome trainingJohn has put together a bunch of great training modules that you literally hand over to your employees so they get up to speed quickly on most of the critical areas of internet marketing. This is a huge time saver.

So that’s, in a nutshell, what John Jonas outsourcing is all about. He has a certain way of thinking about business that is incredibly simple, yet smart. It’s definitely worth learning from him.

What to do next:

If you want to learn more about John Jonas outsourcing techniques I recommend you do one of these two things:

First, go sign up for John’s free audio lesson. This is incredibly educational and is what got me hooked on his methods.
Second, go and read my Replace Myself Review. You’ll find it helpful also.

This webcast is high quality and highly recommended. John Jonas is talking with Niche marketing superstar Adam Short. I’ve watched Adam before and I was impressed, so I knew this would be good right from the start.

Remember: When you decide to outsource, you should consider ReplaceMyself.com as a training tool. I’m offering this Replace Myself Bonus Package for those who use my link to purchase it.

John Jonas and Adam Short Webcast

Click on the “full screen” icon at the bottom right of the player to get a more clear view of what’s happening during the screencapture portion.
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Answers to Common Questions:

This webinar was posted at John Jonas’ blog originally, and I used the embed code to share it here. I noticed that there were quite a few responses to the webinar in the comments section of his blog so I thought I’d answer a few of the common questions. Obviously Adam is selling his “Niche Profit Classroom 3.0″ course, which I’m NOT an affiliate for (but am considering buying). It looks like you can get 2 weeks of access for a buck, and if you are really intent on just learning and canceling, you can do that.

1) Do you have to build your own team to execute this business model?
Yes, naturally you do need to build your own team and that’s what ReplaceMyself is for. It teaches you how to hire people. Since writing (in English) is a key component of this business model you’ll definitely want to take advantage of my bonus offer which shows you some important tricks to hiring writers. I haven’t tasked my writers with doing an ebook, but I’m very confident they CAN do ebooks if I ask them to.

2) Do you get to keep your websites if you cancel?
I assume it depends on how you are hosting your sites. Adam offers free hosting so if you use this, and cancel, you probably lose your site (I assume). BUT hosting is uber-cheap and there is NO EXCUSE for relying on someone else to give you free hosting. Bluehost costs less than $7 per month. Just get your own darn hosting!

I was just working on publishing my review of Replace Myself today. I logged into my account so that I could write up a proper summary of all of the modules. Low and behold I noticed that John added a few new things to the very first module that customers get. Module 1 now includes two new training packages that cover social marketing. Specifically, the use of Twitter and LinkedIn. These are both things that I’m not currently doing in my business in any big way, and I probably should be doing them. So it’s nice to know I’ve got access to a training package that I can listen / watch myself and then hand over to one of my employees in the Philippines.

I’m also hard at work adding more bonus material to my bonus package. It’s kind of a dual benefit for me. Obviously I’m promoting the system as an affilliate, but the bonus material that I’ve created was all stuff that I needed to make for my own business anyway – that’s why you know it’s genuine. It’s stuff I actually use. It’s stuff I learned by DOING outsourcing.

All the best,
Chris