Archive for August, 2010

The Economics of Article Outsourcing

Monday, August 30th, 2010 at 12:38 pm  
Leave your comment

Today I want to talk a bit about outsourcing as it pertains to article writing and the economics of doing this. I see countless posts over at WarriorForum.com, or other places, asking about how to get started outsourcing article marketing.

Obviously, article marketing can be a powerful way to promote your business. You get backlinks from your articles, and you get potential traffic from people who read your articles.

So let’s talk about your options when it comes to outsourcing article writing:

1) You can go to a freelancing site such as Elance or oDesk. Here you can probably hire someone to write articles for you either by the hour, or more likely, on a per-article basis. You generally spoon feed the person the exact keywords and other article requirements. They work for you but they also work for many other employers. They get paid by the article and they crank out whatever they crank out. You might get lucky and find a great person through this method, but it’s not easy. They have no real incentive to learn about YOUR business, and do anything to help you succeed beyond writing articles. They are not truly working for you.

2) You can hire your own writers to work for you full time. This is far more effective, in my own experience, because you are able to set expectations for how much output a person creates in an average week or month, while paying them a salary. This means they aren’t looking to crank out garbage. You can also teach them exactly what you need accomplished. You can show them how to do keyword research so that they know exactly what to write about without you needing to explain it on every single assignment. You can earn each other’s trust and you can give them your login details for article marketing accounts, so that they submit the articles for you. You can get them to track your rankings for keywords. There is FAR more value in having a dedicated employee than hiring a freelancer.

The Economics:

I use Unique Article Wizard, so whenever I have a writer do articles for me, I get 3 versions of the article along with a resource box file that we submit to the UAW service.

Imagine that on a typical day my writer takes plenty of breaks (you go nuts writing all day), and outputs a total of 3 article “sets” each day. That’s actually 9 articles, but only 3 topics because each “set” for UAW has 3 versions like I said above.

There are an average of 22 work days in a month. That’s 66 article sets per month. Say the salary is $400 per month. You can hire people for less, but I’m using numbers that are very achievable for you.

This works out to a cost of $6.06 per article set. Oh, and since my writers also submit to the Unique Article Wizard Service for me, this means that I’m getting a lot more than “just” an article. I’m completely outsourcing article marketing so that my time is free to figure out what the next growth path will be for my business.

Do you need a full time article writer?

If you are not sure, then you probably don’t have ambitious enough goals. With one writer on your staff, full time, you should be able to pick 3 niche markets, setup blogs within each niche market and find products that you can promote using a feature box in your blog (or the “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin).

Then, you train your writer to follow the news on each niche market. You have your writer write one article per day for each of the blogs, and post to the blog. The writer then creates the 2nd version of each article and submits to EzineArticles.com (and perhaps other directories). Then, the writer creates the 3rd version of each article and submits the entire set (all 3 versions) to Unique Article Wizard.

If you pick niche markets that actually have buyers, and you promote products that actually sell, then you should have no problem making a solid profit with this strategy. And there are many variations of it.

For example you could have your writer do product reviews and write articles to point backlinks at your reviews. Go to some of the affiliate networks where physical products are promoted. CJ, ShareASale, LinkShare, etc. Find products that look like they sell very well (check for real user reviews online).

When you find a great product that you think you can promote, check the top 10 organic listings when you query the product name in Google. Look at the number of search results using phrase match (product name in quotes). Look at the average page rank of the top 10 listings using broad match (no quotes, the way people actually search). If you think you can get ranked for the product name, publish a review. Then start sending articles to the review using Unique Article Wizard. You’ll be surprised how many awesome products there are to sell out there once you move away from Clickbank. Even Amazon has a TON of stuff out there, but you need to focus on expensive products given the 6-6.5% commission cap.

The point is this: Hiring an article writer in the Philippines is very low cost. If you have ANY aspirations for making money online you better learn how to manage a few employees and you better learn how to do article marketing.

The side point is this: If you are willing to step up to the plate and hire a dedicated employee for a few hundred bucks per month, then using a service such as Unique Article Wizard is a no-brainer. It’s like buying a car for $30k and not paying an extra $5k to be able to drive faster than everyone else.

Where to hire writers

My top recommendation is to use John Jonas’ training over at ReplaceMyself.com (make sure you claim your bonus through me)

Using CampFire for Chats with Your Team

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at 11:09 pm  
Leave your comment

Recently I started using CampFire, a chat-room product, with my team. This product is by the makers of BaseCamp. It’s incredibly useful.

Here’s a link to CampFire. It is not well advertised, but there is a free account available that will let up to 4 people chat at one time.

Here’s how you can use it. When you have more than one employee and you need THEM to resolve a problem together, you can ask them to go to the Campfire chat room to resolve it online via discussion. You don’t even need to be there. Campfire will keep a log of the discussion and you can go in later and take a look at what they said, and see what resolutions they came up with. If you like the resolution, great. If not, email them suggesting some alternatives.

The point is this – you do NOT want to become the middleman for problem resolution in your business. You want THEM to figure it out for themselves.

Here’s a real world example. I have one writer who writes articles and another “jack of all trades” who submits them to article directories, with the exception of Unique Article Wizard. I want my writer to submit to UAW herself.

My writer will submit articles to our system and my other guy will then submit to EzineArticles and other places. When he is done, he needs to let the writer know so that she can go submit to UAW.

Things were falling through the cracks and we needed a system. I simply asked them to go figure it out via CampFire. I was not online with them. But it got solved and I got to see how they interacted with each other.

Remember, Campfire is a free tool if you use the free version limited to 4 chatters and 10 MB of file storage. It’s fine for me so far. Very fine.

Actually Talk to Your Employees Using Skype

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 at 11:01 pm  
Leave your comment

I got an email today from someone who claimed my bonus package and I wanted to share what I noticed.

This entrepreneur had hired 3 people from various places, including OnlineJobs.ph and given them the task of installing WordPress (just as John Jonas recommends). Let’s call this entrepreneur “Paul” just to hide his or her identity.

Paul had not heard from his employees in a few days and noticed they were taking 8-12 hours to reply to emails during supposed “working hours”. He was beginning to worry that outsourcing just doesn’t work.

I suggested getting on Skype and having an actual conversation. This is a HUGELY important thing to keep in mind, guys. You can’t just rely on email for problem solving. Sometimes you’ll have given your person a task that they have no idea how to handle. If you just get on Skype and have a voice chat, you can often resolve many problems.

My guess is that the employees were not given enough direction and somehow got confused and / or intimidated by the task assigned. Maybe these employees won’t work out for Paul (it sounds like they aren’t). But there may have been a miscommunication and using email will take FOREVER to resolve it.

The reason these people were taking 8-12 hours to reply to emails may have been because there was no understanding of what the working hours would be. I’ve often found that some of my guys like to start in the afternoon and work into the wee hours of the evening. I get daily updates from them at 2am their time.

The point is that you just DO NOT KNOW what is going on and you’ll not find out quickly enough by email. It will eat you up and it will piss you off to no end. So get on Skype, have a call, and figure it out. It’s way faster and more effective.

Making Money with Article Marketing and Product Reviews

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at 1:21 pm  
Comments (2)

Today I want to give you another simple case study about article marketing + blogging. This is a story about how I got a first-page Google ranking for a profitable keyword within one month. It will generate me auto-pilot income for (likely) years to come. It took some up-front investment in time, but it is easily outsourceable and repeatable.

Got your interest? Good. Let’s move right along.

Important side note: When I say “article marketing” I’m specifically talking about Unique Article Wizard, which is by far the easiest way to accomplish these results. It is not free, but as you’ll eventually learn throughout your marketing career, you need to pay for good quality stuff if you want to succeed. If you subscribe to this service using my link I will give you the same bonus package that I offer to people who join Replace Myself. See this page for info on the bonus package, and then just come back here and use my link to join UAW.

About the Product I Promote:

I chose an information product that has a recurring monthly fee and pays a decent commission. It’s something I feel very good about promoting because I’ve seen the content. Pick stuff you feel good about. Be ethical. Enough said.

The Keyword:

My goal was to rank very highly for the product name, and for variations such as “product name review”, etc. When people are searching on a product name it means they are interested in buying, but they need more information. It’s a great area to start with your marketing efforts.

Just so you know, the product name I want to rank for is two words. It’s harder to rank for two-word phrases compared to something like “Captain MonkeyUncle’s Large Brown Underwear”. Duh.

Assessing the Competition:

I don’t believe in huge keyword research. Keep it simple. Type the keyword into Google within quotes to reveal the number of pages with a phrase match for your keyword. Reminder, if the keyword is “Stinky Shoes”, you want to know exactly how many pages say those words in that order. You don’t want to skip the quotes or you’ll get a total number of pages that says “stinky” and “shoes” anywhere on the page.

In this case, my competition is about 90,000 pages. Certainly not child’s play, but definitely not rocket science to beat.

Now we look at Page Rank. Type the keyword into Google again, but without quotes this time. This is how your prospects type stuff, so copy them. Look at the top 10 results and get the page rank for each page. I use the FireFox plugin “SEO4Firefox” to do this. Average it out. If it is under 2 you should be in good shape. Above 2 and it will be harder to compete.

In my case, the average worked out to 1.1 (a few zeros, and a few pages with PR 1, 2, 3, and even a 4).

The Work Involved:

First, I setup a WordPress site. As usual I made the static home page the sales page. I then created a “blog” page and set that up so that’s where the blog posts go. Pretty ordinary so far. I have a guy who sets up sites like this for me and it takes him about 45 minutes to install WP, add the plugins, setup the pages, install the theme, etc. From there anyone can do the posting (myself or an employee).

I started publishing some decent articles as blog posts. Nothing huge, just stuff that I could whip off easily. I’m up to about a dozen posts on that blog over the course of a month.

Next Comes the Promotion via Article Marketing

I wrote a whopping total of 2 articles with educational information about the niche. I didn’t even mention the product in the articles. I just wrote for the reader, and I provided links back to my site in the resource box. It took me about 45 minutes to do each article, including the “re-writes” needed for the Unique Article Wizard system. Making the resource boxes took 10 minutes.

I submitted the articles separately (about 2 weeks apart) using Unique Article Wizard. I made sure to use a variety of titles and a variety of anchor text and resource boxes.

Ok Let’s Get to the Good Stuff … The Results!

At first I was nowhere to be seen on the first 3 pages of Google. I wasn’t even cracking the top 30! That is typical. I had no backlinks yet, and my site was pretty new. Remember, the articles had not yet been submitted at this stage!

About 2 weeks after I submitted my first article I was on the 2nd page of Google if you typed “product name review” (no quotes). But still nowhere to be seen for the product name alone. Mind you, my first article was still in the process of being drip-fed out to the directories.

That’s when I submitted the 2nd article. Again, I waited another two weeks. Every day the Unique Article Wizard would submit my articles to blogs and directories. I could see the pingbacks coming to my site each day, so I knew I was getting about 10 new backlinks per day (I set the articles to drip out to only 20 sites per day). BTW, I don’t keep the pingbacks. I delete them. But I like to see them come in since it tells me that backlinks are being formed.

After a total duration of four weeks, my rankings had significantly improved. And I mean SIGNIFICANTLY. I’m now showing on the first page for the main keyword. I’m ranked #8 as of this writing. If you add “review” after the keyword then I’m ranking #6.

Do you think I plan to stop there? Of course not! I’ll just submit another fresh article into the wizard every couple of weeks (or maybe every week if I’m aggressive) and I’m very confident I can get to the #2 or #3 spot (the top spot will probably always be owned by the product vendor’s site).

Very Important SEO Point: Results do NOT come instantly. Quit thinking that you can post something today and rank for it tomorrow. That’s definitely true for non-competitive phrases, but if there is even only mild competition it will take some time. Just be cool with that concept and plan to build a business around it.

The Money:

The site I’m referring to has brought in a few hundred bucks so far. Nothing huge, but remember that it’s still new and my rankings are still being built up in Google. I expect that making $1000 per month is very doable from this site. That’s just ONE site. Keep that in perspective when you think about the $67 cost for Unique Article Wizard.

Also remember that the time investment is only modest up-front, and then very light going forward. All I need to do is keep submitting a new article every month to ensure that competition doesn’t creep up behind me and push me out of the way.

Outsourcing These Projects

In this particular example I wrote the website content and articles myself. That’s because I know the market better than anyone who works for me. Plus I actually enjoy writing (as you may have noticed), so I pick topics that I want to write about and I outsource other topics. There are plenty of projects where I do none of the writing. I just manage the process. I have someone else setup WordPress. Someone else writes reviews. That same writer will do the articles and submit them to UAW for me (I literally don’t touch them).

Then my VA keeps track of analytics to see what’s getting traffic and what’s not. We’ve done this on tons of products and sometimes you get “easy rankings” with only a few backlinks.

If you know the rankings are coming quickly and the product converts, you can then go back and improve your review, add more content, add a bonus offer, or whatever. That’s the power of outsourcing. You can test a LOT of stuff very cheaply with someone else’s labor, and then you can go back and re-invest in the stuff that is working.

This way your efforts are concentrated on only worthwhile projects.

UAW Bonus Offer

I think you can tell that I’m pretty passionate about the power of Unique Article Wizard. If you buy it through my link I’ll give you the bonus package that I created for Replace Myself members (outsourcing stuff). The bonus covers a lot of important concepts involving UAW, outsourcing, and hiring English writers, so it will definitely be useful to you.

Outsourcing Article Writing vs. Website Content

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at 12:10 am  
Leave your comment

There is a major distinction that I eventually learned when it comes to content creation. It is important to understand if you are going to get involved in outsourcing “stuff that is written”.

Here it is:

Articles are for backlinks. Website content is to make sales.

It really is that simple.

When you publish articles to article directories, you are generally doing it for the backlinking power of the articles. Because of this, it is not critical to have awesome content.

When you publish content on your own website, you want to drive the reader to take action. That could be to click over to an affiliate link, or to sign up for your autoresponder, or to buy YOUR product. Whatever it is, you are looking for action to be taken.

So how do you maximize ROI when you invest in outsourcing?

Hire “decent” writers to write articles. If you are going after backlinks, then you don’t need works of art. You need articles that are relatively useful and relatively free of spelling and grammar mistakes. I can hire someone any day of the week for about $300 per month to write these types of articles.

Hire top quality writers when you want content written for your own website. This includes landing pages, pre-sell pages, opt-in pages, or whatever you need. A higher quality writer will cost more, say $500 per month. But quality is important.

When doing article marketing is is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to submit unique articles to a wide variety of article directories and blogs. You need to use unique titles, and unique resource boxes.

The best way to do this is to use Unique Article Wizard. It costs $67 per month, and it is WELL worth the price. That is what I use. Seriously just do it and judge for yourself.

Just TRY to take my Unique Article Wizard account away from me. I’ll fight you all the way. It’s THAT good.

Tasks that I’m Outsourcing These Days

Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 2:47 pm  
Leave your comment

Often people will ask “what kinds of tasks do you outsource”. Here’s a list of stuff that I’ve been outsourcing lately, and what I think works.

1) Keyword research.: If we start a new project we need to decide what keywords we are going to go after. I own a copy of Market Samurai, which I like to use to automate a lot of the information gathering on keywords. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on keyword research so I’ll ask an employee to come up with the “big giant list” of keywords, then I’ll delete anything that is obviously not useful, and run the list through market samurai. I export a CSV file and send it back to him. He can then go through it to check for the best opportunities according to some screens that I learned. One of my favorite screens is to look for keywords that get reasonable traffic, have phrase match competition (search in quotes) of under 20,000 results, and where the average PR of the top 10 results (search without quotes) is under 2.

2) Writing landing pages and product review If we have a specific product that we want to promote we might either create a series of landing pages, where one page is targeted at one keyword, or we will create a product review where we are going after keywords such as “product name review”. Either way, this is something that is easy to outsource. Make sure you outsource this to a good writer. The content needs to be high quality here.

3) Article writing. We write articles mainly for backlinks. I have never found that articles have been a good source of traffic on their own, but they do propel us in terms of off-page SEO, so we get more direct traffic for our keywords. I use a method of article marketing that John Jonas teaches inside of Replace Myself.

4) Article submission. We use EzineArticles, along with other free directories. But, the KEY to our SEO success is using Unique Article Wizard. This service does cost money but it comes back in spades. I wrote this case study in using unique article wizard, and the same thing keeps happening over and over again when we write specific product reviews and aim links at them through UAW. I don’t do any of the submission myself. It’s incredibly easy to outsource.


5) Mini-net creation. We setup a series of blogs that link to each other and to our “money sites”. We link using a mixture of anchor text. These are easy to setup and require a new blog post ever few weeks to keep them active. This is an ongoing product that I outsource. I have not ever touched it. It certainly helps us with SEO. The guy that takes care of this project also does a monthly rank-checking spreadsheet and we can see that we DO move up. One trick: Make sure to log out of your Google account before checking your rankings.

6) Blog setup and maintenance.. We run a lot of WordPress sites. The setup is now templated. We do the same thing, pretty much, for all sites. One of my guys just sets them up and he does a weekly check for comments, spam, etc. We may shift to every two weeks on this because all comments go into a moderation queue anyway.

7) Split Testing. We use Google Website Optimizer to perform A/B tests on landing pages, or on offers, etc. I simply had one of my guys learn how to install the split tests using a WordPress plugin and he runs the tests. I usually get involved only to come up with a good idea … something I think is worth testing. He does the legwork to make it happen.

8) Google Analytics. If you run websites you should be using analytics. I like to use analytics for content ideas. I can see how people are finding our sites. Say that we setup a new site and we have a product review for XYZ. Say we have VERY few links pointing to the review, and somehow we’re getting traffic for it anyway. I taught my guy to dig into this. So he can now look for sources of traffic, and then go to Google to see where we rank on these keywords. Sometimes we rank within the top 20 but not on the first page. So we write some articles to throw backlinks at these reviews using the keyword as anchor text. Within a few weeks we’re ranking better and we get MORE traffic.

It ain’t rocket science folks … but you need to be organized and execution-driven.

Important Point about Tools:

I notice a lot of people are hesitant to try out a tool that costs money. They go to forums and ask people how well they work, or they read reviews. That is DEFINITELY smart, but please do not fall into the trap of standing still because you are not sure if it works. Guess what! Pretty much every monthly-fee tool out there has a free trial period, or at the very least, allows you to cancel anytime.

Look at Unique Article Wizard as one example. It’s $67 per month. I hesitated in the beginning because I didn’t know better. I thought, “Is it really that useful”. Then I re-read something John Jonas wrote over at his blog. He said something like, “This is the way article marketing was meant to be done”. So what’s the worst case scenario? I login to the system, absolutely hate it, and ask for a refund? I know I’ll get refunded if I ask. You know it too.

So if there is a tool out there that you think might help you, GO FIND OUT. Test it.

What About Those “Bad Experiences” Outsourcing?

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 at 7:00 pm  
Leave your comment

I read a lot of threads about outsourcing on forums, and a lot of blog posts on the topic. Whenever anyone talks about how effective it is for their business, it is virtually a sure thing that someone will come in and reply with a comment like this:

“Well, I don’t really know about this. I tried outsourcing overseas before and it really didn’t work out. The guy couldn’t do anything that he said he could, and I kept giving him chances. Eventually I had to fire him. I don’t think outsourcing works.”


Let me ask you a few questions:

  • When you were a kid and you missed the bus, did you say that “Well, I just can’t use the public transport system. it’s impossible”?
  • When you had a date with a girl/guy, and it didn’t go well, did you say, “This dating thing just doesn’t work. I don’t think I can do it”?
  • When you bought some toy and got it home, only to find yourself disappointed by its quality did you say, “That’s it .. I’m not buying any more toys”?
  • When you take the milk out of your fridge and find it sour, do you say, “I’ll never buy milk at THAT grocery story again”?


Of COURSE you don’t!

So why is it that when someone has a bad experience outsourcing, they just want to give up? Probably because it is NOT a complete cakewalk, and it is a bit scary to become a “manager”. So if you are reading this and you fall into that camp of “not being sure” about outsourcing, just ask your self this:

Would you rather stop, and simply cease to move towards your goal?
Would you rather do EVERYTHING yourself? (This is impossible)?
…or would you rather figure out what you did wrong and get back up!

Maybe you hired the wrong person
Maybe you were a crappy manager
Maybe you provided no training or direction
Maybe you did not define tasks clearly
Maybe your expectations were wildly unrealistic

There are SO many possible reasons why you didn’t achieve what you expected when you first “tried” to outsource. You can either conclude that “all those offshore workers are no good”, or you can get smart and realize that you probably have more to learn.

There’s my rant for today. I hope you learned something from it. Seriously.

(Oh, BTW, this kind of stuff is exactly why you need to learn from what John Jonas teaches about outsourcing)

6 Simple Strategies for Recruiting and Training Offshore Writers

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at 8:00 am  
Leave your comment

Throughout the internet marketing field, there are many business owners who would rather hire a writer rather than write for themselves. This is because working on your business is generally better than working in your business. Let me share with you a few tips that I’ve developed for hiring and training writers.

1. Ask your potential candidates to send you samples of their writing. Ask for more than one sample, also. You do not want to blindly hire someone based on the content of an email message.

2. If you come up with a fictional topic, you can ask candidates to write about that topic as if it were a real topic. This prevents the writer from being able to copy material from elsewhere. It gives you a chance to see how they write, creatively, without being given any material to start from.

3. Test candidates on their ability to correct basic errors. Pre-write a one or two paragraph sample that is injected with basic English grammar and spelling errors. Focus on verb tenses and plural vs. singular formats. If they can fix all of the mistakes, they are likely better qualified.

4. Avoid having the above-described test done by email. It’s better to have this short test done right on the spot, via Skype chat. This way your candidate won’t have a chance to get help anywhere else. You need to see what they can do on their own.

5. Discuss the volume of writing output that you’ll expect ahead of time. But avoid asking for any kind of software time tracking to be used. You don’t want to make your writer feel like he is punching a time clock. That’s not cool. Focus on quality and quantity, rather than hours.

6. Early on, for example in the first week or two, ask for revisions to any work that is not absolutely perfect. But be nice about it! This will set the tone for what kind of quality you expect while not having you come across as a mean boss.

Stick with it. These are just a few ideas, but ultimately as you outsource your writing you’ll develop more ideas to grow your business. Just take action.

Should You Use Time Tracking Software when Outsourcing?

Monday, August 9th, 2010 at 1:05 pm  
Leave your comment

I’m an Internet Marketer, and like most of you, I’m on a ton of other people’s lists. I get promotional emails every day about something. Lately, I got a promotional email about some nifty project management software that competes with what oDesk provides you. The big feature they talked about was time tracking.

Let me say what I hope many of you are already thinking. I have NO interest in using any sort of time tracking software.

I believe in treating people the way I’d want to be treated if I were an employee. This means not having anyone police my hours. Now, obviously there are some exceptions. For example, if my job was to guard the cash register at a store, during operating hours, then there is a clear relation between hours worked and accomplishing the job. The job IS dependent upon being there. Another example would be working at a restaurant, or being a Lifeguard at a pool.

But in Internet Marketing, we hire people to use their brains when they do their work. We hire them to do some mechanical stuff, but find ways to be efficient on their own. We have some internal expectations of what they’ll accomplish in a day. If they meet those expectations, we should reward them. If they fail to meet those expectations, we should ask questions and help them get better.

If, after investing some time in an employee, you find that he or she simply is not outputting what you expect, then let the employee go. But don’t tell me that I need to start measuring their hours and turn them into a clock puncher. Not interested. Thanks.

I don’t need MORE work (tracking their hours). I simply need effective employees. By treating people well, and setting clear expectations, that’s what I get.