I wanted to write up this quick post because it demonstrates the power of following a plan and setting it on autopilot using outsourcing.

As many readers know, I’m a member of John Jonas’ “Replace Myself” program and I hire full time employees to work for me in the Philippines.

For the time being we’ve stopped building Amazon sites simply because I have a few other high-priority projects and I don’t want to dilute my team’s work too much. But I have a total of something like 15 separate sites promoting Amazon niche products and nearly all of them make some money. A few are total duds, and a few are really profitable.

I won’t disclose exact numbers but I’m really serious when I say that you can build a handful of these and easily cover the cost of a full time employee. You can hire one person to build these sites for you, completely, and you’ll probably have your “handful” done in two months, and you can then either build more or downshift to “promotion only” while having your employee working on other tasks for you.

So that’s where I am now. I have about 15 of these sites and we’re concentrating on about 10 of them to boost rankings and revenue.

I have one employee who spends about 1/3 of her time writing a SINGLE article set every day. It is submitted to Unique Article Wizard, which is where the magic happens. UAW builds links for us in a very stable manner. It submits variations of the “article set” to hundreds of article sites over about two weeks (we set the rate). It attaches a RANDOM resource box to the end of the article based on a file that WE created. And obviously we created a slew of resource boxes to build links to the review pages that we want to promote, using anchor text that represents a variation of our keywords.

Two months ago I made that decision to stop building out new sites and instead focus on simply growing what we have. Every day we submit one article for one site, and we rotate through the 10 sites we’re focusing on in weeks.

This single task has doubled our revenue from Amazon. It’s actually up more than that, but I have one site that is somewhat geared towards summer products so I’m not counting the growth there. That’s more of a seasonal effect, but surely still helped by our UAW efforts.

The lesson in this is to come up with a system that you can manage, understand how it works and then set your guys in the Philippines out to execute on the plan. Be the manager and just guide them, while you come up with new money making projects. It’s great fun and it’s profitable.

Here’s more info on UAW in case you’re interested in using this. I joined because John Jonas recommended it and it was a very good rec.
Chris

The following question was sent to me regarding the outsourcing of Amazon review sites. Rather than email the answer directly I figured it would make a good blog post, so here goes:

The Question:

Hello, I read your blog post on outsourcing Amazon site’s.

I hired an outsourcer from Freelancer a couple of weeks ago to create 5 Amazon Review site’s for $600. They were due to start working on the project on 25th December but he emailed me yesterday saying that his Dad has become ill so he asked me to give him until 15th January to start.

I’ve got a couple of questions;

1. Is it worth paying the monthly fee for OnlineJobs.ph considering i only want to create around 20-25 site’s. Would it be better to stick to site’s such as Freelancer and Elance?

2. What is the best way of having backlinks created for the site’s? Jan Roo’s recommends 3waylinks.net in his ebook but i heard that if you unsubscribe from 3waylinks then you lose all the backlinks created.

As i intend to have around 25 site’s, i don’t want to spend many hours creating backlinks manually. What would be the best way to have the backlinking automated?

My Answers:

If you are hiring a freelancer rather than hiring a full time employee, I would seriously consider hiring 2 or 3 of them and give them the exact same job (different websites obviously). For example hire 3 guys to build 2 sites each. Pay via Elance escrow or something like that, and make sure the terms are clear to avoid disputes over what a “completed” site looks like. Do not do this unless you have created your own review sites in the past. How else will you know how to answer any questions they ask you?

You asked about joining OnlineJobs.ph, and if it is worth the fee. There is no monthly limit to OnlineJobs.ph – you can hire someone and cancel the next day if you like. That’s your call, but if you think you will need someone full time *permanently*, then yes, join the site. If you want someone temporarily, do not join. These people are looking for permanent jobs, generally not freelancer jobs.

Building backlinks: John Jonas teaches you how to build a mini-net (or more correctly, how to outsource the creation of a mini-net) inside of ReplaceMyself. That strategy involves labor, but no cost since all of the sites you’ll use are free. This is definitely a good option.

Another option that he recommends, and one that I 100% agree with and use myself, is Unique Article Wizard. It is SO worth the $67 per month fee it’s not even funny. You will never “lose” the links because this is article submission done correctly. It’s article marketing on steroids. It really REALLY works and I use this strategy with all of my review sites. I have no experience with the 3way links system.

Go check out Unique Article Wizard for yourself. I hesitated for the first couple of months on this after joining ReplaceMyself and I even emailed John Jonas to ask him, “Is it really as good as you say” … he replied, I bought, end of story. It’s fantastic.

Now let’s talk about your desire to have 25 sites. Ask yourself this question – why do you want to have 25? Why not 50 or 100? Why not 1 or 2? If you do not have a solid reason for picking 25 (and I expect you do not), then forget about the number.

Do this instead …

1. Build a few sites and make sure you post quality reviews
2. Market your sites according to SOME marketing plan. Mini net + UAW submissions, you pick what you do here.
3. Monitor your results as you keep building a few more sites. Track your keyword ranking, traffic, and sales for each site
4. Analyze each site’s results to determine where your time and money is best spent going forward. What I mean is this: Say you have 10 sites and 2 of them are ranking really well, get tons of traffic but have massive bounce rates (meaning people hit the back button). This is a sign you can improve the quality of your content (or the look of the site) to improve bounce and make more sales. This is WAY easier than creating a new site. But you might have another site that gets almost no traffic despite putting in a lot of time and energy. In that case you wouldn’t want to invest more time in it … just leave it behind and build something else.

So your decision to get to 25 sites should first be based on getting to 3 or 4, and then if you feel you’ve maximized the potential (or are busy waiting for enough statistics to make decisions), build more sites. The more you have, the more “real estate” you have to analyze and renovate. Always renovate your winners (improve them) when the ROI (return on investment) will be better than building a new site (breaking new ground).

But most important is this – if you THINK you’ll end up with 25 sites then you better be planning on making profits, and you better be planning on training a team (even if a small team) to help you maximize those profits.

That’s why I love ReplaceMyself. It teaches you how to build systems so you can live the 4 hour work week.

Tonight I was browsing the Warrior Forum and came across another oh-so-common thread where the original poster was asking how people make money from the Amazon.com affiliate program.

Here’s my post to explain what I’m doing. Full disclosure, my Amazon activities are by no means a full time income today, but they are decent and growing and because I see how good the potential is, I’ve been doing a lot more of it over the last couple of months.

What is Amazon’s Affiliate Program All About?

Let’s start with the basics – if you have a website where you promote Amazon products you’ll earn a commission ranging from 4% up to about 7% depending on how much stuff you sell every month. You only need to sell about 6 or 7 items to get to the 6% mark, which is incredibly easy. So you should think about it as a 6% commission. Check the terms of the program because some categories, like electronics, only pay 4% no matter what.

There are two main ways to promote Amazon products. You can either write reviews, your you can contextually market products. Let me explain.

Reviews are pretty obvious, and are probably what most readers here will be doing. You either have a website in a niche and you post product reviews, or you create a website with a focus on niche product reviews. This is very common and is exactly what I’m doing. You summarize the product information along with customer feedback and provide a link to where the reader can go buy the product. You get traffic from people who are researching these products, and if you do a good job writing the reviews, you get clicks through to Amazon. Conversion tends to be around 6-7% based on my experience.

Contextual marketing is different. Instead of reviewing a product, you may write a blog post or an email and you may mention a product in the context of a story you’re telling, or information you’re sharing. This strategy is best suited to experienced marketers with a following. Say you had a popular email list in the health and fitness market. Maybe you’re writing about how you started cooking with coconut oil because of its health benefits. When you create anchor text (just like I did there), linking to Amazon, without offering a “review”, that’s contextual marketing.

But most of you are probably interested in doing product reviews. So let’s talk about that for a bit longer. There are some rules you need to abide by when writing reviews.

Here they are:

1) Make sure you review products that will pay you. You need to consider search volume and price. Most people say don’t promote products under $100 because they don’t pay much commission. That’s true, but if you find a $10 product that gets 30x more search volume than a $100 product, you’ll still make 3x as much money. Factor in volume AND price when you consider writing a review.

2) Always do keyword research on the product name or niche keyword, and then make sure you do proper on-page SEO by incorporating keywords in your title, description, headlines, URL, and several times in your body text.

3) Pick products that your writer is interested in writing about! This is REALLY important. If you are the writer, then you need to be interested. If you are hiring a full time writer from OnlineJobs.ph then you should ask your writer what gets him or her excited. Perhaps you can find good niches that your writer is personally interested in. This will help you add value in your reviews. This leads us to …

4) Make sure your reviews HELP PEOPLE. If they are crap, nobody will click them. If you can’t write, do not write reviews. Hire someone who can. Even hiring an American writer for $0.02 through TextBroker.com will be better than doing it yourself if you are not a good writer.

5) I personally find that text links work best. I link to the actual product page on Amazon, and I link to customer reviews. Amazon makes it easy to get an affiliate link to these variations of pages.

Outsourcing Amazon Review Sites

These days I outsource all of the review writing and most of the niche research. I hire people through OnlineJobs.ph to write for me full time and in their first (probation) month I will assign them a complete website to build. Obviously it takes less than a month to build a site, but I’ll hold their hand through the process without doing any of the work for them. I’ll just show them how to do things. I get them to pick products, pick domain names, install WordPress, write reviews and write articles to promote the site.

Other than “English writing”, everything else is easy to teach, so I focus on hiring people with some writing talent.

I do not have a full time graphics person. I simply outsource some small jobs to a freelancer that I like. A website header for my Amazon sites will cost me $2 (yes, I’m serious).

I spend my time managing projects, doing some niche research, and proof-reading some of the reviews to make sure quality is in check. I send my guys lots of emails or training videos to suggest ways to do things better. I work “on” my business rather than “in” my business. This is the only way to grow, in my view.

Getting Started with Amazon Review Sites

I recommend two products that happen to be sold at Clickbank.com to get started. Both of these should be handed over to your outsourcing team so that THEY can implement these for you, so long as you known enough to guide them. Remember guys – Clickbank forces vendors to offer a 60 day guarantee so I wouldn’t recommend this stuff (using my affiliate link) if I thought it was crap. These are both systems I purchased with my own money.

The first is Dan Brock’s Super Deadbeat Affiliate Program. I previously wrote about it here, and if you use my affiliate link to buy it I’ll send you my notes on how to make the program even better.

The second is Gary Gregory’s MOBS system. He doesn’t advertise this as an “Amazon” system, but it is PERFECT for building sites that promote physical products and it is a very complete system. You really can’t go wrong if you follow Gary’s instructions. He even shows you his own demo site that acts as a perfect model to follow. You need nothing more. If you buy this using my affiliate link I’ll send you a report I’ve been working on (for my team) that explains how to make Gary’s strategy even MORE powerful. Email me at info (at) replace-myself-bonus (dot) com to claim the bonus.

The Most Important Part: You won’t make money sitting on your ass thinking. You won’t make money analyzing stuff. You will only make money by taking action and making LOTS of mistakes. Trust me on this. You NEED to make a ton of mistakes to become profitable and luckily these are low-cost mistakes. But the faster you start, the faster you’ll make money. Once you make money you’ll understand exactly why you’re making money and you’ll be self sufficient. It really is that simple.

Internet marketers buy a lot of domains. BUT I’m pretty new to the idea of buying domains from other people. In the past I’ve always just picked domain names based on availability of new names, and I’ve never considered buying pre-registered domains.

…Not until my guy in the Philippines suggested it.

I’m not talking premium domain names here either. I’m just talking about domains that some other Joe Marketer registered. I’m talking about making an offer and simply buying it privately.

We’re building a lot of niche sites right now and I have one main guy doing all my keyword research and domain research. Last week he came back to me with a top-3 list of potential names for a new site.

But in addition to the top 3 list, he did something I never asked him to do. I love it when guys go beyond what they were asked to do. How cool is that?

Here is what he wrote to me:

“If you look at ExactMatchKeyword.org it is an abandoned site. Maybe he [the owner] will sell it? It ranks very well in Google”.

He was right. The site had 2 or 3 pages of content, but a perfect exact match on our keyword with a popular .org domain. The site ranks #2 for the keyword. It’s a SUPER thin site that we can make a lot better.

I visited NetworkSolutions.com and did a “whois” search. The owner had not used private registration so I was able to email him and offer him $150 for the domain. He asked me for $200 and we settled on $175. It’s a bargain for me because I know I’ll be able to sell a lot of physical product via Amazon using this site – especially once my Filipino writers create real content for the site.

Anyway, that’s your quick tip for today. When you have your guys look for domain ideas, always tell them to look at the .net, com and org extensions of the exact match keyword. You’ll be surprised how often the domain has been registered, but is not really being used. You might as well throw out an offer to see if you can buy it rather than start from scratch with a lesser-known extension (such as .biz, .info, etc).

Best regards,
Chris Thompson

P.S. I highly recommend you use Market Samurai for keyword research because it speeds up the process about 5x compared to using Google’s free keyword tool. Time is money. Here’s where you can get a free trial of Market Samurai.

Last weekend I got an email from an online marketer recommending Dan Brock’s “Deadbeat Super Affiliate” program. The crux of Dan’s program is how to use Amazon to generate passive online income.

Because I already believe in using Amazon, and because I’m a fan of continuous learning, I bought the course.

Here is my affiliate link (use this to get my notes)

I bought Super Deadbeat Affiliate for two reasons:

1) I think it’s important to always be learning
2) I think it is important to give training to your team of outsourced workers.

Dan Brock’s course is easy to “give” to my team because all they need is the URL for the customer login, along with my email address. That’s it.

I posted the details for them in BaseCamp (project management software I use) and I told my guys what training modules I wanted them to train on.

We’re about one week into this now and we’re busy writing product reviews, and picking niche markets.

Is Dan Brock’s Super DeadBeat Affiliate Any Good?

Yeah, it’s pretty good. It costs $37, but if you “exit” from the page it sends you to an optin form (exit splash). If you exit again you get a $10 discount so it actually costs only $27.

Considering the price, it is a total no brainer. You don’t need any of the up sells. If you outsource, you should get this just to give it to your guys.

It took me about 3 hours to go through the first set of modules focused on Amazon. I haven’t finished going through all of the other advanced training he has, but the basics of the course have definitely proven to be worth the money. The simple tricks he gives you to boost click-thru and conversion are very solid. He even gives you his HTML code to add in some nifty features that make your reviews look way more professional. When it comes to having my guys in the Philippines do this stuff for me, having the HTML is cut-and-paste easy for them. That’s cool.

The Economics of Doing This

I want you all to start thinking about the economics of using outsourcers to implement “stuff” for you. Whether it’s this Super Deadbeat Affiliate course, or something else, I am willing to get that the training material costs next to nothing compared to using the material with your team. That’s why I keep buying stuff!

So here’s what I found out: It takes about one day to put together one of these Super Deadbeat Affiliate sites. Generally Dan recommends starting with 5 product reviews, and these can be done by one person in one day without a lot of trouble. Basically that’s 90 minutes per review.

If you are paying your writer $300 per month (22 working days) then it should cost you about $25 to build a site. $10 for the domain and another $15 in writing costs. That’s the beginning. Then you might pay for some article marketing to promote the site, and build the site into a larger review site if it is making you money. But your initial per-site investment is pretty low. If you build 100 of these ($2500+ investment) and if 20% of them make $100 per month, then you’ll have $2k per month of income. In other words, the payback period is so low that you can’t afford NOT to try out a strategy like this.

The “Warning”

My warning is that you need to stick with the strategy for a while to see the results. Your first sites are not going to rank overnight. You need to figure that these sites will take 2-3 months before they start getting enough recognition by Google. So you can’t go into this (or any organic SEO) strategy expecting a payback within the first month or two. You need to suck up the investment for a bit before you see the reward. Be consistent and be patient. Just make sure you are following a proven system.

My Bonus for Super Deadbeat Affiliate:

If you happen to use my affiliate link please email me and I’ll send you my notes on what I think is missing from the course (there are a few things I’m doing differently and I can say this with some authority because I’ve been doing online marketing longer than Dan Brock). My own notes will be valuable to you as a bonus. Email me at info (at) replace-myself-bonus (dot) com.

Anyway, whether or not you get this program, the key advice I have for you is to buy good training and GIVE it to your guys. This will accelerate your progress. This is the advice that John Jonas gives to members of Replace Myself and I gotta say, he’s 100% correct. You’d be a fool to not give good training to your guys.

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.