john jonas Archives

John Jonas Presentation at The Webinar Summit 2011 (Salt Lake City)

Sunday, September 25th, 2011 at 1:32 pm  
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Last night I caught part of John Jonas’ live presentation to a packed room at The Webinar Summit. He was giving his usual presentation on outsourcing to the Philippines for $2.50 per hour by hiring full time employees.

I did not catch the entire presentation and I will be going through the replay videos to soak up all of the advice given by John Jonas and many other speakers. That said I wanted to bring up an important point.

At all Internet Marketing conferences, speakers usually pitch their stuff. John pitched ReplaceMyself.com, naturally.

Nobody was pitching products for less than $997. Not a single person. So John came up with a creative way to get his price point up that high. Normally, customers can purchase a membership to Replace Myself for $97 per month, or get permanent access (the “pro outsourcer” upgrade) for $797.

So how can he sell the same thing at $997? Well, he added in a pretty good extra bonus that is technically worth $800. The bonus was a pre-screened and pre-tested employee. You see, because John Jonas owns OnlineJobs.ph he also setup a business by which he tests candidates and places them in a separate pool. Those candidates are more likely to be successful to you in your business, and he guarantees they work out for you or he will replace them free of charge. A tested employee costs $800 (a finder’s fee) plus usual ongoing salary. So John was throwing in a tested employee and adding $200 to the sticker price of the package. That means you’re actually getting a 75% discount on the pre-tested employee.

If you just want to do the hiring on your own, you can still buy his package at the usual $97 per month, or currently $797 if you take the “pro outsourcer” upgrade. BTW, that upgrade is pitched to you AFTER you confirm your payment for the first month. So don’t worry. You pay $97 and then you purchase the upgrade. Then you never ever make another payment in your life. That’s what I did, and I’m very happy to have done it. I don’t like ongoing fees.

Useful Links

Visit Replace Myself.

For people already ready to buy, and want my huge and helpful bonus, visit the checkout page.

To hear John Jonas on his next webinar (these are GOOD), register for his webinar.

Remember to Pay Employees in Philippine Pesos

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011 at 7:15 am  
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This is just a quick post on paying your online workers in the Philippines. Now that pretty much everyone in that country has access to PayPal, it’s clear to me that PayPal is fastest and easiest.

However … I would not recommend paying in US dollars.

Here’s why: When I started using Replace Myself and hiring people through OnlineJobs.ph, I would do as John suggested and arrange a US dollar salary. The conversion at the time was about 46 pesos to 1 US dollar. But yesterday, on August 1st, I went to send payment for July’s work to my team. The conversion rate is now about 40:1 instead of 46:1

I hadn’t noticed this because we shifted to Pesos a while back, and I’m glad we did. It’s costing me a bit more money because of the currency move, but imagine if I was still paying the same $US salary? They would be getting penalized for something they can’t control.

Let’s do some math on this: Say you paid $300/ month to an employee. That would work out to 13,800 pesos back at the old 46:1 conversion. But now that the US dollar has been weak, this same employee would only be getting 12,000 pesos. That’s eighteen hundred LESS per month.

You might want to have a conversation with your guys about this to see what they prefer, but I am going to guess that most of them want stability. They get this when you take the foreign exchange risk yourself. And if the dollar recovers, then you can inch in some raises for them while not even spending more money. Then they’ll be doubly happy.

Great case study on hiring Filipinos and outsourcing

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 at 10:52 am  
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Hey everyone,

I woke up early while my kids are still sleeping because last night John Jonas sent out an email with a case study that I wanted to watch.

I always learn good stuff from these case studies, so I prefer to watch / listen when I won’t be interrupted.

Go watch this awesome case study on John’s blog with a guy named Eric.

Eric talks about his particular business (local SEO work for local companies), and how he hired his first few employees, what worked out and what did not. Hint – his first hire did NOT work out and he explains exactly why. I’ve seen this happen before. Eric also has a great mindset about what work he wants to do himself (almost none) versus what he wants to leverage his team to do (almost everything).

Go watch Eric and John talk. You’ll learn something.

Local SEO Outsourcing Case Study using Filipino Staff

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011 at 7:05 pm  
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John Jonas just posted a nice audio interview on his website that you should definitely listen to. Unlike so many of the hour-long fluff pieces out there, this is short and sweet. Just let it play while you delete your junk mail.

The conversation is with a guy named Scott, and John gets him to walk through what he’s doing to get revenue from local SEO clients, but outsourcing all of the work to the Philippines.

If I was starting over I am pretty sure I’d get involved in doing this sort of business because I believe the revenue opportunity is quite large … but the strategy still revolves around one simple thing: 1) have a business model; 2) hire someone to do the time-consuming parts of that business model for you; 3) focus on running the business, and growing the business rather than working “in” the business.

Go listen to this interview between John Jonas and Scott.

After you listen, consider checking out John’s program called “Replace Myself”. This is exactly what I did a couple of years ago and there is no turning back. I have fully embraced the idea of having full time employees for around $300 per month and up. It DOES work. Seriously.

Doubled my Amazon Earnings Recently

Saturday, April 30th, 2011 at 11:04 am  
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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

Answers on Building Amazon Review Sites

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011 at 9:01 pm  
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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.

What NOT to do When Hiring a Filipino Writer

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 at 3:19 pm  
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When hiring people make sure that you throw this faulty way of thinking straight into the garbage can where it belongs

Today I was browsing through some of the jobs that people have posted at OnlineJobs.ph and I came across one that I think is a classic example of failure-in-the-making.

I don’t want to paste the guy’s job description, but let me boil it down for you. The employer wants to pay $1.50 per article for articles that are at least 500 words, and well researched. The employer wants “professional writers”.

Let’s do some math, shall we?

If you are looking for quality writing I don’t think you’re going to get more than 4 unique articles per day from someone. There simply is not enough time to do proper research and proof-reading / editing otherwise.

But let’s pretend that someone was genius and could crank out 6 per day. Yes, that’s 6 well-written articles of 500 words or more per day. If you think that’s reasonable then I challenge you do exactly that, consistently, for at least 10 consecutive work days (take Sat-Sun off).

Now, how much does that lucky genius make? A whopping $9 per day. And if he gets sick, or if there is a power failure he does not get paid. The power goes out in the Philippines often. Oh, and he doesn’t get paid for vacations. Nice deal eh?

$9 per day works out to about $200 per month based on 22 days per month (remember to exclude weekends). I can tell you that I have NEVER come across a candidate on OnlineJobs.ph who can write in excellent English for that price. Never. Good writers will cost you at least double that price. Even mediocre writers will cost about $300.

This fantasy employee does not exist.

But the bigger point is this: Filipinos simply want a JOB. They want reliable income. They do not want you to pay them on a per article basis. If you approach them with this attitude they will run for the hills. And they should.

You need to approach hiring people as if you are giving them a REAL JOB. Not pay-per-article. In the end they will be much happier with this and you’ll get better work. You’ll have them thinking about your business rather than how many articles they can crank out for you. They’ll put more thought into proof reading, and they’ll do better research.

I’m sure if John Jonas was reading this he’d say the same thing (after all I learned this from him).

That’s the end of my rant for today.

Article Marketing Resource Boxes: An Awesome Free Tool

Sunday, November 28th, 2010 at 2:54 am  
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If you do article marketing then you know about the importance of resource boxes. If you are new, article marketing means writing articles and publishing them in other people’s article directories. You get to include an “about the author” section at the end of the article where you can include links back to your websites.

This gives you the opportunity to get clicks on your articles (traffic) and it also gives you a backlink to your site which helps search engine rankings.

In case you need help creating resource boxes, here is an awesome free tool.

This tool, which was created by John Jonas, allows you to make a whole variety of resource boxes pointing to different URLs and using different keywords. This is particularly useful if you are using Unique Article Wizard (which is what I do).

Bottom line – this tool ROCKS and you should use it. You should give it to your outsourcing team also.

If you are at all confused – just go take a look at the tool and you’ll understand.

OnlineJobs.ph Shows Proof of Excellent English from Philippines Outsourcing

Friday, November 5th, 2010 at 3:29 pm  
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I wanted to show you a new feature at OnlineJobs.ph because after reviewing it, I think this is really cool John Jonas has added videos to OnlineJobs.ph so that job seekers can “pitch” themselves using video.

When you watch a video of someone, you get to hear how they speak. This makes it really to tell how good their English is, and how well they communicate. This is super important!

I think this is going to become my favorite way to screen people before I contact them. I also wanted to show you this one specific example (see video) because it clearly shows someone (a 35 year old woman named Anne) who has absolutely perfect English just as you’d expect from an American. She’s clearly pitching herself as a freelancer, so not someone you can hire full time, but I show you this just so you can see how good the English can be with a Filipino.

Free Access to OnlineJobs.ph

When you join Replace Myself, you get free access to OnlineJobs.ph, which means you can look up these candidates, get their contact info, and hire them.

I already emailed Anne to tell her how impressed I was with her video. I need someone to do freelance logo design anyway, so it fits one of my current needs.

Importance of Giving Outsourcers Some Freedom

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010 at 3:13 pm  
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I am a big time believer in training people not only to do a job, but to be able to think about how to improve upon the job. I also believe in allowing my outsourcers (the guys who are with me full time) to do training during their work day and I’ll pay them for it (and buy material if needed).

Today one of my guys sent me his daily update. He spent the entire day listening to and watching Jeff Johnson’s “unstoppable traffic” videos. He found out about them, opted in to Jeff’s list and told me he thought they would be useful. I said “Ok, go ahead and watch them and summarize them for me”.

He sent me a text file with all of his notes. He told me which ones I should watch. This is really super cool because after I do so (and I will, I love to learn), I’ll ask him to come up with an implementation plan. I’ll let him drive the bus, so to speak. But I’ll know the map he’s following. I’ll suggest course corrections if necessary.

This mentality that I have regarding educating people is not new to me. I’ve had it my entire adult life. But it was also strongly reinforced in the training material I got from John Jonas. His training and thinking strategies are fantastic.

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