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.

We all know that the Gurus do a pretty good job of giving away good quality content. I’ve started having my Filipino workers go through this training and send me their notes. This way they are the ones learning it so they can implement it, and I’m not spending my time watching & explaining concepts to them. After all they will often be the ones doing the work. And by having them send me their notes, I get to see the quality of the information (helps me decide if maybe I’ll go back and watch it myself) … and I also get to see if my Filipino worker truly understood the video (based on the quality of his notes).

I recently assigned one guy the job of watching Jeff Johnson’s pre-launch sequence where he explains how to do Youtube marketing more effectively. This is pretty timely since we’ve started taking all of our articles and converting them to video and uploading to YouTube. The Youtube “Bounceback” strategy that my guy sent me notes on makes lots of sense and I’m having him implement this.

FYI, here’s how we take articles and turn them into videos. This happens to be for a website where the content is really important to me so I tend to write most of it myself. What I do is take the articles and read them into my microphone. If they are long articles I will break them into 2 or 3 sections and make up to 3 recordings.

I save the audio as MP3 and upload to our project management software. My guy in the Philippines then takes the MP3 and throws it into Windows Movie Maker (free) and ads a title slide with a nice background. The background actually moves, so the viewer can tell that it is actually playing properly, not stalled. This features is built into Windows Movie Maker.

So he takes my MP3, ads a title, and saves as an MP4 and then uploads to YouTube. He crafts a description of the video based on our chosen keyword + snippets of the published article.

From my perspective it takes less than 10 minutes to turn an article into a video. All I’m doing is speaking, saving and uploading. He does the rest.

Now, thanks to having him use Jeff’s free training, he has a better knowledge base on which to achieve better results for my business.

As a final little piece of advice, I’ve found that I used to get WORSE results out of my outsourcers when I tried to give them every possible piece of help needed to do a job. I was simply training them to rely on me for help and answers. Not any more. Now I give them just the basic description of what I want done and I tell them to do their best to figure it out and ask me for help only if needed. Instantly better results. DO THIS. It really does work.

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.

The following post is a direct cut and paste from WarriorForum, where a Filipino person post his thoughts on outsourcing. I think it’s essential that you read it.

Hi a Filipino here,

I’m not here to advertise myself. It’s just that, Too many people just want to hire us for a low salary and get all the work they can out of us. I’m NOT saying they’re ALL like this.

Show Respect! Sometimes, they treat us like a SLAVE or a ROBOT who can throw any words they want. Yes we ALL need a job.. But please treat us like a business partner, a friend, or just a normal person who has emotion and feelings. I believe if you treat us better, you’ll get something better in return. We would love to have a job, and we want to be hired by a business man who respect us..

I hope you guys understand what I want to say…….

Clearly he is not an article writer, ok? He’s an SEO. So dont’ judge his English. But this guy is BANG ON with what he’s saying. There are too many people that I’ve corresponded with who seem to think that the Philippines is a way to get slave labor. It isn’t. Yeah, it’s lower cost (much lower) but they are still real people. You can’t give them mindless work and expect it to continue for very long.

The typical example I see is people who want to outsource articles. They think that it should be pretty easy for some guy or girl in the Philippines to just “bang out a 500 word article in 30 minutes”. They then assume that this translates directly into at least 15 such articles per day.

Good luck to whoever thinks this is a way to run your business. You are destined to fail with an attitude like that.

My experience shows that if you have a writer simply write about topics that he or she is not personally passionate about, they WILL burn out. And it won’t take too long. So my advice is that you give your writer tasks aside from writing about non-interesting subjects. Ask for their input on what they’d like to learn. Teach them other skills so that they can rotate away from writing articles for a few days at a time.

A few examples could be:

• Video marketing projects
• Sales letter creation
• Autoresponder series creation
• Bonus material creations such as short ebooks

Not everything has to be an article in a niche where your writer couldn’t care less. Just put yourself in their shoes. How would you feel if you had to write about window cleaning all day long? Or how about sewing machines? Coffee makers? Backyard toys? It would get old fast.

Don’t treat your guys like robots or slaves. Treat them with respect.

“Replace Myself” works when you keep in mind that people should be treated just as you’d treat yourself

This is a guest post from Antony Hayes. I asked him to share some of his tips with respect to hiring English writers. He clearly prefers native English speakers based in the US, but his tips are very useful,and apply equally to hiring offshore writes. Thanks Antony! You’ll find a link to his content writing website at the end of his article

I have been asked by Chris Thompson to write a guest blog on the selection process when looking to hire writers for short or long term projects. This is something that I am quite experienced in since I run my own content production company and always strive to provide clients with the best articles on the internet. For this to happen, I need to know how to spot the best writers and this is something that I have managed to refine down to a few simple points.

My Opinion on Native English Writers

First of all, I would like to just point out that when I first started, I used to concentrate on hiring writers from India and the Philippines but eventually decided to only use native English writers from the U.S. The main reason for this is because the majority of my articles need to be written for an American audience. As a result, it works out better to hire individuals already familiar with the education and government system, as well as the political state, various mannerisms and sayings within the country.

Additionally, it is so much easier to be able to find great writers from English speaking countries due to the fact that it is their natural language after all. This isn’t to say that there are no good writers from non-native countries and many people do choose to use this option due to the favorable exchange rates which invariably leads to cheaper services. In either case, knowing how to spot the best writers is a skill that needs to be learned. Below is a closer look at my recruitment process in a step by step format

Setting up the Advert

Whether you use Freelancer.com, oDesk, Elance or any other freelancing market place; the first step in finding the top writers revolves primarily around the advert. Always remember to offer a rate as high as you can afford as writing is a skill and should be treated as such, especially if you want the better writers applying. When it comes to the advert, be clear on your specifications as well as your requirements. However, keep the advert short and simple as writers won´t want to read an essay.

The First Message Says it All

The first message or introductory message from a writer usually says it all. If the writer’s message is pre written and has been pasted over, I won´t even read it. Secondly, if the message itself is poorly written, that is a direct reflection on the writer´s integrity as a writer. A writer who is truly particular will take care of grammar and spelling at all times, and not just when writing articles. I frequent Freelancer.com which is a bidding site; so I will always request applicant’s to bid a set amount as this also ensures that they at least took the time to read my advert.

Requesting a Sample

I will always request that applicants send through a few samples of their best writing with an introductory message. This should give employers a brief idea on the applicant’s writing skill but it doesn’t say it all. 9 times out of 10, I will also request a sample to be written according to my own specifications which I will pay for (and accept their bid) if it is written correctly. I only do this to those few out of the tens of applicants that make it onto my shortlist. Keep in mind that many writers refuse to do this as there have been some scams, so it helps to build a reputation first as a trustworthy employer.

Understanding the Sample

When analyzing the sample, it is important to consider the flow of the article as well as any subtle habits that the writer may have. For example, many inexperienced writers can only write in first or second person which is problematic for clients who want authoritative articles. However, it is more than possible to write in a conversational, easy to read tone without using words such as “you”, “I” or “we”. When it comes to the flow of the article, it is vital that the article follows a logical progression otherwise the end reader will lose interest after the first paragraph.

Other points to look out for include the structure of the article (even paragraphs / sub headers – both of which I am a stickler for), readability, as well as whether the article is actually helpful. Many writers have a habit of writing a neat article that looks good and may be grammatically correct, but won´t have any substantial information. I usually provide new writers with one chance to adjust their style to see if they will be compatible for future work. Lastly, any hint of plagiarism or a spun article will result in a terminated application.

Don’t Forget Important Details

During the recruitment process, remember to make sure that all aspects of current and future work have been discussed with the shortlisted and/or successful applicants. This will include information such as the writer’s daily writing capabilities, past topic experience, as well as whether the writer can work with short deadlines. Additional details can include formats and writing styles that the applicant is used to; as well the employer’s payment schedule. Making sure that nothing is left out will prevent any unnecessary bumps in the road later on.

Final Thoughts

When a writer has been found, make sure to have patience with the first couple of articles as they will need to get used to your particular preferred writing style. However, if you performed the recruitment process properly – the articles should be exactly what you are looking for. Just remember that writing is not a commodity and writers who do take pride in their art should be respected for it. I hope these points have been helpful, and please feel free to check out my website and get in contact if you have any enquiries.

Antony Hayes runs this online content production company, and kindly contributed this post as a guest blogger.

Every so often I see forum threads talking about this topic. How long should my article writer take to write a 500 word article? How many articles a day should I expect from my writer? How long should article rewrites take?

Here is my answer:

I recommend using Unique Article Wizard for article submission. I put my money where my mouth is. I have writers that are paid to create article to go into this system. So how do I know if I’m getting my money’s worth? Simple – I have done article myself and I know what to expect.

Here is an example from today: I actually thought of doing this blog post because I had just finished writing one article along with 2 re-writes of the same article. I wanted to know how long the whole process took me to complete.

Stats: My article was written on a topic I know very well, and required zero research. Add any research time to your expectations. My original article was 320 words. The two rewrites were 437 and 388 words each.

In case you are wondering, Unique Article Wizard uses 3 versions of an article in order to give you the human-written “uniqueness” when they are submitted to hundreds of directories and blogs.

Time taken: The original article took me 20 minutes to write. That does not include any proof reading or editing. I’m a very fast typist, I knew the topic well and it just “flowed” rather easily. I expect someone I hire should probably spend 45 minutes on this.

My rewrites each took me 10 minutes. I timed them with a stopwatch.

What’s left: As I write this blog post I have 3 finished articles. I’ll now need to go into the Unique Article Wizard portal and paste them, pick categories, add keywords, and spell check the articles. I’ll also need to create the resource boxes that I want to use (to get my backlinks). I expect that process will take me about 15 minutes.

Adding it all up: If you add up the entire workflow I described above, you get 55 minutes. Let’s call it an hour. That is the time it took ME. I would expect someone not as skilled at typing / composing articles would spend at least 50% more time on this, so let’s call it 1.5 hours per full article set.

Now let’s get realistic. What I shared with you above included only the actual working time. Guess what? I was having a cup of coffee, so between re-writes I drank some coffee. That naturally leads itself to a bathroom break. I also took some quick mental breaks between re-writes. Heck, I stopped to change gears by writing this blog post (something your outsourced employee obviously should not be doing during work hours). But my point is that your employee will require mental and physical breaks. Nobody can be expected to sit at a computer and crank out content without stopping.

Take your time and triple it. If my non-stop-time would be 1 hour then I have to adjust to account for 1) my employee won’t be as fast as I am; 2) we all need breaks. So I would expect my employee can finish an entire article set + submit that article set within 3 hours. If any research is required then again you need to pad this number further.

My conclusion is that if I’m asking my article writers to work 8 hours per day then I should expect about 3 article sets per day of work. Anything more that this is probably unsustainable, poorly written, and demotivating for your employees.

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)

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.

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.

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.