It really is Ok to fail if you know the reason you failed, and that is where most people go wrong. Once a site or a product fails then you need to analyse why it bombed it’s only then that you can learn from it.  Be like a pathologist investigating a death and find the cause of the failure, then next time you can make sure that you don’t have the same problems.

Over the time I was doing WSO’s I created 8 products,  their level of success can be measured as follows.

Success, Failure Failure Failure (at this point I nearly gave up, instead I looked at what was wrong) Success Success Success Success.

After the initial success I thought I’d made it , but I was wrong the following 3 failures nearly made me give up IM but instead of throwing in the towel I looked at what was wrong and it was obvious , I was just stupid for not realizing it earlier.

My target market were just not seeing the products, at that time WSO Plus didn’t exist so no one would promote a WSO for you, I refused to build a list for moral reasons (see told you I was stupid) so I couldn’t tell my previous buyers about my products It doesn’t matter if you have  the best products in the world if no one knows about them.

The run of relative successes came once I started to spread the word about the products I created, I knew that there was no point in creating a course or a series of videos if no one was going to see it so I started to make sure that I had a ready market for anything I produced.

Without analyzing that run of failures I would probably not be writing this and living where I live today.

If you are going to fail then fail quickly, learn your lessons and move on. Don’t get attached to sites or projects that aren’t going to make it. If you can’t make a project work dump it and move on don’t let it slowly drag you and your other projects down.

You will fail, but there is nothing wrong with failing if you know why. Failing is only bad if it makes you give up.

I wrote a post a few years back that talked about planning to be successful http://mjthompson.net/630/what-has-eating-an-airplane-got-to-do-with-im-success/ but you also need to plan to fail and to know why you failed.  It took the guy in that post 2 years to eat an aircraft. He didn’t sit down and say I’ll eat it all at once he did it one bit at a time and thats how you can be come successful at IM

My golfing & beer sampling buddy Andre Chaperon posted an image as a response to a comment earlier this week so I stole it and I’ll post it here as it sums up success perfectly.

Don’t let failure get you down, and don’t let it make you give up.

I deleted 24 websites from my server this week. Each one of those represented a failure.

I also got sent a payment of $3800 for a deal I made which allowed someone to sell one of my old products as an downsell to one of their products. I originally only sold less than 500 copies of that product… he sold 800.

Was that product a success or a failure?

It all depends on how I want to quantify it.

Watch out for Issue 3 of IM Manifesto later this week, I’ve got space for 1 more article if you’d like to write one but I need it before tomorrow. So if you want to get expose to over 1000 people then let me know and I’ll hold a space for you.

You can read that article at:

A Free Alternative To Outsourcing

Running an IM related forum means that I spend lots of time testing tools and products many of them aren’t worth recommending so after a month or two I stop using them or cancel my subscription.  There are usually several reasons I don’t stick with them.

1. They just don’t work

2. They are too complicated and take too much work (Synnd)

3. They aren’t really worth the money. (senuke/senukeX)

4. They just miss the point….  (no one needs 100,000 auto generated low quality back links!)

However having said that there are a number of tools i’ve been using for 4 years or more and several I’ve been using over a year.

Both Socialadr and Ezarticlelink are products that I am still using on an almost daily basis while tools like linxboss and serpassist were great for 6 months or so then seemed to lose their power.

As I am in the middle of an SEO competition at the moment (3 weeks in and it seems no one has been sandboxed yet and several of us are on the first few pages of google already..!) I’ve had to dig around and make sure i have the best tools for the job.

It really does seem that for the type of link building that seems works at the moment you don’t need very many fancy expensive tools.  Apart from Socialadr (social media links) Ezarticlelink  (article and blog back links) and the new tool I’ve started to use Build My Rank you really don’t need much more (Fiverr is proving valuable at the moment but more of that later) and I suspect i am over doing it with those 3.

I’ll be creating a full case study next month when the competition is finished but to all intents and purposes I really don’t think that you need to be trying to get thousands of links to you sites. Stick to tools that work in a subtle way and rely on high quality content and you won’t go far wrong.

But don’t take my word for it… TEST TEST TEST.

I am sure by now that everyone knows that you can increase your income by using outsourcers. It doesn’t matter if you are only earning $100 a month If you put aside $20 for outsourcing that can help to double or treble your income.

The problem is if you don’t do it right you can give yourself more problems than you solve.

Back in August 2009 I did a month long outsourcing experiment that turned out to be quite sucessful for me.(I’ll add links for the 5 posts documenting it at the end of this post) the problem was that a short while after after the experiment I realized that I was spending a lot of time just managing my team.

I’d replaced doing the grunt work with a management role and I still wasn’t getting the projects I wanted to work on done.

Since then i’ve used outsourcing a few times each time my income increased but I gave up because it was just a nightmare to manage.

Scroll Forward to last November and my seminar In Vegas.

On the 3rd day we were finishing off and we had an hour left to fill so I asked some of the people there to tell us what they were doing with their businesses that was different.

Heather, who has been a customer of mine for about 2 years stood up and started to tell us about how she was outsourcing and how sucessful it was, she got bombarded by questions as almost everyone there had tried outsourcing and had given up. It became clear that Heather had an angle on outsourcing that most people ignore.

Heather realizes that good outsourcers are an asset and like all good assests the more you put into it the better the return.

Several of us told her that she should write a report about it, and eventually after constant nagging she has produced a report that I wish i’d had 2 years ago. I would have done the experiment in a completly different way.

She has called the report Internet Outsourcing Mastery forget all the products that promise you instant riches and money for nothing, this is a no fluff no filler blueprint that will show you:

How to Find an Outsourcer
How to Interview your Outsourcers
How to Train Your Outsourcers
And Importantly How To Manage them so that you can concentrate on what really matters in your business.

Just follow the guide and do exactly what she recommends and you will have a worker who is adding to the value of your business. Heather released the guide to members of WPG a few days ago and already we have members who are at the interview stage and are choosing their new employees. (That’s called taking action!!…it works)

I can’t recommend Heather’s Guide highly enough and in fact I gave her a testimonial as I learned so much from it. In the past i’ve purchased expensive outsourcing guides and even monthly subscription courses about outsourcing this is better as it comes from someone doing outsourcing every day and making money as a result.

It’s really has changed one aspect of how I do business …but that is a post for next week or the week after!!

Read More About Internet Outsourcing Mastery

Links To My Outsourcing Experiment:

http://mjthompson.net/339/outsourcing-experiment-pt-1-how-to-outsource-and-increase-your-profits/

http://mjthompson.net/343/outsourcing-experiment-part-ii-3-outsourcing-tips/

http://mjthompson.net/354/outsourcing-experiment-part-iii/

http://mjthompson.net/374/outsourcing-experiment-part-iv/

http://mjthompson.net/392/outsourcing-experiment-part-v/

Following from the amazing response to my last post I thought I would show you an Free/Cheap alternative to outsourcing some repetitive tasks.

There are 2 tools that I have been testing for the past few weeks that are providing me with great initial results. The thing I really like about them is that they both allow you to start with a free account and “work your passage” what I mean by that is that in return for you providing them with resources the allow you to use the system. One distributes your articles to hundreds of quality article directories which have lots of back links pointing at them. The other distributes your bookmarks to 17 bookmarking sites without you lifting a finger.

Let me explain more.

The first tool is EzArticleLink.

EzArticleLink is a unique article distribution service. There are 2 parts to it , firstly you add an article directory to the back end of some of your sites, for this I use old sites that are of little use to me. EAL will post articles from other members to these sites (you can monetize these). In return for doing this you can then submit articles for your main sites which are then posted to other peoples directories.

Additionally for every article you post you get 100 additional anchor text links if you are a paid member.

You need to add spun articles but the service has it’s own in-house article spinners who do an excellent job.

Free members get 100-200 distributions per article and paid members (currently $29) get 200-300.

One side effect I’ve noticed is that the sites I’ve added the directories to are starting to perform slightly better. Most probably due to the back link that EzArticleLinks provide to ensure that Google indexes the directories regularly. I’ve added 20 directories which gives me unlimited article distribution for my other sites so If I can earn $1 a month from each of these directories I will have covered my monthly fee

In summary:

Read More about EzArticleLink…

The next tool I like is Socialadr.

Socialadr also has a free and paid business model. The service provides back links to your site from social bookmarking sites. Free members earn credits by setting up accounts (Takes about 1 hour) and then logging in everyday and pressing a button which adds bookmarks to the sites for free members. It takes less than 5 minutes per day to do this.

If you are like me and are basically lazy and don’t want to press any buttons then the paid service is for you. You just need to set up the bookmarks you want distributed and then sit back and all the work is done for you. The sum total of your work is opening the email that tells you what has been distributed.

Read more about SocialAdr

To have outsourcers do this work for you would cost a lot more than these services charge. The results I am starting to see means that these are no brainers. You can use them for free until they pay for themselves then upgrade to paid status.

First I suppose I had better let you know what my views on back linking were before I started.  I believed that all the talk about the power of back links was over rated and just something that SEO guys kept on promoting as they know normal people like us just can’t be bothered to do on a regular basis. I can pretty much generate all the traffic I want by choosing the right keywords , the right Domain,good on site SEO and writing the right sort of articles, so I have never really bothered with it.

So has my view changed in the last 6 weeks??  No not much.

I will admit that there is a place for “good quality” back links for long term results and I will admit that ” poor quality” back links will give you a boost in the short term.

So let’s look at types of back links and see if they have any long term value because long term is where you’ll make your money. It’s great having a site making $5 a day for a month because you got some back links to it but what you should want is a site that makes $5 every day for the next few years.

Back Link Packets.

I am sure most of you know what I am referring to here. Monthly lists of High PR sites that allow “do follow” links. They do work short term, every site I promoted with them had a big jump in rankings to start with. Often from the 200′s to the top 20 or 30. With these you could probably get a site into the top 10 of Google for most easy  difficulty search terms. But you can also probably do that with a few good articles.

Long term they don’t have much of a future and may even eventually damage your sites ranking. Google is not stupid they know what’s going on with these and they can instantly devalue the links. Many of the site owners aren’t stupid either and can quickly make your links worthless. Nor are the software developers stupid, want to bet the next version of the software they release uses “No follow”

The number of sites I look at that have posted links based on these packets but have no good on site seo is amazing I would say that 70%-80% aren’t optimized. By spending 10 miuntes optimizing the sites they would probably rank higer than they do with bad optimization and loads of back links.. Remember The O in SEO means OPTIMIZATION!!! If that’s not a clue nothing is!!

I do use these at the moment but am planning on cutting back and concentrating more permanent methods of getting back links.

Link Directories:

The less said the better about these. In the main low quality links and you have no control over what other sites are linking from the same site. Do you really want a link from a site with 80% porn and meds links? Avoid like the plague!

Social networking/Social book marking sites:

Generally good quality links and can give extra juice by using the link wheel method. They not only generate links but traffic as well and can be integrated into an article marketing strategy. Unfortunately getting Links is not easy and takes time and effort, not a bad thing because it keeps a lot of the spammers away.However there are ways of automating it and still getting good quality long lasting links. More of that another time after I’ve shared my methods with the WordPress Goldmine members.

BTW in case you are wondering if the methods I teach in WordPress Goldmine work, here is part of an email I received today.  The funny thing is , I’ve not done any SEO work on that site as of yet!!

For starters congratulations on some outstanding SEO work. That is actually the reason for my email. I am a hard working entrepreneur who is having the hardest time getting my website on the 1st page of Goggle.

I was sadly burned 3 times by SEO companies, and I just feel so close in giving up. But then I came across you and your site and if I am not mistaken, you are ranked so well on Google yet your site is new, and doesn’t seem to have an overload of back links and you are in a pretty competitive niche.

So to summarize do you need hundreds of back links? It depends on the competition, your keywords and the Domain name. There is no straight answer, but before you set out to get hundreds of low quality back links first ensure that all your on site SEO is set up properly on a page by page basis. Once you have that sorted , you’ll find where you rank, then you can plan your back linking strategy.

My criteria for keeping people on is that their rate is reasonable and that they complete the tasks allotted within a reasonable time. People do have problems so as long as they tell me that work will be late I am prepared to overlook it a few times.

I have found that the best way of getting a good team together is to run the same ad every week and make sure people know you are adding to an existing team. This helps gives you credibility as who wants to work for someone who hires and fires people every week. They Also know that you are a serious buyer.

Each week I hire two or three people and if they are good I will keep them on, either way I always give them a few tasks to ensure that they are reliable.

My ultimate aim is to break the big team I have into smaller teams with reliable workers in each that I can specific assign projects to. I’ll try to explain that a bit better. Everyone I hire joins my main team. Here I assign them work for various existing sites. Back linking, article writing , creating graphics, article submission etc. They generally work on existing sites.

Once they have proved to me they are reliable for a month or so I’ll move them into a new team which will work on new and important projects. These teams are much smaller and have 1 or 2 people with specific skills. By doing this I can create teams with specific roles and control the costs better.

Better cost control means more profit.

Using the method above I know I  can create a small  reliable site building team with all the necessary skills to create and promote new blogs for around $64

Site Building $12
Content creation 5 articles $8
Initial Back linking 150 links $ 27
Article For Submission 15 articles $ $17

Once you start to get this level of cost control you can really start to use outsourcing to it’s Full potential. For example I ultimately want to have 3 or 4 specialist teams in place That can build and promotes sites.  Then all I need to do is to research and monetize the sites and ensure that they have they are profitable

There has been one development that has made the experiment so far very worth while. I’ve had to go through my server and create a list of all my sites and then see how they are performing. I am not the most organized person in the world and some sites that don’t perform well in the first few weeks tend to get abandoned or fall through the cracks.

Because I need to go and prepare work for the 11 people I am now employing I have to get a system in place. So I’ve needed to create a spread sheet of all my sites, list the keywords they are targetting and see how they are ranking. I now use this to decide which sites to work on next

During this process I’ve found several sites I’ve not looked at for a long time and noticed that they are by some miracle ranking just outside the top 10 a quick push and they should be top 5 within a few weeks. With luck I’ll get a few number ones.

Additionally i’ve found several of my articles at ezine articles are ranking very highly for competitive keywords. Once again a quick push in the form of backlinks and they should rank at the top. This is one of the excellent things about ezine articles, I’ve got lots of PR 6 articles that just need 20 or 30 good quality links and they will sit at #1 driving traffic to my site.

i’ve noticed that the more jobs I post the better the quality of provider I am getting, I assume it’s becise i know what to ask and I know how to test them with small jobs to start with. The Article writers I hired last week have proved to be excellent so far.

I’ll get together some stats next week and see if i can quantify how thigs are going although it’s still to early to tell what effect all the back links will have as they can take upto 8 weeks to take effect.

Finally If you missed the last post. WordPress Goldmine 2.0 is being released next week. I am switching to a subscription based model to allow me to add some cool features and courses I’ve wanted to include. This is your last chance to get in for a one time only payment. (you’ll also get to see the videos I’ve created for the outcoursing step by step course I am running at the moment)

The costs for the first week were $156 and for that I had 72 hours work done for me. In those 72 hours there were 20 articles posted to 25 sites each giving 500 back links. There were 3 links for 4 different sites posted to 150 high PR sites. So a total of 1800 links. 2300 potential backlinks for $156 is not a bad deal especially when 500 or them are articles which could generate lots more links for many years to come.

It’s a bit too early to tell how the links will impact on the sites but initial results are quite encouraging. With just an extra 4 high pr links showing up for one site the pages the links went to had risen by up to 300 places in Google. Getting into the top twenty of Google is relatively easy. The difficulty comes moving into the top ten and up to position 1.

One interesting thing I’ve managed to do for a site that was already #1 was to get positions 2 3 and 4. Position 2 is now a second page on the site and position 3 and 4 are 2 or my articles from ezine articles. Just a few links to an article can have a very positive result.

Financially, which is what really matters, it is too early to tell if the links are having a genuinely positive effect. My Adsense earnings is up by about 20% over last month so that’s good. I’ve also made some sales from sites that haven’t made sales for a few months. All of this could be coincidence. Time will tell

Overall I am happy so far, so much so that I now have 10 people working for me. I took on 4 article writers today. They are all native English speakers and the rates range from $1.67 and hour to $4.44 an hour. I’ve asked for a minimum of 3 250 word articles an hour and created a video to show them how to do it. I’ve also given them a copy of the article I wrote about how to write an article in under 10 minutes.

The reason the rates are so low is that you’ll often find new providers on Odesk are happy to work cheaply so they can build up feedback and experience. That then allows them to charge more later on. I am more than happy to increase rates and give bonuses when work is completed well.

I’ve given all 4 new employees 2 keywords today and asked for at least 6 articles. If everything is Ok and they get accepted by the article directories I use I’ll give them 10 hours work next week. Finally I’ll choose the best ones and give them more hours.

As I’ve said in the past articles, break your outsourcing down into small manageable chunks. The last thing you want to do is to have to pay someone for 40 hours if their standard of work isn’t good. Start small and increase the hours once they prove they can work accurately and to a deadline.

It’s been a few days since I updated you on the outsourcing experiment. During that time the learning curve has been steep but I’ve learned a lot. Here are 3 tips that i learned.

1 . I mentioned in the original post that the first thing I learned was to break the tasks down in to small simple tasks , i.e don’t advertise for someone to submit articles and backlinks. Instead advertise for someone to post backlinks and someone to post articles. Since then i’ve learned more.

2 . Rather than hire 1 person to do 40 hours work it is far better to hire 2 3 or 4 people to do 10 or 20 hours each. You then have the option of increasing the hours of the good workers and reducing the hours of the ones that are so good.

3 . The next tips is to advertise for people who have done the work in the past, so if you are using backlink packages from of of the well know suppliers then say in your ad that preference will be given to people who have done this work before. You don’t want to pay to train someone if you can avoid it.

Feel free to haggle with providers but the rates that seem to be standard so far are

Back linking $1.50 to $2.00 per hour
Article submission $2 -$3 per hour.

I have had several bids of below $1 and a low bid of $0.67 but I declined these

By far the best person I have employed is costing me $2.94 to post articles but she does almost twice as much as the other person doing the same task.

Both the article posters have shown initiative, some of the article sites I asked them to post to were having problems so they submitted new sites , in fact both of them provided me with lists of sites they had submitted to before.

I am about to take on 2 more people today which will bring my “workforce” upto 5 people giving me 80 hours of work a week for less than $150. I only need 5 of the 25 sites they are woking on to make 1 extra sale to justify the cost.

Stay tuned to see what happens next.

Finally If you are building your twitter followers then check out Twitter Organizer. This is a brand new site which will add followers and delete people that don’t follow you back while you sleep. It takes 30 seconds to set up and then runs automatically. The sales page isn’t the best in the world but watch the video and you’ll see the power of it.

However up to now I’ve been an idiot!

I should have been using outsourcing for so much more, backlink building, Article submissions etc in fact everything I hate doing and avoid doing because it’s so mind numbingly boring. But because of some horror stories I’ve heard about I have avoided hiring people. This is about to change.

I am about to take on 3 or 4 staff maybe even more depending on how it goes.

I have looked at elance and Getafreelancer and also companies like Agentsofvalue who will hire you staff on a full time or part time basis but I rejected them all for different reasons. I have decided to use Odesk.com.

Odesk allows me to monitor exactly what work the provider has done for me and I only pay for an hours work if they have worked for an hour. It also has various tests which providers can take which gives an indication of their abilities.

Because this is my first foray into hiring multiple workers for multiple tasks I am creating videos and documenting my progress , the videos are available as part of Augusts step by step project in the WordPress Goldmine forum. (previous documentated steps by steps include, Article marketing, Niche reseach and site Building and site reviews. All this and much more is available for a one time payment at Wordpres Goldmine…end of advert!!)

So what have I learned so far.

Well the first thing I learned is to break the job offers down into small tasks. I initially posted a job offer for a Virtual assistant, backlink builder and Article submitter. This got me 24 applicants in 24 hours, but many were over qualified.

I created a new ad for someone just to post backlinks and mentioned that people with previous experience would be preferred. The advert made it perfectly clear to them what would be involved and anyone who had done this particular type of backlinking before would immediately know the process. I’ve had 50 applicants in the past 5 hours. Most have done this before and know exactly what I want.

The difference In hourly rates are also noticeably lower.

It’s very possible that I’ll hire 2 people to do the work, I’ve had bids from people with good rankings for similar tasks charging less than $2 an hour. At prices like that I am happy to give them a days work just to test them out. I am more than happy to give a pay rise or a bonus to keep a good reliable worker once they have proved themselves.

By outsourcing all the stuff I try to avoid doing for very little cost I can concentrate on what I do best.

I’ll keep you informed as to how my outsourcing experiment is going. So check back or better still subscribe to the RSS feed email notification at the top of the site…(a retweet using the Tweet button at the start of the article wouldn’t go amiss either!!)

Outsourcing experiment Costs/Progress/income

August 6th:
Costs so Far $0
Backlinks submitted 0
Ranking Improvement N/a
Page Rank Improvement N/a
Additional Traffic over July.. N/a
Additional Income Over July N/a