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.

I’d like you to do the following, read this post, Download version 2 of the report from the link below, grab a coffee and read it.

If you can see the potential then consider the offer at the end of the post, please don’t make a rash decision to sign up I would much rather you considered it first.

Consider if you’ll have time to implement my suggestions, If you can’t make an hour a day or at least 5 hours a week then you probably won’t have time to succeed even if you outsource.

Next consider if you are happy to maybe spend some money on tools that will speed up the process , yes you can do everything manually and reinvest your profits but if you have some “play” money you’ll be profitable so much quicker.

Finally consider if you are happy paying a small monthly subscription. The main reason I switched from a one time payment to a monthly subscription was to allow me to spend time researching some of the things I am going to tell you about. I’ve actually had people join in the past few weeks and then email me saying they love the information but they refuse to pay a subscription on principle. If you feel like that then please read some of my other posts there is more than enough information to keep you busy for weeks.

Right on with the post..sorry for that long introduction but hopefully you will understand the reason for it as you read the rest.

Last week I released a report called the Article Leverage System, it was received favorably and I got lots of positive comments. During the week I thought I could improve it. The reason for this is that I have always taught people to target “low hanging fruit” and build sites that get 50-100 or so visitors a day with the right niche this is good for around a $1 a day.

Using the power of the leverage system is wasted on sites like this so I set about finding a better type of site. I managed this by paying around with Micro Niche Finder and coming up with some truly amazing niches. I am talking about 5 page sites that get over 20,000 searches a month and have low strength of competition. You can use other tools but MNF was made for stuff like this, if you already have it you are going to love what I show you.

I didn’t believe the results I got the firt time I tried it, but they were repeated 4 times in a row afterwards. Members of the Wordpess Goldmine Forum have also got similar results. As a result for the same amount of work you are now looking at much more income from your sites.

You can find details of what I did in version 2 of the report just right click the following link.  Article Leverage Report Version 2

Now it gets very interesting, There is going to be a version 3 of the report that I’ll release in the forum in the next couple of days. This adds one further layer to the system and turns it from a simple system into a full blown cash generating business. It gives you real cash flow and the opportunity to generate an ever increasing residual income. Above all it’s simple, it can be outsourced and still make you big profits. I’ve seen less viable systems sell for $147!!

Version 3 will only be available to the Forum members so here is a deal for you. I have never made this offer before and I doubt will never make it again.

Please remember what I said and consider if this is right for you.

Click on the Special offer link below and you can try WPG for $1 for the next 7 days. Now nothing is withheld from this offer, you get the books , videos etc. There is nothing stopping you taking the ebook , watching the videos and leaving. But I am confident that you will see the value of the forum.

I  believe that 90% of people are honest,

Well it seems I was wrong!!  Of the first 20 people that signed up 14 downloaded the book then cancelled their account with 12 hours. As a result I’ve modified the offer you can still view the forum and watch the videos but the book will remain protected until the end of the special offer. it was either that or cancel the offer and I really beleive that it’s the best offer available .

All I ask is over the next few days you spend a couple of hours and look at some of the posts in the forum, the step by steps courses and if you don’t think that the forum is worth the $19 a month and that it won’t help you take your online business to the next level then you can keep the book and the bonuses with no hard feelings from me.

Version 3 of the guide is called WordPress Goldmine Advanced and it is available in the forum, other recent additions are our own in house writing team who are all well qualifies native English writers, the standard rate for members is 1 cent per word. We are also planning to build our own blog network that will be available to members only.

I don’t think I can say fairer that that.

Special Offer Link

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.

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

Recently there have been subtle changes the addition of video and audio (radio ads and infomercials?) but it still has a long way to go before it develops into it’s own well defined unique marketing system. This is not to say whats being done now is wrong, virtually every new business type has started by copying it’s older rivals .

Another aspect of how an internet marketing business is run is the outsourcing of work. Outsourcing makes it seem relatively cheap to get work done. Suppose I want to build a new site on a Niche what do I need to do to have it outsourced.

Suppose I want 20 articles written on the niche .  I sit down at home , compile a list of keywords, send them off to a writer, who writes them sends them back a few days later. If I am lucky I can use them as they are or them may need some tweaks for this I’ve paid $160.

It’s the same If I want some graphics created for a site or a wordpress theme designed. I complile a spec sheet, send it off pay my $100 3 days later I have a set of graphics.

I want you to now consider something that many people consider as heresy, setting up an office and employing staff and interns.

If i want to get that same site set up..I call my graphics guy and my writer in to the office and tell them I want a site built on the following niche. By the end of the day I’ll have several articles and the theme will be ready. I am not sure what the wages for staff/interns are but they shouldn’t be too much more than I’ve paid the outsourcers.

I can then pass this on to the person responsible for building links and ensuring that the sites rank as high as possible in google.

By setting up my own office just like old style businesses have I have immediatly speeded up the creation of projects and sites and more than likely the profitability. I can also offer professional outsourcing to fill any time that my staff aren’t busy. Imagine being able to offer professional style outsourcing, provide a phone line for clients so they can order over the phone , give the client a phone number so the clients and writers can actually talk on the phone. Hell they can come and visit if they wanted! You could even set up your office and as a sideline provide desks, house services & training to internet marketers, just like some companies do for day traders

Imagine having an idea while driving to work, then as you step in through the door calling your graphics guy and your adwords guy togehter and telling them that within an hour you wanted a series of adwords and and landing pages for product X.  I had an idea for the samething 3 weeks ago, I still haven’t managed to get the landing pages outsourced!

Think about it for a while…yes the overheads are higher but the income and income possibilities are much higher.You have fixed costs each month so you know you need to earn $3000 that month with the staff and systems in place you can just as easlily build 100 sites a month as you can build 1 site a month. You can buy established sites and develop them to their full potential.

Do you think EzineArticles would be as important as they are today if they didn’t all work out of an office.What about Google? Where would they be if the owners didn’t see the big picture and stayed in their home studies.

Think about it, do the maths then start small with a sublet office and 1 or 2 staff and expand.

I’ve been resistant to outsourcing for quite a while but a few months ago I bit the bullet and started to use freelancers to do tasks I didn’t like doing or doing tasks that they would be better at.

One of the reasons I took so long to outsource was I thought that no one knew my business as well as I did and no one could do a better job than me. This was naiviety on my part.  Using freelancers has freed me up to do things that I am good at. Finding new methods , testing them and coming up with idea’s for sites and products. So instead of spending 5 hours writing 10 articles I can spend that time more productivly. (or going for long cycle rides in the mountains around here!)

Take a while to think about it, do the articles you distribute  make 3 or 4 sales each time you distribute them?  If they don’t then surely a professional writer who can produce articles that sell products would be useful to you. Even if they charge you $15 if you are making $100 from each article then surely you should be having as many article you can afford written.  If they do then train up a writer to prepare the articles for you and then just add your secret sauce.

Last week I paid a new writer $8 for an article to test her out, the article was released in ezinearticles yesterday within 24 hours it has had 220 views and made 2 sales of $26 each.  What I do next is a no brainer isn’t it!

Look at you business and work out where you can save time by outsourcing, concentrate on your strengths and outsource your weaknesses or time consuming tasks.