Entries Tagged 'Outsourcing' ↓

Ever feel like you could make more money if you just had more time! That’s how I feel every day. December was tough with the holidays and long hours at my day job but I still managed to accomplish a few things.

Business Finances – I figured out my books for the business for 2007, happy to say it was a profit! One crazy thing, I just got my annual performance increase at my day job and my business earnings for 2007 were more than three times the amount of the increase. I can’t wait to get rid of this job so I can spend all my time growing my business! I still need to pay my estimated taxes for Q4 2007, due here in a week or so.

Affiliate Relationships – One of the things that Amit recommended was to build a good relationship with your affiliate manager. So I called up my affiliate manager at Never Blue Ads and had a productive first phone call. I got some insight into which campaigns to promote in my niche. One of the things she mentioned was that the Earnings Per Click numbers you see as you’re browsing campaigns factor in all different types of marketing, Web/Email/Search. When I told her my niche and that I was going to be promoting offers with Pay Per Click she gave me EPC numbers that were just from PPC traffic.

Pay Per Click Campaign – I used the techiques I learned from Amit’s Super Affilate Accelerator course to setup, upload, and launch an Adwords campaign for one of the offers my affiliate manager pointed out. I’m monitoring its progress now and will tweak as needed.

Information Products – I completed my first information product, Easy eBay Business. I’ve been working at it off and on for a while now so it was nice to get it finished. I haven’t begun promoting it yet, I’ll probably use an Adwords campaign once I have time to build one.

I also started exploring a partnership for an information product with one of my online buddies who is a subject matter expert in the niche. He’s going to write a free report to give away, I’ll build a landing page and create an Adwords campaign and we’ll see how much demand there is.

One of my business advisors and friends recently finished an information product that should see demand sky rocket due to a new government policy. I spent some time on some content promoting their product and will likely set up an Adwords campaign there as well.

Time Management – I got my FreshBooks account back up and running again. I set it up at the beginning of the year but didn’t use it much. My only New Year’s resolution at this point is to make better use of my time since I tend to try and work on too many things at once. I’m tracking everything in FreshBooks now and every two weeks or so I’ll go over how I’m spending my time.

I tried out Mechanical Turk to outsource some basic tasks to help get content on a new site for a niche I’ve been wanting to move into for some time. I listed the same task on both Mechanical Turk and eLance and so far the bids on Mechanical Turk have been much more reasonable and in line with the scope of the job.

Next Month – Not bad I guess for a busy month at work and the with holidays. I’m going to continue to balance my multitude of project for January, then revaluate with some numbers from FreshBooks at the end of the month to see which projects to put on hold and which to pursue.

What’s the most valuable asset for an online business? Some may say search engine rankings, others might say a brand, or you could argue a tightly focused/high dollar niche. I won’t argue with any of those but the one thing that I think trumps them all is time.

Time is Money
Time is a limited resource that is major constraint not just for your initiatives but all of your competitors as well. With enough time you could hit the front page of Google, create a brand, or find a killer niche. But who has enough time right? I definitely have more ideas and to-dos than I have time to act on them all. If I just had more time to pursue all those opportunities, I could be very wealthy : )

Using Leverage
As I learn more about internet marketing one of the skills I’m seeing as a must have is the ability to leverage resources. If you know what you’re doing, and I don’t yet, you can buy traffic and use it to sell products for more than you paid for the traffic. The right article can even leverage social media to get free traffic! If your affiliate tactics work well, you can leverage your success by documenting your methods in order to sell information or build your profile.

Leveraging Time
I was struggling to learn more about affiliate marketing since my main site, non-marketing, was taking up most of my free time. There was a lot I needed to learn but at the end of each day I simply didn’t have enough time. Even going to bed at 2–3 AM and up again at 6 AM for the J.O.B. wasn’t giving me enough hours in the day to learn what I needed.

I recently made the best business decision I’ve made in a long while and decided to hire someone on eLance to run my site for me. The income from the site more than pays the monthly rate for the freelancer and now I have time to focus on learning affiliate marketing. It’s the coolest feeling, the site is still cranking out content and bringing in cash and I don’t have to do a thing! Okay, so it’s no 4 Hour Work Week but it’s a start : )

Addicted to Outsourcing
Now I’m addicted to the thought of leveraging the time of others to help me create my affiliate sites. I’m considering hiring out parts of the market research, site design, and copywriting steps to help me get affiliate campaigns up and running. If I can reduce the amount of time it takes to test and launch a product promotion I should be able to increase my affiliate income and my results shouldn’t be limited by my availability.

Getting Started Outsourcing
I had been toying with the idea of hiring help for a long time but had put it off mainly because I’d never used eLance before and wasn’t sure how the whole process worked.

I got started simply by browsing all the current and past projects and finding one similar to what I needed. I used pretty much the same project description, changing only a few details, and had 6 interested providers by the end of the bidding process. I narrowed it down to three candidates based on their feedback, asked them all some questions via a private message feature, then just went with my gut.

If you’ve been looking for ways to make better use of your time I would reccomend giving outsourcing a try. If you can leverage other people’s time to increase your profits the sky’s the limit!