Social Media Mistakes: Are You Forgetting Your Fundamentals?
It’s interesting as a marketer to watch how the Internet has changed over the last ten years, especially what has changed for solo entrepreneurs and small business owners.
When I started investigating how to make money online in the late nineties, most strategies were e-commerce focused, or built specifically to take advantage of the dot-com bubble.
You either set up a website to sell something physical like Amazon.com did for books, or you set up some kind of service and focused solely on user-acquisition, since most entrepreneurs were more interested in growing fast rather than making profits. The logic being you could figure out a way to make money after you built a huge user-base, but you usually get bought out way before that happens, so you exit rich, even if the company doesn’t make a dime.
I was keen to cash in on the dot-com bubble myself, though being in Brisbane Australia, not exactly a hot-bed for Internet start-ups at the time, it wasn’t easy.
I remember calling a mastermind meeting at my friend’s house to discuss opportunities. We had some good ideas, and some bad ones, but nothing really cemented together. My friends went off and started or continued their careers, while I went back to fiddling around with different web projects in my spare time.
Back then there was no blogging, or social media, or even Google. AdSense and Adwords didn’t exist yet, and affiliate programs were only just becoming readily available in different niches.
That’s why so many people had to focus on selling physical items using online stores. You could make money with advertising or information publishing, but most people didn’t have a clue how to do it. There weren’t courses or all the free information we have about these subjects today to help guide you. You had to figure it out yourself.
Fundamentals Stay The Same
As I’ve watched things change over the previous years I’ve noticed a few key fundamentals that haven’t change, namely –
How John Jonas Outsources To Full Time Staff For As Little As $200 Month
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Download the MP3 [ 73 Minutes - 113 MB ]
John Jonas and I spent several months trying to connect to get this interview done, but it was worth the wait.
I was referred to him via Adam Short from Niche Profit Classroom as a guy who has a unique insight into a particular type of outsourcing online – in this case, hiring people specifically from the Philippines.
Why the Philippines? Well there are many reasons, most of which John outlines in this interview, and by the end of it I’m sure you will be rushing to look into this method yourself.
This is a really, really good podcast interview. It’s one of those discussions where the person being interviewed is willing to share the exact steps used to get something done. If you have ever considered doing any outsourcing online to help grow your business, listen to this call.
Outsourcing Is Not Always Easy
I’ve been telling people to “outsource” for many years, and unfortunately a lot of people come back to me with stories about how difficult it is to find quality contractors.
Common wisdom with outsourcing is that you go to a site like elance.com, guru.com or rentacoder.com, submit a job and then attempt to find the best person to get the project done. This can work, but it’s hit and miss and in most cases you have to go through some “bad” experiences before you get to the good people.
John Jonas has a different system, one that focuses on hiring people full time at very affordable rates, and then establishing a long term relationship that’s more like an outsourced employee than a odd job contractor, who only works with you when you have a project on.
When I say a relationship with his outsourcers, John well and truly trusts his people. He’s willing to give them access to his hosting accounts and even his Paypal account. There’s a lot of trust required to be that comfortable letting other people, especially people in another country far away, have control over pretty much everything in your business.
If you’re curious how John can do this, listen to the interview and you will find out how.
Show Notes
- How John started off and was able to quit his job thanks to online marketing
- How he first found out about outsourcing to the Philippines
- Why John stopped using elance type sites and instead started hiring full time
- John explains an entire case study of how he had his outsourcers set up an entire income stream that they manage without him
- Why John is able to trust his outsourcers with every aspect of his business
- What website options are available for outsourcing to the Philippines
- John takes us through an example of how to locate a Philippino worker using the website he uses to find good people
- We discuss the ethical concerns of hiring a full time worker for as little as $200 a month
- What John teaches in his ReplaceMyself.com website
Want To Outsource To The Philippines?
If you’re interested in doing what John does, and getting access to more training materials and his system you can use to train your outsourcers once you hire them, check out John’s site, ReplaceMyself.com.
John spends much of his time helping to outsource the way he does because he enjoys it, and since so much of his business is outsourced already, he has the time to do so. If you want his help, check out -
Mp3 Download
Click Here to Download the MP3 [ 73 Minutes - 113 MB ]
Living The 2-Hour Workday: How To Create Event Independent Income Streams
In the previous article on living the 2-hour workday I introduced the concept of travel buffers, cash created either through saving or selling assets that is designed to give you a buffer of capital you can comfortably spend if you need to while you travel.
Travel buffers are mostly for piece of mind so you can relax while you travel or use in case of emergencies, but ideally speaking it’s better if you don’t dip into your capital while you travel. In order to facilitate this, you need some form of consistent income streams that are greater than your total expenses, including costs to travel.
What Is Event Independent Income?
My largest source of income has come from significant events, either selling an asset or conducting a launch for a new product.
There’s an inherent weakness with this type of income – you have to do something, often significant work, to get the result, or once you do it’s difficult to repeat, for example once you sell an asset, it’s gone.
Conducting a launch is definitely NOT two hour a day work, it takes a lot more than that. Depending on how you travel it’s quite possible to integrate periods of time where you conduct a launch, for example I did a reopening campaign for Blog Mastermind while traveling in Toronto, resulting in well over six figures in income. However to complete the work required to conduct the launch, I had to settle in Toronto for a summer, renting a house and effectively living there as a local.
You can choose to travel, stop and work, then travel some more, if you depend on event income like launches, but if you really want true flexibility and never want more than a two hour a day work commitment, then you need to develop some event independent income streams. In other words, you need money that is either completely passive, or nearly-passive, consistent as a result of working only two hours a day or thereabouts.
The challenge with this sort of money is keeping it consistent. So many systems for making money online are fantastic as one-hit-wonders, and they work again and again in different niches, but the problem is the amount of ongoing work required to keep things going or to get started in the first place.
Sure you can outsource much of your work (I’ve got a couple of great podcast interviews about outsourcing coming up soon), which is a great strategy especially when you have a system that is already making money, but it takes time to do this and still you have the challenge of always staying one step ahead of the market or finding new markets to enter once one dries up, or the competition catches up.
In my case I’ve always had a solid independent income stream that’s served me well for almost ten years now.
So what is it? Read on to find out…
Living The 2-Hour Workday: What Is A Travel Buffer & How Can You Create One
Towards the end of my trip around the world in 2008 I started to lose interest in seeing the typical tourist spots, even if the destinations were exotic countries or ancient monuments from cultures long passed.
After visiting many amazing buildings and sites in cities like Edinburgh, London, Brussels, Paris, Rome and Athens, I was feeling a little tired. Not to discount the wonders of human history, I was just missing home and seeing building after building was losing its magic.
I had plans to visit Egypt on the way home, but I decided to skip it as I didn’t want the pyramids to be “just another monument”, so I put them on the list of places to visit in the future when I recharge my travel batteries.
This is going to sound strange and perhaps small minded, but towards the end of my trip, especially in my last European stop Athens, one of the remaining motivations I had left to visit the sites was to simply say “I had been there” and capture a photo of the experience.
Throughout this time I was thinking about what I wanted to work on next. My focus was turning towards the concept of the 4-hour workweek, or my spin on it, the 2-hour workday (this to distance myself from Mr. Ferriss – Hi Tim! – and avoid copyright infringement and because I like working a couple of hours a day).
Regardless of what you call it, clearly there is huge interest in the lifestyle I lead, especially when you can travel and earn great money at the same time. The idea of coming back from 8 months of travel with more money in your bank account than you left with is so appealing as a concept, I just knew I wanted to tap into that idea and help more people experience it.
The idea for a new training program started to germinate. I still wanted to visit ancient monuments to snap my photo, so I’d have lots of proof of all the places I had visited for the product I was thinking about creating next. The current design of this blog, with rotating travel photos at the top, is very much in line with this idea.
As you can see, it was hard for me to put the Internet marketer’s hat down, even while visiting amazing places around the world.
Travel Without The Financial Headache
How Well Do You Know Your Customer?
I’m not 100% sure, but I believe the very first email list I subscribed to was David DeAngelo’s Double Your Dating free newsletter. At the time I didn’t realize David D. was a nom de plume (fake name) and that the real person behind the newsletter was Eben Pagan, who I would later come to know as a leading Internet marketer.
In more recent years I’ve studied Eben’s work extensively, however it was my experience on his alter ego’s email newsletter all those years ago that I count as one of the most beneficial in my own career as an Internet marketer.
The reason why the Double Your Dating email newsletter was so valuable to me was because it was the only time I can remember studying an email list from the frame of two very important perception points in a completely “raw” state of mind -
- As a customer who was suffering the pain that the newsletter purported to help cure
- As a newbie Internet marketer studying how to make money online
When I first subscribed to Double Your Dating I was a young single guy struggling to figure out how to meet and date girls. I subscribed because the sales copy “spoke” to me. The benefits struck an emotional cord with my own desires. It was as if this person understood where I was coming from and where I wanted to go.
Like many young men at the same time as I was looking to gain experience with women, I was also looking for ways to make money and establish myself as a business man. In this case, the Internet was my chosen landscape to build my fortunes and I was studying what those who already had made money online did to build their wealth.
Given Eben Pagan created one of the most effective (and substantial – each email was MASSIVE) email marketing sequences in existence today, the foundation for a twenty million dollar dating empire, I had happened upon one of the best resources to study, even though I didn’t know it at the time.
Unfortunately in some ways, from that point forward as I became more familiar with Internet marketing, I found it increasingly difficult to fully engage with any online studying materials because I was constantly analyzing the “how” of what they did (the meta-analysis), rather than engaging with the “what” of what was being taught.
The Customer Avatar
I’ve been going through the recordings of Eben Pagan’s Get Altitude training, a high level coaching program for entrepreneurs who want to take their business to greater success.
One of the fundamentals that Eben teaches is to truly understand where your customer is coming from. This is not just knowing the needs and wants of your ideal customer, but understanding who they are, how they live, who they associate with, what their general attitude to life is – AND, more importantly, what are the underlying emotional conditions driving the actions they take.
To facilitate a deeper understanding of your customer, Eben teaches a concept known as the Customer Avatar.
