The Smart Passive Income Blog » outsourcing

Niche Site Update – New Content, Record Earnings and What’s Next

Pat — Wed, 25 May 2011 19:29:57 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I shared how I declined a five figure offer for the niche site I built from scratch publicly here on the blog, because I felt there was still a lot more room for growth, and possibly an even higher offer in the future.

The lovely thing about this particular niche (the security guard training niche), is that every single state in the US has a different set of rules and procedures for becoming a security guard. In addition, each state will obviously have different training facilities and companies that could benefit from high ranking pages on my site as well.

This made understanding what content to create almost automatic.

Before I hit #1 in Google, I had written about 15 articles that were just about security guard training in general, and then 11 state specific articles with their respective requirements, procedures and links, etc.

After those 26 posts were published, I stopped creating new content since I was super stoked about meeting my goal and I focused completely on monetization and optimizing Adsense ad placement.

Despite not creating any new content, my Adsense earnings were steadily climbing each month, as well as my traffic.

Renewed Energy and Action

I was ready to let the site sit on autopilot since it was earning about $800/month for virtually zero hours of work, but after getting that 5-figure offer and reading all of your wonderful comments about what you would do if you were in my situation, I decided it was crucial that I hold the site, continue to add content, fill it out, and bring it to its maximum potential.

My first obvious step would be to finish writing the requirements for the 39 remaining states that were missing, which was something I was already thinking of doing anyways.

I decided to find a qualified writer on Elance, which I’ve used for several one-off jobs in the past some some good success (including iPhone applications).

Here is the exact project description I put up on Elance, for your reference:

Hi there,

My name is Pat Flynn and I own http://www.securityguardtraininghq.com, the #1 ranked security guard training website in Google.

Even though the site is ranked #1, it is still missing some information that I need someone to do research for.

Here’s the deal:

In the security guard training industry, every state in the United States has a different requirement / prerequisite when it comes to what kind of training and experience one must have before they are able to get hired as a security guard.

For some states, there are no training requirements and the only thing you need is a high-school diploma or GED equivalent. In other states, there are a certain number of hours of training required before one can get hired, and in other states there are other requirements beyond that.

I need a person to do research in all of the missing states (states not yet covered on http://www.securityguardtraininghq.com) and figure out what is required before one can become a security guard, and write a brief, but accurate, step by step article on how one can become a security guard in that state.

There are websites out there that do have this information, but many of those websites have inaccurate and/or outdated information, which is why I’m looking for someone who doesn’t mind making phone calls to security guard companies in each of the missing states, and asking them directly what needs to be done, or at least use what they say as a starting point (for example if they tell you to go to a certain website in that state for more information) so you can complete the step by step guide.

Currently, I have complete information about the following states:

* Alabama

* Alaska

* Arizona

* California

* Connecticut

* Florida

* Illinois

* Nevada

* New Jersey

* New York

* Texas

I need you to help me get the rest so I can complete this website. I’m looking for someone who is, like I said, not shy about making phone calls and getting accurate and complete information. I’m looking for someone who is a hard worker and writes well (Decent English writing skills required, please).

Here is an example article about the state of Arizona’s security guard training requirements:

http://www.securityguardtraininghq.com/security-guard-training-arizona/

If you can help me out, I’d really appreciate it.

Thank you, and I hope to work with you soon.

-Pat

Within 12 hours, I had several people place bids and offer their service, and I chose one person based on experience, portfolio, and a quick back and forth on the message board.

The total bid was $876.71, which equates to about $22 per article. The price may seem a bit high, but a few things justify the price in my head:

It’s an investment.
I’d be adding 150% more content on the site.
I wouldn’t have to do the research and writing myself. I know how much my time is worth.
The articles would be finished much faster than if I wrote them myself.
I know it’ll pay me back once these posts get indexed in Google and I begin to receive long-tail search traffic, just like I have been with the existing posts on my site. To reiterate, more than half of the search traffic coming to my site (57%) comes from search terms other than my target keyword.

I view any content posted online, not just on niche sites, as seeds. Every new seed that you plant can become a new opportunity for people to find you, and possibly an opportunity to earn money too.

Within 2 weeks, I received all 39 well written and researched articles, posted them on my site (thanks to a VA) and the site looks a lot more complete.

I’m lovin’ it.

A Record Day of Income

A couple of days after the site was up with all 50 states included, I had my highest earning day of income (from this site, via Adsense) ever: $90.48

I think it was only a coincidence that I just put up these new articles, and two days later I had a record day of earnings because it should take some time for Google to index these pages and for some of the keywords within these pages to be found by others. But, even so, it was very encouraging to see the site pushing the $100/day mark, and I can only hope that the daily income grows even higher.

If I could get to at least $100/day, that’s $36,500 a year, which definitely trumps the $10,000k offer I had just a few weeks ago.

I’ll keep pushing, for sure.

What’s Next

The site is now complete with training requirements for all 50 of the US states.

So what’s my next move?

Actually, these 50 articles that are on the site now are only for “unarmed” training – and there’s a whole new set of training requirements for each individual state for “armed” security guards, or guards that carry firearms.

I now have another opportunity to fill the site with 50 new articles, for armed training, which is what I’ve already started to do. I hired the same writer from Elance to complete 48 articles (I already had articles for California and New York posted), and they should be finished and posted within 2 weeks.

I’m so excited to see where this takes me. It automatically raises the value of the site, and I envision a boost of residual income in the near future as well.

I’ll definitely keep you posted, as I always do.

Keep planting seeds.

SPI 020 : All About Virtual Assistants and Outsourcing with Chris Ducker from VirtualBusinessLifestyle.com

Pat — Fri, 20 May 2011 16:42:48 +0000

In this session of the Smart Passive Income Podcast, my good friend Chris Ducker from Virtual Business Lifestyle joins us and shares his expertise and wisdom in the world of virtual assistants and outsourcing.

Hiring help for your online business, whether it’s just for one task you’d like to complete or on a more full-time basis, can definitely take your business to the next level and at the same time make your business a lot more passive and automated – as long as you know how to find the right help and work and communicate with your hired help in an efficient manner.

I’ve used sites like Elance and Odesk before to do a number of “one-off” projects, from designing WordPress themes to transcription work and even article writing, however recently I hired my first full time VA, a programmer who is designing a number of websites for me and clients of mine, and the experience so far has really blown me away.

Like you’ll hear me say in the podcast session with Chris, it’s like I’ve been able to clone myself and get twice as much done.

My only regret is that I wish I had hired someone to help me leverage my time sooner.

In this session, you’ll hear Chris and I discuss:

What exactly a Virtual Assistant is, and exactly what they can do for your online business.
How a Virtual Assistant can pretty much automate your entire niche site marketing process.
Why it took me 2 and a half months to write an eBook that was already 95% written.
Where exactly one can go to find a good Virtual Assistant.
How to make sure you find quality hired help when searching for Virtual Assistants to work for you.
How to get a birthday message for you from a guy dressed in a banana.
Why the Philippines is the most talked about country for finding Virtual Assistants.
How much it may cost you to have someone work for you full time for 40 hours a week.
The kinds of things I have my own full-time virtual assistant do for me.
The 4 tools that you need to make sure you’re getting the most out of your VA experience.

Right click here to download the MP3

Items Mentioned in this Session:

Please subscribe below to the podcast to get automatic updates:

Thank you so much for your support, and if you have yet to leave a rating or review, please leave me an honest one on iTunes by clicking here. It will help the show and its ranking in iTunes immensely! I appreciate it!

Enjoy the show!

Cheers!

Transcript:

Click Here to Download the Transcript (PDF)

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SPI 020 : All About Virtual Assistants and Outsourcing with Chris Ducker from VirtualBusinessLifestyle.com
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Creating Niche Sites with PLR? I Ask The Expert

Pat — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 14:59:08 +0000

Currently, I have 4 niche sites – my security guard training site from the niche site duel and 3 others that I have started since. All are on the first page of Google, however the security guard training site is definitely the most successful (see Friday’s post) – at least for now.

I want to do a lot more, but I know from my experience with these 4 niche sites that I just don’t have the time to write the content for anything new. And now, more than ever, the content really matters.

(Actually, content has always been important – we were just recently reminded of how important it is by Google’s latest Algorithm change)

So, I have a few options:

Stop building niche sites, even though I have a list of 7 valuable keywords that all beautifully meet my keyword research criteria.
Hire a ghostwriter / outsource content creation.
Use PLR or “Private Label Rights” articles.

Hiring a Ghostwriter

Obviously, if I were to hire a ghostwriter I would want to make sure he or she was good. I’d probably hire someone through a site like Elance because I could go through their portfolio and read client feedback to help me make an informed decision. Someone on Craigslist, for example, could easily say they were a good writer, but who knows until you actually get that final draft.

Looking at the prices on Elance, it seems like an average article by a provider with a rating of at least 4.5 (out of 5) is $12.00 to $50 per article.

Hiring a ghostwriter seems very tedious and a bit expensive to me, and unless I’m going to use this person to write content for me time and time again, I don’t think it’s worth the effort.

Private Label Rights (PLR) Articles

Before my podcast interview with Nicole Dean (Session #009 on Scribd.com), I didn’t even know what PLR was.

After learning a little bit about it in that interview, I went back to the PLR expert and emailed her a list of questions because PLR is definitely an option I’m thinking about – especially when you consider that the price comes out to about $1.00 per article.

I told Nicole that I’d probably post her answers in a blog post, and here they are:

1) What exactly are PLR articles and how can bloggers and internet marketers like myself use them?

PLR is short for “Private Label Rights”. These articles are written and sold to bloggers and online business owners, to help them with their content creation needs. We all know that writing takes a lot of time, and that time is our most valuable resource. PLR articles are simply a tool to help you to produce your content faster (and oftentimes better).

For instance, I started a PLR site back in 2006, called Easy PLR. My customers are bloggers, authors, speakers, coaches, consultants, service providers, realtors, network marketers, affiliate marketers, and infoproduct creators.

They come to my site, where they can purchase a pack of articles that are already written and ready to go. The PLR articles come in .doc and .txt format and have special rights that allow my customers to use them as if they wrote them themselves. The great thing is that they cost only about $1/article and many of my customers say they’re better quality than if they wrote them themselves.

So, let’s say we have a niche blogger, named Amanda, who has a weight loss blog. She could come to my site, grab a package of 5 PLR articles about the Wii Fit and then use them on her blog, or in her newsletter – without having to link back to anyone else.

I, of course, encourage my customers to use the PLR articles as drafts and to customize them a bit before publishing them. I feel that every person on this planet has valuable information, experiences, and perspective to share, so they should add that to the PLR articles. But that is not a requirement.

2) I’m a little concerned about purchasing PLR because there are several other people purchasing the same exact articles. I know you only limit each article pack to a certain number of people, but it still worries me. There’s the issue of duplicate content (regarding SEO) and we also don’t want people to read our articles only to have them find out it’s something they’ve read elsewhere before. What are your suggestions for how a person should best modify the articles?

Nicole had already recorded a video that explains all of this, which I’ve embedded for you below (4 minutes 59 seconds):

(Watch What Are Some Ways to Edit or Customize My PLR Content on YouTube)

3) With Google’s recent algorithm changes, do you think that weakens the use of PLR material and if so, in what way?

Great question, Pat.

I do not think that the update weakens the benefits of PLR. And, I’m not surprised in the least by this latest algorithm, as I’m sure you aren’t either. Google had to do something to continue to make their search engine valuable. They want the best results to show up when we go and look for stuff there, right? I think this update will, hopefully, lessen the spammers and make searching Google more productive in general. And, overall, it will continue to reward those of us who have informative, entertaining, relevant, quality content on our sites.

I would never suggest, even before this update, that a customer of mine should take PLR unedited and load up an entire site with it. Like I said, I view PLR as a tool. A shortcut to help make writing easier, to help you generate ideas when you have writer’s block, and to provide value to your customers.

However, I know that saying “customize the content” isn’t what you had in mind here.

Some other ways you can continue to benefit from PLR without publishing it solely as search engine content are…

Add the content to a protected area of your blog. That way only your members will see it, and you don’t have to worry about what Google thinks of it. They don’t know it’s there.
Send a PLR article directly to your list (inside the email) rather than posting it on your blog first.
Post a PLR article on your Facebook page rather than publishing it directly on your blog.

Or you can turn your PLR articles into a valuable report instead. Convert it into .pdf format and …

Share the report with your list.
Post it on document sharing sites.
Use it as a bonus to add value to an existing product that you’re selling.
Offer it as a bonus to those who purchase a product through your affiliate link.

Actually, I do a ton of report marketing and will be creating a product about that soon. Stay tuned.

4) I’m wondering…how do you as a PLR producer select the topics that you have your writers write PLR articles for?

There are a few ways that I come up with topics.

The first is through experience. I know that articles and reports on business, finance, health, weight loss, and self-improvement will always sell. The majority of my content is on those topics.

I also accept suggestions from my customers and from those who receive my emails. They can submit their ideas through my support team. I then go through the lists to look for the topics that I feel are marketable. Of course, I regularly research the topics suggested to see if it’s worth it on my end. I probably wouldn’t create a PLR set on “how to build a chicken coop” even though it’s a profitable niche, simply because it would be harder for me to find enough customers to recoup my expenses in creating it.

Most of my topics are pretty evergreen, so I don’t look through newspapers or search Digg or StumbleUpon for trending topics. I prefer to create content that will be in demand and relevant for my customers, hopefully, for years to come.

5) What are some of your most successful and highest converting PLR packages? What topics seem to be the most popular and which ones produce results?

Some of my most popular topics have been…

WordPress
Social Media (including Facebook)
Weight Loss
Productivity

They are consistent sellers. Longevity, anti-aging, and goal setting sell very quickly, too.

I’d like to invite everyone to ask questions below. I’ll try to answer as many as I can. In the meantime, check out Easy PLR to see if there’s anything that I have that can make your life easier.

Warmly,
Nicole Dean

What is Your Experience With PLR?

I’m really close to giving PLR a shot. A couple of the target keywords I have on my list have related PLR packages for sale on EasyPLR. However, first I want to see if any of you have experience with PLR and what your experience was like, or maybe you have some tips you’d like to share. Here are some questions I have for those of you who may have used PLR before:

Have you had success using PLR articles as far as ranking in the search engines?
Is it hard to rewrite or add your own voice to the PLR articles you purchase?
Have you ever had any readers complain that they’ve already read the PLR inspired content that you posted elsewhere?

Thanks for anyone who may be able to chime in, and thanks again to Nicole from NicoleOnTheNet.com and EasyPLR for her time and helpful answers.

I’ll keep you posted as I go along.

Quick question: would it be helpful if I setup another niche site, just like I did in the niche site duel, and revealed the niche and all of my strategies again including how I may tackle content creation (PLR or however I go about it) that I don’t have time for? I’m pretty sure I know what the answer will be, but I just wanted to make sure.

Cheers, and have a great week!

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Creating Niche Sites with PLR? I Ask The Expert
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Hiring a Virtual Assistant – Everything You Need to Know

Pat — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 08:24:00 +0000

I have quite a bit of experience hiring help for my online businesses, but only on a project to project basis. iPhone applications, copywriting and web design are usually what I hire out for.

Lately, however, I’ve been incurring a lot of daily tasks in some of my businesses (mostly geared around the Niche Site Duel and other niche sites that I’m building) that I believe would be better suited for a full time VA. Working online for two years now, I know just how valuable my time is and where my time should be invested to give me the most return. Plus, I’d like to keep things as passive as possible, and utilizing a VA will help keep me from working during the beginning phases of some of these potential passive income streams. Tasks such as building a website and building backlinks, as much as I enjoy doing those things (I really do!), should probably be handed off to someone else.

For my niche site in the duel, I will continue to do things on my own as much as I possibly can.

As you may already know, last week my buddy Tyrone Shum hosted a free webinar where I basically asked him as many questions as possible about hiring a full time VA. Tyrone has a team of full time VAs working for him and also runs a very successful outsourcing training course.

The webinar was fantastic! He answered all of my questions in full detail, and we were even able to answer questions from many of you too.

The webinar session and audience Q&A are embedded for you below, and underneath each video you’ll see an outline of exactly what was covered:

Outsoucring Webinar (1 hour 10 minutes)

Download to Your Computer (Right-click > Save Target As) – 215MB

What are the benefits of working with a VA?
Where do you find good VA’s?
How do you actually “hire” a VA?
How do you know if a VA will be good for you or not?
Are contracts necessary and what does one look like?
What is the normal price for a VA?
- See Chris Ducker’s post on How Much Do I Pay My VA?
Payments – how do they work? When do you pay and how?
How do you give your VA web access to your stuff? Is it safe?
What can you expect from your VA, and what can they expect from you?
How do you communicate with your VA?
Do VAs have their own software to do everything you need them to do?
How do you manage your VA, making sure they are doing everything you want them to do?
Special Trial Offer for Tyrone’s Course for SPI Readers Only

Public Q&A (28 minutes)

Download to Your Computer (Right-click > Save Target As) – 65MB

How would you outsource backlinking?
Full-time or contracting? Which one gives you the most bang for your buck?
Do they have article spinning software, and if not, do you have to purchase it for them?
How much time does a VA actually save you each day?
How much vacation time are you supposed to give your VAs?
What is a “recurring task” that you could give your VA?
Is there any kind of legal action you can take against a VA if they don’t play by the rules?
What business hours do you have your VAs work?
Is there liability insurance involved when hiring a VA through a parent company?
Do you prefer a female or male VA?
Can you search for specific skills from a VA, like eBook writing?
Would you rather have one person who can do 10 different jobs, or one person for each specific job?
Can they ever trick you into charging for more hours than they actually worked?
How does hiring a VA affect your taxes?
How much do you pay your VA per hour?
Do you ever have meetings with your VA?

As you can see, we covered a lot of info. I am still doing some more research, but I am planning to meet with some experts soon and I’ll definitely make sure to report back on what I find out.

A special thanks again to Tyrone Shum for taking the time to share his outsourcing expertise with us, and also for the trial offer for his outsourcing course which is only available to SPI readers for a limited time.

Feel free to leave any additional questions you may have in the comments section.

I’m off to Vegas for Blog World Expo, but I’ll post some updates and photos while I’m there. Cheers!

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Hiring a Virtual Assistant – Everything You Need to Know
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How to Utilize Virtual Staff to Create Multiple Streams of Passive Income

Pat — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 08:02:05 +0000

This is a guest post from Chris Ducker from VirtualBusinessLifestyle.com. Chris has quite an impressive resume, with 19 years in sales, marketing and PR. He’s a CEO of a total business outsourcing company with a staff of approximately 165 full-time employees. I’ve gotten to know Chris fairly well recently since our recent interview, and he’s got some really exciting stuff planned in regards to generating passive income streams and truly living a super-mobile lifestyle. Enjoy!

As someone that has been involved in the outsourcing industry for almost 10 years, I’ve seen it change a lot over that period of time. It used to be something only the big boys would get involved with, outsourcing scores of customer service and technical support staff over to countries such as India and the Philippines – but, it’s become a whole different animal in the last 3-5 years.

No longer is outsourcing, or utilizing virtual, offshore staff something just for the large companies and corporations of North America. Nowadays scores of entrepreneurs and small to medium-sized business owners from all around the world are catching up by working with virtual employees to be able to grow their businesses, or simply have one-off projects completed quickly and with cost saving benefits in mind, too!

There are fundamentally two ways to be able to engage and start working with virtual staff – and which avenue you decide to go with depends solely and completely on your needs and requirements. To give you a quick idea, I’ll go over them real fast for you, because this is a post on how to work with virtual assistants to create passive income, not a lesson on the outsourcing world!

Working with Freelance Virtual Staff

This is for the entrepreneur. The one-man-band type of business person. Potentially even someone just starting out, and wanting to ‘see what can be achieved’ by hiring some virtual staff. Very often these types of people are really boot-strapping it, so the lower cost affiliated with working with freelance virtual employees (meaning they work from home or a web café, etc.) is a slam dunk of a decision to make.

It does come with some pitfalls however, such as the fact that they are not dedicated to you, and a lot of the countries where you can find good people, at a low cost, are still ‘developing’ countries so to speak, and internet connections are sometimes not as stable as you might like them to be. So, from time to time communication can be a bit of an issue.

Working with Virtual Staff from a Solutions Provider

This is something that larger companies will get involved with, or entrepreneurs happy to pay the slightly more premium dollar required to work with this type of set-up.

Historically speaking, the infrastructure in regards to this solution is a better, more professional one and usually has a better track record, in terms of performance and production. But, you must be sure to do your due diligence and get involved with the right company. Make sure that these types outsourcing providers can provide client references for you to talk to, etc.

Now, based on the podcast interview I did with Pat for my own blog, and the insights that came from it, I am going to assume that the large majority of you reading this drop into the ‘entrepreneur’ category, or perhaps the ‘aspiring internet marketer’ group, which is great, because there are a TON of things you can work on with virtual staff to be able to be more effective, productive and to create more streams of passive income for yourself and your family.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can create passive income, which I’ll grab directly from Pat’s awesome video post (the first filmed in his new office, I believe) entitled How to Earn More Money Working 9 to 5 Versus Working For Yourself Online. I’ll focus on just a few in the spirit of space saving and quick reading time, plus give you some tips to leverage working with virtual staff to get these ideas together, set-up, online and making you money in no time at all..!

Creating an eBook

A lot or people nowadays are using eBook’s to build up their subscriber and newsletter numbers (both Pat and myself included!), and it really does work if you have great content and great, professional design. This is even more true when it comes to actually charging something for the eBook (just as a side comment here, if you are thinking of creating an eBook to giveaway or sell online and you haven’t already downloaded Pat’s eBook on this exact subject – do it right now!).

There are several ways to utilize a virtual employee when creating an eBook. Let’s say you’re a huge rock climbing enthusiast, and you’ve traveled the world scaling the highest mountains and rocks known to man. People are going to want to read about your experiences if they are also into the same stuff. However, although you have all the experiences and lots of knowledge to share, you’re not a great writer. You can hire a virtual copy writer to help put your words into a strong, informative format for your potential readers (customers).

Finding a copy writer is simply as easy as visiting an outsourcing resource such as www.Freelancer.com and posting a job description requirement. Believe me, I’ve searched on this exact thing before and there are literally hundreds of great writers ready and waiting to work with you. The same can be said for a reliable, experienced graphic designer, to be able to professionally layout your work into a nice presentation, so people really feel as if they have gotten more bang for that buck.

I also know several online marketers that have done their research, found a number of excellent niches that are really untapped in terms of information products and have hired writers offshore to basically write eBooks for them, from scratch, and then launched the product as their own – they make several thousands of dollars a month on products that took them very little time to work on and put together.

Online Marketing and SEO Work

The majority of the entrepreneurs I know, including myself, are simply far too busy to sit at their desks promoting their company reputation, website, blog and online presence in general to would-be customers and clients. And let’s face it, almost all of us don’t really know how to do it all, anyway!

Social networking / media management (getting more and more important with every passing month right now!), blogging, search engine optimization and pay-per-click management are just a few things that virtual assistants can do for you to help increase traffic to your online homes and to generate more sales of your information products.

I have personally worked with virtual assistants who have been able to get my own company to the top of the SERP’s in a very short period of time, on pretty much every keyword I have thrown at them (and on several different vertical websites) – and my industry is an extremely competitive one, even more so in regards to its online space. We all know the power of the internet nowadays is huge. And if you are wanting to create even just a single stream of passive income online, you must make sure that your online marketing strategy is second to none.

Joint Ventures for Passive Income Brilliance (Real Life, Recent Case Study!)

Since I launched the Virtual Business Lifestyle blog in January this year a lot of different opportunities have come my way that are, mostly, unrelated to my core business. Because of this, within the last four weeks, I have teamed up with two completely different, relatively well-known bloggers to put together two completely separate projects online – both of which will be launched initially as ‘knowledge centers’, but will quickly turn into passive income streams for all involved.

One is based on personal outsourcing and another is being put together for wannabe entrepreneurs that are foaming at the mouth to be able to ‘stick it to the man’, and quit the rat-race to become their own boss.

Throughout the last two weeks, I have had virtual staff do the following, with clear instructions, with absolutely no screw-up’s at all:

Huge amounts of keyword research.
Domain registration for a whole bunch of domains.
Tracking down, sizing up, comparing and choosing a hosting company.
Looking for premium blog themes, collating data, presenting these findings to me, and then purchasing the themes for me.
Searching for, testing, negotiating (that took me off guard as I thought I’d have to do it myself!) with graphic designers and web developers.
Setting up social networking accounts for both projects.
Installing WordPress on servers and also installing the chosen themes, too. As well as creating administrator accounts for myself and my partners on these projects.
Emailing respected bloggers on the subject matters, asking for their buy-in on running posts in regards to the launch of both these two new ventures.
Massive amounts of research for content to be produced for the ventures, and even beginning to produce certain parts of the content that will be used in the launch of the projects in the next month or so.

Quite an impressive list, I’m sure you’ll agree – and the whole thing, by the time everything goes live, would have cost no more than $800, all in. That’s BOTH projects, so slice that in two for just one potential passive income stream to go ‘live’, so to speak.

The important thing to mention here more than anything else is that, myself and my partners on these projects could have done ALL of this ourselves. However, we chose to outsourcing the work to highly skilled virtual staff instead, so that we could spend more time on strategizing and working on finalizing concepts for the respective web presences, and planning their launches with more focus.

As Pat commented in our aforementioned interview, the most important thing is that you simply get it done, make sure its full of top quality content and get it out there. it doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect – there will be time to create perfection.

The bottom line here is that, the way I see it, passive income is not just about making money in an easy way, with little requirement of effort from our part as marketers. It’s also about creating a lifestyle that enables us to spend more time with our children and family. To be able to travel more frequently and enjoy a more mobile and varied life. However, most importantly it’s about being able to get stuck in, try new things out and see how they work – with very little investment. And that is the key here, more than anything else.

So, if you’re thinking of setting up any number of streams of passive income, get SMART, and look at utilizing virtual staff to get the brunt of the work done, so you can spend more time on making sure that when you do launch, it’s a home run all the way!

This is Pat again. I really have to say that if I could go back and start all over again, I would have utilized virtual assistants much earlier. I probably would have been in the market much faster and probably earn a lot more money too. Unfortunately for me, I was totally new to the online world, so I didn’t even know such things existed. Luckily for you, Chris laid out most of your options quite nicely.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them below. I’m sure Chris will come by to respond. Also, if you want to learn more about Chris and what he’s up to, you can visit him on his blog at Virtual Business Lifestyle.

Cheers!

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Here’s Why I Don’t Have a Full-Time Virtual Assistant

Pat — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:40:35 +0000

Virtual Assistants, or “VAs” for short, are helping people get more things done each and every day. If you’ve read the 4-Hour Work Week, then you know that Mr. Timothy Ferriss is a huge fan of using VAs for all of the clutter and “the things that I don’t want to waste my time doing in my life” type of stuff. Like many internet marketers and other lifestyle design artists, I’m sure he has several full-time VAs working for him at this very moment.

I, on the other hand, don’t have any full-time VAs. I only hire providers and pay them on a per project basis. I’ll tell you why in a second, but there’s one thing I need to address first.

The topic of hiring VAs is a touchy subject for many, especially when it comes to outsourcing overseas. There are obviously two sides to the argument: on one side, hiring for cheap virtual labor overseas takes potential jobs away from those in the U.S. (or your respective homeland), who may be in need of work. Additionally, the labor can be very inexpensive, almost to the point of being ridiculous and unfair to the eyes of many.

On the other hand, some businesses could not survive with hiring people in the U.S. to do similar tasks that cost much less to accomplish overseas. And at the same time, the low wages that are being offered are actually competitive and comparable to wages in that particular country.

There’s much more to the argument than that, but before I go on, let me just say that this post is not a debate between whether or not hiring virtual assistants, overseas or not, is a good or a bad thing. To tell you the truth, I’ve hired designers and developers here in the U.S., and I’ve hired people overseas as well. I’m just hoping not to start a debate in the comment section of this particular post, but if you must, by all means.

Anyways, back to why I hire VAs only on a per project basis.

There are two mains reasons I do this:

I don’t want to manage a full-time VA.
I want to hire the best VA for the specific job I want accomplished.

Managing a Full-Time VA

I know a lot of internet marketers and entrepreneurs who have full time VAs working for them, and they love it. I also know a lot of internet marketers and entrepreneurs who have full time VAs and are struggling to keep them busy.

Managing a full-time VA is tough. If you can get to the point where you’ve setup systems and procedures and your VAs automatically know what to do, then that’s awesome. That will help your business become more passive. Getting there, however, does take a lot of work.

I’ve witnessed many VAs be let go just because the person who hired him or her couldn’t keep up, or simply didn’t have the time to keep them busy. You don’t want to replace the tasks that your have your VA doing with time spent managing your VAs.

For me, I’d rather focus on exactly what I need to focus on, and nothing else. If I have a project that needs to get done (website design, SEO, iphone apps, etc.), then I’ll hire a VA just for that specific project. Once the job is finished (website design is done, I’ve reached a certain ranking in Google, the iPhone apps are finished), then my time with that particular VA is finished as well, and those are terms that are understood by all parties from the beginning.

Yes, I know I could benefit from hiring a full-time VA do “continuous” jobs for me, like article writing, SEO, and things of that nature, but again I’d have to spend time continuously managing their tasks to make sure they are done correctly and on time, as well as spend time managing the finances of the relationship as well. Maybe I could hire someone to manage the VAs, but then who would manage that person?

Specialty VAs

With a Full-Time VA, you’ll often find yourself teaching the VA what you want him or her to do. It can be time consuming, and the fact is that in this case, you’ll rarely find that the VA will go above and beyond what you taught.

When hiring on a per project basis, I know (based on the qualifications, feedback, recommendations and portfolio of the person I hired) that my VA is nearly perfect for the job, and someone who already knows what to do. I’ll obviously have to give that person a scope of work, but I’ve never found myself having to teach someone I hired how to do the thing I hired them to do. That just wouldn’t make sense!

Furthermore, for almost every project I’ve outsourced, the specialty VA I hired has gone above and beyond the scope of work. For example, my website designers for The Smart Passive Income Blog (the incredible team at BlazerSix) did much more than I had originally asked for, especially when it came to the backend of the blog and making my life as the admin for this site much easier for me to handle.

Hiring a VA for a project doesn’t mean you cannot hire them again. If you love what they did for you, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go back for them, or at least ask if they are available. In many cases, these one-time hires will become your “on-call” business helpers, because they live from project to project and would love to establish a long-lasting business relationship with you.

Before I finish up, I just wanted to remind you that there is no right or wrong way here. Again, this is just how I decided to work with VAs. How you plan to work with VAs is totally up to you.

How do you work with VAs? Have you had good experiences with who you’ve hired?

Thanks for your support. Cheers!

p.s. If you’d like to get automatic updates of new material here on The Smart Passive Income Blog, you can simply subscribe to the RSS feed!

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The Triple Threat of Informational Products You Can Easily Create

Pat — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:57:24 +0000

It doesn’t matter what industry or niche you’re in – different people prefer different ways of learning. If you can cater to each of these types of people, you will not only expand your customer base to those who wouldn’t normally purchase from you, but you’ll give those who would of purchased from you anyways the tempting option to send a little more cash your way.

There are three basic methods to learn new material: reading, listening, and watching. Keep in mind that particular order. While doing business online, we can cater to those who prefer each of these methods by creating eBooks, audio products, and video, respectively.

Reading via eBooks

Most internet marketers and entrepreneurs start out with an eBook as a product to sell. Why?

Creating an eBook is relatively easy, it’s cheap, and it can be started today. All you need is a Word Processing program, and you’re well on your way to a finished product you can sell online. There is no wonder why my How to Create an eBook series page is one of the most visited pages on this blog.
Anyone with a computer can read an eBook. Reading is the most common form of learning new information. It’s what we’ve done since we started school.

An eBook is great, but why stop there?

Listening via Audio

If you have an eBook, why not create some audio to go along with it?

Today, more and more people are learning “on-the-go”. In their cars, waiting at the airport, at the gym, on a walk – audio is perfect for these kinds of people. I remember when I used to take the train from San Diego to Irvine every day (I don’t miss it), I’d prepare my iPod with various podcasts to listen to on my commute. One was actually the Internet Business Mastery Podcast, which ended up being the real reason why I’m where I’m at today with my online business. I’d also listen to Fantasy Football podcasts, and Dave Ramsey’s financial podcast too.

Anyways, the creation of an audio product could not be easier – especially after already having an eBook. Your eBook is your script. You can record the audio yourself, but I recommend hiring a professional voice talent to do it for you. It will cost a little bit of money (maybe some money you’ve earned with your eBook already), but it will save you time and the quality will be superb.

To give you an idea, the creation of my audio guide helped me go from an average of $200/day, to nearly $600 (and often more) a DAY!

But wait. Let’s not stop there…

Watching via Video

So we’ve got the eBook, and now the audio – why not top it off with video too? This will cater to those visual learners who are more used to learning in a classroom/lecture hall type setting.

The video can simply be a slideshow presentation, or even just a person speaking on screen. I’d recommend taking advantage of the video format by adding pictures and examples (if appropriate for your niche), which can’t be done in an audio format.

Many people don’t use video because they think it will be tough to create, or it just won’t be useful. Well – you have an eBook already which can be formatted into a slideshow presentation, and you have your audio which can be used on top of the slideshow presentation…it’s practically made already!

Furthermore, video is seen by consumers as a “higher-end” product, so you’ll be able to use that to your advantage as well when converting sales.

The Triple Threat

With an eBook, an audio and a video product, you can easily cater to all types of people and their learning preferences. But again – it doesn’t stop there. (This is where it really get’s exciting…)

You can easily get more from your customers by combining your products and offering deals and discounts! There are a million different possibilities and combination of offers you can do with three different products, but here is one example:

Let’s say you sell your eBook at $25, your audio at $35, and the video for $50 (remember…high-end!) – separately. Combined, that’s $110.00. You could offer something like the eBook and Audio both for $50.00, which is a nice $10.00 savings. You could offer the eBook and video both for $60.00, which is a nice $15.00 savings – or, you could offer all three items, the eBook, Audio, and Video for a total of $85.00 – a substantial $25.00 savings! You’ll have people spending $85.00 who would of been happy with one item separately.

They’ll be happy, you’ll be happy, and your bank account will be happy too.

(p.s. currently I have an eBook and audio guide, but as I mentioned in a previous post, I am working on that third element – the video, as we speak)

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Ask The Readers: Is Outsourcing Irresponsible?

Pat — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 09:02:52 +0000

On the Internet Business Mastery Podcast Blog, there’s an interesting debate going on, and it involves a little bit of what I do online. There are tons of very interesting comments and a lot of rage about the subject of outsourcing.

On one hand, online businesses outsource many tasks overseas because you really can’t beat the price. As I mentioned in a previous post, I had hired someone from the Philippines for $2.22/hour to do some web research for me. Hiring someone in the U.S. would cost me a lot more, and a lot of businesses rely on these low wages in order to succeed. In other words, many online businesses would not survive if it wasn’t for outsourcing.

On the other hand, outsourcing takes business and money away from within the U.S. Many people are losing jobs to people overseas who can do the same work for far less. Also, people are saying that paying someone $2/hour is just wrong and immoral.

As a response to that, the “pro-outsourcers” say that although they are hiring people overseas, they have U.S. based businesses that get taxed by the U.S. and contribute to the economy and are allowed to conduct business as they wish. As far as the low wages, $2/hour seems very low for the U.S. but when converted to pesos, $2/hour is a normal wage for workers in the Philippines.

Then, there’s some people’s feelings about our responsibility to America. It’s all really interesting stuff! I encourage you to have a look at Jay’s post and the comments over at the Internet Business Mastery Podcast Blog. I think I’ve read through them 3 times already.

I’m not sure exactly where I stand on the issue, and I usually try to stay out of these kinds of things – but I really do feel for the people who are losing their jobs to people overseas (since I know what it feels like to lose a job). On the other hand, as a business owner, it’s nice to be able to get work done at a cheaper rate and have more capital for other things. Also, it’ nice to be able to provide an income for some individual in another country who may be struggling and needs a job too.

What are your thoughts on outsourcing? Where do you stand on this issue?

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What’s Stopping You From Using a Virtual Assistant?

Pat — Tue, 19 May 2009 06:01:50 +0000

In Tim Ferriss’ book The 4-Hour Work Week (aka, my 2nd Bible), he dedicates an entire section to VAs and the benefits of hiring virtual assistants to do almost any task for you. At first, I was reluctant to agree with the idea of outsourcing because I was always the one who wanted to do all of the work myself. But, after reading more about VAs and how they could help me, I soon realized the huge advantage I would have by making a VA a part of “my team”.

Now, understand that there are a lot of people out there who use VAs for almost everything they do. If there was a way a VA could cut up their steaks and feed it to them, they’d probably have them do that too. Tim gives an example of a man who asked his VA to “make up with his wife” after they had gotten into a little quarrel. The VA sent his wife an apology letter and some nice flowers. I think if I did that, my wife would be pissed…anyways, I digress.

I’m not so much about outsourcing my personal life, but I did learn that my life was better after outsourcing the things I wasn’t that good at (and even things I was good at) and the things I didn’t enjoy doing.

It been almost a year since I first cracked open Tim’s book, and I’ve since hired a VA on 10 separate occasions, for 10 different projects. I have yet to hire one to do personal things like plan a trip to Asia or find a venue for a birthday party that has a nice room large enough for 25 and serves chicken tikki masala, but here are a few examples and how VAs helped save me some time and ultimately make me happier:

Web Design:

The Smart Passive Income Blog was custom designed by a VA. It’s also being redesigned and upgraded as we speak by the same person. The only work I did was point my VA to websites that I liked and which parts of those websites I wanted on mine. After a couple of
- Hours spent, including posting the job on elance.com and communication with the VA: about 2 hours total
- Estimated amount of time it would have taken me to do it all myself: 20-25 days (researching and implementation)
- Results: a custom designed wordpress blog theme (you’re looking at it!)
- Cost: $250.00

Search Engine Optimization:

When intheleed.com started, I was getting some traffic, but I wanted to take it to a whole new level. I hired a VA who specialized in SEO, and they did a lot of work for me in such little time.
- Hours spent, including writing 2 press releases and blog descriptions for the VA: about 3 hours total
- Estimated amount of time it would have taken me to do it all myself: over 2 months
- Results: the VA and his team posted my press releases to almost a thousand article websites (which created backlinks to my blog), and my blog description to 200 different search engine listings. Within a month, my organic traffic increased by 50%, and I ranked in the top 5 in Google for all but 1 of the 5 keywords I asked for. I was able to reach more visitors, and after my eBook came out, more customers too.
- Cost: $400.00

Web Research:

A lot of times a new business idea pops into my head. In order for me to determine if it’s a good one, or one that is marketable, I need some initial web research done. Instead of spending time to do it all myself, I leave it up to a VA. All I have to do is give the VA exact instructions and a blank excel template with the information I want – and 8 hours later I have tons of data to look at.
- Hours spent, including writing a procedure list and communication with my VA: about 30 minutes for each topic I need research for.
- Estimated amount of time it would have taken me to do it all myself: 8+ hours per topic
- Results: One day I’ll ask my VA for some data, and the next day it’s in my inbox. How awesome is that?! The data is as good as your procedure lists allow it to be, so it’s really important to tell the VA exactly how much detail you’re looking for.
- Cost: $1.67/hour. Yes, I said $1.67 an hour. (thanks to odesk.com)

Other Projects:

Here are some other project I’ve also hired online help for:

iPhone applications: Quoc, my business partner at LOLer Apps, actually just wrote an awesome post about why we outsourced our ideas. It’s actually his first blog post ever, so if you have any nice comments, I’m sure he’d really appreciate it!
Voice Talents: I hired a voice talent for my audio book to go along with my intheleed.com eBook.
A Flash movie: As I’m writing this blog post, I’m actually on Skype at the same time talking to a VA about creating a flash movie for me as a presentation tool for a contest I’m entering. Once it’s finished, I’ll give you all the details. I’m really excited about it!

Conclusion:

Outsourcing work was such a weird idea to me at first, but it has opened up many opportunities and has given me more time to work on things that I really want to do. Personally, it’s also really fulfilling to play a project manager role while working on these VA projects.

If you’re interested in hiring a VA someday, I wrote a helpful post on LOLer Apps that has gotten some nice buzz on the net about how to maximize the potential of your project while working with a VA. Check it out, because it’s applicable to all outsourcing projects, not just iPhone apps.

Have you ever outsourced anything? How was the experience? If you haven’t yet, what are your reservations? Any questions?

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How to Find Hired Help Online and Save Valuable Time

Pat — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 22:56:02 +0000

In a previous post, I talked about how knowing and doing everything can be a major mistake for anyone working online. There’s absolutely no reason to waste time learning and doing things that other people can do for you in a shorter period of time, and probably with better results, no offense.

On elance.com, you’ll find thousands of specialists who will bid on any project that you may need help with. It kind of works like eBay. You post a project description, people or companies will submit a bid, and you choose the best one for you. Each bidder has a qualifications listing, a feedback rating as well as a portfolio of previous projects, so you can easily choose the bidder of your liking. It’s free to sign up and post your projects, and you can pretty much get help with anything, including:

Web & Programming
Design & Multimedia
Writing & Translation
Administrative Assistance
Sales & Marketing
Finance & Management
Legal
Engineering & Manufacturing

You could run an entire business through elance.com, from manufacturing a product, building a website for it, marketing and selling it, and even keeping track of finances and inventory – amazing!

How I’ve Used Elance

Personally, I’ve used elance.com for the following items:

SEO (search engine optimization): I asked for help to increase my rankings for certain keywords on my other blog at intheleed.com. I did this about a month ago, and I’m now on the front page of Google Search for all of my top keywords. I’m now 5th for the Keyword “LEED Exam”, which I was previously ranked 30th for, only to be topped by the United States Green Building Council and the Green Building Certification Institute, the companies that administer the exam. Ever since I asked for help, I’ve seen a 15% increase in the number of visitors, as well as a $5.00/day increase in Adsense earnings. Sweet.
Voice Talent: As previously mentioned, I have an ebook that I’m turning into an audio guide. Just a week ago I post this project and the next day I received 8 bids with all different voices and portfolios from me to choose from. I paid $50.00 and already have what I asked for. It’s gong to take me a while to edit the whole thing (I should hire someone to do this too), but here’s a small sample:

Custom WordPress Theme Design: After spending a lot of time on my first blog, I decided to hire help to design The Smart Passive Income Blog. After 1 week, I had this full working blog that you see now, and for a very reasonable price. I’ll talk more about how this helped me below.

My Experience Hiring a Blog Designer

I already had wordpress setup with a very generic looking theme, but I wasn’t excited about it – and I didn’t want to spend time tweaking it or learning how to code things like the “tabs” area you see in my sidebar on the right. I had more important things to do, like work on my eBook and write on eHow and such. So I went to elance.com for help.

I posted a project with a description of what I wanted. I was still unsure about how exactly I wanted The Smart Passive Income Blog too look, so I simply explained that I wanted someone creative with sufficient WordPress theme design capabilities. After 2 days, I had received 6 bids, ranging from $80.00 to $250.00.

I went with a guy named Michael from Vision Master Designs because I liked his portfolio and he had a very reasonable bid of only $100.00. Communication is a big part of working on elance, and this is something that Michael did very well, which I appreciated.

Communication is Key

Elance has what is called “workrooms” for each project that you are working on. In each workroom, you can share files and talk on the Private Message Board. This is okay, but Michael suggested that we instead talk on an instant messenger, so we can communicate more efficiently. I highly recommend doing this is.

In the beginning we used Gmail chat, where Michael got an idea of what I wanted the end product to look like. We spoke again once a couple of days later after Michael had some preliminary designs for me to choose from. I contacted him once more because I had an idea I wanted to see on the website (the Hello My Name is thing you see on the sidebar), and he quickly had that implemented on a final design, before he then coded everything and had it all ready to go in just a few days.

When you hire a designer, make sure you’re not afraid to tell them what you like and dislike. It’s their job to work for you and give you what you’ve asked for based on the project description (it’s not courteous to ask for more than the scope of the project). Michael, again, was great at taking my suggestions and criticisms about his designs. At times, I would tell him what I thought, and seconds later he would ask me to reload the webpage and see if that’s what I wanted. Very fast, very efficient, very cool.

My Particular Blog Design

When speaking with Michael about the design I wanted, I didn’t really know what to say. He then asked me to give him a few websites that I really enjoyed reading and/or where I really liked a particular design.

“I like this thing from this website, and I love this part from that website…oh, and I really like how this website…blah blah blah.” It’s that easy. This is ok to do, as long as the designer knows not to just copy the exact design from another website (they know not to do this). It’s ok to take parts from a bunch of different ones that you like.

As you can see, I really liked parts from Michael’s own blog, and he was okay with putting some of his design into my own.

If you already know what you want your design to look like, another technique would be to use Photoshop to create exactly what you want and just hand that over to the designer to code.

A Question You’re Probably Wondering About

How do designers put code on YOUR website?

You have to give your designer access to your website in order for them to go inside and code everything. You DO NOT want to give them YOUR username or password.

What you should do is create a unique password for your designer to access your FTP. This will allow him or her to view and upload files at their liking, based on the new design. Find your FTP settings on your website host to create a new username and password, or contact your particular host if you need help. I use bluehost.com, which makes it really easy to do this, as you can see below:

If you have a blog, you’ll also need to give your designer access to your blog as well. Again, you should not give them your username and password, but create a unique one for your designer. You’ll want to give them an “administrator” role in order for them to do what they need to do. If you’re using WordPress.com as your blogging platform, click on “users” to view the page to create a new username and password.

Once the project is over, I recommend at least changing the password so they cannot go back in and change anything without your previous knowledge. Again, there should be nothing to worry about – this is just for safety reasons.

Continuing Work

Because I was so happy with Michael’s service, I will use him again on any further projects that I need help on. I will work outside of elance in the future with him, because elance does take a big chunk of his earnings for his work, and I want him to get as much as possible from my work.

I’ve asked his permission and you can contact him if you think you may want some custom website design work done for yourself.

What’s Next

Tomorrow is December 1st, and I know you’re all probably anxious to see how my eBook, adsense, and eHow earnings have done this month. It’s been a little slow this Thanksgiving weekend, but I’ll just say it’s been a record month for me once again.

Come back soon or subscribe if you haven’t already to stay updated. Thanks!

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The Smart Passive Income Blog » outsourcing

Niche Site Update – New Content, Record Earnings and What’s Next

Renewed Energy and Action

A Record Day of Income

What’s Next

Other Posts in The Niche Site Duel Series

SPI 020 : All About Virtual Assistants and Outsourcing with Chris Ducker from VirtualBusinessLifestyle.com

Creating Niche Sites with PLR? I Ask The Expert

Hiring a Ghostwriter

Private Label Rights (PLR) Articles

What is Your Experience With PLR?

Hiring a Virtual Assistant – Everything You Need to Know

How to Utilize Virtual Staff to Create Multiple Streams of Passive Income

Working with Freelance Virtual Staff

Working with Virtual Staff from a Solutions Provider

Creating an eBook

Online Marketing and SEO Work

Joint Ventures for Passive Income Brilliance (Real Life, Recent Case Study!)

Here’s Why I Don’t Have a Full-Time Virtual Assistant

Managing a Full-Time VA

Specialty VAs

The Triple Threat of Informational Products You Can Easily Create

Reading via eBooks

Listening via Audio

Watching via Video

The Triple Threat

Ask The Readers: Is Outsourcing Irresponsible?

What’s Stopping You From Using a Virtual Assistant?

Web Design:

Search Engine Optimization:

Web Research:

Other Projects:

Conclusion:

How to Find Hired Help Online and Save Valuable Time

How I’ve Used Elance

My Experience Hiring a Blog Designer

Communication is Key

My Particular Blog Design

A Question You’re Probably Wondering About

Continuing Work

What’s Next