Internet marketing is a long term income source. Sure, you read the sales letters and emails and hear how ‘Mr X’ earned $45,322 in one day, and these types of massive incomes are possible, but only after building a massive list, an awesome reputation for your content, and some serious JV parterships.

While the long term goal of virtually all online businesses is building a responsive list (you are building a list right?) many people, when they are just starting out online, need a way to make money right away. While there might appear to be many options available (from paid survey sites that will pay you next to nothing to all manner of scams and schemes) there is only one method I have found to make quick money reliably - offering your services via freelancer websites.

The flip side of outsourcing

A lot has been written in this industry about outsourcing, and how it’s the key to scaling your business and being efficient with your time. Even in the early stages of an online business, outsourcing can play a vital role in getting things done and leveraging other people’s talents (As Russell Brunson talks about in his free DVD). But rarely do I hear people teaching newbies that they can use outsourcing in a different way, to make money rather than save time.

Put simply, outsourcing is paying someone else to perform some task(s) for you, at a price. Typically you might have a report or series of articles written, some software developed, SEO performed on a site etc. Outsourcing websites such as GetAFreelancer.com and ScriptLance.com act as a virtiul agent, matching buyers with providers and also offering some middle ground for any potential disputes and payment issues.

Making quick income from outsourcing sites

If you have the right skills, and are able to pitch them well, you can earn money fairly quickly. The first thing you’ll need to do is head over to GetAFreelancer or ScriptLance (there are others, but these two tend to be the best) and sign up for an account (aon Scriptlance you want a provider account, not a buyer account!) Then you can search for projects to bid on.

The type of project you bid on will obviously depend on your skills, and they range from article writing, market research, transcriptions, programming, web design, SEO and more. Just be sure only to bid on projects where you have the required skills, and can perform the task to a high standard.

Competing and winning bids

Now I need to be clear on this - DO NOT try and compete on price. As tempting as it might be to put a low bid in to secure a project, it is likely to backfire. There is a lot of competition on these sites, and someone will always undercut you. You’ll either lose the bid, or worse, be forced to accept a project for less than you wanted. The key to being successful is to compete only on customer service, and that starts from the moment you place your bid.

Bidding for projects

Most bidders will place a generic bid, something like “We can perform this task to a high standard…” but you want to stand out from the crowd. Firstly, spend some time reading the entire project specification carefully and think about what skills are required, and whether you can complete it quickly and to a high standard.

Then write out a proper bid giving an introduction to yourself, your thoughts on the project (offer ideas/creative input) and if possible showing examples of previous work. Be specific about the project to ensure that the buyer notices that you are not offering a generic response. Make your bid reasonable (don’t bid too high) but at the same time don’t make it too low either, and certainly don’t be afraid of making it quite a bit higher than the lowest bid they already have. You don’t want to seem too eager to win the project in my experience, your confidence in your own skills should shine through and be enough to win the bid. You can do this by proving your skills, rather than just telling them. Be sure to explain why you are perfect for the project, and include examples of similar work you have done in the past (This probably means having a portfolio of work ready for viewing).

What you’ll find is that most (probably 75% or more) of your bids won’t be accepted, they will simply choose the lowest bid. However, some will notice that you have taken the time to give a proper response, written in good clear English, and offered some creative input - and they will accept your bids!

Those few bids you do win can really add up, and probably take you a lot less time to complete than all the low end projects you’d have to do in order to earn the same amount. If you have tried this approach and not had any bids accepted just keep trying. I put in over 20 bids last month, and only had 3 accepted but those 3 earned me over $4000. I’d have had to do a lot of $30 projects to do that competing on price alone!

Feedback, and long term success

Of course, your customer service doesn’t stop once your bid is accepted. My approach is always to over-deliver: give the best possible service you can. The reason for that is two-fold. Firstly, just like eBay, these sites have a feedback system and getting good feedback from buyers will help you secure further bids in the future. Secondly, a buyer who is happy with your work is likely to have further work for you in the future - you want to build a relationship with them to ensure that you are the person they come to next time.

Outsourcing for profits

Outsourcing often gets associated with bad workmanship, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I have experience on both sides of the fence, since I’m a buyer and provider of projects. I find that I can bid very profitably on projects which are prefect for my skill set, while outsourcing time consuming and monotenous tasks very cheaply. The key is to be very specific about what to bid on, and to be throughly professional at all times. Using the freelance sites can be a great way of supplementing your income, while building your online business and assets (websites, email list etc.) and is also great experience for when you want to outsource projects yourself.

Resources:

GetAFreelancer.com

ScriptLance.com

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Thinking of entering a new niche? Before investing time and effort to create products or content for a niche, you really need to spend some time on market research. You need to know whether enough other people are interested in the subject that the market is big enough, and you need to know that the competition isn’t so fierce that you’ll never get the exposure you need to be profitable.

My top 3 free tools for market research are Amazon.com, Clickbank.com and Google.com - let’s take a look at each in turn.

Using Amazon for market research

Amazon is a great tool for market research. Go to the magazines section and have a browse around. At time of writing, there are over 93,000 titles so there are plenty to choose from. Start with a more generic topic, such as golf, or computing, then look for narrower sub-niche publications. If publishers are producing a magazine about a topic then you know that at the very least there are a few thousand people out there willing to spend a few dollars on the price of a magazine for their hobby or interest!

There are over 93,000 magazine titles on Amazon

If you find topics that you think might interest you, it’s worth getting hold of a copy of the magazine and taking a look at the type of content, what products are being advertised in it, how technical the content is, and anything else you can glean. If possible, look at several consecutive issues. If a certain product or service is advertised again and again, you can be sure that people are buying!

While you’re at Amazon, another great thing to browse is the ‘For Dummies’ books. Again, you know that if there is a ‘For Dummies’ book, there has to be a market… they don’t make these books if nobody is buying them!

Clickbank as a market research tool

You probably know about Clickbank, and selling affiliate products from their marketplace, but did you realise it’s a great tool for researching your niche?

Clickbank - thousands of products you can promote, and great to research the market!

Here’s what to do. Go to Clickbank.com and click on the marketplace link at the top right of the screen. You’ll see a search form which allows you to filter and search through all the products available through Clickbank. The reason this is so cool, is that these are all information products, like ebooks, downloadable audio or video etc. That means, if there is a product (or even better, several products) in the niche you’re interested in listed here, you know that there are people buying products in this niche on the Internet… and they might well buy your product too! It also means that you have potential affiliate products to promote in that niche.

Google for niche research

So you found a potential niche, using Amazon or Clickbank, but there’s one more piece of the puzzle. Ideally, you want to find a niche where other people are spending money (cold hard cash!) to reach their target audience. If you found any suitable magazines on Amazon and bought one you can tell instantly – are there lots of adverts in the magazine, offering products to this market?

Well if you didn’t find a magazine, or you want more proof, then Google comes to the rescue. When you do a search on Google, you’ve probably noticed that there are a group of listings that show up on the right hand side of the screen (and sometimes at the top) separate from the main listings. These are what Google calls sponsored links, or paid listings. Essentially, someone has paid Google for those links to show there whenever someone searches on specific phrases. For example, do a search for mountain bike on Google and you’ll see a results page something like this:

Google results page showing sponsored links on the right

Again, if you see a fair few adverts here when you search for keywords related to your niche, you know that people are paying to attract customers. Take a moment to click on each link and see what they are selling, but the important thing is are there adverts here. You know that since these adverts cost money, people must be buying products in this niche, otherwise companies wouldn’t be advertising!

The right niche

The right niche will depend on many factors. Are you planning on creating your own products, or just promoting affiliate products? Is it a topic you have a specific interest and passion for, or are you going purely on what the market dictates?

Trying to enter the wrong market is a sure fire recipe for failure. The more time spent at this stage, making sure you’re choosing a suitable niche will pay massive dividends in the future. My best advise is, to consider profitability and passion. To be successful you’re going to be spending a lot of time researching, writing and creating content around your niche as well as networking with other people within that niche. If you choose a topic purely because you think it will be profitable, but you have no interest in, you’re unlikely to keep your motivation up - ask yourself if you could write articles and blog posts about this topic, day after day? On the flip side, choose a subject purely based on your passions without checking out the market first and you could end up dominating a niche where there are no profits to be made… Take your time, choose wisely and always be willing to learn!

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E-books, blueprints, free reports… in this first of a series of guides to producing content I want to show you how to easily create these using the free office suite software Open Office.

If you’ve not already got it, download it now from OpenOffice.org and go right ahead and install the package. What you get is a suite of 5 applications: Writer, which is a word processor to rival Microsoft Word, Calc which is a spreadsheet (like Excel), a Powerpoint style presentation application called Impress, a graphics tool called Draw, and finally Base, a database application.

These are all great applications, and they integrate well together as a productivity suite, but for our purposes we’re really only going to be interested in two of them - Writer and Impress.

If you’re at all familiar with Word, or any other well known word processor, then you’ll feel quite at home with Writer. In fact, most of the application works just like Word but with one massive advantage for us - you can export directly to PDF format!

PDF is pretty much the standard for ebooks and reports since it’s very portable (It isn’t called the Portable Document Format for nothing you know!) and can be opened on just about any system, fonts are embedded so your document will look pretty much the same on anyone’s computer, and probably the most important - it is basically a non-editable format. What that means is, unlike a Word document, if you open a PDF ebook you downloaded, you won’t be able to edit, or start adding to or changing the content.

Exporting a document as a PDF is dead simple - just click the red Export to PDF button on the toolbar and save it just like you would save a normal file. There’s no messing around with PDF print drivers or any of that nonsense - just one click!

Now, you could just type up a few pages, click export and bam - you’re done. But if you want to create a report or ebook that looks professional you’re going to want to spend a little time making it look nice with a good layout, and here’s where OpenOffice shines again by making it really easy to get your documents looking great.

First of all, you can apply a template to your document that will give your creation a professional look and tie the pages together. You could create your own, but why reinvent the wheel right? There are loads of places to get free OpenOffice ebook templates - just try a quick Google search.

Once you have your template, open it in OpenOffice (If you double click the template file it will open ready to edit - told you this was easy!) and start typing. Hit the PDF export button when you’re done, and you have created your first ebook!

Now, remember that I said we were interested in Writer and in Impress? Well the reason for that, is that you can also export presentations to PDF format to create an ebook. Earlier this year, when I started teaching my 1 Day Webmaster seminars, I sat down and created a 160 slide presentation which I use as the basis for my seminars. To create the manual which accompanies the seminar, I edited the slides putting notes and comments in key places, exported to PDF and I instantly had an ebook (in fact I print a hard copy and spiral bind it for my seminar delegates but you get the idea!).

The best part is, OpenOffice is compatible with Microsoft file formats, so if you have an old Powerpoint presentation, just open it in Impress, make any changes you feel necessary, hit the export to PDF button and you have an instant ebook - how cool is that!

Just a final note on that… Microsoft have never really liked competition much, and when they released their most recent version of MS Office they changed their own file formats so that programs like OpenOffice were no longer compatible. The old style MS formats had extensions like .doc for Word, and .xls for Excel. Well the new versions have an extra x after the extension (.docx, .xlsx etc.) and these are the ones which OpenOffice can’t read… but don’t worry I have a solution for you! Just head over to Docx Converter and upload your file, enter your email and click the button… The file will be converted into OpenOffice format and emailed to you for free - how’s that for service!

So there we go, a very quick and easy introduction to creating content and your own products. Whether it’s a free report to give to your email subscribers, or a full blown info product to sell on Clickbank, OpenOffice is more than capable.

Have fun, get creative, and tomorrow we’ll look at creating websites using the HTML editor Nvu.

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Several years ago I was in a dilemma. I’d been working as a self employed web designer for a couple of years and things were going well. I was building up a string of regular clients, a growing portfolio, and getting more and more referrals. I was earning good money and always had more than enough work.

That, however, was the problem. I was getting so much work that I was having to turn projects down. There are only so many hours in the day, and when you’re self employed you can’t just spend all your working time doing your actual work. On top of designing websites there are accounts to be done, and marketing, and admin and all sorts of other tasks. I knew that in order to scale my business I needed to take on an employee, but the idea scared me. My father had been an employer for the past 40 years and I knew about all the stress, and headaches, and health and safety, and pensions, and respinsibility that came with it. An employee would mean having to be at the office on time to open up, and stay until closing. No longer could I wake up and, on finding the sun out and the winds right, decide to go kite boarding for a few hours before rolling into the office at lunchtime and making up the time by working until midnight.

No, employees certainly sounded like too much responsibility for me so I struggled on, trying to be a one man band and do everything myself. Luckily for me, it was around this time that I stumbled upon Network Marketing. Here was a way of scaling a business, and leveraging other people’s time and effort, without the need for employees. I started building my Network Marketing business in my ’spare’ time and as that began to grow into a substantial second income I eased off on the web design.

More recently however I’ve been more prolific on the web again. Creating my 1DayWebmaster seminars and a number of other projects has, once again, started to put strains on my time. The idea of taking on employees has once again reared its ugly head.

That was, however, until I read a book that changed my view of business all together, The 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss. Tim spends much of the book praising the virtues of outsourcing, a subject I’d never paid much thought to before hearing about the book over at Internet Business Mastery.

Put simply, outsourcing is the process of paying a freelancer to take on a specific project for you. It could be writing a report, building a website, creating a small piece of software, carrying out market research or any number of other tasks. Now, I know from personal experience that the perceived cost of hiring a freelancer is often the stumbling block here but you may be surprised with how incredibly cost effective it can be. Let me describe my first venture into outsourcing by way of example.

I had an idea of writing a report about home business opportunities in the UK. I had been thinking about writing it for months and had got as far as drafting a rough outline of what information should be included but not further - the thought of spending hours and hours researching each opportunity, and writing the report was hardly a task I would relish, although I was convinced it would be a marketable product.

Enter outsourcing… There are quite a number of outsourcing websites these days and the one I chose was getafreelancer.com

I signed up for a free account set about posting my project. I wrote an outline of the project, what I expected to me included in the report, what opportunities I wanted toi be included, how the report was to be formatted etc. I included a list of 60 UK home business opportunities and one sample page which I wrote to give an indication of style and content… Then I waited.

Getafrelancer.com and many of the other outsourcing sites (rentacoder, elance etc.) work as a kind of ‘reverse auction’ where freelancers bid on your project and you can choose the one best suited. As well as price you can be guided by an ebay-like feedback system and private messages with the bidders.

The first bids started soming in within about 2 minutes! First were $500 bids from very professional sounding individuals, although their PMs sounded generic and stilted. Slowly, more and more cam in until after about 6 hours I had 18 bids ranging from $500 down to $30… I went with the one for $30!

The bid was from a Kenyan woman whose English wasn’t perfect, but it was very, very good and was expecting to have to edit the report myself anyway. I was told it would take 3 days!!!

True to her word, 3 days later I received a 90 page report packed with information about the business opportunities I had requested. For 30 bucks! I couldn’t get over the amazing value for money - if I had employed someone local to carry out the work it would have cost me a small fortune, yet I had just managed to have the entire report written, in 3 days, for less than the cost of a decent dinner!

Needless to say I paid up, left glowing feedback, and have been using outsourcing on a regular basis since. In fact, I still don’t use it as much as I could and that’s something I’m working on. I’m a bit of a perfectionist and find it hard to relinquish control and delegate but it’s something I’m working on.

I’ve learned a lot since that first venture into the world of hired help so here are my top tips to getting the most from outsourcing:

1. Plan your project

They say that failing to plan is planning to fail. Freelancers might be great at what they do but they are not mind readers. If you’re not clear of exactly what you want, how can you expect them to deliver?

2. Be specific

The more detailed your project outline the better chance you’ll get what you want at the end. For a book or report give chapter headings as well as a synopsis. A sample of writing style is also a good idea. If there is research to be done give examples of books or websites where you expect that information to come from.

3. Research your freelancer

All good outsourcing sites will allow you to view feedback but it’s also a good idea to look at a sample of pervious work. Use PM or email to discuss the project before choosing a bidder to make sure you’re compatible.

4. Define rights

If you’re having a report written, or software created for example you need to be sure to get the full rights to the work. In order to avoid any potential legal problems in the future use a contract saying that you get full rights to the work and none are retained by the author.

5. Use multiple freelancers

You can save money on larger projects by getting the work done by multiple people. For example, having an ebook written by a native English speaker will generally cost you a lot more than having it written by someone in e developing country who speaks English as a second language. However, you may find you can have the book written cheaply by a freelancer in India for example, and then have it edited by a native English speaker at a fraction of the price.

6. Agree payment schedule

For larger projects it’s a good idea to setup multiple escrow payments which are released as the project develops. For example, you make the first payment when they deliver the first 2 chapters, second payment when half done and final payment on completion. This creates trust between you and the freelancer and also alows you to monitor the project as it progresses and catch errors early on rather than waiting until you get a complete project with fundamental flaws.

7. Finally - Start off small

Handing over control of any project, and a payment for the pleasure, can be a daunting experience. Start with a small, non-vital project to get yourself into the mindset, learn from the experience and also scope out the freelancer you’re hiring. If they do a good job, and you manage them well, you’ll feel more comfortable delegating a larger project in the future.

There really are only 24 hours in the day, no matter how hard you work! There’s only so much you yourself can do in that time so if you want to get more done you’ll need leverage. Sure, employees could be the way forward depending on your business, but they also come with massive responsibility and costs. Network Marketing is another great way to leverage your time but it doesn’t suit everyone… but hiring freelancers is a method that will fit most business models. Start small, test the water, follow the tips above and watch your productivity soar!

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How many users visit your site each day? Where do they come from? Where do they go when they leave? What keywords did they search on to find you? What country are they in?

The answers to these, and so many more questions are easily, and often freely, available with the help of a good stats system.

The lifeblood of your online business is traffic. Not the noisy, fuel guzzling, car and truck kind, but the constant flow of fresh, unique visitors who are eager to consume your infomation and hopefully buy your products. Just getting visitors to your site is not enough - you need targetted traffic. For example, if you market a product for UK small business owners, but 80% of your traffic comes from Asia or South America you’re not being very efficient with your marketing.

My clients are often amazed by the wealth of data that can be harvested about visitors to their sites. Everything from physical locality to screen resolution, what browser operating system they are using and how many pages they viewed before heading to another site. This is all valuable information. If you know that 75% of your visitors spend less than 5 seconds on your homepage, and then leave, you are either attracting many people to your site how aren’t interested in what you offer, or more likely you need to spend some time making your homepage more attractive to those visitors - better communicating what your site offers.

There are loads of stats systems out there, some better than others. Almost certainly you’ll have basic stats included with your hosting package and these can be very useful on their own. Personally I use a combination of 2 free services which, when combined, give me a wealth of invaluable information

StatCounter.com offer a monthly subscription based service, but offer a restricted version for free which is stil excellent. It takes 2 minutes to set up a free account, generate the HTML snippet and add it to your site. The wizard to generate the code supports a multitude of popular blogging and CMS platforms as well as basic HTML and is very simple to use. You can also block your own usage from affecting the stats (assuming you’re logged in to a blog or CMS system)

An example of visualised stats from StatCounter

Once set up, the system starts to track data from your visitors which you can then view at the StatCounter site by logging in to your account. The stats are viewed per project so you can set up stats for a number of sites as different projects and view them all from the same account. The free service allows a log of up to 500 entries per project and you can buy blocks of 1000 extra and allocate them between projects as you choose. Having said that, the information just from the free allocation is still great. The system stores lifetime data on page loads and unique visitors etc. And the data limits are only for detailed information such as recent keyword activity.

The second tool I use is Google Analytics

Google analytics is another free service, this time from the search giants Google. Google analytics, or GA for short, tracks visitors in a similar way to StatCounter but can also be used to track conversions - i.e. which visitors from what type of traffic results in a sale or opt-in. Essentially it provides information for Adwords customers (Google’s highly successful pay-per-click system) but it still provides some very useful information which StatCounter doesn’t provide. Firstly you can sort visitors from paid entries (via PPC) and non-paid or natural traffic. Analytics also allows you to export date to XML files or ‘print friendly’ views which are features sdaly lacking from StatCounter.

The general focus of GA is on commerce and a big part of their interface is geared towards tracking ‘goals’ or conversions. A goal could be a sale, an opt-in, a file download etc. You can also track how far along your marketing ‘funnel’ a visitor gets before leaving if they don’t convert which is a very useful way of finding weak points in your marketing system. The other big advantage is that for customers with an Adwords account, GA will track unlimited pageview stats for free!

Best of both worlds…

So which to use? Well I opt for both - there is a certain amount of overlap but since both systems are free (unless you upgrade to a paid StatCounter account) and both have features which the other lacks, a 2 pronged approach will give you the most amount of information. In marketing, knowledge really is power, and with these 2 systems in place you’ll have the power to build on your past and current successes and develop your business to the next level.

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In order to make money online you need to sell products or services - either your own, or someone elses. No matter whether you’re developing and marketing your own products (ebooks, DVDs, membership sites, whatever…) or promoting as an affiliate, you need to be marketing to the right audience.

One of the first, and most important steps in starting an online business is researching the market and developing your niche. It’s no good trying to sell golf equipment to an audience whose primary interest is computing. Sure, there will be visitors who come to your site looking for computer information who also happen to play golf, and you’ll probably make a few sales, but you would do MUCH better offering those visitors a computer related product, or marketing your golf product to an audience of golf enthusiasts.

There are many different ways to choose and develop your niche market. The first thing you should do is think about yourself. What are your hobbies and interests? What are you passionate about? This is probably the niche you’ll do best with for 2 reasons. Firstly, if you’re passionate about it then you will put your heart and sole into it. You won’t mind the early mornings and the late nights to get your business off the ground if you’re working in an area that really interests you. Secondly, if you have a true interest in a subject then you have a head start in developing a product for that niche.

Let’s take our golf example. If you are an enthusiastic golfer you probably know many of the frustrations that golfers have. You know what sort of product or information YOU would be likely to buy that might help you improve your swing, or get better at putting. That ‘inside’ information might not seem like much to you, but it will give you a great starting point for developing content.

Once you’ve decided on what subjects you’re interested in and passionate about you need to know if there is a market. It’s all very well being passionate about building theramins if there are only 10 other people in the world with the same hobby - your target audience is just too small.

Luckily, on the Internet it’s very quick and easy to see at a glance how popular a topic is. For a start, do a quick search on Google. If there are only a handful of sites about your chosen subject you may have chosen too narrow a niche, and may need to expand it. Try searching for variations of the keywords (for the golf niche you might try ‘golf’, ‘golfers’, ‘how to improve my golf swing’, ‘how to play golf’ etc.) and see what turns up. See what content is already available - is it free or commercial? Is it of high quality? Are there gaps in the information that you might be able to fill? Is it fresh and topical content which is being updated regularly, or is most of it stale and out of date?

It’s worth mentioning at this point that you want to be writing all this down. Write down the URLs of sites you find, products about your niche, ideas for possible sub-niches. Keep all the information you gather together so that you can refer back to it when you’re done.

Amazon is a great tool for researching your niche. Not only can you see which are the most popular titles for any subject, you can even read the table of contents for many books and get a break-down of exactly what is covered. Look at the ‘For Dummies’ titles and see if your niche is covered there… The ‘For Dummies’ publishers are anythig but dummies, they know what sells and if they have published a book then there is obviously a market for that niche. Can you expand on it? Can you find a profitable sub-niche - a niche within the niche?

My other favorite way of researching a niche is to use keyword tools. There are a number of great ones but Wordtracker and Google Adwords are my favorites. Both are free (WordTracker have a paid upgrade) and both will give you statistics on how popular keywords are, how much competition they have and give alternative keyword suggestions. Enter a couple of words relating to your niche into WordTracker and you can drill down through lists of related keywords to your heart’s content. Sometimes you’ll hit a dead end and realise that a niche is either too small (no market) or too crowded (too much competition), other times you’ll hit the nail on the head and decide that you have stumbled upon a perfect niche, a goldmine waiting to be dug! More often than not however, you’ll find that there are related niches and sub-niches that demand further investigation.

Don’t rush this vital stage in setting up your business. To be successful you are going to be spending a lot of time dealing with this niche which is what I said right at the beginning that it’s best to choose something that you are both interested in and passionate about. You will be blogging about it, writing articles about it, maybe producing videos about it, doing teleseminars, wraiting ebooks and so much more. You will be totally absorbed by your niche and your market if you’re going to be truely successful and the last thing you want is to be spending all that time working in an area that bores or frustrates you - if you wanted that you could get a J.O.B!

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