Since I first started in business almost 25 years ago I have worked with people who provided services to my business but who were not employees. In the real world we used to call them contractors. Online we seem to call the same thing ‘outsourcing‘.

The bottom line is that the different outsourcing methods, however we call them, enable us to grow our business without taking on the responibility, or cost, of employing a permanent team. With effective use of outsourced work we can become a relatively large business without it ever looking like we are running such a beast.

Anyway, I decided to start a website devoted to outsourcing methods and techniques. The chances are that if you take a look at the site that you will pick up some new tips for how to grow your own business.

The new site is over here: Outsourcing Method Review oh, yes, we are taking a look at the new package on the topic of outsourcing training from the PLRPro guys, Dan and Marc. For a few days you can get in and try everything for just one dollar!

SUBJECT: Doors closing soon (don’t miss out this time)

I wanted to give you a quick heads up…

Like you, I purchased books, software, tools and everything else to try and build a successful online business.

But, one thing has made a huge difference in my success online and I want to share it with you today.

Several years ago, I discovered something called PortalFeeder.

What is PortalFeeder?

Well, it’s not a “product”.

Imagine this…. what if you could tap into a community of hotshot Internet Marketers and pick their brains, get new ideas, strategies, and answers to your top questions… everyday.

Plus, you get access to the same proprietary software and website promotion tools that they use to dominate the search engines.

Also, what if you were assigned a Mentor to help you, guide you, and provide you with a proven blueprint and roadmap for success.

If you had access to all of this, wouldn’t it be easy for you to succeed online?

Yes it would. And I am living proof of it.

PortalFeeder has really changed my life.

I am no longer an ebook junkie. PortalFeeder gives me all the latest software, training, tactics and techniques that I need to get traffic and make money online.

The bad news is… PortalFeeder is “closed” for most of the year. Membership is limited.

However, there is some good news. PortalFeeder is accepting new members again. The Bad news is that the doors are closing again soon.

That’s why I wanted to mention it to you. Once you hit the link below, you will be able to check that you are not too late:

Am I too late to join Portal Feeder

This way, you’ll get more information about PortalFeeder and be among the few people to have aspot within PortalFeeder.

I know you’ll want to find out more about PortalFeeder and what it will do for you.

Here’s the page again. Go check it out before it slips your mind:

Portal Feeder Signup

I hope to see you inside the PortalFeeder private forum. Just look for me and say HI. My nickname in the forum is Andrew W.

      

Very early on in my business I started using outsourcing to do some of the jobs that I did not know how to do. I was lucky in that in the ‘real world’ I had experience of working with external contractors. I applied this knowledge to my online outsourcing. I was lucky but my next experiences cost me a packet.

A few weeks ago was offered the opportunity to review ‘The Outsource Method’ a comprehensive training package from the guys behind PLRPro.com and several other online businesses. Dan and Marc have spilled their guts on the topic of building an online business leveraged using the power of well applied outsourcing techniques.

Here is a listing of the ten main modules in the Outsource Method training course:
Lesson One - Introduction to Outsourcing
Lesson Two - The Light at the End of the Tunnel
Lesson Three - Establishing the System
Lesson Four - Outsource Method System Overview
Lesson Five - Outsource Method Advanced System
Lesson Six - System Creation
Lesson Seven - Final Words
Lesson Eight - Outsourcing for Content
Lesson Nine - Outsourcing for Design
Lesson Ten - Outsourcing for Software

Please, check this out, it might be the best and most actionable training you ever take in your online career!

One problem with doing business online is that it’s easy to treat it as something other than a business. Many business owners treat it as if the ordinary rules of business don’t apply.

In reality, though, business online is the same as business offline: if it isn’t making money, it isn’t working.

You’d think the business world would have learned from the dot-com to dot-bomb crash that attracted investors simply on the basis of, “Hey, we’re a WEBSITE, and websites are bound to make a fortune.”

Yet, here, eight years later, many business owners still find themselves seduced by the aura of the Web, focusing on metrics that are nothing more than a means to an end.

Metrics like backlinks, search engine rankings, and even traffic are valid metrics. But they must be viewed in the context of what effect they are having on generating revenue.

What role do they each of them play?

Backlinks is a term that refers to links from other sites that point to your site. Their value is twofold. First, they are a potential source of visitors. Second, they represent a vote for the page to which it points.

This vote is important when it comes to search engine rankings. With thousands of websites that seem equally relevant as far as what is on their page, the search engines use incoming links, especially ones from high-regarded authority sites, to determine which sites other sites consider most valuable.

Backlinks can affect your revenues indirectly by bringing you visitors and by helping to increase your search engine rankings. In no way, though, do they measure your revenues.

Search engine rankings, similarly, affect your revenues indirectly. High rankings for highly searched terms bring you more visitors, but they do not directly increase or decrease your revenues.

Website traffic comes closest to affecting your revenue. It represents the living, breathing people who visit your site. Yet it still is not the key metric you ultimately want to track.

In the end, the metric that matters is revenue. You can track any of these other metrics to assess general elements of your website’s potential for generating revenue. But never let them distract your attention from revenues.

Even when you plan expenditures that affect these other metrics primarily, your ultimate concern should not be, “What will this do for my backlinks, or rankings, or traffic?” but “What will this do for my bottom line?”

Always make sure that any discussion of website work focuses squarely on what really matters to your business.

Take a look when you first walk in to Wal-Mart or any other big store. Even if you’ve never been in that particular store before, it takes no more than a second to orient yourself.

How people locate what they want in a brick-and-mortar store
Signs above the aisles direct you toward the departments you want. Signs above the shelves tell you what to expect in each row.

Each sign is concise and clear. You won’t find any long product lists or fine detail on them. Everything is digestible at a glance.

So what can you learn from this brick-and-mortar shopping trip? Make your navigation similar to what you saw in the store.

Remember how you found your way around there? You looked for the big sign with the department name. Then you looked at the smaller signs that listed what was in each row.

How to apply brick-and-mortar navigation principles to your website
You can do the same thing with your website navigation. First, identify the links that lead to your main sections of your website. Place them in your navigation bar in a way that really makes them stand out so your visitors’ eyes will naturally be drawn to them.

Then identify the key links that lead to any subsections of those sections. Place them in your navigation under their parent sections. Make them less noticeable than your main section links so it is clear that they are subservient to your main section links.

What you want visitors to do is to scan the main section headings in your navigation and find the one that suits them best. Then you want them to the scan the subheadings to narrow their search. If you do this right, it should take your visitors two seconds to find a link to click as they move toward what they want.

But can’t my site visitors find their way on their own?
Why is it important to break things down like this? By organizing their search into easy-to-scan blocks, you build their confidence that they will find what they want quickly and easily. They could wade through a long list of links, but you might lose them before they find what they want.

Going back to the Wal-Mart analogy, the Wal-Mart greeter could hand customers a long list of all the racks and what was on them as they came in. They could count on the customers to read the list to locate what they wanted and do away with all the signs. But how many customers would get discouraged and give up before they found what they wanted?

Keep your navigation simple and easy to scan. Put it where visitors expect it to be. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t draw distinctions that match your in-house terminology but that could be confusing to visitors.

Think of your website as if it were a brick-and-mortar store. What would you do to help customers find what they want if they had to walk through a physical store? Then arrange your navigation so their eyes and their mouse can bring them to their destination with as much ease and confidence as they would if their feet were doing the walking.

Ecommerce Facts
Online spending in 2007 increased at a rate of anywhere from 18% to 21% compared against the same quarter in 2006. (http://www.census.gov/mrts/www/data/html/07Q4.html)

Fears of recession are not affecting most online marketers. A February 2008 survey showed that 43% of marketers surveyed plan to increase their online marketing budgets for 2008. 37% plan to maintain them at 2007 levels. Even in time of cutbacks, marketers are finding their customers more and more online. (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006267&src=dp1_home)

When pressed by Wall Street to explain how his bank was preparing for the double whammy of recession and the subprime mortgage crisis, the CEO of Bankrate, Inc., outlined how his company’s strategy for search engine optimization was helping his business weather the storm. (http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3629390)

Today I came upon a very useful blog post describing several tools (almost all free) designed to help social marketers and optimizers to gain an insight into what real people are doing, are interested in and are writing about.

These tools will help internet marketers, search engine marketers and social marketers to do research, find niches and to some testing of their ideas almsot all for free. The cool thing is that Marty, the author takes care to explain the utility of the tools and provides links, for those less clear about the concepts, to learn from.

The site is very useful and well worth a read with a cup of coffee or two.

As I was moderating today’s articles on my article directory I came across a piece that I wanted to share. There are not many articles that I see that I’d want to share, after all how many articles on acne or getting your girlfriend back does the world really need.

This one is special, it is about Search Engine Marketing and carries an important message.

Here is the link: Search Engine Marketing Parable

I apologise in advance if the page does funny things, the site is still a little flakey, but much healthier than a few weeks ago.,

The following is a review of an ebook I bought a few days ago. I have to say that it is one of the most powerful documents that I have read recently. I urge you to read the review and hasten off to buy a copy of ‘The Forbidden Keys to Persuasion’ without further ado!

Book Title: Forbidden Keys to Persuasion
Author: Blair Warren
Website: http://forbiddenkeys.com/

My Rating: 8/10 (for what is missing) (10/10 for what is presented)

This 142 page ebook in PDF format is the content of a series of eclasses along with homework and Q & A’s from an e-course run by Blair Warren on the topic of how to use the techniques and tools that work for con artists, cult leaders, magicians and others to gain our ready acceptance of ideas and actions that we might otherwise choose to reject.

The premise of the document is that most people do not understand or use a couple of fundamental truths about humanity, that these truths form the basis of certain techniques that have been used for many, many years by demagogues, grifters and snake oil sellers for ‘bad’. Blair contends that knowing these secrets enables one to benefit from their use for ‘good’.
The text covers an introduction to the the basic, and perhaps distasteful, concepts underlying the following chapters and then proceeds to build an understanding of how to use these concepts in a systematic form in order to enable our own personal success.

Here are the topics covered in Blairs book:
*Two ugly truths no one wants to talk about
*Why people don’t respond to “honest” communication and what they WILL respond to
*The Masking of Intent
*The Achilles Heel of the Human Mind
*Our 7 “Hidden” Addictions
*An ad that changed history
*The Mechanics of Cult Mind Control
*How to Create a Context of Power
*The Power of a God Complex
…and more!

I came into contact with this ebook as a result of a discussion between (in the main) copywriters and I read the sales page and scanned the ebook in that context. However it is MUCH more than a copywriter’s aid. Used in full the knowledge presented here WILL enable one to have a better love life, earn more money and to garner respect and social esteem.
How do I know this?
Well, many years ago and in a different life I was trained to use these concepts as a manager and consultant and whilst it was in a different context I gotta say that this is well worth buying.
I STILL find myself applying techniques covered here albeit with less discipline and the concepts DO feed into the life that I love today.

If you want to learn how to ‘press buttons’ in personal and business relationships then read this document.
If you understand that persuasion is the heart of selling (and thus marketing) and that ALL management is an ongoing sales/persuasion process then this book will ring lots of bells.
If the foregoing is outside of your knowledge, read the book and internalise it - it’ll change your life.
If you want avoid falling for the ‘latest greatest’ learn from this book.
If you NEED to write persuasive copy or close sales then this book is a goldmine.

Read Forbidden Keys to Persuasion to avoid falling for the false promises of shysters and even honest liars.

My only criticism of the document is in terms of what is missing. I picked up on this material as a result of my training in psychometrics (personality assay and analysis) a couple of decades ago with one of the top firms in the world, in this field, with a validated tool and system. So, for me, the aspects of personality are an important bulwark to this knowledge.
Fortunately the work as presented stands well on its own and is of universal application, the personality aspects are strong ‘force multipliers’ but are not key to the material.

For those interested in understanding the personality aspects that, in my opinion, go hand in hand with this material take a look here: http://www.thomasinternational.net/ and perhaps read the seminal work by Dr William Moulton Marston: ‘Emotions of Normal People - still in print and available from Amazon for just over $30.

This is NOT hocus pocus ‘magic’. Whilst this is not a scientific treatise Blair does use supporting material from relevant experts and the concepts have been studied elsewhere in an objective manner. I strongly recommend that as owners of businesses we owe it to ourselves to understand and use this stuff!

Oh, Blair has also provided a ‘taster’ a very interesting and eye opening document that’ll cost nothing to get, not even an email address. He is giving a document called: The One-Sentence Persuasion Course. Without trying to give too much away, in a just a few words, he encapsulates EVERYTHING one needs to get into any sales document. Get The One-Sentence Persuasion Course NOW!

Andrew Wilson.

Internet Marketing Video: Business In A Box

It is not as easy as we sometimes think to get into the field of internet marketing. That’s where Andrew Wilson’s Internet Marketing Videos will help you.

Internet marketing is not easy and every month the field changes. We need to learn about new products to offer, learn about new SEO techniques, sometimes Google change algorithms and our pages get lower rankings.

For a long time I have been building websites for internet marketers, the sites work well and are very popular but I, and my clients always faced the same problem…

How could I provide the training they needed at a price they could afford whilst still keeping the quality at a level that made ME happy to share it.

In the end there was only one way. I needed to set up a membership system that enabled my clients to learn about internet marketing from A to Z and where the content could be updated every month to enable members to keep up with the latest developments.

So, that is exactly what I did. Andrew Wilson’s Internet Marketing Videos is a monthly membership that each and every month brings new videos, a selection of ebooks and software all on the same topic - this month, for example, we are concentrating upon SEO (search engine optimization).

In fact we have gone one step further and every month all the members of Andrew Wilson’s Internet Marketing Videos will receive a complete ‘business in a box’ complete to the last detail with the tools that you will need to start to make money using the training provided that month.

Please pop on over and take a look!

Andrew Wilson’s Internet Marketing Videos

I have been thinking about and working with keywords for quite a while but I have never been really big on keyword lists per se, they always seem too limiting because they, too often, do not reflect what people actually do.
Anyway the following post is about a way I found to develop keyword lists that were a reflection of the use and thoughts of ‘real people’.

We are moving away from simple keywords as being the definition of our sites and content. To be honest I have always felt that humans are much more intelligent than a simple keyword list gives credit for.

So we are seeking a way of associating what people are thinking with the language they use to express those thoughts when they are using the internet as an interface to our websites -yes?

And we are learning that the systems are mightily more complex than we frst thought, but even now we try to distill that complexity into simple systems - themes, silos etc.

Anyway, I was playing with my the plugin I have been using for my automated WordPress blogs - the automated blogs.
At the same time I was looking at a coupleof my original autoblogging experiments that led to the automated blogs format - I had built some sites that I called ‘meta search sites’ and then monetised with Adsense.

One of the sources for content that I experimented with was rss feeds from social bookmarking sites such as Del.ico.us and Furl where I made a custom rss feed from searches on keyword pairs.
The script did its thing and I then got a whole load of links, most of which did not contain the keyword pair in them. But all were on the theme of the keyword pair.

Hmmmm…..???? Thinks Andrew.
All of these links are here because people thought that they had an association with my keyword pair - and in the search, but not the feed, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of the buggers. How can I use this. You see almsot all the tags that are used to identify posts are done by humans, of course there is a little noise from automated bookmarking systems but it seems to be quite small and the larger social sites work to keep the noise level down.

It seemed to me that if I could take these RSS feeds and do some (as yet unspecified or considered) analysis on the words coming out I could get a picture of the concepts people connect with my keyword and the words/phrases they use to describe the concepts.
Does this make any sense?
For now I simply do analysis by hand, item by item. It opens up one’s eyes to see the strange ways in which folks’ minds work.

So, now I have a basic, free and simple tool that gives me lists of keywords that people associate with my initial keywords - lists of word synonyms and more importantly THOUGHT synonyms.

To get the same effect one simply makes the custom rss feed and put the URL into one’s rss reader. The nice thing is that the output consists of little more than the title of the post and the link itself saving a laod of work of reading.

It seems to me to be very neat to be seeing how real people see the conncetions between my search terms and the greater themes.