I’ve been building a site over at http://quaywords.com to provide services to local business in my area, though I’ll probably roll things out farther afield now, based on the updated edition of Tim Ferris’ “Four Hour Work Week” which arrived this week from Amazon. It helped me refocus with regards to carrying out all of the labour in my business personally, instead outsourcing the work to freelance providers on a job-to-job basis. I’ve chosen to use http://Elance.com on both my forays into the whole idea of outsourcing.

I’ve basically been testing a few freelance service providers this week with a view to having them work on projects for my clients in the near future. I’ve had a Facebook Fan Page created, and a couple of different email message sets for my own Aweber autoresponder – yet to receive the second message set as I write this…

The Facebook Fan Page has come back  fine, with the test costing only a fraction of the cost I’ll be happy to outsource client tasks at. I thought it best to combine my own need to have the Fan Page created, with the need to have confidence in service providers before letting them loose on client projects. I’ve responded with a few required changes to my freelance provider, and I’m sure things will run smoothly with this specific provider. Incidentally, I’m in the UK, whereas she’s in South Africa, and no communication issues whatsoever – despite the distance.

The first email message set though, is a different story. I was looking for a message set which would encourage and motivate my affiliates to continue to promote the services on offer, and to help them understand how best to carry out promotion. I figured the affiliates may need some help with promotional techniques, given that they’re likely to be business owners themselves, with little affiliate experience. I’d also like to recruit my own clients as affiliates too…

The message set created is basically waaaaaaaaay off track, and doesn’t really relate to the kind of people I believe my affiliates will turn out to be. Without going into too much detail, it’s clear that I should’ve spent more time personally communicating with my provider, as opposed to assuming telepathy would do the job. I reckon with a little more guidance upfront, the message set would’ve come back far closer to the kind of thing I’m looking for.

That’s really the big learning point for me. It takes a little time to create a Job profile on http://Elance.com, which is fine given that the job itself would take so much longer. However……………..

If you’re going to have a stab at outsourcing some of your tasks to a freelancer, do yourself a favour and create an accurate Job profile or proposal in the first place. There’s no sense in earning yourself some extra time to work on additional projects, when you have to spend all of your time tweaking the jobs you’ve outsourced.

My Facebook Fan Page designer used my own site at http://QuayWords.com to create the Facebook Fan Page, and I was able to leave most of that task up to her “proffessional judgement” as she suggested. Great stuff there, and the job is on track to come up trumps.

Not every freelance provider you use will think like you, and have the same approach as you!!!

Do yourself a favour and give them a fair crack at getting it right, by taking a little extra time up front to give clear and precise guidelines. Maybe once we’ve established a good working relationship with our providers will we have the opportunity to take our eyes off of the ball a little.

What’s your experience of working with freelancers? – leave me a comment below this post…

I came across a forum post I liked the look of and wanted to draw your attention to it – click here to view the original post.

I’ve made a quick screen cast style video to help you understand why the post is so insightful, and hopefully to inspire you to go out and do the same thing… It’s not a difficult concept! Trust me.

Check out the video below, and as always I love to get comments here on the blog.

I received a question via my YouTube channel a few days ago, and thought it may be useful to post the reply here on the blog.

The question is from YouTube user MrKristianNelson:

“Can you install [Google Analytics] on your own YouTube channel? If so, how?”.

The short answer is a resounding, NO… But there is hope!

Watch the video below to find out how to go about researching the traffic viewing your YouTube videos, with ideas on how to benefit from the data you find.

As always, it’s great to hear back from blog readers and video viewers, so do stay in touch!

Leave a comment here on the blog with any questions, or requests for future videos.

Without the landing page, there’s nowhere to drive traffic… at least, there’d be no way in which to convert site traffic to residing on our subscription lists.

Landing pages come in all shapes and sizes online, but I wanted to create a reference here for you, of a few solid sources of landing page templates to download.

All of these links are live currently, but feel free to leave a comment if you find that any of these links have expired – I can go ahead and figure out some new links if that happens.

Okay, here are three of my favourite squeeze page resources – those available via the first two links are at work in my business:

Download 1

“Want a Squeeze Page Template That Gets 65% Opt In Conversion… For FREE?”

Rich Schefren is responsible for this killer headline, and you can find it at the head of a stunning blog post over at his Strategic Profits blog – click the headline to check it out.

The post includes a video interview of a pair of list building legends, literally, in Sean Casey and Tellman Knudson. That interview alone, posted for public consumption on a blog, contains strategies that can establish your online business overnight.

Okay, so the “overnight success” may come after a couple weeks of hard work, but I was blown away by the insights contained in that post… and you can download 3 tried and tested landing pages to plug into your own business.

Download 2

“FREE Landing Page Template”

What do you get if you google the search term… “FREE Landing Page Template”?

Nope, it’s not a joke. You’re likely to stumble across the FREE Landing Page Template available over at DotComPreneur.com.

I’ve been aware of this template for a while now, and I do like it. Again, it’s at work in my own online business.

I actually posted about this template on one of my other blogs, and saw organic traffic improve considerably. So it’s not a bad idea, if you like the template, to go ahead and blog about it too… then you’ll have a new landing page template, and increased traffic to your site!

Download 3

“We’ve made building and customizing affiliate web sites using WordPress very easy.”

Well, if it does “what it says on the tin”, then the affiliate world is a shinier, happier place. This is the only one of my recommendations not currently at work in my own business, but I like what I see, and I like the guys promoting.

“What do top affiliate marketers and online moneymakers say about Affiliate Theme?” – sounds like another joke, right? Actually, there’s a few top name bloggers putting their names behind this currently… Yaro Starak, Zac Johnson and John Reese to name a few…

It seems to be a solid option for using WordPress to create landing pages. Maybe it’s the way to go for your next project… or maybe you could use any of the above templates!!

Let me know what you think !!

I interviewed a friend of mine a few days ago, who had just that morning opened an Aweber account, to begin building his list of email addresses. He’s a fellow drummer (we met as drum tutors a few years back) and is targeting an interesting niche of web users…

As a working drummer, Alex has earned his full time living as a musician for a number of years, but he’s leaning towards earning money online as an internet marketer.

If you’re not really sure what to do with an Aweber autoresponder account once you have one, you’re going to struggle to put it to good use and fulfill it’s real potential – it’s a stunning addition to any marketing arsenal, but we’ll have to be savvy when we put it to use.

In the video, we chat through how Alex intends to put his new Aweber account to good use (he’s put together a solid report to give away free to his subscribers) and the strategy he’ll pursue afterwards.

Click the video below to start watching… (if you need a bit of a laugh too, you should check out the second video which is made up of a few bloopers I caused !!)

Please do leave a comment before you head off… it’s always welcome !!

I’d like to invite you to watch the video posted below, but most of all to leave a comment below the post.

My biggest hope is that I can help you, as you grow with this blog, to come to the place of making a consistent income from your home computer. I’ve been at it for a while now, but have needed the helping hand of others who are successful online, to help me by sharing their strategies with me.

Please do ask away, and I intend to answer every single one of your questions relating to how you should go about making money online.

Hope you enjoy the video today, and the blog in general over time…

Links mentioned in the video…

http://AddIncomeOnline.com/blog
http://Twitter.GraemeSutherland.TV
http://Blog.GraemeSutherland.TV
http://YouTube.com/TheGraemeSutherland

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