If you haven’t completed day 6 of the SEO course, you can review: DAY 6: Mapping Your Site Structure before starting this post.

“It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.”

- Robert Green Ingersoll -

Understanding links from a SEO point of view

Your ability to design a SEO friendly site comes from your understanding of Link juice flow and how you can leverage its power and compensate its weaknesses.

The lesson today will help you have a better understanding of what is link juice flow and how it works.

Why Link Juice Flow?

In order for your pages to be indexed (yes, remember pages get indexed, not sites), they first need to be crawled.

Using a proper site structure like we learned yesterday in “Day 6: Mapping Your Site Structure ” highly helps and increases your chances to meet this first requirement.

After a page has been crawled, if this one meets the minimum requirements of the search engines, it will be indexed.

In Google a page can be indexed either in the primary index (that is where you want to be) or the supplementary index (for the pages that are relevant enough to be indexed, but don’t have sufficient authority yet to figure in the primary index).

When it comes to link juice, only pages from the primary index in Google can transmit some; that is strictly from a SEO point of view,
backlinks from pages in the supplementary index are worthless.

You can easily identify those pages as they don’t have PR (not PR0 but really no PR).

Link juice is transmitted by links between different pages from the primary index only. Those links can both be internal or external.

You can identify pages from the primary index as they all carry a PageRank score ranging from 0 to 10.

The higher the PageRank, the more link juice each link from that page can transmit.

If you want to read more about PageRank, I invite you to read my old article Understanding Google PageRank.

How to Get a Page in the Primary Index?

For a page to get into the primary index of Google, it needs to receive a sufficient amount of link juice from other pages.

For the sake of explanation, let’s assume that what you need to get a page in the primary index is 10 points, and that each inbound link is worth 1 point; this would mean that this page would require at least 10 inbound links of 1 point value to be listed in the primary index.

How much link juice can a page give?

A page gives out about 80-90% of the link juice it receives.

This means that if a page receives 10 points, it can only give out 8-9 points.

In addition, that point value is divided by the number of links on the page

Also, there’s a restriction of 1 link value maximum from one page to another one. Any additional link towards a page already linked from the current page will not double the amount of link juice passed on towards that page, but instead half the amount of link juice passed on from each of those links.

Special cases

Under special circumstances, it is possible to prevent a link from giving away or sharing some of the link juice of a page.

The most popular methods being:

• Rel=”nofollow” attribute on the link.
• Unreadable links like JavaScript link or Flash link (Recent news
  would indicate that Google may now be able to read those.
  But I have yet to confirm this information).
• Meta Robots nofollow.

The link attribute rel=”nofollow” introduced by Google will prevent a page to give away link juice to the target page of the link, however it will not redistribute the excess of link juice and will absorb it just like a normal link.

Unreadable links however will bounce the link juice as they are completely ignored, just as if they didn’t exist on page.

If you are interested to learn more about this attribute, I invite you to read my posts:

• To “DoFollow” or to “NoFollow” that is the question…
• Can we survive the “NoFollow” Black hole?
• Did The “NoFollow” Attribute Really Change?

The Meta Robot NoFollow is an extremely powerful command and will have effect page wide. None of the links on that page will be followed or passed any link juice.

Exercise

The only assignment today is to read this lesson and make sure that you understand clearly how link juice flows and can be controlled.

In addition, you must learn to identify links that won’t give you link juice as they may end up being a waste of your efforts during a backlink campaign.

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts below.

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If you haven’t completed day 5 of the SEO course, you can review: DAY 5: Evaluating Your Keyword Difficulty before starting this post.

“Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.”

- Fred Brooks -

This is where you make your site SEO friendly

Before we go anywhere else in this course, I want to remind you that all the lessons we just went through represent all the homework you are supposed to do BEFORE you go and see your web designer, and not after!

Today, we are going to take all the keywords we have selected, evaluated, grouped and analyzed, and organized them to start mapping our site structure and optimization strategy.

3 Tiers Structure

If you are not familiar with site structure or web design, I invite you to read my post “Improve Your Crawling Rate”.

Search engines spiders on your site are like a man in a shopping mall.

As long as you have a main alley, shops on the left, shops on the right it’s cool to go around that, but if I have to start to go through one small door, and another one, and another one, I quickly become confused of what is where, and more importantly, I lose interest in finding out.

The same concept applies with search engines spiders, if your navigation is too complex or too deep, the crawler loses interest to visit or index your pages.

Keep it clear and keep it simple, it works both with the search engines and your human visitors too!

That being said, the site structure we are interested in is the one called the 3 Tiers Structure.

In this type of structure, no page in your site is further than 2 clicks away.

This is not only good for the search engines, but also good for your visitors, which is very important.

Here’s the summary of such site structure:

• Tier 1: Index page
• Tier 2: Category pages
• Tier 3: Content/Products pages

By now, you may have already noticed that this is looking strangely familiar with the exercise I gave in Day 4: Grouping Your Keywords…

Mapping Your Site

From this point on, use whatever tool is convenient to you, be it imaging software, mind mapping software, pen and paper, iPhone, etc…

Tier 1: Index Page

The first tier of your site should be your index page, or homepage.

Remember the keywords you grouped as your niche keywords, the ones with volume over 100,000? These are the ones you want to put in that box.

Now, I also need a dominant term for my homepage that will allow me to optimize simultaneously for as many of my keywords as possible.

In my case, I have 2 keywords “nail polish” and “opi nail polish”; obviously there’s no need (and it’s not recommended either) to use “nail polish” twice as it’s already part of “opi nail polish”.

By choosing OPI Nail Polish as my main keyword, what I accomplish here is:

• Optimizing for OPI Nail Polish
• Optimizing for Nail Polish
• Optimizing for OPI Nail
• Optimizing for OPI Polish
• Optimizing for OPI
• Optimizing for Nail
• Optimizing for Polish

I’m doing all of this at the same, staying true to my niche “Nail Polish”, yet optimizing for a term that is much less competitive.

So here’s my Tier 1:

• “OPI Nail Polish” will probably be my page title.
• “Nail Polish” and “OPI Nail Polish” may be my H2 tags onpage.

Tier 2: Category Pages

Much less thinking here since we already have established our categories previously; however we want to make sure that they all are linked from the homepage of your site:

For categories like “Nail Polish Colors” and “OPI Colors” we’ll apply
the same blending technique as for the Tier 1 keywords, ideally making sure that those categories pages are linked to using the different variations of keywords to cover them all from different locations on your site.

Tier 3: Content Pages

This is where you list and link all your content keywords.

Just follow the same procedure you have been using for Tier 1 and Tier 2.

Special Note for e-commerce sites

There’s another Keyword element you must be very wary about for your product pages, and that’s the buying/commercial intent of a keyword.

Understanding this difference is what makes a site converts like crazy, or one with a lot of traffic not selling anything.

There’s a huge different those 2 keywords:

• Nail Polish Remover
• Nail Polish Removal

In this example, it’s quite easy to spot the difference, if you are selling a product, you must optimize for the first keyword as people who search for “nail polish remover” are looking for a product; while people searching for “nail polish removal” are seeking for information on how to remove nail polish!

So make sure that your content will match the intention of your visitors!

There’s a neat free tool available online to calculate for you automatically the commercial intent of keyword: Detecting Online Commercial Intention.

URL Structure

Based on the diagram you just produced, you should be able to map your URL structure too like this:

/
/nail-polish-colors
/black-nail-polish
/china-glaze-nail-polish
/…

/opi-colors
/opi-nail-colors
/opi-new-colors
/…

/fingernail-polish
/nails-polish
/nail-varnish
/…

/nail-polish-remover
/nail-polish-remover
/nail-polish-removal
/…

/nail-hardeners
/nail-hardeners
/nail-top-coat
/…

Exercise

Today’s exercise is to use your keyword research from Part 1 to produce 2 maps of your future site:

• One graphical map, that is visually appealing and easy to
  understand.
• One text map that will provide you with the recommended
  SEO URL structure for your site.

At this point, even if you weren’t to complete the other lessons of this Site Structure Mastery part, if you were to produce these information to a web design firm, you’d already slash down the cost of your service by half at least.

Not only you’d be saving money, but you’ll also be sure to get a site structure that does what you need it to do.

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts below.

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your bonus copy of my book "Make Money From The New Internet: Web
2.0"

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If you haven’t completed day 4 of the SEO course, you can review: DAY 4: Grouping Your Keywords before starting this post.

“Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.”

- Oscar Wilde -

Don’t bite more than you can chew!

This week, we have been working very hard on our keywords, from assessing our niche, building a keyword list, refining this list, grouping and classifying our keywords, there’s one last thing to do with our keywords, and that’s evaluating their difficulty.

Before you start, you want to make sure that you are going to optimize for the right keywords in the right order, or you may just fall into the swarm of sites that are never found on internet.

The truth is that 99% of those pages are no competition whatsoever to you, especially considering how well we already have prepared our keywords already!

Your competition lies with the other people with the same knowledge as you, the people in the “know” about SEO.

Forget about KEI

One of the most popular way people use to evaluate a keyword potential is the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI). That’s a huge mistake.

If the core theory of the KEI is correct, its real life application demonstrates that this index is very flawed.

Your “real” competition is not the number of result pages returned by Google during a search query, that’s only the “virtual” competition volume.

SEO 101

Anybody with basic knowledge of SEO is a potential threat to you, so you need to identify those people quickly.

In SEO it’s widely known that having your keyword in your page title is crucial and dramatically increase your chances to rank well in the search engines.

Your first task is then to identify those people, and for this, Google has a command line that makes this task a breeze: allintitle.

Since having your keyword in your page title is one of the most important on-page SEO factor, we must know who are doing so.

In the search field of Google, type the following command:

allintitle: “your keyword”

The number of results returned this time is the number of pages that have your keyword (in this example “nail polish”) in their page title.

Re-open your basic keyword list and add 3 columns:

• All In Title
• All In Anchor
• Difficulty

Your keyword spreadsheet should now looks like this:

Repeat the process for each of your keywords.

Good job, you know already a much more realistic number as too what your real competition is, we are not done yet!

Remember, SEO is a combination of Onsite Optimization and Offsite Optimization.

Obviously, the page title is an important component of on-site
optimization, and we have covered this area with the command “allintitle”.

It’s now time to check the competition level at the off-site optimization level, and luckily for us, Google also has a command line for this: allinanchor.

In the search field of Google, type the command:

The number of results returned this time is the one of all the pages which are linked to by backlinks with your keyword in their anchor text. This is where the real competition lies!

Repeat the process for each of your keywords and update your spreadsheet accordingly.

Evaluating Keyword Difficulty

Aware of the information we just collected, here’s the formula I came up with and use myself to evaluate keyword difficulty; some of you may want to adjust or not this formula to their own flavor, personally, I ‘m satisfied with the results returned.

Here are the three elements we must keep in check with this formula:

1. How many pages have your keywords in the page title.
2. How many pages have your keywords as anchor text of their
   backlinks.
3. How many pages have both keywords in the page title, and
   keywords as anchor text of their backlinks.

Since someone who uses their keywords both in the page title and as anchor text for their backlinks is obviously somebody literate in SEO, I decided to attribute them double value.

Since the raw number is quite big, I decided to divide it by 1,000 to simplify the results.

So here’s the formula:

Keyword Difficulty = (([#allintitle] + [#allinanchor]) + ([#combo]*2)) / 1,000

Here’s how I rate the difficulty scale:

• Less than 1 – Extremely Easy
• Between 1 and 10 – Easy
• Between 11 and 100 – Medium
• Between 101 and 1,000 – Challenging
• Between 1,001 and 10,000 – Very Hard
• Over 10,000 – Extremely Hard

Calculating the Value of [combo]

Here’s the method I use to calculate the value of [combo], that is how many pages have the keyword in anchor and title.

I’m not aware of any real accurate way to know such thing for sure, so I’ll just go with the difference between the allinanchor and allintitle (if you have one to share, you’re welcome!).

That is if 10 results have the keyword in their title and 23 have the keyword in their anchor text, I will assume that 10 of them have both keywords in anchor and title, and 13 only in anchor.

Alternatively if there were 23 results with keywords in their title and only 10 with keyword in their anchor text, I will assume that 10 of them have both keywords in the anchor text and title, and only 13 with the keyword in title only.

Do not waste your time trying to get exact numbers as the results are ever changing, go with the best
guesses and what makes sense for you.

Apply the formula and fill in the difficulty score for each of your keywords.

Optimizing for low difficulty keywords will allow you to rank quickly and easily in the search engines.

Current Example

The best way for me to demonstrate this to you is to share an example with one of my recent post: Google Keyword Density SEO Tutorial.

After researching the keywords about Keywords density, I found 2 different categories:

• Keywords Density Tools
• Keywords Density Information

I chose to go with the Keyword density information selection, and got to select 7 different keywords, all complementary to the main keyword “Keyword Density”

Here are the search engine results I got in a bit more than a week:

As you can see, it works, and that’s in Google alone, in fact I already have several #1 ranking in other search engines for those terms too, and yes they do bring me traffic from the search engines already!

That was easy!

Going after “Keyword Density” directly would have been a very foolish move, so instead I went on with optimizing for 7 other super easy complementary keywords, which resulted in not only having me rank well for those, but also highly increase my ranking for the competitive “Keyword Density“.

Exercise

Today’s exercise is the last part of the SEO keywords research topic and your graduation day as Keywords Master!

For each of your keywords within the keywords groups your created, research the competition using the commands “allintitle” and “allinanchor” and evaluate your keyword difficulty.

Re-organize your keywords within each keyword group based on their difficulty as this will make it clearer for you to know which keyword you should optimize for first.

In the next part of this SEO course, we will be looking at the importance of site structures and more of the technical aspects.

Get
your bonus copy of my book "Make Money From The New Internet: Web
2.0"

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If you haven’t completed day 3 of the SEO course, you can review: Qualifying Your Keywords before starting this post.

“If you don’t drive your business, you will be driven out of business.”

- B. C. Forbes -

Congratulation to you on your hard work

Today, we are going to use the nicely refined Keywords list we build yesterday and start to sort our keywords into different groups.

This task will give us a great head start as to how our site should be designed and which keywords should be optimized for, so be very serious with this task too.

Sorting Your Keywords by Search Volume

The very first step you should do with your list of Keywords, is to sort them by Volume.

In order to do that, just copy your keywords list into another spreadsheet with just the “keywords” and “Searches” columns as the picture on the next page.

The easiest and quickest way to sort your keyword is by using the sort & filter function of Excel.

Your keyword list should now be sorted from the keywords with the most search volume to the ones with the least search volume.

We now are going to create a new spreadsheet with 4 columns based on their search volume and copy our keywords in each of them accordingly:

• Over 100,000 – The main keywords for your site should be
  within this category.
• From 10,001 to 100,000 – The keywords that will define the
  different categories for your site should be in this category.
• From 3,001 to 10,000 – This category should contain potential
  primary keywords for your posts or pages on your site.
• Less than 3,000 – This category should contain potential
  secondary keywords for your posts or pages on your site.

Now I understand that some niche will still be viable with a much lower traffic volume, if this is your case, just scale down proportionally the numbers.

Deriving Categories for Your Site

Look at the list of Keywords you have in your second category, and group them thematically as follows:

Through this process, we just found out what are the main categories of our site.

Now, if you look a bit closer to the list, you’ll see that it is possible to refine it a bit more just look at the Nail Color Category:

As you can see, there are some colors listed there, obviously those should not be categories despite their high search volume, however they certainly must be some of your top pages of content to optimize for.

• “Nail Color”, “Nail Colors”, “Nail Polish Color” and “Nail Polish
  Colors” are one and same category.
• “OPI Color” and “OPI Colors” are one and same category.

Through what I see for the moment, my nail polish site would have the following categories:

• Nail Polish Color(s)
• OPI Color(s)
• Fingernail Polish
• Nail Polish Remover
• Nail Hardener

This is not a definite list, but a great start already.

Predefine your site content for each category

Repeat the same process for each column of keywords you have by grouping your keywords under each of the categories you just defined.

We now have a gross overview of what content should fit under each category for our site.

In the process of adding more keywords under the categories, you may come across some keywords that don’t fit in any of your primary categories, at this point; you may just have to create a new category just for them or consider whether or not they really are relevant to your site.

Exercise

Today’s task will require a lot of thinking on your side, as well as organization!

If all is well, by the end of the day you should have all your keywords sorted in such a way that you already have an idea of what your site structure should be since you already know your main theme, your site categories, and the primary content for each of those categories.

We are not going too deep in details about the keywords for each post as this will be further discussed in a later lesson. Right now, we are trying to build a solid and sound base for our site.

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If you haven’t completed day 2 of the SEO course, you can review: Building Your Keywords List before starting this post.

“High achievement always takes place in the framework of high expectation.”

- Charles Kettering -

It’s now time to refine your keywords list

Yesterday, you have collected a list of keywords as per the suggestions of different tools and software. That’s good, but not enough.

There’s a fact that a machine is nothing more than a machine in the end.

Only you will truly be able to tell whether or not a keyword is relevant to your site or not.

Reality Check

The real success of a site doesn’t come from traffic, it comes from targeted traffic.

There’s no point to optimize your site for a keyword that has nothing to do or very little with your site, you may get some one time traffic visitors alongside suffering a loss of relevancy and credibility as per the quality of your content.

If you are offering medicals services in Denver, there’s no point optimizing for “medical services in New York” just because it’s suggested by a keyword tool.

Why Qualifying Your Keywords?

There are two major reasons as to why you should qualify your
keywords:

1. As I just explained, to prevent time wasting by optimizing for irrelevant keywords.
2. To reassess your “real” potential traffic volume within your niche.

How to Quality Your Keywords?

Start by opening the keyword list you built yesterday, remember your list should look like that:

For today, we are going to add 2 columns to our keywords list template:

• Site Relevancy
• Adjusted Traffic Volume

Your keyword list spreadsheet should now looks like this:

For each of your keywords, ask yourself honestly how relevant the keyword actually is to your site.

To simplify the work, we’ll divide them in 3 categories:

• Relevant– the keyword will be attributed a 100% relevancy.
• Somewhat Relevant– the keyword will be attributed a 50% relevancy.
• Irrelevant– the keyword will be attributed a 0% relevancy.

Now for each of your keywords, in the column “site relevancy”, add either “100”, “50”, or “0”.

Once you are done, your list should now look like that:

Here’s the logic behind those few keywords examples:

Nail Polish – This term is what I want to sell in my online store, so I consider that it is 100% relevant to what I’m doing, or planning to do.

Fingernail Polish – This term is a variation of the term “nail polish” and one of the primary products I’m planning to sell, so I give it 100% relevancy.

Nail Polish Remover – This is another product that I’ll be selling on my site, so it’s 100% relevant to what I’m going to do.

Free Nail Polish – All what I’m going to do is about selling products
and not getting them for free, so this term is not for me at all, I’ll give it a 0% relevancy.

Wholesale Nail Polish – My primary objective is to retail nail polish, but if opportunity comes, I may consider wholesaling some of my stock, so I would say that it is somewhat relevant to what I’m doing, and give it a 50% relevancy.

Finally, on the last column “adjusted traffic volume” use a basic formula (or compute it yourself) now returning the weighted Keyword search volume, where if the keyword is 100% relevant, then 100% of the search volume will be carried over; if the keyword is only 50% relevant, then half of the search volume will be carried over; lastly if the keyword is considered irrelevant, none of the search volume will be carried over.

Once you are done, your keyword list should look like this:

Niche Viability Second Check

I now want you to sum up the weighted search volume of all the keywords in your list with exception for the actual niche term and any of its broad term components.

In my case, my niche term is “nail polish” I will then exclude this term, as well as “nail”, “nails”, and “polish”, as being broader, they certainly carry more volume but also much less relevancy and are outside of our niche.

With that new weighted search volume do a second check with what your minimum search volume for the viability of your site should be.

If you pass the test, then you are doing a good job, if you fail the test, you may want to reevaluate your niche choice from Day 1.

Exercise

Today’s task consists of qualifying your keywords in your niche following the different steps as explained in today’s lesson.

In addition, you’ll have double check the viability of your niche, and restart the entire process in case of failure.

Lastly, sort your keywords in the 3 categories of relevancy; you may keep somewhere the keywords that where somewhat relevant for later use, however you can discard the ones that were considered as irrelevant during the qualification of your keywords.

In the next lesson, we’ll be working with your now refined list of 100% relevant keywords.

Keep in mind that it’s much easier to write content for keywords that are relevant to your site and niche than trying to produce content for keywords that are irrelevant to what you are doing or offering, even if within the same industry.

Tomorrow, we’ll learn how to group the keywords within our refined list in order to make them more usable for us.

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If you haven’t completed day 1 of the SEO course, you can review: Analyzing The Viability Of Your Niche before starting this post.

“What is the distance between someone who achieves their goals consistently and those who spend their lives following? The extra mile.”

- Gary Ryan Blair -

It’s time to  get the keywords that go with your Niche!

Keywords are at the core of your entire SEO strategy.

No matter how much money or how much time you have on your hand, if you really want to get noticed in the search engines through organic search results (non-paid listings), then you owe it to yourself to have the right keywords.

Selecting good keywords for which you should optimize your site is the result of many different steps.

Without the shadow of a doubt, the first step consists in build a strong primary keyword list.

2 Keywords List Building Methods

There’s basically 2 ways you can build your keywords list:

• Manually for free (except for the time spent)
• Automatically with paid software or tool.

Honestly, which one is the right one for you depends of your involvement online I would say.

If you are only producing a few pages here and there from time to time, you may just do well by doing all the work and research yourself.

On the other hand, if you have hundreds or thousands of pages to work with, you’ll love the way professional software can simplify the tasks for you.

Now, even if you go for a paid solution, I strongly recommend you to learn how to do the research manually as this will help you build necessary experience in your keyword analysis to determine which keyword is the one you want to optimize for.

Either way, just remember that when doing online business, time is your most valuable asset, so use it wisely!

Building Your Keyword List Manually

Yesterday in our first lesson “Analyzing the Viability of Your Niche”, we managed to find or refine what our main niche should be.

Today we are going to pursue on this work with building a specific keyword list for our niche.

Yes, it’s true that there’s an almost infinite possible combinations and thousands and thousands of different keywords that we could possibly use to build our keyword list; however, doing the work manually our goal is to optimize our time and effectiveness, so we are only going after the keywords that have volume.

We’ll always have more time to chase after more keywords as time goes, but building the list of our primary keywords that will be used in the basic structure of our site is key for the moment.

How to qualify those keywords is subject to another lesson, today we’ll compile a descent list of keywords.

We are now going to learn how to gather keywords from 3 different sources:

• Google AdWords Keywords Tool.
• Google Wonder Wheel.
• Wordtracker Keyword Tool.

Also, in order to better organize our keyword list work, I strongly suggest you to use a spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel (or any software alike) and set a template design like this:

Google AdWords Keywords Tool

Ok, so let’s get started with the Google AdWords Keywords Tool we used yesterday to analyze the viability of our niche.

Repeat the same search process as we did yesterday, but this time using your “definite” niche search term.

By now, you should see 2 lists of keywords populated for you by Google:

Keywords related to terms(s) entered

Additional keywords to consider

At the bottom of each list, there’s a link for you to download the keywords list, click on “CSV(for Excel)”

Depending on your browser, a popup alert will ask you whether you want to “save” or “open” the file. The choice is up to you, in this case, I will simply open the file.

Once opened in Excel, the list I just downloaded looks like this:

We don’t actually need all the information that is there, so let’s refine the list to fit our needs.

Delete the “Advertiser Competition” and “Global Monthly Search Volume” columns.

Can you see how some search results return a volume of “-1”?

These are the same results we saw in the Google Adwords Keywords Tool that didn’t have sufficient search data. They are currently useless for us, so delete them too. (We’ll find some use for them later, but that’s another lesson).

Ok, now just copy and paste those data onto your Keyword Research Spreadsheet.

Repeat the same process for both lists of keywords populated by Google

At this point, we already should have a nice little list of keywords, but that’s not enough, so let’s dig a bit deeper with another Google tool.

Google Wonder Wheel

If you haven’t done so yet, I strongly recommend you to go and read my post regarding Google Wonder Wheel before going any further.

Using Google Wonder Wheel, make a new search for your niche keyword (for me, I’ll use the “nail polish” as example).

What is interesting about Google Wonder Wheel is the fact that it returns not only what Google considers highly relevant search terms, but also only search terms with sufficient volume to be worth mentioning.

Anyway, as we are on the Wonder Wheel first results, add to your list all the keywords that are suggested.

Then click on one of the suggested term to get a second level of keywords, add them too and repeat this process for all the suggested terms.

Once this is done, click again on one of the suggested keyword and add them all too to your list.

You could go on forever like that, but for the sake of our example and first list building, there’s no need yet to go further than 2-3 levels deep.

Of course, there’s no need to say that if the keywords suggested are already in your list, there’s no need to add them again.

Now, for each of those keywords you just added through Google Wonder Wheel, I want you to go back to the Google AdWords Keywords Tool and research each of them to get their search volume data.

Add this information to your keyword list.

In order to expand our keyword list beyond Google, we are also going to use a keyword tool called Wordtracker.

Wordtracker Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Yes, Wordtracker offers both free and paid tools, but for this example, we’ll use the free tool.

As you can see the interface is rather simplistic.

Just type the search term you want to analyze in the search box and click “Hit me” button.

You should then see a list of keywords populated as well as search volume information. Now, keep note that Wordtracker gives daily search volume information and not monthly like Google; also they are using different data sources so the results are different.

Currently, we are just going to overlook the search volume, and copy and paste the keywords they suggest us onto our list.

This first level of data should be sufficient for the moment, but just like Google Wonder Wheel, if you click again on one of the suggested keywords, another list with longer tail keywords will then be populated for you.

Just like for Google Wonder Wheel, I want you to research the search volume data for those keywords.

For all your keywords in your list, you have the keyword name and search volume, I want you to go to Google and search for each of those terms, and add the result volume to your data list as per the template I gave you.

Congratulations, you just have completed the basics of a keyword list building.

Automated Keyword List Using Paid Software

This kind of software cost money at first, but they really are worth it as huge time savers.

Personally I use Keyword Elite.

Let me show you how much easier the work is with this keyword software.

Type the Niche I want to build a keyword list for (here “Nail Polish”), then select where I want it to find the keywords from, as well as how many keyword I want to have in my suggested list (up to 10,000 keywords!), then all I need to do is click “OK”.

Once my keyword list is populated, I send them to another project which will then collect all the data for me, such as search volume, result volume, Search/Result ratio, KEI, etc…

Done, here’s my keyword list. That was easy!

There’s other software like that out on the market, but I’m not familiar with them, Keyword Elite is the one I use and recommend for the people who intend to purchase such kind of software.

Since keyword research is at the core of SEO, don’t consider these tools as expenses, but rather investments that will allow you to work faster and better in the future.

If your niche doesn’t have 200 keywords possible, then you are in an overly narrow niche, and you should reconsider you plan seriously before wasting any more time and money on this project.

Exercise

Well I guess it’s pretty obvious, today you’ll have to build a keyword list for your site. Try to collect at least 100-200 keywords.

I know it’s not difficult but time consuming, but this task is very important you mustn’t skip it as we’ll be using this list throughout this entire course!

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments area below.

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In the next 3 weeks, there will be a guest post series about Search Engine Optimization and how you can improve and optimize any niche website. It’s been a huge topic from within my membership course and it’s something that can be easily outsourced. So let’s get started…

“Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the ‘gotta have it’ scale.”

– Zig Ziglar -

Learn how to pick your own battles.

This may sound like a joke for many of you, but this is the primary reason why many sites or online businesses fail online.

Having a niche marketing strategy, that is focusing on a specific topic rather than a broad query allows you to perform better as you are competing with much less other sites on internet.

Your visitors will be much more targeted and thus will convert better.

Getting yourself into an overly competitive market is a recipe for disaster and a way to ensure that your site will never be found.

On the other hand, entering into an overly niche market may result in insufficient traffic volume to monetize your site or store and ensure your survival.

Remember, because you think you got a great idea doesn’t mean that other people share your feelings!

In the end, it’s all about money

Depending on the nature of your site, the way you plan to monetize your efforts may differ from site to site.

However, as a general rule, you’ll be monetizing your site through one or more of those following methods:

• Ecommerce– selling products, be it physical or digital.
• Affiliate Marketing– selling other people’s product and getting a commission for it.
• Advertising– selling ads space on your site.
• Services– selling your skills.

Regardless of the method you intend to use, you should have a number in mind as to how much money minimum you expect or you need to make out of your website for it to be worth your time.

I won’t elaborate much on it as this goes with all the information you should have gathered already in your business plan. You have one right? It would be foolish to start a business without one!

Ok, for the sake of illustration, I’m going to say that I want to start a new business online selling “nail polish”.

After my estimation, I also know that I’ll be making $1 profit for each bottle sold, and based on the marketing strategy I have established, I estimate that I’ll be able to sell 2 bottles to each customer in average.

Now, based on my expenses and personal needs, I want $2,000 of net profit per month to make this project worth.

Converting Financial Needs Into Traffic Volume

The average conversion rate online is 1-2%, if you do better, good for you, but for our example, we are going to base ourselves on a 2% conversion rate.

Based on the data we have, I need 1,000 orders to be placed on my store each month.

With a 2% conversion rate, that would bring my required traffic volume to be 50,000 visitors each month, or about 1,700 daily.

Analytics in SEO have demonstrated that a #1 in Google will get you about 30% of the traffic volume for that specific keyword, and having #1 and #2 listings (double or indented listing), would get you about 70% of the traffic volume for that search term.

Although getting a #1 listing is our goal, it’s really not easy to obtain, but even so, it would mean that we’d be getting only 30% of the traffic volume for a given keyword, which for us lead to the conclusion that the main keyword we should be targeting needs a search volume of at least 170,000 to be viable for us at the very least.

Just to be safe, I would rather be looking into the 340,000 (double than the estimated) search volume at least for our example.

It’s much safer to be in niche that delivers traffic beyond our expectations, rather than below.

Checking the Analytics

In order to check the search volume for my niche “nail polish” I will be using a free tool called Google AdWords Keyword Tool (another reason to consider SEM part of SEO).

This will provide valuable information as to which keywords are searched on Google and what is the search volume for these searches.

Another great point is that you have many filtering capabilities to target your market effectively including geographic location.

In our example, I’m only interested to sell to people living in the USA.

The process is very simple, just type the search term you want to analyze, enter the captcha code and click “Get Keyword Ideas”.

A list of search results will be populated with different variations based on the popularity of a search term and the relevancy to your search query.

As for our niche keyword, we can see a search volume of 1,000,000 – this passes our test.

Although this passes our initial niche test, this search term is still extremely broad and may not reflect accurately the market we are targeting.

Nonetheless, it’s good to keep an open mind as it will give us some room to expand further down the road as our business will do better.

We’ll learn more on how to qualify our keywords in a later lesson.

Exercise

Whether you are starting a brand new site or currently are running one, check your analytics and ensure that your niche is viable for your business and your expectations (those may be higher than your business needs).

Make sure that your niche is not too broad like “gift” where the competition is unimaginable, or too narrow like “traditional chinese gift” which may not have enough search volume to monetize your work. Keep in mind that because today you are selling “Chinese gifts”, doesn’t mean that later on you may not want to sell “Japanese gifts” or “Korean gifts”; think about that and don’t just corner yourself.

If during this exercise you realize that your niche is wrong, just scale it up or down a bit (if you don’t know yet how to do that, don’t worry, in the next few days, you’ll know how to do all of that on your own).

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments below.

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your bonus copy of my book "Make Money From The New Internet: Web
2.0"

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Over the last few months I have been running teleconferences every fortnight for my students and I have accumulated a lot of common questions that gets asked regularly. It was very interesting to find out that it's not just my students that have these questions, but also many business owners around the world have asked these questions as well. How I know is I regularly check forums to see what is happening within outsourcing.

What I've created below is a video that goes for around 20 minutes and it answers a lot of the common questions and I even give away a lot of tips on how to leverage your Internet Business. So take a moment now to watch it:

Transcript:

Hi, Tyrone Shum here from MassOutsource.com. Welcome to this video! This video has been created so that I can help answer any of the questions that students and any people such as business owners from around the world have asked and a lot of the questions has to do with outsourcing and how to setup their business so that they can be outsourced to people over in the Philippines.

What I want to do now is go through and answer the most common questions that people wanted to have answered and also be able to give them guidance, some tips and also strategies on how to be able to outsource their business. This whole video presentation is for you to be able to benefit from and gain some knowledge and be able to get out there and start outsourcing your entire business. Hopefully with all the information that I provide here, you’ll be able to take away, get started and take action straightaway. So enjoy this, and just see how I’ll be answering a lot of these questions as well so it can benefit for you:

Where do I start?

This is a very common question and also very good question too. A lot of people who are just starting out and internet entrepreneurs wanting to run a business online and also those running the business for 6 months to 12 months plus are getting to the point where they say “I don’t know how to explain, how to grow and how to leverage business…” then basically you’ll want to look out outsourcing as the next level to be able to get your business running to where you want it to be. So where do we start with this?

The first thing I do is just to gain some experience exactly on how to go about outsourcing. I know you’re not going to get it right at the beginning and this is the reason why I’ve created this video for you and also to be able to answer these questions for you.

I know from experience when I first started to outsource a lot of work that I’m doing in my business, I struggled because I don’t know where to go, how to get the right people in place and also what systems to put in place and give them the right tasks to do. A lot of times I’ve been through and been ripped off as per sé and also not paid the correct price, a lot of times wasted as well. I don’t want you to go through that. I want you to fastrack your success to be able to achieve the goals that you want in your business.

Now, the first thing that we want to look at is getting some experience and also some knowledge. Let’s take step back – the most important thing that I believe in is Knowledge. Get some trained knowledge on how to go about doing it. What I would do is there are some free videos that I have in my MassOutsource.com website – 10 free videos on Where, How, and When to manage these people and a lot of these are towards hiring people from the Philippines. Go through and have a look on those videos just to be able to get started. It’s all absolutely free so there’s no strings attached.

Though, to gain experience, if you just have the knowledge and you don’t have experience, you wouldn’t be able to succeed in outsourcing your business. The first thing I would do is to either go out or find someone and hire them on a contract basis just to give them one project to start off with, learn to manage with them and learn to train them and see what they can do. Once you get that first trial over, and you know what to do from there then you can start to hire these people on a full time or part time basis.

When I first started, I went straight to eLance and I hired a virtual assistant to be able to get started in outsourcing my tasks. That experience wasn’t the best because I hired people from India. It took a lot longer and the cost was much higher. Now, you may be wondering how much did it cost and also how long did it take.

The first task that I outsourced was basically to handle and create a website, simple Wordpress website. I got charged about $6 an hour which is quite okay but the matter of time that they spent to setup a Wordpress blog it took about 30 hours so it’s about $180 just to setup one Wordpress blog. When you compare to see how long it really takes, for me, I can have it installed myself within 2 hours so it should have been charged $12 just to be able to setup that first blog.

So that was a learning experience for me. What I found was I when I first went to eLance, it was also on contract basis. When you go to contract basis, you basically hire them on per project that means you pay a little bit more but also at the same time you lost the skill set that they have because a lot of times they have multiple projects that they may be running. That’s not the root that I recommend you taking down. I would recommend hiring people at least on a minimum of part time then if you see the need and you’ll have more work for them, hire them on full time basis.  That’s why I would recommend starting off first.

Where can I find cheap, reliable and honest people to work for me?

This question is very common as well to where to start finding people that is cheap, reliable and also honest which will give you the time back. Well, first thing as I mentioned, Philippines is a great place to start. Secondly, they are quite cheap. Currently with the rate that’s in Philippines, on average if you’re looking to hire virtual assistant on part time basis, you’ll probably be looking at something between $125 to $180 per month that’s with part time which is 20 hours a week.

So if you pay them $125 per month working for you for 20 hours a week which is quite a lot of hours, you can imagine what kind of work you can do. Plus, if they don’t know the things that you have, then you can begin to train them. Once you train them and you’ve got all the systems in place to train them, basically they’ll retain that knowledge and will be able to continue to manage and grow the business for you. So that’s one thing that I would start. If you’re ready to start full time, then you could probably hire a full virtual assistant for at least $250 per month signing out.

How do I know if they are really working and how do I track this?

This is a very good question and I get this question all the time. It’s not something that’s easy because you may find it difficult to be able to track what they’re doing. You may give them a task and say it may take them 5 or 6 hours to do but you do not know whether or not they’re completing the task or if they’ve outsourced it themselves. From my experience, I haven’t had that issue within the Philippines but I know within India I’ve had that before.

I’ve got a story for you. I hired a full time programmer from India paying about $500 per month. This person did a reasonable job for me. He wasn’t good at graphic work but what I found was that he could do the programming. Though he told me that he was working on my projects for full time but when I did found out and the work that was sent back wasn’t correct and also complete, I questioned him. I’ve found out that he was travelling all around the country and he outsourced a lot of his work to some friends. I was blown away that he could do that because he didn’t even give me notice that he’s going to find someone to work on my project and furthermore, it’s just wasn’t done properly. That was the end of that one and I’ve just gave that one go.

But I don’t want you to go through that experience because going through there, you do waste a lot of time. Ultimately, what we want to do is to be able to fastrack your success rather than spending so much time learning and finding out all the ins and outs. This is what this course is all about, it’s to skip across on all of that so you don’t have to worry about those things. So, why the Philippines and also what are you going to do to be able to track them? The first thing I would do is that once you’ve hired your first virtual assistant or virtual staff in your business, you want to be able to set them up with the right systems.

The first thing I would usually do is I’ll send them a setup guide on how to set up their responsiblities and also their daily accountability. The first thing I usually do to track them is I install a little piece of software called RescueTime. You can download it from RescueTime.com. It’s a fantastic little software that’s free but you can also upgrade to pro versions which gives you more functionality. Though I currently use the free version which is very simple to use and very easy to do.

All they have to do is to register with an account and once they’ve registered the account, they’ll just download this little piece of software which gets installed onto their computer. What will happen is that as soon as they start to turn on their computer and logging in for their work day, it starts tracking exactly what they do. It tracks the applications that they open, it tracks the websites that they’re on, all the things that you need to know just to what they’re doing. Obviously, if they’re doing the work that they’ll need to do then everything will be logged properly. If they’re not, then you can go back to them and start asking questions about why that’s not done.

That usually doesn’t happen very often but if it does, that way, you can at least have some proof and evidence to prove to them that they’re not completing the work on time. So that’s a great little piece of software that I recommend to install as well. Also, as I mentioned Daily Accountability, they have to submit it to me on a daily basis answering three main simple questions. The first question I usually ask them is, “What have you completed for me today?” second questions is, “What are some of the problems or issues that you may have?” and last question, “What are some of the things that I can do to help improve and grow you so that you can be better on what you do?” – an e.g. training, additional resource that I’ll need to provide, and so forth.

As long as they answer these three questions, and submit their report on what they’ve done on a day to day basis then at least that way they’ve been accountable to what they’re doing, and also I’m keeping track of what work that’s been done. That’s a great way to do it. Now, taking a step further, if you later on decides to hire a project manager, they can manage all these things for you. That’s where you want to take your business to a next level later on but I’ll cover that on another topic later on.

How do I communicate with them and get work done?

Let’s look at how to setup a system or what kind of system I recommend to use to manage your virtual staff. Let’s say for example you’ve already set up and you’ve got say 3, 4 virtual staff on your team doing various different like web development, managing customer support, graphic designing, doing copywriting and so forth. You can either manage them through using just email and they’ll communicate sending emails back and forth to you which can become really a heavy thing on you because a lot of times they may send you not one email a day but they may send you 10 to 15 emails asking questions this and that.

You don’t want to do that because at the end of the day, what we want to do is we set up a system that runs itself so that you are basically just overlooking the system and not being involved in it. Remember, “not being involved” that’s the key and what you’ll want to do is be able to traffic or overlook like an inspector of what’s going on. So how do we do this? We’ve got a project management system within my business that I run and it’s called ActiveCollab. It’s a fantastic system that you can install on your server. I know that there’s a lot of other project management systems out there that’s also free like DotProject Net, and also there’s a few like ClockingIt, those are great project management systems and they are also free but they are limited because they are locked into a server.

Whereas, what you probably want to be able to do the reason why I recommend using ActiveCollab is because you want to run on your own server so you don’t rely on other people’s servers to be able to continue to manage your business. You can always get your data around if anything happens and you’ve got backups on it as well. I’m not saying that the other systems don’t have backups, it’s just that the monthly fee and cost that add up to run those are probably just as high. While when you just buy ActiveCollab, which is a software that you can buy for around I think $300 to $400 for a corporate version outright, you can keep it forever.

The reason why I recommend using a software like that is because everyone is able to communicate and manage the project within each. You can set multiple projects, multiple users, and lots of things to be able to do. I’ll give you a great example. Say for example you’ve got a project that you need to set up a website and you have maybe 3 people working on it. You probably have a copywriter, a web developer and also you have a graphics designer. To set up a website isn’t that high, but to get it exactly the way you want, you’ll have to draw your specification. Once your specification has been drawn up, then you can outsource it to all your staff to do it.

Now, they’re going to communicating with each other because there’ll be different stages, different parts of the project where they need to talk. So having a project management system to be able to store information and allow them access to do all of these things will save you so much time. Rather coming back to Tyrone, or rather coming back to say for example the graphic designer asking where the login details, it’s all stored inside one project management system. They can access that anytime to be able to get access to the login details, to be able to get access to files that they need, the graphic work and so forth. That’s how I would manage a project and also how I recommend people to do it. That way it saves you time, you don’t have to check emails, and secondly, everything’s all stored into one location.

Let’s just say for example, I went on holidays and one of the projects will due in weeks time and I wasn’t around. Who would be able to provide them with the information to be able to access the server and update the files? I’m not going to be here because I’ll not be checking my emails so the project management system is crucial because that’s what you need to be there for. That’s how you manage your staff and quickly get things done. It minimizes the amount of emails, it minimizes the amount of time that you need to use and spend on it, and you can hop in anytime just to check what’s going on and see the reports and reviews.

How and when do you pay outsourcers for their work?

Let’s talk about pay. Well as I mentioned to you if you’re looking to hire virtual staff on a full time basis and also part time basis as well, then you’ll need to set up a system to pay them as well. It’s not that hard to do and there are few payment services that I use and how I pay them is quite simple. I usually pay them every fortnight, or if some of them prefer, I usually schedule for at least monthly basis. Ideally monthly is a great thing because that way you can plan for your cashflow. But fornightly is sometimes requested by staff so I do that as well. It’s quite simple.

All you have to do is either set up and use either PayPal which is what I currently use or Xoom and both of those systems are great. PayPal wasn’t really that established back then in the Philippines but now it’s quite commonly and widely used. The fee is relatively low. Recently I’ve just sent pay through Paypal over to one of my virtual staffs and the fee is around $1.25 US just for one transaction so the fees are not that expensive to transfer money accross. Whereas Xoom is about if I remember correctly it’s $7.50 per person so we’ve got $15 and Xoom is getting more expensive to be able to transfer money accross, the reason why is that Xoom is becoming more and more popular.  But if your virtual staff doesn’t have PayPal, and they’re going to Xoom then I recommend that as well. Those are two payment systems that I recommend because they’re both safe and widely used around the world.

Do I have to pay taxes for them?

Taxes! Well, it depends to which country you’re in. The first thing I want to mention and say is that I’m no legal advicer, I don’t have an experience in terms of accounting, I don’t have a qualification in accounting so I can’t give you that advice on how you go about your taxes. I would highly recommend you go and speak to your accountant and find out exactly what would be best for your company and also how would it be best for your tax structure within your own business. But I’ll give you an example anyway because we’re talking about how to handle taxes and so forth.

A lot of times when you’re working with the people in the Philippines, you don’t have to worry about paying taxes for them because they handle their own taxes within their own country. So that’s number one thing, you don’t have to worry about those taxes within their own country – they handle their own super for example, they handle all that and they pay for their own taxes. For me, in Australia for example, in terms of paying for taxes we basically treat them as business expense. And because they are contracted out, they are all considered business expense. All I have to do is just pay them the monthly fee and at the end of my financial year, we basically just work it out and I’ll set it deducted from my profit and that’s how we bascially work it out.

That’s the beauty of actually having outsources, it’s because there’s no headaches of running a HR department or Human Resources department, there’s no headaches doing the paperwork for managing the super, managing the taxes, managing the sick leave and all those things. That’s why it’s so beneficial to actually run people or have people running your business overseas in the Philippines. So that’s pretty much on taxes, I would highly recommend you speak to your accountant or tax advicer on what to do in this situation but on the general overview or scheme of things that’s basically how easy it is and simple to look at.

I don’t have time to train people. How can I outsource my work if I don’t have time?

Well, I can understand because being entrepreneur and someone who has started out doing everything myself and running a business basically from 15 hours to 20 hours on average can bring it down to less than that, it has been quite a lot of work. I used to do at least 60 hours a week or 12 hours a day roughly. Since having an outsourced business and having people running business for me, I’ve been able to bring that down dramatically. And, the hottest thing that I struggled with was did I have time to train them? The simple answer was no, I didn’t have time training them because I’m so busy running my business but I’ll have to make time to do that.

Now, yes, you’ll need to spend some time training them though there are great systems that are out there who already got taining in place. Just to give you a little bit of overview, for example in my Mass Outsource Mastermind video training course that I provide for students and members, I have lots of training videos in there that I provide for anyone to train their virtual staff particulary for internet marketing – anything from SEO, to article marketing, to link building, to building lots of great websites and blogs, and so forth. All that kinds of training are all provided in there and we are always expanding and adding more to the training resources as well.

So to save your time, if you join into the Mass Outsource training program, there are a lot of great training materials in there. That alone already basically has paid off for a lot of your time because if you spend say an hour training your people within say for example in the Philippines, you can basically take these training videos and give it to them and training videos itself already paid off and you don’t have to spend more time to do any of these. That’s the beauty of that, once your staff has been all trained up, then you can just give them a task to do.

Coming back to training them, you’ll probably need to spend a bit of time to get to know them and just focus your time on providing your business information. Though once you’ve got that all set up and you’ve provided them working with training and virtual staff at the same time, you’re going to be able to see a dramatic change in your business and also more time for you. Yes, there all going to be times that you’re going to spend time training them but once you’ve got your first one trained up, and you just decided hiring the second one, you get the first one to train them and the process just continues to flow on from there and you start to see more time giving back to you from doing the things that you need to do.

That pretty much hopefully explains everything on how to go about training and also how to give you back more time on managing your virtual staff and also giving you more time to do the things that you want to do as well. Well, thank you so much for watching this video today. I hope that you’ve gained a lot out of it because there’s been a lot of tips and information you have to take away.

What I recommend you do if you want to get started on outsourcing, know where to get some great information and begin finding your first virtual staff, I recommend hopping onto www.MassOutsource.com and there are 10 free videos there which shows you step by step on how to be able to outsource your business and all those videos are all free and complimentary. If you subscribe also to my free report, you’ll also get access to a lot of websites which you have to pay money for normally but with this website, you can get access on them for free and be able to find lots of potential candidates from the Philippines to help grow your business as well. ‘Til I see you next time and enjoy your life!

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your bonus copy of my book "Make Money From The New Internet: Web
2.0"

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You may probably ask yourself, “How can I outsource if I’m still starting up?” Well, there’s already the answer to that. The reason is when you are running a small business, you are the jack-of-all-trades where you play as the worker, manager and even the administrator all by yourself. Additionally, the more tasks you do on your own, the lesser it is to maintain the productivity of the work done and in effect, less efficient results to maintain greater profits in the near future.

Do Smart Business Owners Ask For Help?

Yes, they do and everyone should realize there would always reasons to seek help to expand expertise and opportunities. For me, I admit I’ve been through all the hassles of handling things by myself but since I have started outsourcing say, my Dragonboat business, I’ve had the best relief of having the chance to communicate with the suppliers and plan ahead of time to develop my Dragonboat service while my customer support staff stays responsible in answering queries, processing orders and payments as well.

If you’re thinking I’ve been spending too much as a start, no! Generally I’ve decided to outsource since it’s just a cheaper part of investment overseas while receiving a high quality of work in less time and effort. Now, let me show you how I’ve been able to realize that outsourcing while starting up really works:

What to Outsource?

Get to this mindset: Think of the things that you’ve done during the day and what actually gets done in the long run when you outsource it. I’ll draw an example to make this easy – emails for instance has always been part of your daily routines in the business and if you thought you have always checked on the new ones, then try to realize how your virtual staff can even filter, organize and respond to them in less time in daily basis. See? That’s a big break. Start to outsource anything that goes around a routine which cuts off at least 2 hours of your day administering to friends, customers and the likes.

When to Outsource?

There are just two things: when you know everything that has to be outsourced and when you know nothing about the tasks that you are currently outsourcing. As I said earlier, outsourcing can help you maximize the expertise in the business through the expanded efforts of your virtual staff all done at the same time. When you’re not good at graphic design for example, let an expert do that for you then it’s up for you to decide on a good, better and best outputs. Secondly, you can outsource the things in which you already are good at to give your virtual staff the right information and get things done the way you wanted. Also, checking on minimal errors on your part can be a lot easier than to implement the whole project yourself.

Why to Outsource?

It’s simply because you can do other things outside of your business but can think of more ways on how to increase profits as well. Outsourcing gives you enough time to plan, draw more targets and set better strategies for your earnings. Thus, the less work you do, the more it frees up your mind to activate your plans, grow profits easier and also enjoy the rest of your weekends.

Where to Outsource?

Since I hired my virtual staff in the Philippines, I can say I’ve never had any issue with their work yet because if there are problems coming in, they’ll be able to honestly inform me beforehand about it to prevent wasting time. Also, there are no culture barriers so they can easily cope up to my approach, understand my instructions, and be more productive of their time effectively. Not only that they’re really are the most cost-effective, but also they are the ones that you should be working with full time through their best efforts.

 If you want to hire staff from the Philippines, take a look at these two websites: Bestjobs.ph and Onlinejobs.ph which I highly recommend for quality resumes.

How to Outsource?

Definitely, you cannot automate the work if you don’t have someone who can do it for you. Hire your first virtual staff by starting to target on small yet repetitive and essential roots of the business to be completed throughout the day – someone to handle your administrative tasks from customer service, checking your email, and all the data entry which free up enough time for you to prepare their training videos useful for their other routine tasks in the future.

Another thing is to train them in a direct, easy and efficient way through the use of tutorial videos. Visually, it’s a way better for them to follow when they see how the instructions are applied “live” and that way, they can always view and review it if there’s something that they’re missing. Some of your time will be spent creating these videos at first but once they’ve learned through all your systems, you can just sit back and see how they’re applying your concepts.

I use both Jing and Screenflow for easy recording. Jing Project is a way easier tool that allows you to capture what you want to say with a picture or a video instantly and you can download it free. Although if you like it much advanced, you can also download Screenflow to do screen captures and share multimedia presentations in HD quality training.

The Better Small Business Mindset

Indeed, every business starts small but not all small businesses do endure better results and grow even more profits if they are managed alone. Outsourcing your team is a whole new way to advance from these basic steps with your business to possibly do “everything” that gets to be done than only finishing those you can do for the rest of the days. Save those free days to plan ahead, enjoy personal time and just let the great results  onto your doorsteps.

Tyrone Shum
Small Business Owner

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These last few weeks have been the most fun and productive times in my life. I just got back from a trip over to Hong Kong and Thailand and to share with you what I did, I’ve created a little video right below here that shows one of my most memory events whilst on holidays:

The reason why I show you this event is because when I look back over the time whilst I was away, not once did I check my email or have to worry about what was happening in my business. I literally left my laptop and mobile phone in Australia and I headed overseas and just had FUN! When I came back I was not surprised to only get 32 emails that were from my virtual staff and personal friends. Last time I traveled overseas when my business was not setup with the proper systems, I received easily over 200 emails in that same period of time. What a change it was!

How Did I Setup My Business To Allow Me To Be Stress Free Whilst On Holidays?

The key is outsourcing. I have a business that has core systems in place that allow full-time virtual staff to manage and run the business whether I am working or not. I spend a majority of my time creating video content which is the heart of my business and my members appreciate this. The rest of the work that still needs to be completed, such as customer billing, technical issues and marketing are all outsourced to people I hire from the Philippines. Though, even having full-time virtual staff working for me it is still vital to have proper systems in place. I am going to share with you the top 5 tips on how you can prepare your business to allow you to enjoy a stress free holiday:

Tip #1: Plan Ahead Of Time

Within my business, delivering video content is like running a TV show and if I want to ensure that my viewers receive what they paid for, then I need to follow a schedule. The best way to look at this is if you are writing content for a blog or uploading video to an online channel website, then you need to plan at the beginning and consider what you want to deliver to your market. As the saying goes, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. Before I left for my holiday, I already had created over 8 videos which will be delivered over one and a half months. That way I am already prepared ahead of schedule. The same thing also applies to virtual staff and you will need to discuss with them the necessary work to be completed over the course of the year.

Tip #2: Set Dollar Productive Routine Weekly Tasks

I get asked this question a lot: “What work should I give to my virtual staff?” Firstly, it’s not a tricky question. The simple answer is to look into your business and find out the most dollar productive tasks to give to your virtual staff. It comes back down to the 80 / 20 principle. Basically we want to find 20% of the tasks (dollar productive tasks) that will generate 80% of our income / output. Once you have found these productive tasks, have them set as weekly routine tasks. For example you may find that creating websites targeted in specific niches that generates $50 a day is a task that needs to be completed weekly. Then you will need to create training material and action steps for your virtual staff to complete these tasks weekly, as it will help you generate an additional $50 per day for each website they create. The more websites they create, the more income you earn and the less work you do.

Tip #3: Use A Project Management System

I remember my experience when I hired my first virtual assistant very clearly. It was very easy to communicate with her via email and to send work to her. Though as the business grew and I started hiring another virtual staff and the third and so forth, I started to get headaches just from checking emails. I became frighted to see what would be in my inbox the next day. The reason was because I didn’t know how to manage them and I would literally get 50 – 60 emails a day back from my virtual staff asking lots of questions on how to complete tasks. When I discovered the power of using a project management system my life completely turned around emails dropped dramatically down to 2-3 a day. Furthermore, information such as training material, documents and all related items to the projects were all stored online in one system. If I didn’t make this change early on I would still be under the ground with more work than ever.

The project management system I use and have customised is called Projects2.us. Essentially it is the ActiveCollab system with a few extras that make life easier for my virtual staff.

Tip #4: Use A Ticket Support System

Once you have your virtual staff under control and all the projects are managed within one system and the processes are automated, the next step is to handle customer support. The common method is to setup one email account, for example support [at] yourbusiness.com and have all the emails routed there. Though what happens if emails don’t come through, or staff overlook the emails because they were confused with which email to respond to? Well, you can minimize these problems by using a simple ticketing system which can allocate the customer support queries to the right department or virtual staff. Furthermore, with an assigned ticket number, customer’s queries will never get lost or blocked by spam filters. The customers can easily login to their account and check their query if they wish as well. A free ticketing system that has been very effective in my business is called HESK. Easy to install and use for any business.

If you want a more advanced system, try the Kayako Support Suite, which I also use as well.

Tip #5: Provide Access To Relevant Accounts

If you want to ensure your business runs smoothly, you will need to let go a bit. Many clients have asked me is it safe? how can I trust them? what can I do to not give them access but have them complete the work? All valid questions and the simple answer is to put trust into your virtual staff and ensure there are fail safe mechanisms in place to handle account abuse. All of my programmers have full access to my websites and the reason why I give them this is because I trust them. I give them trust at the beginning because I know they are going to work for me for the long-term. If I am paying them to complete work, then I have already opened my business to them to trust them to get work done. Whilst I was away, access to the server to update information and make changes to websites were important and it would keep the business running smoothly. Therefore it’s important to provide account details for your virtual staff to access whilst being away on holidays and to leave it there. All of the information to usernames and passwords are all stored securely in a encrypted database and therefore I have complete faith that my websites or account details will not be abused.

Time To Prepare For The Next Holiday

The most challenging aspect of any business owner I believe is letting go of control. Control in the aspects of getting work done, knowing what happens with every deal, and running the business. It does take a leap of faith and the mindset to allow this to happen. A question I leave with you is to ask who will complete the work that can free up your time?

Time to plan for the next holiday and remember to mass outsource for a great life!

Tyrone Shum
Traveler And Outsourcing Expert

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your bonus copy of my book "Make Money From The New Internet: Web
2.0"

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Get
your bonus copy of my book "Make Money From The New Internet: Web
2.0"

Download Here

Over the past couple years I’ve been very privileged to participate in Yaro Starak’s coaching programs and learn from his teachings. Recently I’ve been listening to his audio Mindset series in the car quite a number of times, not because I don’t have anything to listen to, it’s because I want to. What I have noticed every time I listen to this series is a new idea will come to mind and it keeps me grounded in how I should be approaching my Internet business.

A specific topic Yaro talked about is batch processing and it’s an important system for any Internet business. This topic wasn’t directed to outsourcing, though I wanted to share with you how relevant it can be.

What is Batch Processing?

Let’s take a look at an example in relation to emails. Emails are probably one of the biggest distractions in modern society (sorry guys, in my opinion it is), though they are necessary because it is considered a main form of communication between a client and a business. Now you can have the option of checking your email every hour of the day and replying to people answering their questions or you can batch process them at most once a day or twice a week (ultimately this is what you should strive to achieve). What batch processing does is it allows you to process all your tasks at one time rather than processing them as they come.

Rather than answer an email straight away, which takes 5 minutes to complete and interrupt your current task, you can process all your emails once at the end of the day, that allows you to have a focused effort. So you get the emails replied to in 30 minutes compared to the 50 minutes it would have taken you if spread these over the day.

In my Dragonboat business I let customers know that I personally check my email twice a week on Tuesday or Thursday and if the matter is urgent, they need to send the request to my support team who checks the ticket system twice a day on my behalf.

What Are Tasks You Can Batch Process To Be More Productive?

I’m a firm believer of the 80/20 rule, where 80% of your output comes from 20% of your input. Batch processing is a system that helps accomplish this. Here’s a few tasks I batch process in my business and the rest are outsourced:

• Writing 6 blog posts in one day and schedule them to be posted automatically over a two week period
• Creating 3 videos in one day and schedule them to be sent out over a two week period.
• Checking and replying to email twice a week on Tuesday and Thursday at 4pm
• Completing interviews back to back with a 30 minute break in one day

As you can imagine by completing these tasks within one week, I can take the next week off and my Internet business will still be generating income without further input from me. This is power of batch processing.

How Can Your Outsourced Work Be Batch Processed?

The same process can be applied to your virtual staff and I highly recommend you do this. You receive greater value from your money because they complete your tasks faster and in less time, allowing them to take on more work for the same monthly rate. Here are examples of batch processing I have trained my virtual staff to apply:

• To process orders and dispatch from the dragonboat business only twice a week.
• To return all phone calls on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon
• Process any transactions or refunds once a week
• Setting up social media accounts and submitting articles twice a week

As you can see above these are some of the tasks they complete and only do it once in the time set for them. Otherwise they continue on with their tasks and be as efficient as possible in having their work completed to meet set requirements.

One thing to mention as well, in order for batch processing to work effectively with your virtual staff you need to have a defined system in place so they can follow and continue to repeat these tasks without your intervention. This is how a successful Internet business will run smoothly and generate more income.

Tyrone Shum
Batch Processing

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Firstly a big thank you to everyone who participated in the Mass Outsource launch last week. It was a huge success and I’ve already begun teaching all the students who have joined the program. If you haven’t grabbed your free copy of Secrets Of Outsourcing Experts Revealed report yet, I recommend you do so because there’s a lot of cool resources inside.

Since the launch and the feedback I’ve been getting from the videos, a recurring question that has come up from Mass Outsource Mastermind is this:

“How do I handle tax when I outsource my work overseas (to the Philippines)?”

It’s a really good question and I can only share this from my experience. Before you read any further though, I need to let you know that I’m not a legal adviser or financial consultant in this area. Therefore I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you seek advise from experts who handle this sort of detail as everyone’s financial situation is different to mine. What I share with you below is what happens in my own business and this is a general overview of how to go about this.

How To Handle Tax When Outsourcing Overseas?

In my own business I currently hire a few full time staff from the Philippines and they are paid monthly via Xoom or Paypal. Let’s take a step back and look at an example if you were hiring staff from your own country. Since I am living in Australia, normally to employ staff there would be a lot of paper work involved, from filling out a Tax File Number form, Group certificates to Superannuation forms. It becomes a real nightmare when you start to hire 15+ staff! I’ve been there and it’s not pleasant to see so much paperwork just to manage employees, let alone managing the business. In that circumstance, I would recommend hiring a book keeper to help you pay your staff, manage the forms, and all the account keeping records.

Now in Australia, every quarter I would have to pay the PAYG (Pay As You Go) tax to the government which is a percentage of income tax taken out of your employees wage and your own wage that is compulsory. The highest tax bracket here is around 48.5% and the minimum tax is around 15%. So somewhere in between there is that percentage of tax taken out from our wages. On top of this, a minimum of 9% is taken out of the total wages and paid to Superannuation (similar to a 401K), which is also compulsory.

In comparison, jumping back to paying virtual full time or part time staff overseas, there is none of these details I need to worry about in my own business. Basically all I have to worry about is paying their monthly wages on time and they sort out the rest.

How Is This Accounted For In My Business?

The next question that comes up is how do I account for these funds that go out of the business? Well, I don’t account for these transactions under as wages, because if you do it is then subject to the PAYG (Pay As You Go) tax, and superannuation. I treat them as an expense, since I am hiring them as contractors. Therefore in my Profit and Loss statement I’ll see an account listed there as “contractors” with a total expense of how much it costs for me to hire full time virtual staff. This is the simplistic version so that you can see how this works. Obviously there are other finer details which I leave up to my accountant to work out.

One last thing to mention, I only pay income tax at the end of a financial year on the net profit of the business and throughout the year I don’t have to worry about this. Whereas if I had employees in Australia I would have to pay tax every quarter on behalf of them.

In my opinion this is one of the many benefits of hiring full time staff from overseas.

Additional Resources:

• What is Payroll Tax
• Individual Income Tax Rates in Australia
• Income tax rates in United States

Tyrone Shum
Benefiting From Outsourcers

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your bonus copy of my book "Make Money From The New Internet: Web
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You can watch my video above to get a “Sneak Preview” to the course.

Mass Outsource Mastermind

The Mass Outsource Mastermind coaching course opens today – and I’m only opening it up for 3 days, as places are limited and, like all Internet Marketers, my time is precious.

This training course is designed especially for newbies who want to create an Internet business – and live the lifestyle you want. It is the best video 
training course for beginners – and, as you saw from your free report, is endorsed by guys like Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick who wished they’d had the sort of information I’m teaching when they started outsourcing – it saves a lot of time, money and stress.

For more information on this course, please visit the signup page at:

http://www.massoutsource.com/signup/

Also if you haven’t downloaded my free report, you can do so here:

http://www.massoutsource.com/report/

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your bonus copy of my book "Make Money From The New Internet: Web
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Leading up to Mass Outsource Mastermind program opening on Tuesday, 17th November 2009 at 9am US EST, I’ve produced another video for you, showing you exactly how to train your virtual staff. This information is different from anything else you’ve seen because I’ve shown you step by step exactly how I do it – and (more importantly) how you can do it too. Furthermore, I also give you a run down of what’s in my course:

I have a very specific way (and some may say uncanny) of outsourcing so that my business takes up as little of my time as possible – and training up your virtual staff is key – which is why I’m introducing you to this now.

If you haven’t seen my 10 FREE videos on how to outsource your business, visit www.massoutsource.com now. Remember to download my free report “Secrets Of Outsourcing Experts Revealed” which has lots of useful resources too!

Enjoy the videos and don’t forget to leave your comments here.

Tyrone Shum
Training Virtual Staff

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your bonus copy of my book "Make Money From The New Internet: Web
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