Outsourcing – Valuing your time

Why Outsource?

To understand why one should consider outsourcing, you need to place a value on your time in any business endeavor. You need to place a value on your time in any business endeavor. Would you drive forty miles for fifty cents? Of course not. The price of gasoline alone would make the trip a financial loser. Would you walk across town for fifty cents? Walking may be free, but it wouldn’t be worth the time and effort. It would be irrational to make a long trek like that for spare change.

Outsourcing and Internet Marketing: a match made in Heaven

Strangely, many Internet marketers seem perfectly happy to walk across town for chump change. They do it every time they involve themselves in a task that they can’t complete efficiently and effectively. Time for outsourcing.

A good web designer can put together a mini web-site template in a very short period of time. Someone who’s never touched the software and who doesn’t know HTML might spend hours on the same task. (And it might be full of errors!)

Reason for Outsourcing

Wouldn’t it make more sense to pay a designer to turn out that design quickly (and economically if you compare it to the time you would have taken, how much you value your time and what revenue-earning activities you could have been involved with instead) while using the time saved to do something that will add to your Internet marketing profits? Again, it’s time for outsourcing!

Great SOURCE FOR OUTSOURCING

We can provide you with great outsourcing resources from a large, tried and tested company that we have happily used many times over a number of years. Contact us for more information about the best route for outsourcing.

Outsourcing and value of your time summary

Outsourcing projects to those who can do them correctly, effectively and efficiently can free up a great deal of your time enabling you to focus on those aspects of revenue-earning / moneymaking that you do best.

Stop walking across town for spare change and start using your most valuable asset—your time—to your best advantage. Work smarter and use outsourcing.

November 1, 2011December 31, 2011

Outsourcing and the golden rules to follow for best results

Why use Outsourcing?

Outsourcing is one of the best ways to free up your most important asset: your time. And to improve your financial bottom-line. Hiring others to handle everyday or even specialized functions (especially non-revenue earning) within your overall Internet marketing plan can be a shortcut to superb financial success.

How best to make outsourcing work

In order for outsourcing to work, however, it must be done the right way. That involves a lot of different considerations. You need to know how to hire and who to hire for outsourcing. You need to develop the right organization skills and learn to be a Project Manager. You also need to approach your contract workers with the right attitude. Outsourcing is vital but not a quick fix. Start with a small project and measure the outsourcing company’s success. The saving of time and low-cost associated can be a great benefit of outsourcing.

What not to do re: outsourcing

Too many Internet marketers deal with contractors as if they’re robots. They make unreasonable demands both in terms of work-load and timescales. They communicate with the outsourced workers in a superior tone. They don’t handle disagreements or questions with civility. It’s sometimes as if outsourcing turns otherwise nice Internet marketers into slave-driving monsters. That often results in disagreements, missed timescales, low productivity and even shoddy products. Not great for your reputation!

Source for outsourcing

We can provide you with great outsourcing resources from a large, tried and tested company that we have happily used many times over a number of years. Contact us for more information about the best route for outsourcing.

The best way to make outsourcing work for you

That’s not the best way to make outsourcing work for you. You should approach those with whom you’re working with respect, politeness, understanding and decency. That’s the best way to forge valuable, lasting relationships with your outsourcing company and to encourage the best possible work from contractors. Additonally, be sure that you’ve clearly specified your requirements and documented the agreed project scope and timescales of the work. Pay close attention to these guidelines and you’ll certainly benefit from outsourcing.

September 1, 2011January 1, 2012

Using Web 2.0 to Enhance Your Business

Three traffic-producing opportunities using social media or web 2.0

A few years back, you had two ways to drive traffic to your website. You could either pay for it by implementing an advertising campaign or you could try to build a site that you felt the search engines would love in order to get traffic via them. (A third way of course is article marketing.) The maturation of the web has led to a third core means of generating traffic. Social media and other “web 2.0” strategies represent a potentially efficient and effective way to secure visitors to your website.

Here are three examples of leveraging these traffic sources to your advantage

YouTube Traffic

Video continues to gain traction as it becomes easier to create and edit and as users have greater levels of accessibility through faster Internet access and use of mobile devices such as smart phones and iPads. When done the right way, a short, home-made video can produce a great deal of traffic: often more than a similarly-targeted traditional article.

See my YouTube channels for examples.
http://www.youtube.com/user/VindenGrace

http://www.youtube.com/user/DunedinConsultants

For help on creating videos for your websites, please contact us.

Twitter Traffic

Twitter, often described as a micro-blogging platform, allows you to develop relationships and reach audiences easily and for free. If you handle this opportunity the right way, you can turn the service into a traffic driver that delivers targeted customers.

See our Twitter channels for updates and examples:

@vinden

@vindengrace

@coacheve

@evegracekelly

@LiveSuccessFull

@Coaches4Divorce

FaceBook Traffic

Sometimes it seems like everyone you know is on FaceBook. Between its ease of use, ‘addictiveness’ and that old “six degrees of separation” concept, it’s easy to build a social profile that many people will see. Plus, you can integrate everything else you’re doing with your FaceBook account.

Advertising and SEO still bring home the bacon for many Internet marketers in terms of traffic, but social media is really beginning to have an impact these last couple of years. If you’re not involved, you should be! It’s all in the name of that all-important traffic.

August 1, 2011December 31, 2011

Internet Marketers: Why you should be a publisher/product creator-Product Creation

Internet Marketing: Product Creation

In the vast world of Internet marketing, you can be a product owner through product creation or product development or an affiliate. There are good reasons to consider both options. I thought this would be a perfect time to cover a few of the advantages of going the “it’s my product” route vs. being an affiliate as, with such a crowded market-place, you need a way to stand out. That’s by product creation.

Why ‘Product Creation’?

Initially, being your own product owner/creator gives you a chance to bring your unique vision and ideas into the world. There’s nothing quite like seeing “your baby” succeed in the marketplace. That’s a kind of personal fulfillment that you can’t quite replicate as an affiliate, although affiliate marketing can be very lucrative. That’s the joy of product creation or product development.

Benefits of Product Creation

Personal fulfillment, however, doesn’t pay your bills. Most of us involved in Internet Marketing are also interested in making money and that’s another great reason to consider creating and owning your own product through product creation. Instead of being one of many affiliates for someone else’s product or service, you can be the person who has a collection of affiliates working on his or her behalf. Think of how many sales a good affiliate could make for you. Now, start multiplying it by many affiliates. When you’re at the ‘top of the food-chain’, those multiplied earnings flow in your direction. Additonally, it enhances your reputation as a ‘thought-leader’ or trail-blazer to be seen to have your own products.

Product Creation Assistance

If you need help with product creation, feel free to contact us about our mentoring programs.

Product Creation Summary

There’s a lot of work involved in product creation, it’s true. (We know only too well from our own experience! We’ve written many books, created many face-to-face courses, home-study courses and workbooks.) There’s also work involved in managing affiliates. Successfully launching a new product, even with the help of affiliates, requires some effort and know-how, too. Being the product owner/creator isn’t necessarily the easiest thing in the world. It is, however, the best way to put yourself in a position to maximize your profits. So, crack on with your own product creation.

June 1, 2011December 31, 2011

Marketers: Listen to your market-they have valuable market research for you

Market Research: Your prospects’ opinions are golden

You can take your pick of the Internet marketing gurus. There are plenty of them and some of them, my friends, colleageus and peers included, offer some very good advice. Pick your favorite. It doesn’t matter who it is. That person will not necessarily measure up to a valuable source of input and perspective that you can already access for market research.

Market research via your prospects

We’re talking about your prospects. The people who visit your website, who look at your marketing material, your content that you publish, those who comment on your blogs and who populate forums relevant to your market (assuming that you’ve chosen one or several!) are better able to give you niche-specific advice, i.e. provide market research, than anyone in the Internet marketing industry (unless, of course, you’re niche is the Internet marketing biz).

Great Market Research is available to you at no cost via your prospects

Are you listening to your prospects’ opinions? You should be, because they’re absolute gold. They’re the bedrock of great market research and they’re a wonderful way to troubleshoot problem situations if your efforts aren’t measuring up to expectations.

How can we help you with your Market Research?

Our top notch outsourcing company that we have used extensively for years can carry out market research for you. Please contact us for more details.

Top Quality Market Research

Think about it. These are the people to whom you want to sell products or services. So do your market research and get ahead of those competitors who aren’t’ even bothering to do any market research, merely hoping for the best. You should know as much about them and their way of thinking as possible. Interact with them via email, surveys and in forums. Get to know them. Learn what they’re thinking. When your tuned in to what’s going on in the minds of your prospects, you’re so close to achieving optimal marketing success. Their opinions and perspectives should give you a very good idea of exactly what you should be doing in your business in terms of satisfying their needs, surely the key purpose of top quality market research?!

May 1, 2011December 31, 2011

Get Your Focus Now!

Why you need Focus in business and your personal life

I’m going to let you in on one of the biggest secrets to making a living offline or online and in your personal life. This is the one nugget of wisdom that separates the large-scale winners from that motley collection of also-rans. It’s called focus.

How does this need for Focus come about?

Here’s the situation. Let’s look say at Internet marketing: it is stuffed to the gills with great opportunities to make a living online. There are so many different fundamental ways to make money that it’s hard to get your head around sometimes – hard to focus on just a few. Each of those general money-making strategies can be approached in many different ways. People are coming up with new ideas every day. It’s a lot of potential and a lot of temptation, but also an awful lot of information to digest. So, to concentrate on just one project or even a handful becomes ever-harder, our heads becoming chock-full of new business opportunities. This is when we need focus!

How do you apply Focus to e.g. Internet Marketing?

The ‘trick’ to making Internet marketing profitable is in developing a mindset that will let you move through this minefield of temptation un-scarred. It’s focus: choose a course of action; develop a plan to accomplish it and then implement the plan. Simple to say – so much harder to do! You need focus.

How can we help you to maintain Focus?

As a group of coaches over at QCCgroup, we developed a book on this very subject to help our numerous offline and online clients who had problems achieving the success that they wanted, due to a lack of focus in many cases. Visit our GetMoreFocusNow.com site for more details on this course or contact us.

Where do Marketers go wrong re: Focus?

Many failed marketers put in a lot of the hard work necessary to make a living. Their mistake was spreading all of that effort across a series of projects that never reached fruition. They lacked follow-through. They lacked focus.

If you don’t see projects through to completion, you’ll never get the results you want. The successful marketers follow through on each project, not getting distracted by ‘shiny new objects, AKA the ‘next big thing’! They maintain focus.

April 1, 2011December 31, 2011

The Importance of Creating a Real Internet Marketing Plan

Why is an Internet Marketing Plan Needed?

Many aspiring Internet marketers fail to make a single dollar because they get confused by the maze of choices and strategies available to them. They start a project, only to abandon it in favor of the latest ‘biz opp’ or shiny new object being heavily promoted as the latest, greatest solution for Internet marketing. They begin work in earnest, but find themselves distracted by yet more new information about Internet marketing. What they need is an Internet Marketing Plan.

It’s a common problem for so-called Internet marketing newbies and it requires a certain discipline to beat it. Unless you manage to focus on completing projects, you’ll never find a way to make serious money online. This is called in Human Resources ‘profiles’ being a ‘completer-finisher’, something that’s vital to be successful in Internet marketing, whether you work by yourself or outsource a lot of the work.

The need for an Internet Marketing Plan.

One great defense against against these problems is coming up with a detailed and structured plan of action, an Internet Marketing Plan. When you know what you need to do and when to do it, it’s that much easier to stay on task. Free-of-charge planning tools are available, e.g. “GanttProject” (no affiliation to them or recommendation – but we have happily used it).

Do you have a real plan? We’re talking about a step-by-step outline of what you’ll be doing to reach your goals, not just some vague idea that you’re going to follow a particular strategy. If you do have a plan, congratulations. You have a good shot at getting the job done.

Internet Marketing Plan

If you don’t have a plan yet, get started now. We can help – just contact us or visit our Project Planning & Management website: http://toptipsforprojectmanagement.com/ That outline plan might be the difference between successful project completion and a series of half-completed failures. Then take the outline Internet Marketing Plan and break it down into smaller and smaller steps to achieve your goals. That way, you’ll be less stressed, more focused and increase your chances of success….massively! Get yourself an Internet Marketing Plan!

March 1, 2011December 31, 2011

Can You Live Without Search Engine Traffic?

Do you need Search Engine Traffic?

Search engine traffic is the so-called holy grail of Internet marketing. It’s targeted. It converts. It’s free (at least in the sense that you aren’t forking out cash for every click). The downside? It often requires what feels like a massive effort to rank effectively in competitive niches, such as real estate, Internet marketing, stock-market-related offerings, etc. It also requires quite a bit of patience.

Maybe you aren’t interested in doing the work necessary to appeal to Google and other search engines? Perhaps you want instant results instead of spending the time building a good SEO infrastructure.

Can you skip search engine traffic altogether?

Absolutely. It is possible to live without search engine traffic. There are a variety of different ways to drive traffic that are wholly independent of organic search engine rankings. You can rely on a variety of advertising methods, including pay-per-click (PPC) options. You can use social media tools and other “web 2.0” methods to bypass search engine ranking concerns.

The Search Engine Traffic Challenge

Here’s the challenge though: Unless you’re willing to pay for traffic, it’s going to be hard to get traffic from non-search engine sources. The only way to generate a truly significant and consistent flow of visitors will involve advertising—and that’s going to cost you, potentially quite a lot.

That’s why so many people eventually come back to hunting for the holy grail of high rankings on the search engines. The up-front effort and time investments don’t seem all that onerous when you compare them to the often substantial costs of generating traffic without the search engines.

We recently managed to get one of our own products (a mindset coaching eBook for traders on the stock market/FX/options, etc.) onto page 1 of Google out of almost 69 million search results! And it only took our team 8 days! If you want search engine ranking results like this, and great search engine traffic just get in touch. Let us help you with your rankings and search engine traffic.

February 1, 2011December 30, 2011

What’s the magic formula for Internet marketing Success?

The “Secret” Code for Success in Internet Marketing Is…

…that there isn’t one!

Internet marketing boils down to business basics.

Internet marketing Basics

There are so many different elements and choices in the arena of Internet marketing that it can sometimes feel overwhelming and feel impossible to maintain a well-informed “ helicopter view” or have a grasp of the bigger picture . That’s particularly true when you’re just starting out, being bombarded by what feels like an infinite mass of Internet marketing information and ideas, the latest, newest, shiniest object, the next big thing in Internet marketing.

At its core though, Internet marketing isn’t really so very complicated. There’s a simple formula that underlies just about everything we do as Internet or Digital marketers. After you strip away all of the ‘noise’ and start looking at essentials or first principles, there are three things in which we’re really interested.

The formula for Successful Internet marketing

Traffic. In order to make sales, you need customers. In order to get customers, you need prospects. Traffic is one of the “big three”: you can’t make money if you aren’t getting people in front of your offers.

Conversion. After you get the traffic, you need to persuade those individuals to make a purchase or to take some other action (such as getting on your mailing list so that you can market to them and eventually sell them something) that puts money in your pocket. That’s conversion and nothing good happens without it.

Money. Every time someone makes a purchase or “does what you require”, you need to make your money or begin to by getting them into your marketing funnel. This is the end goal of the whole pursuit of Internet marketing. You also need to carefully track how much you make per sale or action.

What happens when we put it all together and get our formula for Internet marketing?

Traffic x Rate of Conversion x $/Conversion = Gross Profit

When you get down to basics, these are the fudnamentals of how Internet marketing works! Don’t let the noise drown out these business essentials. They still apply to Internet marketing.

January 17, 2011December 13, 2011

Caribbean Cruising Again With 400+ Entrepreneurs, Internet Marketers And Mentors

A New Year, Another Caribbean Cruise And Another Joint Venture For Vinden Grace And Eve Grace-Kelly Of Dunedin Consultants And QCC Group!

We took our first ever cruise last year when we sailed to Mexico, Honduras and Belize on board a brand new ship, the Carnival Dream. We joined around 400 other top marketers, entrepreneurs for their 2nd annual cruise with Mike Filsaime, Captain Lou and Donna Fox.

This year, after 3 weeks chilling out in sunny Florida, we boarded the Carnival Miracle in Fort Lauderdale, a smaller ship, with easier networking possibilities. We visited the Dominican Republic, Turks and Caicos Islands, Curacao and Aruba.

It was so nice to see old friends, Joint Venture (JV) partners and meet new friends and potential JV partners. We didn’t try to cram everything in like we did last time, as we’re now marketers’ cruise veterans! One of our New Year’s resolutions for 2011 is definitely work-life balance!

Last year, we set up a JV on the first night! This year, it took as long as the second night to get one!
Looks to be a potentially fantastically rewarding one!

Watch this space for details of our projects!

Eve is now off to Albania for a week’s coaching and consulting followed by more of the same in Luxembourg for a week. Pleasant but the Caribbean it isn’t!

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Photos are:

Vinden Grace & Eve Grace Kelly on Grand Turk – Marketers’ Cruise
Marketers’ Cruise – Donna Fox, Lou Edwards, Vinden Grace, Mike Filsaime, Tom Beal
Vinden Grace & Eve Grace-Kelly – Dominican Republic – Marketers’ Cruise
Vinden Grace & Eve Grace-Kelly – lunch on Aruba – Marketers’ Cruise
Vinden Grace-breakfast in bed on the Marketers’ cruise in the Caribbean
Eve Grace-Kelly – on a wet day in Curacao – Marketers’ Cruise