Michael Wilding

Category: Motivation

  • 33 Things You Can Outsource

    33 Things You Can Outsource

    Last week I wrote about outsourcing and how it can make a massive difference in your business. You can check out that article here.

    This week I want to show you the process I used to determine what it was that I could outsource and then provide you with a list of 33 things that you can consider outsourcing.

    To discover which jobs you’re doing that can be outsourced is a simple process. What I found to be the hardest was finding the time to actually sit down and do it and then when I did being ruthless enough with it.

    Get yourself a piece of paper and pencil. Next write down every single job you do each day/week/month. It doesn’t matter if it takes 10 seconds or 10 hours, write it down.

    When you’ve put everything down on it, leave it for a couple of hours and you’ll almost certainly remember a couple of things that you haven’t written. Add those in and repeat.

    Once you’ve gone for 24 hours without being able to think of anything else to add to the list then you’ve got everything on there that’s important.

    It’s important to give yourself time for your brain to remember things that you haven’t put down. As a busy entrepreneur your brain is going to be overloaded with information and it simply won’t be able to think of everything in one go.

    Now take your list and ask yourself these questions for each item on it:

    • Can somebody else do this job?

    If the answer is no then ask yourself…

    • Is this job required for the business to run or does it directly affect the amount of revenue generated?

    If the answer is yes then mark the job as one that you need to keep doing yourself. If the answer is no then mark this as a job to get rid of. If it isn’t required for your business, doesn’t directly affect the amount of revenue generated and can’t be done by anyone else then it is not worth your time to do it. After all you’re not generating revenue from it, so you’re not being paid to do it!

    If the answer to this question:

    • Can somebody else do this job?

    Was yes, then that’s great. Mark it down as a job that can be outsourced.

    Be ruthless with this process. Cut jobs that can’t be done by anybody else if they’re not generating revenue and not 100% required. Mark everything that can be done by somebody else.

    Don’t cheat because you’re not sure you can trust someone else to do it or not. The bottom line is you can, you just need to let go. And when you do you’ll find you’re freed in a way you never thought possible.

    When you’ve finished going through your list you’ll find that 80% or more of the jobs you’re doing can actually be done by someone else.

    So… it’s time to get somebody else to do them for you.

    To give you an idea of the jobs that can be outsourced by someone else here are 33 jobs I was doing that I outsourced:

    1. Promotional email copywriting
    2. Scheduling mailing list emails
    3. Building website sales pages
    4. Forum moderation
    5. Subscription cancellations
    6. Customer support
    7. Product reviews
    8. Sales copywriting
    9. Replying to blog comments (I actually chose to keep doing this as I want to keep it personal but I know many people who outsource it)
    10. Remote customer support sessions
    11. Software development
    12. Bug testing software developments
    13. Chasing article writers for content
    14. Create article featured image graphics
    15. Schedule blog posts
    16. Fix website bugs and issues
    17. Find new content writers
    18. Build technical side of launch sequences
    19. Build product delivery
    20. Create invoices for affiliate payments
    21. Build optin pages and sales pages
    22. Track our affiliate promotions for conversions
    23. Find suitable WordPress themes
    24. Edit videos
    25. Create free optin products
    26. Add plugins to websites
    27. Manage onsite advertising
    28. Data entry
    29. Logo design
    30. Graphics
    31. Manage development projects
    32. Outsourcer management
    33. Upload auto-responder emails

    There are also some that I’ve not put on this list as I prefer to do them myself and, having removed all the above jobs, I now have the time to do. These are things such as:

    • Record videos
    • Lead generation
    • New product concept and briefs
    • Develop/Test marketing strategies
    • Work with JV’s

    You’ll notice that every single thing there is related to increasing the turnover of the business. The only odd one out is the video recording and I keep that to me because the sites I record videos for are based around my experience in the industry and so the videos need to be recorded by myself.

    Follow this process and re-discover the freedom that you wanted when you first started your online business.

  • How To Run An Online Business Without Any Stress

    How To Run An Online Business Without Any Stress

    It’s very common to hear stories of internet entrepreneurs who at some point in their career suffer a break-down due to high levels of stress.

    Most people take this as part of the struggle they went through to get to where they are today.

    But doesn’t that seem strange since most IM based products are sold on the dream of living a completely relaxed lifestyle and making money on autopilot?

    The reason most people get started making money online is to run a business from anywhere in the world on their own timescale.

    This is very pertinent to me at the moment as I was heading towards a break-down. Admittedly it wasn’t likely to be this year, and possibly not the next. But it was guaranteed to happen at some point.

    Let me give you a bit of history.

    I got involved online by mistake, it wasn’t a conscious choice to start an internet marketing business. I started a blog that got popular. So popular that the costs of running it kept spiralling. Combined with this I wanted to provide my readers with more content and better service. Which meant one thing…

    The website had to start generating revenue in order to cover it’s costs.

    There were only two options:

    1. Make the website generate revenue
    2. Close the website down

    Aside from the running costs, I was spending more and more time on it. There’s only so much time you can spend without being paid. And so.. I chose option 1. Make the website generate revenue.

    From there I self-taught myself everything and am still learning today. In fact, in this business I don’t think that you ever stop learning.

    But that’s not the point of this article.

    As the business grew so did the number of jobs that needed to be completed. I was aware from the beginning that I wouldn’t be able to do everything myself.

    In fact, although I always believed in doing something a few times to truly understand how it’s done, I was very conscious about employing other people to do jobs if they weren’t my speciality.

    The problem was… I didn’t create a business structure for the day-to-day running of the company and the jobs that could be completed by others.

    Big Mistake!

    Fast forward to 2014 and I’m spending an average of twelve hours a day, seven days a week, running my business. There’s no rest time, never a moment to just relax and no time to spend with my family.

    I could feel the stress building every single week because I knew I couldn’t cope with the amount of work that was coming in. Even worse, if I wanted to continue to grow the business then this workload would also grow.

    Then two things happened.

    The first is I read Tim Ferriss’s 4 Hour Work Week. An incredible book and one I strongly recommend you read.

    The second is I sat down with my mum, the person I use to bounce ideas off outside of the company, to see where I was going wrong.

    Admittedly this is an area my mum is quite experienced in.

    We worked out that on average there 56 jobs every single day that needed to be done by me!

    If each job only took 10 minutes (I wish), then that would be just over nine hours a day.

    That kind of workload is simply not sustainable by anybody.

    To make it even worse, 90% of these jobs didn’t actually need to be done by me. Someone else could do them, I just had to let them.

    I’ve spent my life working towards being able to generate a good income whilst having the freedom to travel the world and live my life on my own schedule.

    Somehow I’d lost it all.

    Because for the first time ever I’d got caught in the trap that most people get caught in.

    Thinking that if you’re successful then you have to be super-busy.

    And that’s simply not true. The truly successful are people who make a lot of money and have a structure in place so that they need to provide very little input to make it.

    That’s what real success is.

    I’ve now defined a company structure and am in the process of implementing a number of big strategic changes that are already showing not only to have reduced my time required by over 75%, but are also increasing our revenue substantially.

    But today I want to share the two things that made the biggest difference to me.

    I would strongly suggest that you implement these now, whether or not you feel like everything is getting on top of you. They’re going to make a huge difference to your life.

    The first I have to thank Tim Ferriss for, and that is…

    Check your email a maximum of twice a day

    Turn off all the instant notifications and only check your email twice a day. The truth is that there is no situation or person that needs to be responded to immediately. On the rare, like once a year rare, occasion when something does need an immediate response. Then guess what?

    They’ll call you!

    Not only do you benefit from not worrying about what’s in your inbox, or using your email as a means to stop yourself doing the work that’s actually required. You also stop getting interrupted in the work you are doing by alerts popping up.

    This one trick has saved me more than four hours a week in lost time. Just implementing this immediately made me feel more relaxed and more in control.

    And you don’t have to stop with emails. I now log into Skype periodically throughout the day rather than leaving it on all the time.

    The result = I no longer see messages coming in that both disturb what I’m doing and make me want to check them.

    Don’t just hide yourself from other contacts, actually log out so nothing comes through. If your Skype is anything like mine then you’re getting an almost constant stream of messages. You need to step away from them.

    Check them periodically and reply to those necessary and it will take no more than 10 minutes a day.

    The second thing I implemented was…

    Give the people who work with me more responsibility

    I truly have a great team of people who work with me, they do an incredible job and are great to work with. I never consciously didn’t give them responsibility, but I realised that was what had happened.

    So… I changed.

    The bottom line is I trust them. If I didn’t then they wouldn’t be working with me. So why was I being hesitant in allowing them to do more?

    Because we all get worked up about what happens if something goes wrong. Will we lose one or twenty paying subscribers. Will we get a lot of unsubscribes on our mailing list.

    The truth…

    If you lose ten subscribers so what?

    Are they worth $100, $500, $1000?

    Bottom line is, it’s not the end of the world.

    A bit irritating, sure. But much better to be working with someone who makes the mistake once, recognises it and doesn’t do it again than forcing yourself to do more jobs because you’re not allowing them to do their job easily.

    More responsibility means jobs get done quicker by your staff because they know they don’t have to ask you every time they want to make a decision and… you save hours of time because you’re not involved anymore.

    If you’re employing someone to do a job then it’s simple… let them do the job. If you don’t trust them to do it then don’t employ them!

    Those two changes made the biggest impact to me, and my business, in the shortest period of time. In fact, it made a difference almost instantly.

    You don’t need to be feeling stressed to implement them. Put them into practice now and you can avoid ever getting to the point of overload, and avoidance is by far the best option!

  • The Distractions Of Running An Internet Business

    The Distractions Of Running An Internet Business

    There are different reasons that you may have decided to start running an online business. Some people fall into it by mistake, whilst for others it’s a carefully considered decision, and for yet more people it’s because it’s something that can be started after work to start bringing in some extra money.

    But there is a miss-conception, perpetuated by the endless product launches styled on how to make a fortune with ten minutes work, that it’s easy. Well, I guess the principles are. But like anything, if you want to be really successful at it then you’ve got to put the work in.

    And that’s where it can get tricky!

    Not the putting the work in, but the fact that your work is the internet. And the internet is so… well… distracting!

    I mean that’s what we want. When we build websites we want people to see links to other articles on the site and read them, view our picture galleries and interact with us. When we advertise we want to stop people from doing what they planned and click on our advert. When they’re on Facebook we want to keep them interacting with our page as long as possible.

    In other words if they’re not on our website we want to interrupt what they’re doing so they visit our website and if they are on our website we want to keep them there for as long as possible.

    But when you spend your days working online, those distraction can prevent you from achieving what you want in the time you have.

    Just some of the distractions are:

    • Facebook
    • Browsing
    • Researching products instead of information
    • Skype
    • Emails
    • Reading competitor websites
    • YouTube
    • Games

    It’s very easy without realising it to spend hours on doing things that are enjoyable, but not directly helping your business to grow.

    Usually these distractions don’t happen in one long session. You’re unlikely to go and spend three hours on YouTube when you know you should be doing something else.

    They happen in small breaks. For example you’re writing content for your blog and an email comes in so you go and read it and then reply to it.

    The reading and replying to the email has taken you away from the task you were doing for five minutes. But, when you go back to the task you are doing it takes a little while longer to get back into where you were because you’re brain is no longer focused on it. This extends what may have taken twenty minutes into something that takes thirty minutes.

    That’s only ten minutes, so not a big deal right?

    Wrong!

    If you do that every hour then you’re spending 16% longer on a job than you need to be. So, if you’re working 4 hours a day on your web business then you would actually spending less then 3.5 hours doing what you should be doing and you should be able to get the work you’ve done in that 3.5 hours done in 3!

    Essentially you’ve wasted an hour, or 25%, of the time you have available to work on your business.

    To prevent this from happening you have to be strict with yourself. When you start a task then you only work on that task until it’s finished or until you’ve spent the required time on it.

    If you find yourself easily distracted by Skype, emails or other applications. Close them all down when you start the task. When you’ve finished you can open them up again and check on anything that you may have missed. Although you may feel that you need to respond to something immediately, there’s very little that can’t wait thirty minutes until you’ve finished what you’re currently working on.

    You may also choose to use a service like Time Doctor. This is an application that runs on your computer and tracks your tasks so you know how long you’ve spent on it. However, the clever thing is that it also tracks your web application usage so you can see how often you’re using Skype or checking your emails, or anything similar. And it then reports on how much wasted time you’ve spent on using applications you don’t need to be using to get the job done.

    Keeping the focus on a task is probably one of the hardest parts of running an online business, but doing it will see your business grow significantly faster than it has before.

  • Work To A Schedule = Working Relaxed

    Work To A Schedule = Working Relaxed

    I’m usually pretty good at working to a schedule. There’s no doubt that the way our business works is with fast development. We come up with an idea, we get it developed (fast) and we release it.

    And while that is still the way forwards for us, 2014 sees a slight change in order to make this process more structured. As of today we have six projects we are already looking to develop in 2014 and there is no doubt that more will appear as the year moves forward. Of these six projects at least two of them are big. When I say big I mean serious software development projects that are likely to cost tens of thousands in development.

    So what does that mean for me?

    It means that I need to be more organised with my time.

    There is one thing that is more important than anything else in our business. And it’s probably not what you think it is. Most people think that the most important things are new products to sell, building new sites, generating new traffic etc…

    And they’re all important, of course.

    But…

    …they’re not the most important.

    At least, they’re not the most important for me.

    For me there is one thing that has more impact on our business than anything else. And that is… our readers.

    They are the single most important thing.

    Without you there is no point in me writing this. Without the readers of our other publications there is no point in writing them. And, without our readers we don’t have any customers.

    That makes my email writing the single most important thing I do every week. I want to make sure that our emails provide awesome knowledge, value and expertise. I want to help everyone who reads my emails to feel that they’ve taken something away from them that they value. And I want them to also find them entertaining and a joy to read.

    Which is why I write all our emails myself, and why I spend as much time as necessary when writing them. They are never rushed.

    At the beginning of 2013 I had a schedule for my emailing. But… I didn’t have a schedule for when I was going to write my emails.

    Big mistake.

    I found that I was usually sitting down to write them the night before, and since I usually send my first email of the week on a Monday that meant Sunday night. This didn’t please my (now) wife and I also found it stressful as I like to take Sunday off.

    So by the middle of the year I had made a schedule of when I was going to write the emails.

    The problem was…

    I was sitting down at the time to write the emails and hadn’t written the articles I was going to be writing about in the emails!

    Why?

    Because I hadn’t scheduled it.

    And then on top of that I hadn’t got a proper schedule for promotions either. With that put on top of all the other work, my email writing schedule began to slide and by the end of the year I was back to writing them again on Sunday nights. I’d gone the full circle.

    Just before Christmas I sat down and wrote down a new schedule which will stop this happening again. And I’m going to share that with you now.

    The first part of this is that Monday and Tuesday are purely about writing content for the next week. I hope to be, normally, finished with this on Mondays but if it runs into Tuesday then that’s no problem.

    The content includes any blog posts, videos and emails. Over the course of the year this may also start to include podcasting as well. It’s something I’ve never done before but would quite like to do for this blog 🙂

    That means that by Tuesday evening, at the latest, all my content for the week is done and I have nothing to worry about on that front until the following Monday. The rest of the week has immediately become less stressful.

    During those two days I will also be turning on Skype and answering emails only twice per day. It’s very easy to get distracted and when you’re writing content it can add hours of time if you’re not 100% focused on what you’re doing.

    I now have between three and four days for product design and development.

    This should mean that our projects will get done even faster because I have a significantly larger blocks of time dedicated to them than I did before when I was doing bits and pieces as I fancied.

    With the writing schedule I also needed a new email schedule. And here is how it is going to go:

    Monday: Quality Blog Post

    Tuesday: Segmented Promotion

    Wednesday: Freebie / Content

    Thursday: Segmented Promotion

    Friday: Freebie / Content

    Saturday:

    Sunday:

    I do have slightly different schedules for different sites but this is one of my main ones. I like to start Monday off with a weekly email which goes to a recent blog post, usually a new one every week. Although sometimes I mix in the most popular across the entire blog.

    I don’t like to promote heavily so Tuesday and Thursday are my promotion days but as a general rule I will only be doing segmented promotions. This means not everybody will be receiving the promotion, only those people who have previously expressed an interest in what the product/service does will receive it.

    This means that some people may not get promotions very often and others will get them more often based on their activity.

    Wednesday and Friday are my freebie or content days. This is when I may provide some free content which is only available inside the email, link to another persons article/video on a different website or do mail swaps.

    Saturday and Sunday are free days when nothing goes out to give my readers a break.

    Now just because I have those spaces each week doesn’t mean that I’m going to fill them every week. Of course, sometimes they will. But more often than not there will be a couple of slots spare each week.

    But… I will never put in more promotions or freebies than I can fit into those periods. This will help me to control the exact number of emails that are received by our readers to make sure that they always have just the right amount of content.

    I hope that you will take this schedule and adjust it to fit your own business needs. I can promise that it will make a big difference the level of efficiency that you work at and the more efficient we are the easier it is to take days off when we need to, knowing that all the regular important work has been done.

    And please, if your readers were not the absolute 100% most important part of your business in 2013, then make sure they are in 2014!

  • You Need To Want Success More Than Air

    Most people want to succeed. But they don’t want it more than they want other things. They may think they do, but they don’t. This speech from Eric Thomas is one of the best I’ve seen.