The staff at Google Adwords puts out a newsletter which they send out a few times a week on Adwords. They talk about the latest updates, what they mean, how to use them, they do Q&A, etc. It’s pretty good and written in a clear, easy to understand format. Good way to stay on top of all the latest changes as they happen.

Go to this link and on the right-hand side there will be a place to enter your email to get updates:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/

Hat Tip: Jon Barrett

1. Outsourcing, insourcing and why you need a cash flow problem.

One of the challenges we face as internet entrepreneurs, like most businesses, is the constant challenge of “finding good people” to hire. But one problem I’ve noticed particularly affects us as a group.

Too many of us are literally trying to do it all ourselves. The problem with internet marketing is that . . . you can. I know many people who work from home, alone, and make a great living online.

But most of us are constantly trying to grow our business, and soon we find that you can’t do it all alone. For all the dreams of working at home, when you want, and getting up in the morning to check your inbox to see how much money you made while you were sleeping, I think that internet entrepreneurs are some of the hardest working people around.

The problem with internet marketing is that there is always more to do. Unlike other businesses where the workload depends on various factors, with an internet business, there is always more you could be doing.

You can always put up another web site. You can always get more links. You can always check your AdWords campaign and write more ads to split test. You can always write more articles to distribute. There are always more newsletters to read, etc., etc.

(When is the last time you distributed a press release on PR Web? I know you’ve been meaning to, but . . . .)

But if you really want to take your business to the next level, you have to grow. By definition, if you want to grow beyond what you are capable of doing yourself, you have to hire more people to do more work than you can do alone.

Ron LeGrande, the successful real estate investor and direct marketer is famous for saying, and rumming into the heads of his students, “The less I do, the more I make.”

Usually, it makes sense for us to do this on an outsourced basis — hiring part-time contractors for various projects, rather than taking on full-time employees.

If you feel like getting the right people on your team is one of your biggest challenges, you’re not alone. In fact, Larry Bossidy, the hugely successful CEO of Honeywell and author of “Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done,” wrote that under normal circumstances, he spends 20% of his time on hiring the right people. In a growth or rebuilding stage, he spends 40% of his time on recruiting.

How many of us are so busy doing things that we don’t have time to focus on building our team and finding the right resources to give outsourced work?

If you need more people to help you get more done, here are some recommended resources for finding outsourced team members.

1. Monster.com

For a few hundred bucks, you can run a national ad on Monster. For example, if you’re looking for help with web design, programming, copywriting, bookkeeping, etc., if you run one ad you will get tons of replies. Many of these people will be looking for full-time employment, but many are looking for hourly work as well. I recently hired a full-time web designer from Monster, but I also received tons of inquiries from great designers looking for more projects.

2. Classified ads in your local paper

If you live in a decent sized city, don’t overlook your local paper. For a couple hundred bucks, you can be overrun with resumes from people looking for work. Many of whom are currently unemployed who would love the chance to work on some of your projects to prove what they can do.

I recently hired an excellent full-time copywriter from an ad in the local paper. And I’m always amazed at the number of resumes that come in from a single ad. There are always a bunch of people that are looking for hourly work.

3. Elance.com

To get the lowest prices on outsourced services, you really need to make contact with people in other countries that are looking for work and willing to do it for much less than American service providers. There are excellent copywriters, programmers, designers, etc. in India, the Philippines and many Eastern European countries.

Elance can be good for everything from copywriting (sales letters, articles, ebooks, press releases etc.) to programming to link getters.

4. Rentacoder.com

Rentacoder is usually thought of as a place to find programmers for short term projects. But my sources tell me that it can be a good place to find copywriters as well.

5. Workaholics4hire.com

This service has been developing an excellent reputation. Sylvie Charrier is the president, and she was at the Internet Marketing Main Event in Phoenix that I was speaking at this weekend. Many of the conference speakers are still recommending her service as an excellent resource to get more done while doing less yourself.

In addition to the better known resources above, check out:

Guru.com – 160 categories of service providers, free access. You pay 5-10% of the project at the end.

FreelanceWriting.com – A site that freelance writers frequent. Be specific in your ads as to exactly what you want. There are all kinds of writers there.

SmarterWork.com – Free signup.

FreelanceWorkExchange.com – You can post unlimited job with no transaction fees.

Accurate 800 – An inbound call center that can answer the phone for all of your web sites 24/7. Regardless of what you sell (including info products) your conversion rate will probably increase significantly if you answer the phone better or at all. (More on this in future issues.)

If you know of other good resources, post a comment below, and feel free to comment on any of the vendors above with which you may have personal experience.

Many of us don’t grow our business as fast as we can because we don’t have a “cash flow problem.” For example, if you are an information marketer or affiliate marketer, it may be the case that almost 100% of every dollar that comes into your business is pure net profit.

Many people work at home, do all the work themselves, and in return keep all the money that is made. So unlike owners of larger businesses, they never have to worry about cash flow. Their overhead is pretty much zero.

But if you want your business to grow, faster, consider how much time you are spending on building your team.

Yes, finding the right resources can be difficult, and you may have to try several to find a good ones. But don’t be daunted by the task, and don’t give up too early! Rather than thinking just about what needs to be done, think about how you are spending your time — which is really your most precious resource — particularly in this business.

Following Larry Bossidy’s advice, I’ve been spending about 40% of my time on finding and recruiting the best people I can. That may be way too much for you with everything you have to get done every day.

But think about how much time you are spending on building your team, decide how much makes sense, and carve out the time.

Remember that finding just one excellent human resource can make a huge impact on your business. Picture what it would be like if you had the perfect ___________ to help you with __________. Then set aside a certain percentage of your time to make it happen.

Hiring the right person is just like finding the right customers. Often, it’s a marketing problem. The more you advertise and get the word out for exactly what you need, and the more time you devote to finding them, the better your team will be!

And speaking of getting the word out . . . .

2. We are looking for a full time affiliate manager.

If you are interested in coming to Atlanta, GA (a great town) and working with me personally, we are currently looking for a full-time affiliate manager. This person will be a key member of our organization. If you are interested in working with us for a period of time (to learn a lot) or for a long term opportunity, email ceo@bradfallon.com

If you know of anyone who would be good for this, we’ll pay you $1,000 for the referral if we hire the person and they work out for at least 30 days.

3. Virtual Conferences and eComXpo

I posted on my blog recently about the successful conference that Jack Humphrey et. al pulled off in the wake of the Katrina disaster. Originally, I was scheduled to speak last weekend at the event in New Orleans. When it got cancelled, the organizers decided to host it as a virtual event. And it turned out great!

I even met one of the attendees this weekend at the live event in Phoenix. He was able to listen to all of the speakers and view their presentions without ever having to leave home and buy a plane ticket or a hotel. Nice!

I predict there will be a lot more opportunities like these in the coming months. A good example is eComXpo which is coming up in October. There are going to be a ton of great speakers including Seth Godin, Bruce Clay and many others. Visit eComXpo.com to learn more and the list of speakers is on the home page. (I hope I’m still on the list — I’m late getting my presentation to them. Maybe I need to outsource more.) And click here to listen to my interview on SEO Radio with the event director.

Until next time,

Keep on Stompin’!

Brad Fallon

P.S. Post your comments or questions below. Perhaps I can find the time to publish a little more often if there are some specific questions, etc. If you have a question or issue for a future newsletter, send them to questions(at)bradfallon(d-o-t)com.

Google now has a tool in beta that allows you to search blogs. Go to Google Blog Search to check it out. Chris Sherman’s more detailed article is here.

HTGB: Wedding Favors To Go

And search “wedding favors” while you’re there.

If you still needed a reason to add a blog to your internet marketing mix, here it is.

By the way, if you’re interested in blogging for business, Dave Taylor and I are are going to be starting a teleseminar series very soon on “Blogging for Business.” You can see the preview and request information here.

According to Michael Robertson, the average conference call has six participants and lasts 33 minutes.

And businessses spend $4 billion a year on this.

Now, you can do it free with up to 96 participants, and up to 10 participants with no long distance charges if you use a SIP phone, like through the Gizmo Project.

Putting up spam pages on your own server is one thing. That’s between you and Google.

But spamming the blogs of other humans with comment spam is bad. Very bad, I think.

Here’s a recent post from Jason Cain about the whole issue of comment spam and people that are not only doing it, but selling software to do it.

I’m actually hesitant to post to it, because some people that otherwise wouldn’t know about it may be tempted to buy the software and start blog spamming.

I never try to get into flame wars with anyone, but what do you think about “internet marketers” who make and sell software that allows people to easily comment spam?

Not bad for a start-up. Skype, the online phone start-up, has amassed 54 million users in two years. And now eBay is going to buy it for up to $4 billion. $1.3 BILLION in cash. Wow.

Watch “Click-to-Call” this year. It’s going to be big.

Over the past year, I have spoken or presented at various internet marketing conferences. But a presentation I gave yesterday really got me to thinking.

Before hurricane Katrina, I was scheduled to be in New Orleans this weekend at an excellent conference put on by Jack Humphrey et. al, called the Internet Publishers Mardis Gras.

After the hurricane, they decided to put on the conference anyway — by webinar.

I thought the idea might be kind of a stretch, but what I discovered was that the idea of a virtual conference is a really good idea, for several reasons.

My presentation was a webinar that used GoToMeeting — just one of the online software packages that allows the “presenter” to share his or her desktop with everyone that’s logged in. At the same time, people in the audience can ask questions as you’re going along.

Of course, the idea of a “webinar” is nothing new — in fact, Andy Jenkins and I have done several of them in our Apprentice Program. It’s a big improvement over the traditional internet marketing teleseminar, where you can only hear what’s going on.

But this was the first time that I saw one where people paid thousands of dollars to participate — and got a great value.

In many ways, the webinar was actually superior to a live platform presentation. For one thing, I was able to sit at my normal computer and switch back and forth between powerpoint slides and an internet web browser.

The last time I spoke at an internet marketing conference, I was on a stage with no internet connection. So I had to use all powerpoint slides and screenshots of web browsers to show examples of various Google searches, etc. On the webinar, I could do it live and show actual web searches and web site SEO examples the whole time I was talking. Very cool.

There were probably 50-60 people listening — you could see them all logged in — and many of them asked questions as were were going along that I was able to answer. In a normal platform large audience presentation, you are forced to wait until the end to answer questions.

But with the webinar, people are able to type their answers, so you can see them, and if there’s a good question that goes along with what you’re saying, you can answer it right then, without halting everything while the person gets a microphone and asks their question. If the question is going to be covered later, you can just ignore it and cover it as it comes, without taking the time for the whole audience to listen to the question.

In short, I thought there were many advantages to this idea of a “virtual” conference, not the least of which that I didn’t have to pay for a flight and hotel — nor did anyone else.

Of course, much of the value of attending such conference is the networking that goes on between the presentations, but I bet there are some good ways that this could be handled, too.

For example, all of the attendees could get a web page that describes them, their business, types of joint ventures they are interested in, etc.

At any rate, for getting the information efficiently, a good webinar is pretty hard to beat. Plus, it’s immediately recorded and you can watch certain segments again, show it to your co-workers, etc.

eComXpo

Along these same lines, if you haven’t already heard of eComXpo, you might want to check it out. It’s a virtual conference and trade show. For a very low price, you can hear tons of speakers, from Seth Godin to Bruce Clay.

The guy in charge of it is John Grosshandler. Last week, he was the guest on SEO Radio and you can hear the interview here. Check it out.

And look for more virtual conferences in the future!

Can Microsoft Out-Google Google?

Microsoft opens up their web applications to attract third party developers. Can they catch up to Yahoo and Google in the web application race?

Till now Microsoft has ignored the web, that is all about to change.
See story here.

HTGB: Matt Lewis

Joseph Tierney, who admits to writing click fraud programs “back when I was 13-14.”

This year, he graduated from high school and wrote an article explaining how easy it is to cheat Google’s Advertisers. Check it out here.

(Note the cool SitePal ad on the page.)

HTGB (Hat tip to Guest Blogger) Matt Lewis.

The New York Times goes offline in 2014, after the Google/Amazon merger.

http://www.broom.org/epic/

We really are living in interesting times. I can even remember what it was like BTI — before the internet . . . .

Did you hear? Google is quietly buying up miles and miles of fiber optic? Read Business 2.0’s report.