Chapter 7: Getting Help with Your Web Presence

In This Chapter

Identifying Internet tasks worth paying for

Finding the right people to help

Assuring that you get what you pay for

Staying in control of it all

If you are feeling a bit overwhelmed with all the steps to follow and tricks and tactics to try while reading this book, try to relax. This is the chapter that will bring you hope and direction in finding help without spending too much too soon. One of the greatest truths of the Internet is that you can start very small, spend just a little, and allow your business to grow steadily and pay for its own growth over time. You get to choose which pieces of the process you want to accomplish on your own versus those functions that are better left to a hired hand (or two).

The struggling economy has forced virtually all Internet marketing services to be commoditized. Tasks that used to be sold for $1,000 or more are now available, for yes, as little as $5! See Fiverr a bit later in this chapter. The key is to understand that no one has ever become a millionaire on the Internet alone. You must build a team of your own or hire one that’s already existing and proven.

Business owners near and far turn to out-tasking and outsourcing their Internet-related agenda. But how? In this chapter, you are introduced to the many types of helpers available to you — broadly called Internet service providers — and you see how to find them and engage with them properly to help with your projects.

Recognizing the Skills You Need Help With

What are you really good at? How do you enjoy spending your days? Do you like sitting in front of your computer screen for hours? Or are you more of a people person? Is your time better spent on the phone talking with prospects or in an online forum giving free advice? Do you jump out of bed in the morning to race to your computer at 5 a.m. to check your Google AdWords click-through rates, or would you rather meet your colleagues on the golf course for a morning of networking?

To maximize the Internet for your business, you have several main positions to fill: an Internet marketing team, if you will. For most business owners, accomplishing all roles solo — successfully, that is — is impossible.

• Vice President Internet Marketing (VPIM): Keeps everything together; creates, directs, and monitors the plan and results; adheres to the budget; holds helpers accountable to their performance and deadlines.

• Marketing expert: Creates the brand, logos, taglines, and stickiness (the ability of a brand or product to remain in someone’s mind over time); promotes consistency among all promotions and packaging.

• Website design expert: Works with the marketing expert to create the website’s look and feel that combines brand consistency with proven sales strategy.

• Internet marketing expert: Researches the competition; works with the sales expert to optimize the website and content for maximum sales conversion; builds the opt-in list and prepares e-mail campaigns and newsletters; conducts organic SEO (see Book II); manages CPC ad campaigns; implements inbound link campaigns, article creation, and syndication; manages blog setup and training; monitors shopping cart setup and testing; oversees audio and video production; provides progress reports to VPIM.

• Social networking manager: Conducts all interaction on multiple social sites including, at least, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Twitter; adds business news daily; receives requests from followers; replies to comments; organizes contests; works closely with the Internet marketing expert to produce blog posts that build traffic; monitors content quality standards and adherence to company guidelines.

• Sales expert: Writes effective and compelling sales copy; creates autoresponder sequences; trains affiliates; finds and attracts joint venture hosts; conducts teleseminars, webinars, and workshops to build product awareness; identifies customer needs.

• Publicity expert: Writes and distributes press releases; finds opportunities for the VPIM to participate in talk radio shows and television programs.

• Programming and database expert: Works with the Internet marketing expert to alter or customize tools that help increase sales, such as WordPress (or other content-management software), shopping carts, lead forms, and online registration scripts; manages online databases and assures that PCI Compliance standards are being met with online transactions.

• Content manager: Changes website content routinely and quickly upon request; edits video and audio and posts to website with appropriate players and codecs.

• Coach or mentor: Provides cutting-edge techniques; recognizes mistakes you might make; helps the team improve its skills.

• Business owner: Stays involved; relays customer approval to the rest of the team.

Attempting to understand and do all these functions on your own is a recipe for loss of sanity over time. So, consider which of these skills you have no interest in performing yourself, and make plans now to find resources to help.

Choosing an Internet Service Provider

You can’t possibly do all the work yourself that the Internet requires for maximizing leads and sales to their fullest potential. You need to build a team or hire a team that’s already established. By having such a team at your side, you’ll be amazed how many more hours of the day are available to you. And, if the right team members are chosen, your sales and leads will likely increase dramatically within only a few weeks of hiring.

To that end, consider hiring an Internet service provider (ISP). Not an ISP like Comcast or AT&T, but people who provide services to help increase your leads and sales on the Internet. Same words, but different meaning.

Ten years ago, the term Internet service provider defined a company that would host your website or provide you with a connection to the Internet. Today, an ISP is anyone or any entity that offers any type of service that directly or indirectly helps you conduct business online: a broad definition to be sure.

You can probably find thousands of ISPs in your area: folks with full-time, non-Internet–related jobs by day who moonlight or even volunteer their time as self-proclaimed experts by night. On the other end of the spectrum, established companies with departments full of employees are ready to dedicate an entire team of experts and a combined 100 hours or more per week to your project. And as you might expect, several levels of ISPs fall between these two extremes. Which level of help is right for you? Table 7-1 can help you with that decision.

Which ISP should you choose to help with your project? It largely depends on your budget, your commitment to running a business versus feeding a hobby, and your desired speed to market. For example, if you’re working a full-time job and want to start a business on the side and get a website to get things rolling and test the waters, a hobbyist or semipro ISP is a perfect fit. Conversely, if you’re part of a large company, you might want to hire a high-end agency. Small to midsized businesses enjoy long-term rewards and individual attention by dealing with the same people over time with the small company team.

Countless website designers have started by designing a free website for their church or for a friend and decided to leave their corporate job to make their millions as a web designer. A month or two later, they’re starving for work, lacking the necessary skills on many fronts.

Others new to the world of self-employment accept any project that comes their way just to make a few bucks. They spend three times as long as they were compensated for just to figure out how to accomplish the task. After a few long nights, hours of trial and error, and an unhealthy dose of uncertainty, the ISPs of this caliber often just disappear without notice.

Finding good ISP candidates

The best ISP referrals typically come through other business owners and colleagues or mentors in your network. By asking for referrals from people you know, you can hear about their experiences firsthand.

If you get no referrals to a good ISP from other business professionals in your network, don’t worry. The old saying, “Good help is hard to find,” rarely applies when looking for a good ISP on the Internet, thanks to freelance websites such as Fiverr, 99designs, Elance, vWorker, and Craigslist. The challenge becomes selecting the right person or team from a sea of talented designers, programmers, and marketers while weeding out those who lack experience or longevity.

The following sections offer tips for finding good referrals as well as introductions to popular freelance resources.

Personal referrals

Begin your search for good personal referrals by reviewing websites owned by friends or business acquaintances. Search the search engines for related keyword phrases to their industry and see whether their websites appear on the first page of Google. When you visit those websites and evaluate them, look for components of proofing and copywriting that sell. If both are present, chances are good that the website was produced by a knowledgeable and reliable team that produces results! Ask for a referral to the site owner’s ISP.

Fiverr

If you have not yet been introduced to the magic and creativity source of Fiverr (www.fiverr.com), prepare to be amazed with what some people are willing to do for just $5! Need a new logo? How about a trifold brochure? Maybe you want someone to create a video for your website saying your company name 100 times in 20 seconds while eating a sandwich. . . upside down! Get creative — it’ll still only cost $5. Just post your project on the site (see Figure 7-1), review the replies from respondents to your posting, and choose the helper whom you feel is the most capable to complete the task. The Fiverr system takes your payment up front, but the helper is not paid until you authorize that the task is complete.

99designs

On a higher level of freelancing than Fiverr is 99designs (www.99designs.com). There you can post a sort of contest for a wide variety of design projects. Submit your requirements and how much you’re willing to pay for the task. Designers will see your posting and compete with each other for your business by producing a better design than the next guy, as shown in Figure 7-2. You choose the winner and keep the design for your use, and the designer gets his payment.

With 99designs, be prepared to bid a large enough payment for the task to inspire several designers to start submitting their design ideas. Most logos are in the range of $300–$400.

Elance

Elance (www.elance.com) has for years been one of the more popular freelance systems for posting design, programming, and Internet marketing projects. After a project is posted, it’s often only a few hours before a dozen or more available helpers respond to bid on your project. Today, Elance has categories for writing, administration, sales, finance, engineering, and legal, in addition to Internet development. Figure 7-3 displays an Elance posting.

One of the great features of Elance is the ability to read reviews for an ISP’s work over just the past six months or overall. You can also see how much revenue that ISP has earned through Elance projects, which will build your confidence that it can do the job right for you.

Craigslist

Craigslist (www.craigslist.org), shown in Figure 7-4, has been a favorite for years when looking for Internet service providers. Some business owners prefer Craigslist because of the speed, and sheer number, of replies to a services-needed posting. Launching a well-crafted task description can often generate 50 or more replies by interested helpers — in a matter of 15–30 minutes! Others enjoy the cost savings (real or perceived) by finding someone to work one on one locally instead of using a higher-end agency.

Posting help wanted ads on Craigslist can be a time-drain! Be prepared to evaluate a great deal of people in response to your ads. Talk to them on the phone and meet with them in person, if possible. Offer to pay each of your potential recruits a very small fee to perform a very small task. If the communication isn’t there or something goes wrong with a small assignment, you’ve just avoided a big headache on a larger project.

ISPs like Craigslist because it’s completely free to review posts and reply to them. Because payment for projects occurs between the business owner and the ISP, Craigslist receives no additional compensation for the job. Another advantage to ISP’s with Craigslist is that all the communication is behind the scenes, whereas VWorker and Elance publicly post project quotes.

Best of all, the Craigslist website is sorted by city, so you’re more likely to get responses from local helpers than with Elance or vWorker.

Internet marketing agency

Internet marketing agencies will typically display their specialties so that you can quickly determine whether what they offer is a good fit for you and your business (see Figure 7-5). Rest assured that agencies want to save their time as much as yours. So, the good ones are willing to offer a free consult to see whether a good match exists.

Freelancers come and go. But, a good agency will be around to work with you over the next 5 or even 10 years or more. And, if they treat their helpers right, you’ll appreciate talking to the same people year after year. Expect agencies to charge higher rates than designers competing for your cash at 99designs or Craigslist. But, having that technical backbone and established team available only through reputable agencies is value beyond compare.

Interviewing and selecting the right ISPs

Finding a person or team of people to help you promote your business on the Internet is much more than the equivalent of contracting a carpenter to reface your kitchen cabinets or a plumber to fix your sink. It’s more similar to hiring an ER doctor to shock what could be your dying business back to life! You cannot afford to make wrong choices. After you review the ISP types to choose from (refer to Table 7-1) and gather a pool of potential candidates through referrals or middlemen (see the preceding section), follow these steps to choose the ISPs that are right for you:

1. Contact the potential ISP by e-mail, phone, or social network with some questions ready, such as “How long have you been in business?”

However long it takes the folks to respond to your contact attempt is how long you can expect a response to take when you’re a client. Be ready for the possibility that even your first contact attempt could turn into a free consultation to see whether your project is a good fit with the ISP’s focus. Listen for the element of enthusiasm for your project. The last thing you want is a service provider that is not interested in what you plan to offer the world through your business.

2. Find out how the ISP charges (by block of time, by project, or by both), not what they charge for.

This demonstrates to the ISP that you know the business — if only a little. Determine whether the ISP requires prepayment, partial down payment with the rest due upon completion, or simply net invoice amount due in 30 or 60 days (often called net-30 or net-60). All these options have benefits; you just need to be aware of what to expect.

3. Ask what the ISP’s typical turnaround time has been for similar projects it has worked with and whether there would be additional charges for rush orders.

4. Find out whether the ISP offers additional services related to the project.

For example, a website design company might recommend a preferred hosting company.

5. Find out how long the ISP has been doing this work.

An ISP with five or more years in the business has a pretty good chance of still being in business the next time you need something added to your website. Few feelings are worse than being in need of immediate help from your ISP and hearing “This phone has been disconnected . . .” when you call.

Plus, an ISP that has been around for a while probably has experience working with a number of clients in a variety of industries. So, you gain the benefit of having strategies applied for your project that produced results for another company in a related industry. Someone who has not had that industry experience will probably need to exercise some additional trial and error to get it right.

On the other hand, if you’re looking for someone to go totally against the grain for your project, you may want to seek someone who doesn’t have much experience and can come up with ideas you wouldn’t necessarily consider. The most important thing is that you want the truth. If a service provider lies about the number of years in business, he’s bound to lie about other elements of your project, too.

You can quickly find out the ISP’s claim to length of service by asking for some website projects that he worked on in the early years and asking how he believes things have changed since he began in the business.

6. Try to determine how you can be assured that the ISP will be around in six months or more.

Listen closely when you ask this question because you can usually hear nervousness in someone’s voice if he’s on the brink of going bankrupt. Be wary of hiring a person or team desperate for a sale.

Attracting the best ISP

Most ISPs prefer to do business with people who have some experience working with helpers to complete Internet tasks and projects. If you sound like a first-timer, chances are you might be ignored. So don’t ask general questions, claim to have the world’s next greatest idea, or use exclamation marks and triple question marks when e-mailing ISPs. Have your project well defined before you call, offer to e-mail your wish list during the call, and communicate with upbeat language throughout the e-mail.

Here are a few more do’s and don’ts for attracting an ISP to work on your project.

Do: Say, Say, Say

“My website visitors would benefit if . . .”

“What safe font types do you recommend that would be consistent with my market?”

“I like some of the components of this other website. Can you produce something similar?”

“Are you taking on any new SEO projects?”

“How do you monitor accomplishments and benchmarks on a project?”

“What are your payment options?”

“I’m taking my involvement with the Internet to a higher level.”

Don’t: Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

“How much do you charge for a website?”

“I know exactly what I want.”

“Can we use some font other than boring Arial or Verdana?”

“Can you just make my website pop a little more?”

“I’d like you to just go to this other website and make the same design for me.”

“Can you get my site on top of Google?”

“Do you have a money-back guarantee?”

“Can I pay you when the project is complete?”

“I’m brand new to the Internet.”

Finally, don’t settle for your helpers owning any part of your website or withholding usernames and passwords. Demand to have all original graphics and program files sent to you before final payment, and require that all accounts, usernames, and passwords for hosting, databases, domain names, or third-party applications be in your name. Website designers in particular have an issue with giving away their original artwork. Set them at ease that you will always go to them for changes to graphics but that you should have originals on hand in the event that they become unavailable for a long period of time or in case the relationship terminates.

You find some exceptions to the rule of ownership. For example, if you hire someone to manage your Google AdWords campaign, it is common practice for an ISP to not allow clients direct access to the AdWords account. For one, it would be easy for a novice to delete months of work and testing within seconds inside an AdWord campaign. Second, one learns proprietary techniques with experience, and an ISP would not want the client to cut and run without continuing to pay for those benefits received. You read about many of those techniques in Book IV.

One way to assure who owns what and to identify specific tasks to be performed for the proposed amount of money transacted is to have a written contract. Some ISPs go overboard with contracts. Sometimes clients overlegalize as well. The important thing is to at least have a simple checklist of one-liner descriptions showing what task will be completed, by when, and for how much. Hours of lawyer fees and time delays waiting for approvals are better spent making you money online! Be sure to ask what, if any, the contractual process is for any ISP you begin working with.

The “Do’s” help to establish a rapport with the ISPs you interview about your project. When an ISP has a greater comfort level that you know what you’re doing, you often get a better-quoted price. If not, at least your ISP will take more interest in your project when you express a certain level of professionalism and courtesy.

Deciding whether to outsource

If you decide to outsource your project to another country in a different time zone, be prepared for some challenges to occur in the areas of communication and time lag. Typically, your main contact will speak your native language, but only on a basic level. So, communicate on a basic level. Expect turnaround times for all requests to take at least 12 hours . . . even if an emergency arises.

And, prices are increasing. You used to be able to get a development project bid at $5,000 in the United States for a few hundred dollars overseas. Now, pricing isn’t nearly as competitive.

Outsourcing does certainly have its opportunities, especially when you can guarantee ongoing work hours, month after month. For example, you can fairly easily find overseas ghostwriters to produce blog posts and articles for you on a weekly or even daily basis for just a few hundred dollars a month.

Setting ISP expectations and measuring results

Whether your ISP is helping with the production of a mere banner ad or rolling out your next millionth-visitor-in-a-week traffic campaign, you and your helper must be very clear on what the goal is for the project. How will your expectation be met? Do you require a certain number of new sales or more traffic? Maybe the completion of the project has nothing to do with traffic or sales, but is merely a convenience to you. Whatever the goal, write it down and have a mutual agreement on the outcome. Here are some specific steps you can take to assure that your goals are met:

• Request frequent communication. When you’re working on a time- sensitive deadline, an update per day by e-mail is not too much to ask and keeps you confident that your project is being worked on. Give instant messaging a try to keep your telephone lines open and inbox less cluttered. Search Google for AOL Instant Messenger or use Skype’s instant messaging system. Both are free and stable and contain chat logs so you can keep track of your conversations later.

• Become aware of potential roadblocks. Ask whether anything might prevent the deadline from being met. If you have an absolute deadline for the project to be completed, you might require up front that a fee reduction should be granted for every day after the deadline that the project is not launched. For example, if you hire an ISP to produce an online registration form for an upcoming conference, you might require that the form is live two weeks prior to the last day of the “early bird” special pricing offer. If the registration form is not complete until two or three days before the early bird date, you would lose significant registrations. If it is truly the ISP’s fault for not getting the form live in time, a reduction in fee would certainly be warranted. But, if that ISP was waiting for content from you and could not go live without the approved information, the standard fee would be in play.

• Use repetition. Announce the goal on every phone call and decide together whether you’re closer to or farther away from reaching that goal since your last conversation.

• Give encouragement. ISPs like to know when they’re on the right track. Even though a project might not be complete, you can make complimentary comments on the job done so far. ISPs like to work for people they like. So, a little ego stroking pulls some weight when working with helpers.

• Ask for activity reports. With the help of an online project tracker, you can request progress reports at any time. If you pay your helpers in blocks of time or by the hour, keep a close watch on what has been accomplished for the time spent. Some software to try:

• Basecamp (www.basecamp.com) is a good system to use, especially when multiple people are on the same project team and need to coordinate who is in charge of completing which tasks by a certain date. Basecamp has a monthly fee starting at $20 and requires a bit of a learning curve.

• Premium Web Cart (www.PremiumWebCart.com) seems to be where people are going who are looking for an alternative to Basecamp. PWC has the added advantage of being completely integrated with a shopping cart, affiliate program, membership system, and CRM. See Chapter 2 in this minibook for more information on Premium Web Cart.

• Google Docs (http://docs.google.com) is the opposite of Basecamp because it’s simply a web-based word processing and spreadsheet system instead of a true project tracker. Oh yeah, and it’s free! You find very little learning curve with Google Docs because it’s very similar to Microsoft Word and Excel. Google Docs is a great application for multiple people to contribute to the same document or allow some people to edit where others only receive viewing access.

• Internet Marketing Actionizer (http://members.HereNextYear.com): Launch pre-made web-marketing checklists of tasks or create your own. Then you can produce simple reports within seconds that display the dates of tasks performed, a description of the tasks, who performed them, and the total amount of time that each task required; see Figure 7-6.

When it comes to tracking billable time, it doesn’t matter whether your ISP uses complex customized software or a simple e-mail once a week, as long as some mechanism is in place to provide you with that information when you need it.

• Request sales and cost reports. If you have a company managing a promotional campaign, demand reports at least once per week. Even with the most complex Google AdWords campaigns, running a sales report takes less than ten minutes. It’s your money: Know where it’s being spent.

• Offer to check off a completed project. When your project is close to completion, offer to sign off on the project. ISPs love clients who want things to be finalized. Extend the courtesy of acknowledging when a project is complete.

If you request a report and notice an abrupt change in communication by your ISP, be on alert that something might have gone wrong. Helpers tend to disappear into their caves when things don’t go as planned or aren’t completed within the time they thought the project would go live. Be sympathetic at first. Unforeseen factors can creep into any project at any time even for the most experienced firms. But, don’t let it go too long. Be patient, yet persistent, when needed.

Not every client/ISP relationship is going to work like a charm. If things are not going how you planned, be the proactive business owner and confront your helper to either get your money back or get the project fixed. This is where trial and error, starting off with small projects when working with a new helper, can pay off. If a helper can’t finish a small task, he probably won’t finish a larger task.

Nurturing a good ISP partnership

When you find an ISP that you like and trust over a period of months, offer a little more incentive than a project fee or hourly rate to keep you and your project at the forefront of his mind. Devise a plan that offers a small compensation per month based on sales. This invitation is best made when the ISP is not expecting it. Offering such an incentive accomplishes several objectives:

• Builds confidence: The ISP is certain that you approve of his work.

• Strengthens the team: People like to be part of teams that accomplish things. Monetary incentives help your ISP understand that he really is a valued part of the team.

• Sparks creativity: Most ISPs start to get creative when they know they’re going to get a piece of the pie. You will get occasional e-mails from them that read, “You didn’t ask me to do this, but the idea just struck me and I had to try it out. What do you think about it?”