Category — Business Ventures

[UPDATE - Adding 1,000 people a day will likely get your account suspended with Twitter. To avoid this add around 300 per day, and don't mass unfollow people quickly. For me I would have a week off following people to do one mass unfollow....then start following again. This makes growing your account a bit slower but is still a great way to grow your account quickly]

I have set myself a BHAG – A Big Hairy Audacious Goal – to get 50,000 twitter followers by 1/1/11 and to make loads of money from those twitter followers.

Currently I have about 5,400 twitter followers and this is growing every single day. But it is time to up the anti and to increase my twitter followers by 10 times that amount. In the mean time I may as well starting making a bucketload of money from my new found twitter fame.

So How Can You Actually Grow Your Twitter Following By 50,000 In Just 6 Months?

It is actually a lot easier than you might think. All it takes is a little diligence and some hard work…or you can outsource these tasks for as little as $1/hour using ODesk. It is really easy and almost anyone can do it.

Step 1 – Find A Twitter User With 50,000 Followers Who Is Following The Same Amount of People

By finding a twitter user with 50,000 followers who is also following 50,000 this means that they autofollow everyone who follows them. It also means there is a good chance that all of their followers will autofollow anyone who follows them.

If you want to follow more than 50,000 then find a few users with 50,000 followers each. Or find a user with over 100,000 followers who is also following 100,000 people.

Step 2 – Everyday Follow 1,000 of Those Followers

Everyday twitter allows you to follow 1,000 people. So everyday you need to follow 1,000 people. The chances are that most of the people you follow will follow you back.

This is painful work, and who has a couple of hours to spend everyday for 6 months? I certainly don’t…that is why step 3 is so important.

Step 3 – Outsource Following Tasks For $1/hour
Instead of trying to follow 1,000 people a day yourself you can outsource this task on ODesk for as little as $1/hour. It wouldn’t take more than 2 hours per day to do this…that’s $2/day.

The awesome thing about outsourcing is that because you are paying someone to do it, they will do it everyday without fail. Meaning you could grow your twitter following by more than 182,000 followers in 6 months…and it will only cost you around $350. (182 days x 1,000 follows per day = 182,000). Once you reach 50,000 followers it will likely only take you a few tweets to make your $350 back, because a huge twitter following is a money making machine.

Now not everyone you follow will follow you back, but that is alright. Of 182,000 that you follow in 6 months time it is very likely that at least 50,000 people will follow you back. Those that don’t follow you; you auto-unfollow all of them at once using one of the many tools out there

Click Here To Sign Up For ODesk For Free

So Now That I Am Growing My Twitter Following How Do I Make Money From It?

There are a few different ways to make money with your list.

1. Sponsored Tweets
Sponsored Tweets is a website that allows you to sell a tweet. This means advertisers can pay you to write a tweet about their product.

Some movie stars with upwards of 1.5 million followers charge around $8,000 for one tweet. Who needs to ever work again if just one tweet will make you that much money!!! Just 5 tweets a year and you would be well ahead of the average wage of Australia/America.

But with 50,000 followers you could probably make around $50-$100/tweet from Sponsored Tweets. Do that once per day and you will be making $18,000-$37,000 per year just from Sponsored Tweets.

Click Here To Sign Up For Sponsored Tweets Today And Starting Making Money

2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is another great way to make money by tweeting. Instead of being paid to tweet you write a tweet with an affiliate link in it. Everyone who signs up for your affiliate offer through the link in your tweet makes you money.

John Chow has approximately 55,000 followers and he made over $4,000 from one tweet just by posting about an affiliate offer.

Market Leverage and Motive Interactive are two affiliate networks that have some pretty good offers. You don’t even have to sell anything to make money because some offers pay you a small amount (around $1) for every person that enters their email address.

Get just 1% of your 50,000 followers to sign up for one of these offers (remember they don’t even have to buy anything) and you have made $500.

You can also market products that people buy. Some products on Market Leverage pay you $80 and the customer only buys the product for $30. Get just 1% of your 50,000 followers to buy this product and BAM you just made $40,000.

Affiliate marketing had a lot of potential on twitter. Just write your affiliate tweets as you would write any other tweet and try not to make it look like spam.

3. Email Marketing
I love making money from email marketing and to me a large email list is always going to be better than a large twitter list. So why not use twitter to grow your email marketing list?

To get 5,000 email subscribers can be hard. But if you build up a twitter following of just 50,000 followers (which will be easy) then you only need 10% to subscribe and you have will have a email list teeming with potential. Keep outsourcing your twitter building using ODesk and soon you could have over 300,000 twitter followers, which could build a MASSIVE email marketing list.

Offer your twitter followers a variety of free stuff (different offers will attract different people and increase your chances of more subscribers). Then set up a bunch of email autoresponder messages with Aweber and let the emails market affiliate products for you.

For best results use the emails to market both your own products and affiliate products. It is also a good idea to writing teaching emails and teach people how to do things, and then recommend them products.

Aweber is awesome because you can run your entire email marketing campaign on autopilot. You write the emails once and when someone signs up Aweber send out the emails (in order) for you. So you can literally make money while you sleep.

Click Here to sign up for Aweber for $1

4. Website Traffic
You can use twitter to drive traffic to your blog, website of squeeze page. I use a plugin called Tweetly Updator, which automatically updates my twitter account whenever I publish a new post on my blog. This generally sends a small influx of people to my blog.

I am sure that when I have 50,000 followers instead of 5,000 I will get a lot more people coming to my blog through twitter. Economies of scale

5. Sell Your List

I have never done it myself, but I am sure that you could create targeted twitter followings and sell them to people.

As you can see, growing your twitter list to 50,000 in 6 months is not only easy, but it can be very beneficial and bring in a fair bit of extra income. That extra income could pay off the credit card, pay off your home faster, pay for a holiday or a night out, or completely fund your lifestyle and give you the freedom to do whatever you want. It is your choice.

Everyday you waste is a day you are missing out on an abundance of income from twitter. So get cracking. Go to ODesk and get a worker for $1/hour who will build your list for you.

I am taking on the challenge to write 100 articles in 100 days for ezinearticles.com. I will use the articles to market my new 14 week (soon to be 14 day) e-course on making money with Aweber. You can check out the course for free if you want at www.richacademy.com/aweber.

The goal with this e-course is to begin to create a passive income online. I have always been (and I think I always will be) all about generating passive income. That is income you work for once, and then don’t have to work for again. My e-course will do that in a number of ways:

• By teaching people how to make money online I will also be recommending a few different products and services. Such as:
  • Aweber itself
  • Hostgator hosting (I can offer my readers $0.01/month hosting if they use the coupon code “ryanmclean”)
  • ODesk outsourcing
  • Affiliate sites such as Market Leverage and Motive Interactive
  • My own products yet to be created

The goal is to have everything eventually run on autopilot. Once I finish writing the 14 lesson course I will move it from a 14 week course to a 14 day course. I will then create a years worth of weekly emails as well. These will all be sent out automatically once I subscribe.

With my marketing I will be using Ezinearticles.com and other article directories to submit my articles to. This will create a good spurt of traffic when the articles first go live (as they go on the EzineArticle.com homepage) and it will also generate me passive traffic over the long term.

Eventually as income goes up and up I will use some of my passive income to hire full time writers on ODesk. You can get english speakers to work for you for as little as $1/hour. Full time that is $40/week or $2080/year to write articles and market my course full time. That will make everything passive.

• Traffic will be passive as I will have a bunch of articles out there marketing my site.
• Lead generation will be passive as it is simply a squeeze page on www.richacademy.com/aweber
• Sales will be passive as emails are sent out automatically
• When people sign up for services like Aweber I will receive passive income as a commission
• Eventually growth of my traffic and business will be passive as I can pay people to market my website for me.

The goal is not to achieve anything quickly. The goal is to earn enough passive income in the next 4 years to be able to become financially free.

EzineArticles.com are doing a challenge…100 Articlies in 100 Days…if you succeed you get a bunch of free stuff. If you double it and write 200 articles in 100 days then you also get a pretty good leather bound journal. So I am aiming for that. My journal is about to run out and I wouldn’t mind a new one. The 200 articles will do wonders for marketing my new ecourse and it will be good for me to get in the habit of writing again. And the freebies will be a plus too. I love a good challenge. Wish me luck.

Microtesting my business idea has to go down as one of the best business decisions I have made to date.

I am an impulsive person! As soon as I get an idea I want to run with it. This often leads to me not being prepared to do business properly and doing a half assed job.

By microtesting my business idea I have been able to develop my business without the expenses of running it, and without having to deal with customers. I have been able to test whether it would be a viable business idea (which it is) and was able to tweak it to maximize profits, conversions and traffic to the site. Microtesting has also allowed me to research the legal side of my business and make sure I protect myself with disclaimers, legal advice and corporate structures.

This will probably be my last post on microtesting for the time being as I have actually finished microtesting and am currently building up my marketing campaign. I just wanted to close off this chapter of my life on the blog so I can move on.

Wow, people like to take their sweet time. I am currently microtesting a business idea…well it has moved more from microtesting to setting up and building a database for a launch, and I have begun to see why everyone talks so much about having a time sensitive offer.

Whenever I go to conferences they always have an offer for “Today Only”. This is to try and get people to take action.

On my site I start with having a 50% offer and I made it valid only for a couple of days, and I found that I go a few signups by doing this. It was a pain in the ass changing the dates all the time so I created a special offer and made it valid for about 2 weeks. I thought this was still short enough to bring in sales but I was wrong.

Everyone seems to be waiting out. They are not forced to make a decision immediately (Today Only) so they take their time and weigh up the options. I wonder whether when it comes to the end of March (when the offer ends) I will get an influx of people wanting to sign up. Time will tell.

I am currently in the process of formulating and finalising the two different membership types on my website (still can’t reveal the website yet). Basically I will be offering a monthly subscription service, but I don’t want people to sign up for one month and then get all of the data and leave, so I have been trying to work out ways to get people to sign up for a full year at a time.

I am going to employ what I call the three legged walker sales close. Odd name for a sales close but let me explain.

I work at a Chemist, and we also sell aged care products such as incontinence pads, beds, chairs and walkers. When you come in to choose your walker most people don’t want to spend a lot of money so they will look at the base model. The base model is a three legged walker with no seat. It is $189 and you have to buy the basket separately. The next model up from that is the base model four legged walker. This has a seat and a basket included and costs only $169. So why would anyone buy the three legged base model?

The answer is: They wouldn’t!

When someone comes in to buy a walker for their parents, or themselves, they are likely not going to want to spend a lot of money. To come to them and say this 4 legged walker costs $169 they could be shell shocked and refuse to pay $169 for a walker. But instead they come in and are first introduced to the three legged walker, without a seat or basket for $189. This seems expensive but then when you look at the 4 legged walker with a seat and a basket for only $169, all of a sudden this seems like a great deal.

You get all these added extras, that would be extremely helpful to that person’s life, and you are saving $20! So now, instead of simply focusing on the $169 and how much that costs, the customer is thinking about the added extras they will get and the $20 (or more) they will save if they buy the 4 legged walker.

I have not yet seen one 3 legged walker sold, nor have I even seen an elderly person walking around with a 3 legged walker. Elderly people who need a walker to get around want a seat, and they want a basket and they love the discount. I think the walker company would be shell shocked if someone ordered the 3 legged walker. They probably don’t even stock any because they know they will never sell them.

The 3 legged walker is not there to be sold, it is there merely to sell the 4 legged walker. It is to make the 4 legged walker look good in comparison to something else.

I am going to use this technique on my website (I think). Instead of only offering a yearly subscription fee and everything you get with that I will offer two options. I will first introduce them to the more expensive monthly fee, without any extras, and then I will introduce them to the cheaper one year alternative which has a whole bunch of added extras. The monthly subscription is not there to be sold, it is there to sell the yearly subscription.

Some may say that this is a nasty trick, but I don’t think it is. The yearly subscription is already great value, underpriced and will be an incredible asset to the customers’ lives. It is already worth every penny they would spend on it. But people freak out when they see big numbers and avoid making a decision that will benefit their lives. So you put something overpriced in there to ease the customers mind about spending money on the original product. You are, through an interesting method, helping the customer have a satisfying purchasing experience.

Let’s face it, old people need walkers so they would buy them anyway. But what is better for the customer? Them walking out angry and frustrated and depressed that they had to spend $169 on a walker, or walking out happy and overjoyed that they saved $20 AND got a bunch of bonus extras for only $169. One sales method adds to the customers life by giving them a good experience, one takes away from their live by giving them a bad experience. They end up with the same product, but different experiences.

So that is the Three Legged Walked Sales Close. I am almost certainly going to use this in my business.

I was reading my bible the other day. Whenever I am feeling overwhelmed or a bit down in the dumps I like to read my bible. Somehow the wisdom from thousands of years of experience and relationship with God soothes my nerves…not to mention that God points things out to me.

As usual I was looking through Proverbs, my favourite book in the bible. In case you don’t know it is mainly written by King Solomon who is considered by many to be the wisest man and the richest man who ever lived. I was reading ‘The Message’ version which is a modern day paraphrase of the bible and I came across one verse that struck me.

“Sell everything and buy Wisdom, forage for understanding”

Ever since I was a kid it was always my prayer to get wisdom. I was inspired by the story of Solomon, who God gave one ‘wish’. God said he could have whatever he wanted, he only had to ask. Instead of asking for riches, or women, or power or glory he asked for wisdom. Because he asked for wisdom and not the other things God gave him wisdom, but he also gave him everything else as well. Ever since reading that I have always asked for wisdom.

Ask my wife, or my friends and they will tell you that I love learning. When it comes to business and investing my main priority is not to make money right off the bat, but to learn and get wisdom. Because the more wisdom you get, the more money you make.

The other day, when I read this verse, I was feeling overwhelmed. I have just become a dad to my baby girl Sasha, and my head has not exactly been in the game. I have been torn between caring for her, trying to get sleep, trying to close on my first investment property and trying to microtest and start a new business. It has been a fairly full on process. Trying to make a decision on what to focus on has been hard.

But this concept of doing everything you can in order to gain wisdom really drummed home for me what I needed to do. Property is great, and I will continue to invest in property, but without income and borrowing power it can be extremely difficult. More importantly it can be difficult to become financially free quickly through property (without any income to support your investments).

My business on the other hand, could gross me over $120k/year with minimal time investment. Costs would probably run at around $40k/year so that is an almost passive income of $80,000/year. Not bad seeing as I am currently earning $15-20k/year at my current job. If I could completely outsource the running of the business then I have effectively created a passive income for myself of $80,000/year an I am effectively financially free.

There is not one way to financial freedom there is many. Sometimes you have to deviate from your original plan in order to pursue something better, or to make your plan work better. This business will make it easier for me to invest in property and make money in property, and become financially free all over again in property.

Wisdom said to me, sell everything you have in order to obtain me. That means, if you have to, sell the idea of investing in property for the time being. That also means, focus some time on learning how to build businesses and growing wisdom in that area. Because of spending some time reading the bible I am now emotionally stable, and I have reestablished my focus and I am moving forward.

So I have been outsourcing work for about 2 weeks now and am starting to get into the groove of how it all works. It is an interesting process learning how to have someone work for you. It is something I have never done before so I am having a lot of fun learning.

Eventually I want to be a businessman and own multiple businesses which other people run for me. In order to do this I need to learn how to have people work for me, and outsourcing has been the perfect opportunity to learn that. I just want to jot down a few of the things I have learned about outsourcing. If they help you they help you, if not it helps me to write things down anyway.

A Native English Speaker Will Make Your Life One Million Times Easier

It seems everyone these days speaks English, and you may not notice a big difference between a native English speaker and a non native when you are just talking to them. But when you are outsourcing work, having a native English speaker is a Godsend.

The first task I outsourced was to someone from India, and they only spoke broken English. Luckily I was smart enough to request an update after 1 hour of work. It turned out he didn’t understand exactly what I wanted him to do and he was doing something slightly different. It was very difficult to communicate with him and to get my message across. It made me so frustrated that I decided not to rehire him.

The next person I hired spoke English as their native language. I hired him for 8 hours and first and it proved so easy that now the same person is my Virtual Assistant. He is currently working 40 hours per week for me. This will drop to 10 hours for the next few weeks, then if the business I am testing works he will be back to 40 hours per week indefinitely.

People Will Only Do What You Tell Them To Do

Even people who speak perfect English only do what you tell them to do. They will not go out of their way to get you exactly what you wanted if you didn’t ask for it. You have to tell them exactly what you want, and exactly what you want them to do.

For example, I want to find cheap bugaboo prams overseas, because I want to buy one but I don’t want to pay the $700-$1,000+ it costs in Australia. I simply asked my outsourcer to find me cheap bugaboo prams. I didn’t tell him anything else.

He must have just done a simple Google search, and maybe have gone to the bugaboo website. He came back with figures MORE than what I would pay in Australia. It’s not his fault, he only did what I asked him to do. You need to give more exact instructions. If you have no idea what to do, be honest and tell them that it is their job to work it out. Don’t just expect them to know what you want them to do.

It Is Your Job To Think Outside The Box

As an entrepreneur it is your job to think outside the box in order to achieve the most you can for your business or your life. When you outsource it is not their job to think outside the box for you, unless of course you tell them to.

For example, I am trying to plan a holiday overseas for the same cost as living in Australia. This involves thinking outside of the box. I outsourced the task of planning this holiday with my outsourcer and expected him to think outside the box for me. Obviously, this wasn’t the case. He came back with expensive figures for expensive holidays.

It is my job to think outside the box and to direct my workers so they can achieve the best result possible for me.

You Are Responsible For Refining The Way Work Is Done

A lot of the tasks I give out I give out because they are menial and take a lot of time. I am sure that there are ways to fast track the task, but I don’t know how. So instead I outsource it.

Someone who works by the hour generally doesn’t care how fast they get it done. In fact the slower they get it done the better because it means more money for them. So as the person paying the wages you need to direct how things are done to get the best results.

Outsourcing has been awesome for my life. What I am learning is worth the $40/week or whatever I am paying the person I am hiring. I now need to work hard to think of things to outsource. If my business model that I am microtesting proves successful then I will be looking to outsource a couple of people full time. It might cost me $200/week but hopefully I will be making more than that. If I hire a few people then in one gets sick and can’t work for two weeks I have others to back him up (Casey!).

Well I have set up the website for my business idea (it is currently on the DL so I am not saying what the website or business is) and I have started microtesting.

In case you don’t know what microtesting is, it is basically setting up the sales funnel and marketing for a product without actually making or selling the product. For me I have set up a sales pages to which I am sending potential customers. I have a registration form almost exactly the same as a real registration form. Only when they register they are send to a page that tells them the product is not in stock at the moment. Obviously we don’t charge them or keep any of their payment details.

This way you can see how many people buy your product and whether or not it will be profitable before you spend a lot of time and/or money on making the product.

One of the best ways to microtest (apparently) is through PayPerClick (PPC) marketing. When you search in Google often there are search terms highlighted in yellow, or ads on the sides of the page. These are PPC ads. Whenever someone clicks on your ad you pay Google a certain amount of money.

The reason microtesting is proving more difficult than I first imagined is that it is quite difficult to get a lot of traffic for a small cost. I want to spend about $0.05-$0.10 per click. So for around $150 I will get about 1500-3000 hits to my site. Some of the keywords in Google cost $3.00 per click in order to place your ad under that keyword. That means for $150 you would get 50 people visiting your site, not nearly as many as the 1,500-3,000 I want to achieve.

So far the hardest part about the microtesting is finding cheap traffic to come to my site. I have been running my ads for 2 days and my ads have had 33 impressions and absolutely zero clicks. I really don’t want to spend more than 10c per click so I think I will be working this week adding more keywords to my marketing campaign.

I was thinking about maybe doing some article marketing in order to get more traffic, but I don’t really want to be spending ridiculous amounts of time writing articles that might not even get any traffic or make me any money. So I will keep trying to refine my PPC marketing campaign and see if I can start getting some decent traffic to my site.

I want to microtest my site for about a month. Then if it turns out it has a good chance of being profitable it will probably take me another month to get it up to the standard I want to start actually charging people (I won’t actually do any of the work myself I will completely outsource it using Virtual Assistants on oDesk for just $1-$1.50/hour). Then once that is done I can launch it and hopefully take a small profit as I continue to build it up, or at least break even. Breaking even or making a small profit will then give me the time I need to build up my product without it costing me any money (because I don’t have money to burn). So that is what I am aiming for. If it turns out no one is interested I will either can the project completely or sell the idea to someone else who could make it profitable.

If I can work out PPC and get cheap clicks then I can test a whole bunch of different products and business ideas, that I have floating around in my head, without taking a lot of time and effort making the product. This could change my life.

The other day, after a semi-frustrating joint venture meeting, I was forced to completely rethink my product. I am a property investor and previously my product was a joint venture on positive cashflow property.

They say when starting a business you should find the market first, and then create a product for the market. Well I have discovered that the market does not want a joint venture on smaller positive cashflow properties. For the business person joint venture is difficult because people tend to fall into 2 categories

1. They know nothing about property and investing and don’t want to learn anything. They lack the knowledge and therefore are afraid to invest.
2. People who know about property investing. These people want to know everything about their investment and want to have a say in everything. This micro-management makes closing a deal painful.

So I have come up with a business idea that is created specifically for the market. I am not trying to create a product and find a market, instead I am reading the market and trying to deliver exactly what they are asking for.

With the ability to outsource most of my work, the potential for creating an automated business is huge. The only problem I have is capital to start with. To get my business up and running it would cost me around $500 and ongoing costs of around $200/month. That is money I can’t really afford to lose. I don’t even know if my business model will work yet.

But there is a great way around the problem and it is called microtesting. I got this idea from the 4 hour work week.

Basically is works like this. Create the front end of your business. This is the sales page that sells your product for you. For me I need to create a website to explain my product. I can create this website for $15, the cost of the domain, and about a week’s work. So you create the front end and the sales systems but no product…yet

Second step is you begin to market your product without making it publicly known. You can do this through Google Adwords PPC (Pay Per Click) Marketing. The goal is two fold.

1. To test whether you can make more money in sales than you pay in advertising
2. To test different ads and to see which ads work the best

To do this you set up ads that point to your sales page. For me I am creating a sales page that has a complete form to collect all their information. In order to create this form I am using Aweber, which is the best in the business for email marketing.

People will be directed to my sales page and if they want to purchase my product they will fill out the required information and click buy. They will then be redirected to a page saying that the product is out of stock, or is currently on back order. I will tell them I have collected their information and will email them when it becomes available. There will also be a link they can click if they choose to not receive information.

Note: It is illegal to charge people for something that is not yet being manufactured. So I do not charge them. I believe it is also illegal to keep people’s credit card information if they cannot purchase, so I get around this by keeping their details but NOT their credit card info.

Each person that fills out the form and clicks ‘buy’ counts as a sale in my test. So I can effectively work out if my product is profitable or not. If I spend $200 on advertising and make one sale worth $100, then chances are my product won’t be profitable (unless I can lower my marketing costs). This is a great way to test whether or not there is a market for my product and whether or not I think I can make a profit. All I had to do was create a sales page and some PPC campaigns. I didn’t have to spend months of work and money creating the product.

Microtesting also gives you the ability to test different variables in your ads. Look at the two ads below (examples taken from The 4-Hour Work Week):

SAILOR SHIRTS FROM FRANCE                  REAL FRENCH SAILOR SHIRTS
French Quality, Shipped From US                   French Quality, Shipped From US
Lifetime Guarantee!                                              Lifetime Guarantee!
www.shirtsfromfrance.com –                             www.shirtsfromfrance.com

By changing only one thing, you can test which works best. As long as you disable the feature that serves only the best serving ad. Create different ad campaigns changing just one section to see which works best. In the end you can combine the best aspects to make an effective ad campaign.

Microtesting allows you to test the profitability of a business without needing to put money and time into creating the product. If your business is a dud then cut your losses and move onto the next one. If your business model works then take it to the next step and create your product and start selling it.

The best thing about using Aweber in all of this is that those fake ‘sales’ you made in the testing phase can be turned into real sales. Instead of the person clicking the buy button and then disappearing because you are unable to sell them anything, their details are collected and stored in your Aweber service. When your product is finally up and running you can email these people and turn that fake sale into a real sale. So you $200 of testing might actually make you money in the end anyway.

This idea of microtesting is genius. Just make sure you don’t break any laws by not actually charging people or storing their credit card data and you should be fine. This is the ultimate way to test a business idea without outlaying a lot of time or money on product creation.

I have created many ebooks to sell before and never microtested them. I didn’t lose a lot of money (usually I would lose about $80 and a week to a month of my life), but by microtesting I could have saved a lot of time and saved the feeling of failure a few times over. So why not think about microtesting your idea.