Hiring employees is a lot of hassle. You have to deal with a bunch of legal requirements and taxes. A much more economical solution is an independent contractor. And in this day and age, a virtual assistant is a great way to go.

A virtual assistant (VA) is essentially an assistant that does not work in my office. In other words, they are not an employee, but an independent contractor. They provide their own material and they work remotely, doing whatever you ask them to do. With the technology we have today, there really is no reason that you HAVE to have people in your office. In my case, I operate out of a home office. Even if the VA needs to work with your own software, you can give them remote desktop access and they can use a computer in your office while sitting anywhere in the world. Hence the name virtual assistant.

Virtual assistants can be hired online and can either be local or on the other side of the world. You can hire them for as cheap as $5/hour all the way up to much higher rates. Often, the rate varies depending on where they are in the world. For instance, you can usually hire somebody from India a lot cheaper than you can hire somebody from the United States. The thing to consider, though, is the cultural nature of it. You will be dealing with a language barrier and a significant time difference when dealing with somebody overseas. Also, just being from different cultures can lead to issues with communication. Sometimes, dealing with assistants from right here at home makes more sense despite them being, overall, more costly.

A very well known book by Tim Ferris is called 4-Hour Work Week. This book is all about the use of remote labor to run a business and (as the title shows you) in as little as 4 hours per week. That might be a best-case scenario for many, but the principles in that book hold true for anybody looking to get more time in their day and still get the work done.

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Day 24: The Secret To Having More Than 24 Hours In a Day

I can tell you from experience that it can be very hard to make the transition to outside labor. The following things are in play:

1. The feeling that nobody can do it as well as I can.
2. The time it takes to train somebody else to do the things you can do very quickly.
3. The fact that this other person probably doesn’t really care too much about your business and is only doing this for you as a J-O-B.

It can be frustrating, but the one thing you absolutely HAVE to have to EVER outsource anything is documentation.

It would be a wise move as you build up any business (as well as an online one) to take the extra time to document your procedures as you go. Write the documentation such that it is easily followed by somebody else. You want that person to be able to go through the documentation and be able to start doing things just as YOU would do them.

By creating this documentation, it will keep you from having to train every new person who comes down the pike.

You can use text documentation. You can also use video. Using a program like Camtasia to simply record your screen and make a movie out of it can allow you to quickly show people how to do things. And those videos are reusable later on for other people (as long as the procedure doesn’t change, of course).

If you are just getting started, start taking the time to write down your procedures as you develop them. If you are already in business, then start systematizing things into easily followed steps and then document it. You want to make your post occupiable by somebody else.

That is the key. Do this now and you’ll be much happier down the road. Take this advice from a person who didn’t know this when he got started.

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Day 23: Do This Now And You’ll Be Happy Later

A lot of business people online think it is best to charge for everything, but it is hard to argue with Eben Pagan when the man is generating around $20 million per year in sales.

One of the important principles to recognize in marketing is that of reciprocity. It means that when you do great things for people, they often feel the need to give something back. Using that principle, you can see that giving a lot of real, quality content to your potential customers is going to lead to higher numbers reciprocating when it is time to actually sell them something.

Not only that, but giving away quality information sets you up as an authority in your market. It trains your market to recognize you and to know what the information you provide is good stuff. It makes selling them something down the road all that much easier when they have seen your stuff in the past and know it is good.

Image courtesy of Entreprenuer’s Journey, where Yaro Starak has a great article on this subject.

Using the image above, you can imagine that free line being pushed down the funnel. That stuff you might have sold for $27? Give it away instead and this can lead to great numbers of sales of more expensive items down the road.

You might have noticed that, here at PCMech, we provide a TON of free content every day. But, we also have premium content in that mix, available only to our paid members. The premium stuff is good stuff – really good stuff. But, if we charged for everything, there is a high chance you would have never found PCMech in the first place. You found us because of the volume of free information we post every day. Yet another example of the free line in action.

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Day 22: Why Giving Things Away is Smart Business

For example, let’s say you have a product you would like to promote. You have a mailing list. You have a website. But, there are others online who cater to the same market you do and they have their own mailing lists and clientele as well. There are two choices here: (1) You look at that other person as pure competition and you work to out market them, or (2) you look at that other person as a potential partner.

So, you can work up a relationship with that other party and you can offer to do a JV deal. A JV deal can take a lot of different forms, but a very typical arrangement might be “You promote my widget to your mailing list and I will pay you XX% commission for every product sold.”. This allows you to get your product in front of that person’s database and it allows them to make some coin in the process.

It can be work to set up a good joint venture partnership. You’re dealing with actual people here and they will need to be convinced to partner with you. Often, the successful people in a market are approached for JV deals quite often. You might be just another number to them. So, you need to exercise come tact when you deal with them and you need to have a product that is truly worthy of such promotion.

We have a full series on how to set up joint venture partnerships here at PCMech. This series is available to members only, and it will walk you through the pitfalls of securing JV deals.

JV deals can be the make-break point between an unsuccessful product launch and a very successful one. JVs are what allow some of the best known internet marketers to create these huge product launches and have million dollar paydays. Without JVs, they couldn’t do it.

It is that powerful.

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Day 21: Gold in Joint Venture Partnerships

For Windows there is no better text editor than Notepad++ (pronounced as it looks: “Notepad Plus Plus”). Once you start using it you’ll never use plain ol’ Windows Notepad ever again.

There are many perks to using Notepad++. Here’s a few of them:

• Syntax highlighting (color coding for specific programming languages)
• WYSIWYG
• Auto-completion
• Multi-document environment (as in tabs)
• Drag’n'drop support
• Zoom in/out
• Macro record/playback

There’s a lot more that this editor can do but you get the idea.

You can download Notepad++ from here. It’s free and ready to rock.

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21 Windows Apps – Notepad++

For those that are all about speed, speed and more speed when it comes to productivity, you can’t get much better than Launchy; it is an application launcher that does its thing 100% by keystrokes.

Launchy stays in the background, requires only a bare minimum of memory to run and can be executed at any time by the default ALT+SPACE keystroke.

An example of how Launchy works: You want to launch a Firefox web browser. ALT+SPACE, start typing firefox and before the e in fire you’ll see it. Then press enter. App is launched. If you want to launch Firefox with a specific url: ALT+SPACE, firefox, TAB, [url here], enter. Done.

I use Launchy so much that I can’t use Windows without it. This app launcher does the job better than any other. Google Desktop can’t touch it. Try it and you’ll see why.

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21 Windows Apps – Launchy

In my opinion, the fact that Twitter users get nervous when they see a “internet marketer” use Twitter is testament to the fact that many use it incorrectly. Twitter and any other social media platform is inherently a community. And that community is made up of real people.

And just like when people get annoyed when you walk up and knock on the door to sell you something during dinner time, people are going to resent you if you start marketing to them in their social settings online.

This is not to say that, as a business person, that you should steer clear of using such sites. Absolutely not. These sites are used by a LOT of people. And with a large group of people, it is inevitable that some of your potential clientele are using these social media sites.

The trick (if you want to call it that) is to treat people with respect. You need to actually participate as a person first, and a business second. You need to be a part of the community. Offer things of value. You might even just “shoot the crap” with people about things which have absolutely nothing to do with your business. If you build a reputation on these sites as a PERSON and not as a business, then when you send in the random plug every now and then for your business, people won’t really mind it.

These sites are called social media, and you need to place emphasis on the SOCIAL part of it.

If you find the social part of these sites to be a waste of your time, then do yourself a favor and don’t even start using these sites to begin with. You will do your business more harm than good by joining a site like Twitter for the purposes of building up a big follow list and then spamming them with your links.

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Day 20: Using Social Media For Your Business

And rightly so.

You ever watched television for hours on end? Even if it isn’t particularly exciting, your eyes are kind of glued to it until something else distracts you. Or have you ever experienced seeing something that really moves you and really tugs on the heart strings. You have the imagery, probably coupled with some appropriate music, and you really FEEL it. Now, you would have to be on incredible writer to get that kind of reaction from the written word.

There is something about seeing and hearing something that just draws in the human mind. People stick to it like glue.

As a person working online, you really do need to take this into consideration. Even if your videos aren’t really emotional, videos often will communicate to your audience better than the written word. Not always, of course.

If you look at your website, sit down and brainstorm potential uses for videos on the Internet. Also gather some equipment to help you create some videos. You can hire people to create videos for you. You can also make them yourself any number of ways.

Always include your website URL in your video.

When using sites like Youtube, you might want to try to make a viral video. A video that goes viral means that it spreads similar to a virus. One person “catches” it and passes it onto another. To get this effect, your video has to be truly interesting enough for a person to want to pass it onto their friends. It doesn’t take rocket science to determine what kinds of videos are most likely to go viral. Throw some humor into it, perhaps even with a hot woman in it, and it’ll go viral. Youtube viewers aren’t exactly a high-brow audience.

TIP: Youtube, by default, will pick the exact half-way mark in your video to use as the thumbnail for that video. Many video publishers take advantage of that to put something visually interesting at the half way point. Then, when casual viewers are looking for something interesting to watch, the thumbnail may get their attention and draw them in.

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Day 19: Using Internet Video To Build Awareness

If you’re going to explore the area of advertising, though, you need to be aware of some basic terms. This is true whether you want to puts ads on your website for revenue reasons or whether you want to purchase advertising for your website.

Below are some basic terms:

• Impression. An impression is any single time an ad is displayed on a website.
• CPM – Cost per thousand impressions. When buying advertising on a CPM basis (or charging on a CPM basis), you are talking about a certain fixed cost for every 1,000 impressions of the ad.
• CPC – Cost per click. Regardless of how many times the ad is displayed, charge will be based on the number of times the article is clicked on. For the advertiser, this is good because they are only paying for an ad’s performance and actual clicks on the ad.
• PPC – Pay per click. The method of paying for advertising where the advertiser only pays when a user actually clicks on an ad. As you might have guessed, networks that pay on a PPC basis will be talking about CPC, which is the cost per click (see above). PPC ads are open to abuse because of click fraud.
• Conversion. A conversion is where the person clicking on the ad actually does what the advertiser wants them to do (buy a product, sign up for a mailing list, etc). So, the advertiser puts out an ad. That ad is designed to entice the person to do something. If the person clicks on the ad, they visit a website. If the person then does what is desired from them while on that website, that counts as a conversion.
• CPA – Cost per Action. Cost per action is where the charges are based on the number of actual conversions. Ads of this type are common in affiliate programs where pay is based on commission.
• Contextual advertising. This is advertising which appears in context with other content, usually using keywords to determine the ads. Google Adsense, for example, is contextual in that the ads that are displayed usually are related to the content they are displayed next to.

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Day 18: Understanding Internet Advertising

The goal is to find a market which has enough demand and enough of a space for you to make a niche of your own and make an offer that would be of interest to that market.

I would say that there are 4 markets that are pretty much proven to be good performers on the Internet. Those markets are:

1. Health
   There is a huge market for people looking to solutions to health problems, looking to lose weight, look better, etc.
2. Relationships
   Another huge market is teaching people how to have successful relationships, find a mate, get dates, etc.
3. Making Money
   A really huge market is that of the information product designed to show you how to make money. You see a lot of products on making money with real estate or, yes, making money online.
4. Hobbies
   Another huge market is to find a hobby that has a perhaps small, but very enthusiastic audience and offer products specifically for people with that hobby.

If you’re just getting started, and you need direction, start with one of these categories. Choose one where you have the most personal knowledge. A product where you are not really an expert will be noticed from a mile away.

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Day 17: 4 Goldmine Markets For the Internet