The Six-Figure Second Income: How to Start and Grow a Successful Online Business Without Quitting Your Day Job (20 page)

The competition is fierce between commercial e-mail account providers. As a result,

many of them wil al ow you to have a free account as long as you have only a few

hundred customer e-mail names and you don’t send massive amounts of e-mail. The

only negative with some of these free accounts is they wil attach to the bottom of your

outgoing e-mails a smal promotion for their service. That’s a smal price to pay for a

good service that actual y gets your e-mails delivered. Besides, you can always upgrade

to a paid account when your list size and profits grow.

Warning: All Commercial E-Mail Vendors Are Not Created

Equal!

As crazy as it sounds, the very best vendors are sometimes the most difficult to deal

with.

Think about it for a minute: The way good commercial e-mail vendors work is they

painstakingly cultivate a great reputation with the ISPs like Comcast, AOL, Hotmail, and

the others. They build that reputation by making sure that, if an e-mail is sent from that

commercial e-mail vendor, those ISPs can relax and know it was a quality message and

not something related to Discount Vi@Gr@ pil s!!!

The e-mail vendor must therefore become the tough guy, and the very best ones are

real y tough. They wil monitor the type of e-mail you send very closely—and that’s only

after you have passed an application process. If they see any irregularities with your e-

mails or the way they were perceived by the recipients, they’l contact you and insist on

an explanation.

I know it sounds like a lot of work, but the alternative is to think you successful y sent,

say, 2,000 e-mails only to have the vast majority of them never reach your customers’

inboxes. You might even change your marketing approach because you concluded that

customers didn’t like your message when in reality they never saw it.

Look at the bright side: When you work with a tough e-mail vendor your e-mails wil

get through and al the spammy garbage your competitors may want to send wil never

see the light of day.

The other good news is, when you send quality e-mails with good information, it tends

to sail right through the spam filters. You stil need the commercial account, though,

because, if you fol ow the steps in this book, you’l eventual y send a great deal of e-mail

and only commercial accounts can handle the volume effectively.

For the names of commercial e-mail vendors I currently recommend, go to

www.sixfiguresecondincome.com and type “e-mail” in the search box.

Another Benefit: You Can Name Your Own E-Mail Accounts

Speaking of e-mail accounts, when you reserve that new domain name you’l have the

ability to create your own e-mail accounts. For instance, if you reserved BestBass

FishingSecrets.com then you are free to create as many different e-mail addresses as

you

want:

Bubba@BestBass FishingSecrets.com,

[email protected], and so on. In a matter of two or three

minutes you can set up a new account—that is, a new name like “bonus@ . . . ”—through

your web-hosting provider. Then you can easily have that e-mail forwarded wherever you

like.

For example, let’s say you set up a new e-mail of Bubba@

BestBassFishingSecrets.com and you don’t want to have to check every day whether

new mail came to that address. On the web site control panel, which your web host wil

give you access to, you’l be able to specify which e-mail address should receive any of

the mail from that new address you set up. It wil be automatical y forwarded to you, and

you’l be able to see that it was original y sent to the “Bubba@” address.

Handling E-Mail on Your Web Site

There are two ways to set up your web site to receive communications from visitors—a

lazy way and a correct way.

The lazy way is to use what’s known as a mailto: link. Web pages are built to

recognize the word mailto:, so if I create text on the web page that says

mailto:[email protected] then when the web visitor clicks on that text with mailto: in it, the

visitor’s own e-mail account wil start up and stick [email protected] in the address to send

that e-mail.

Here’s the problem: At any given time a high percentage of web visitors have

problems with their own e-mail accounts, whether they be through Comcast, AOL,

Hotmail, or whomever. If your web site is now relying on the visitors’ e-mail accounts to

work in order to send that e-mail, you’ve now blown a hole in the amount of

communication you’l receive from visitors.

The correct way to have visitors contact you on your site is through the use of a
web

form
. You’ve seen them—they’re the forms with little boxes to fil in your name and

message and they usual y have a gray Submit button at the bottom.

When visitors use that type of form, the message travels right from your web site to

you without ever relying on the visitors’ own e-mail systems to deliver it. Any web site

design template you buy wil have those forms already made and ready for you to

customize with where you want the visitor messages to be sent.

GETTING WORK DONE FOR YOU

This has been a long chapter fil ed with many details about getting your business up and

running on the web. It may seem like a lot of work, but it’s simply putting one foot in front

of the other. No one step is a giant leap. Besides, I’ve given you a number of options to

consider so the actual process you’l choose has fewer moving parts than al the

variations we’ve discussed.

Also keep in mind that, once you set up these tools and procedures, they’l be behind

you. Your first info product wil take a certain amount of time to set up, but the second,

third, and subsequent info products wil each take a tiny fraction of that time because

you’l be able simply to clone and modify everything you did for the first info product.

As soon as practical you should consider outsourcing some of the work to others.

Initial y, you may not have the resources to hire anyone, so you might do the work

yourself. But you’l be very smart if you plow some of your early revenues back into

building a team of people who can take the drudgery off your shoulders.

Let’s say your first info product is SchnauzerGrooming Secrets.com and you’ve had

so much success that you quickly want to come out with PoodleGroomingSecrets .com.

Don’t even think about having a site with both Schnauzer and Poodle grooming

information! Those dog owners love their breeds in a special way and only want to see

information about their one particular breed.

What you should do is outsource the work to set up the new web site, change around

the pages to incorporate Poodle pictures, and so on. I’ve already told you about

www.99designs.com for web designers and other specialists. You should also check out

www.elance.com, www.rentacoder.com, and www.odesk.com. They are al good sources

for temporary technical help.

The way most of them work is they are split into two sections—one for people looking

for work and the other for people looking to hire specialists. Typical y, you can browse

around the site anonymously.

When you get serious about finding someone to help you, first you register at the site

so they have your name and contact information. Then you post a project outline, where

you should be as explicit and detailed as you can. For instance, you might say that you’re

the owner of Schnauzer GroomingSecrets.com and you want to create another site

along those lines, and how it must be five pages with certain changes you have in mind.

You spel out every detail in the project description.

If you’re skittish about revealing the nature of the new project, you have some options.

You can either create a private project so the whole world won’t see the project but only

actual candidates can see it, or you can simply be specific about the page details but

vague about the actual topic.

Let’s say you work through Elance.com and you set the budget for your project at

$150. You’l then post the $150 to an escrow account control ed by Elance.com. Escrow

accounts are for the protection of al parties. On the one hand you don’t want to be a

programmer who builds a bunch of pages and sends them to the customer who never

gets around to paying you. On the other hand you don’t want to pay a programmer to do

work but he never quite finishes the project after he’s paid.

When Elance.com holds the escrow money it gets agreement from both parties that

the work was done before the money moves from the escrow account to the

programmer. If the programmer never completed the work then Elance.com wil return

the escrow money to you. Elance. com also acts as an intermediary in any disputes,

which can happen when one party is vague and the other party misunderstands the

instructions. That’s al the more reason to be highly specific when you hire someone to

help you.

Before you initiate a project on one of these sites, spend some time looking at al the

people who offer their services and review the portfolios of work they’ve done for other

clients. I think you’l be impressed with the excel ent work some freelancers do.

You need to get a sense of how to narrow your specifications for people you’l hire. For

instance, wil you accept only workers from the United States or is Europe also okay but

not Asia? Maybe you only want people who are rated at least four stars out of five stars.

Maybe you insist that they’ve passed certain proficiency tests that Elance.com and the

others offer. You may even prefer to work with people of a certain gender or of a certain

age range.

I can’t answer those questions for you because they depend on the supply/demand

equation for the project you have. Basic web programming is a very popular area and

you can literal y find thousands of potential specialists to do the work. On the other hand

you may want to use that Joomla program I spoke of in the last chapter and hook it up to

the special XYZ e-mail system, in which case you’ve just narrowed the field of

candidates considerably.

Don’t give up too soon on this process. Al you need to find is a handful of great

people who can work with you on project after project. It’s worth going through a number

of candidates to find those gems.

Also be very wary of going with some of the amazingly low prices you’l be quoted by

some people. I’ve had projects where literal y 10 minutes after I posted the project there

were bidders, some of whom would say they’d do the job for $5 or even $3 when others

wanted $50 to $150 for the same project. I’m sure that a few people in poor countries

are so desperate for work that they might even do a decent job for $3, but sometimes I

just get a good or bad gut feeling about the candidate.

My gut feeling deteriorates when I get an instant response from a candidate who

doesn’t even refer to my specific project but sends me a canned message like “We do

great and fast workings! You can count your business on us to deliver wel .”

On the other hand, my gut feeling about a candidate is improved when I read glowing

comments from many past clients. I’ve even had a few candidates real y impress me by

doing the work instantly and posting it to the project area—without my even hiring them

yet! They’re so fast and confident in their work that they complete the task while other

candidates continue to ask me for clarification and needless details.

One excel ent approach is to hire two people to do the very same task at the same

time. You may initial y think that is a waste of money because you only need the job done

once. You can make it a relatively smal task that’s part of a larger project. The benefit of

a side-by-side horse race is then you real y have a basis by which you can judge these

people against each other. Who completed the task faster? Who did a more thorough

job? Who went above and beyond and actual y exceeded your expectations?

Once you find such a person you’l have a valuable member of your team. Just be sure

to treat him or her as a valuable member: Be specific in your requests, communicate

promptly and in detail, leave good feedback about the person, and most definitely pay

promptly.

I have found some great people al over the planet to help me with projects.

Sometimes I even give them a bonus of another 10 percent or so of the project cost

because their bid was very reasonable and their work was excel ent. That’s the way to

cultivate team members who wil drop what they’re doing to take on your next project.

Are you getting excited about what you’re discovering? Do you see how al those

barriers to this business are helpful Keep Out! signs to the dabblers and the Uncle

Moe’s of the world, but that in reality the sky’s the limit with this information-product