Youtoub casehflow blueprint

 

Business and Website Traffic

             How to Increase Yours

How to Increase Yours

Website traffic is essential to your business success and one of the key elements to creating online revenue streams. Without traffic your business is destined to fail from day 1. Website traffic will show you how to increase your traffic to build a better business from day 1.

Contents

Increasing Traffic to your website 3

Web Content 4

Sending Newsletters and Info 6

Become a Community Member 7

Use Experts to Write For You 9

Use Tracking Software 10

Use of Keyword Tools 11

Don't be Afraid to Copy Others 12

Focus on the most Popular Parts of Your Site 13

Always Give Free Stuff 14

Advertise Advertise Advertise 15

Build Your Brand 17

Using The Right Software 18

Using the Right Content 19

Using META Tags 21

Your Blog 23

Hold off on Comments 24

Create a Sitemap 25

Big Traffic 26

Become Part of an Online Community 27

Be Patient 29

Be Nice to People and Customers 31

Conclusion 32

                

Increasing Traffic to your website

The World Wide Web has truly pervaded all aspects of human existence. Everything and everyone is going online now, and the move towards a totally connected world is not “if” anymore, it’s “when”.

Statistics show that up to 85% of the people who spend time online also purchase online. If you take the North American continent alone where more than 75% of the population have a broadband Internet connection at home, even if a fraction of these people buy online, it is still a huge market.

Online purchasing is also seeing tremendous growth and many companies are projecting a doubling of volume in just three years. If you take PayPal as a case in point, they have gone from $2 billion in payment volumes in 2002 to $16 billion in 2009 with revenues crossing $2.4 billion.

Amazon is another case that you can take as an example. Considering that Amazon is one of the largest online retailers, if not the largest, just looking at their total sales volume will show you that the trend in terms of online purchasing is only going up.

While just a few years ago, in 2006, Amazon was about par with retail sales, since then they have posted higher growth rates, including during the recession years while retail sales has seen a steady decline in sales. Amazon has posted a 16% growth since the last one year alone while retail sales have grown only by 2.5%.

Online is where you will have to be in the future and whether you are selling something or just blogging about your thoughts, if you are serious about it you will have to do something to increase web traffic to your site.

There are a number of ways in which you can do this and there are a number of people who give free advice on what you need to do to increase web traffic. One of the most common things you hear is SEO or Search Engine Optimization, and while this is something that you have to keep in mind, there are a number of other things that you can also think about.

This guide is meant to be informative to help beginners who want to set up their own websites on the salient points that they will have to keep in mind while they do this. Some of the tips may be a little complicated, but most of them are very simple and

how popular your site becomes depends on how effectively you can bring them all together.

Web Content

The content that you put up on your website is the most critical thing that you need to think of. In the same way that a store will do well only if they sell things that people need, you will get people visiting your website only if you give something that people are looking for. Of course it also means that you are entering a crowded market because genuinely unique niches are hard to come by. If you do find one, you are on to a good thing, but even if not, as long as you make the content appealing, you are sure to find takers.

Do something that others don't do. For example, selling products or services online is catching on really fast, and you will find a number of sites with products that link back to the larger online retailers like Amazon or eBay. If you want to do the same, it is not that difficult, except that there is something that you will have to give that other websites do not offer. For example, if you offer a personal review of the product that you are selling you are sure to develop a certain number of loyal customers and as long as the reviews are informative and helpful you will only get more customers with time.

There are other websites that offer the same thing, but most of them will have only a couple of lines that they probably found in other websites and copied. If you give information that is more detailed and specific, things that only a user would know, you are sure to make a hit.

Keep people coming back for more!

This does take more work and time, but unless you are willing to invest in good content, there is really no point in proceeding further. Make sure that you do your research. Even if you are only selling dog collars, as long as you give the pros and cons of each one honestly people will appreciate it. The goal should be to make the

content such that people who even casually visit your site once will bookmark it and keep coming back.

Keep it short and simple

While writing your content, remember that just because you want to be informative you should not have long winded articles. Statistics show that between 600 and 800 words is the best length for most online articles. If you want to fill space in your site use other interactive content. Not only will this make the whole thing nicer to see and read it will also relieve the monotony of just plain text.

Even if you do not have the expertise to create interactive content, just using bullet points and charts in-between text will break it up into smaller more easily read pieces.

Stay who you are

Lastly, while writing, never lose your human voice. While writing it is easy to lose the personal touch that you give when talking and instead go for a more professional voice. The only thing that this will serve to do is to make visitors feel unwanted.

This becomes more of a problem as you grow, because as you see more money come in you will start to streamline the content. You need to walk a tight rope here because it is very easy to lose what brought people to your site in the first place while doing this. The risk of changing anything is that just as there is potential for success, there is an equally good chance for failure too.

One more thing that you should keep in mind when developing web content is that the more graphics you have, the more time it takes to load the page. While this may not be a problem with many people because they have a broadband connection, a number of people access the net through their phones and tablets, and heavy websites really slow down these machines when not on a wifi connection. Find that balance.

Sending Newsletters and Info

Newsletters and subscribers are a big thing in many websites nowadays. Websites ask people to subscribe to their free newsletters and keep sending out information every week or sometimes more frequently depending on the strategy that they follow. A few years ago, there may have been an issue with spam filters and emails being placed in junk folders. Today, this is still true but ISP are realizing the fact that news letters are here to stay, so place news letters and email info high on your list of to do's when feeding your subscribers.

When you do send out your email's and newsletters it is a good idea to get creative with content and the title of your email. Interesting titles create open rates, and open rates create revenue. Try to offer interesting titles which offer value. Depending on your business you should be able to work out what your subscribers want to read and what sells after some time of research.

Give them the option

A better idea is to give the option to people to subscribe to an RSS feed. This gives them the option to either choose to subscribe or not which means that only genuinely interested people will. It will also give you a much more accurate idea of how popular your site is because most of those who subscribe will actually read what you have to say. You now have three good option for people to read your content.

RSS Feed

Email Newsletters

Your website content via bookmarks

Give value

When you have your subscriber interest, the best ways of generating interest is to give huge value. Don't just write rehashed information that is easily found in other places online. If you are recommending a particular software for a specific purpose give honest impressions that are not found elsewhere. You may think that this is too much to give away freely, but look at it this way. Open Source is catching on like blazes now, and there is a free alternative to almost everything, including Operating Systems. If you want to charge for your opinions as well as for the product that you

sell, you will find that someone else is only charging for the product and is offering their opinions freely resulting in a movement away from your site.

In conclusion to giving value, ensure you give the best value. Remember, you are in competition with a lot of other websites and newsletters around the globe. stand out to make a difference.

Become a Community Member

If you are starting a website business, chances are that there is already an online community on the niche that you want to start yours in. Make sure that you become involved and join them. Don't get so high and mighty that you think that everything that you write online should get you money. Write on other people's blogs and websites too. Just make sure that you link back to your site. Usually this is done in the signature and is one of the most effective ways of generating traffic to your site as long as what you write is worth reading. If the posting was good, people will come to your site just to read other articles written by you which is what you want. Gone are the times of selfish business owners. Giving and sharing content are the new ways to do business. People respect the knowledge of others and follow that knowledge. This is how you will generate your content.

Quote, but link

If you are pushed for content, another way is to quote from an article written elsewhere on the net. Usually nobody minds you quoting as long as you give them credit for it and link back to their site as well. Not only is this good etiquette, it will also improve your standing within the community which means that slowly, other more established people will start to link to your site. Remember, people respect knowledge.

Apart from the traffic that this linking generates, there is another more valuable reason for doing this. Most search engines do not index a website as soon as it is hosted. There are a number of people who create sites on free to use communities

and then do not follow it up. Obviously no search engine wants any site like this in their results. One way that they identify if a site is in use and is genuine is by the number of links back to it. If these links are from sites in good standing with the search engines, the chances of your site getting indexer faster are greater.

However, you do need to remember to write original content 99% of the time and do not quote everyone else's content 100% of the time. The search engines love original content.

Use article directories

An older, but still very popular way of getting these links back is by posting articles on article directories and then linking it to your site in the bio section. There are many such article directories that allow you to upload content free although they have certain criteria about the kind of articles that you can upload. Ezine Articles is only one among them and there are a number of others that you can post to.

What this does is help you upload a lot of content in places other than your website and then back link to your website thus improving your website standing with the search engines. This is where you use the SEO optimization that you hear about frequently. There are two goals to doing this, one is the already mentioned improving of ranking with search engines, and the other is that sometimes these articles will actually come up higher in the ranking than your site. If this happens you will be driving traffic to your site from there too. Remember, original content is always the best way to achieve the best rankings from your articles and your website content.

Use Experts to Write For You

This is easier said than done, but using experts is one of the most effective ways of generating traffic to your site. Whatever niche you are in, unless you yourself are an expert, getting one to write articles for you is a good idea. Of course, not many experts will actually consent to write anything for you, which is where the previous point comes in. Most of these experts would be high standing members of the community and as long as you lay the groundwork properly and get connected, they are sure to notice you. Over time you can approach them about writing something for you, and even if they decline, you've not lost anything by asking. By becoming a respected member in the community you will just be making it that much harder for them to refuse you when you do ask.

This is not something that you can do a couple of weeks after you start, or even a couple of months after you do. It takes time to earn a name, and even if you are not considered an expert in the field, as long as you make sure that you are a respected member in the community your chances are greater. Once you have an established website which offers some good content and has a reputable name, guest writers will come naturally. People will want to write for you, because of your search engine standings and traffic rankings. You more you grow the more attention you will get from interested writers and invited writers.

For example, if you want to start a website that recommends/sells software, make sure that you join a community where such software is discussed. Join as many as you can, and make sure that you participate. Help out others who ask for help and if you do this long enough it is the best way to get noticed. If you offer your time and expertise for free not only will those you helped directly come to your site the next time they want something, other members in your community will also link to your articles. Over time, some of them may even start recommending that their visitors visit your site. Helping others very rarely does not pay; it just takes time for you to see the results.

Use Tracking Software

Any business revolves around metrics. You need details of how many people visit your site, how long they spend at your site, which pages are the most often viewed and many other details that will help you improve your site. There are a few different ways to do this.

The most popular way is to use Google analytics. Google analytics is a free code that Google gives you that you have to put into each page of your website. This code runs every time a person visits your website and keeps track of everything from whether this was their first visit to how long they spend in each page. This is not a foolproof method because this system does not take into account people, who disable Java script in their browsers, but the number of people who do this is very small and in any case Google only uses 500,000 randomly taken hits for their metrics.

Although Google analytics is the largest used such software there are others too that you can use, both free as well as paid. There are issues with running such software starting with increased loading time, but they are getting better and better with each passing month.

There are some websites that do not use Google analytics because the information thus collected can be accessed by others. By others, it does not mean retail customers, but for example Google itself retains this information for their uses. Large corporations are not comfortable with other companies gaining information about their websites and therefore do not go with Google, but for most of us analytics is good enough and an excellent resource for small to medium business owners.

Use of Keyword Tools

Using key words is one of the most important things that you will have to do. First, you will have to decide what the keywords are that most people may use when they want to look for what you are providing. Think about the words people would use to find your site, and the more people who contribute, the more exhaustive the list is going to be. After you have narrowed down the general keywords that you think that people will be looking for, you can use specific software like Google's keyword tool, Yahoo's Overture Keyword selector tool, Wordtracker, Keyword Dictionary, Market Samurai or any other tool that you are comfortable with.

Most of them are free to use and will give you a combination of keywords based on the keyword that you typed in. This will help you identify the best combination of keywords to use in your content because it will give you the search strings that are the most commonly used in relation to the word you typed in.

Be dynamic, not static

This does not mean that once you write and post your articles you are finished. Keywords are very dynamic, and often, along with trends the search strings that are often used too often will change. You do not have to necessarily change the entire content in your site during times like this. Just making sure that you incorporate the new keywords is sometimes good enough. Remember, reviving old content is a great way to keep your content highly ranked.

Don't overdo it

This may sound simple but in reality it is not. This is because you will have to walk a fine line between over-stuffing your articles with different keywords and with putting in too few. And even then most search engines are able to identify if the keywords come logically as part of the sentence or have been forced in somewhere where they are not suitable.

Nobody knows exactly how the search engines do this as it is their trade secret, but suffice it to say that just because your article is full of keywords it does not necessarily mean that the site is going to get a better ranking. Often an article with the keyword appearing just once will pop up higher than one where it has been repeated a number of times. Keep this in mind when writing your articles, don't

overdo it with the same key words. Google likes to read content like a reader, not a manufactured key word hungry robot.

Also never copy content, unless you are linking back to where you are copying from. All search engines are able to identify copied content and if it finds that your article is copied, you will even lose ranking because it will tend to push your site to the bottom of the pile. Original content, is always the best way to rank don't forget this.

Don't be Afraid to Copy Others

This may sound a little odd, especially after the previous chapter but this is something that everyone does. You don't copy the content; instead you copy what someone else is doing better by getting more traffic to their website. You will know what websites are getting more traffic to them by their ranking on search engines. You can also use Alexa.com to check the rankings of websites you are interested in.

Do your groundwork

This is not as easy as you would think though. You will first have to locate all the sites that are the leaders in the segment you are in. There are a number of tools that will help you do this, and Google PageRank is both very useful as well as free and can be installed in any browser.

After you form your list you will have to visit each of these sites and figure out for yourself why they are doing better than you. Check different search engines that will give you this information and this is where your true talent lies. The more accurate you are in identifying why others do well, the better you can make your site.

While making changes you will obviously have to continue tracking hits to your site, but do not be hasty and make changes quickly. It will take a day for the changes to be indexed properly in the search engines, and even then you will have to allow some time before the changes start making any difference. It is a slow process and you learn as you go.

Never directly copy website content, this is not only illegal but detrimental to your website search engine rankings. Remember, no one not even Google likes a copycat. Use content as ideas to create your own content and make it better.

Focus on the most Popular Parts of Your Site

Many people do not realize it when they start out, but it is difficult to start a website and put in information that is always appealing. To most of us as long as the article that we post is well written and interesting to read, it should work, but it rarely does. You need to know which portion of your website is working well and which is not.

You can get this information using Google analytics, and once you identify this trend, it is up to you to start concentrating on that portion of your website. For all you know the portion of your website that you would think is the least appealing will get the most number of look ins.

For example, if you have started a website where you post reviews of different home appliances and also sell them, your assumption would be that the most hits would be on the reviews. When looking at the metrics however you may be surprised to find that it is your blog or your comments page that is receiving the most hits.

What you should immediately do is to concentrate on the comments page and leverage it. Ultimately advertisers look at the total number of hits on your website and as long as you can maintain a consistent number of visits a day or week it is all for the best.

Of course it means that you will probably need to rework your review page so that it too starts seeing more traffic, but that should be the second thing on your priority, not first.

Be patient

Many websites that are really popular have a ratio of around 1:20. This means that for every 20 articles that you put in, one will turn out popular. For beginners this ratio will be much higher, but keep plugging away at it. Nobody finds a winning combination instantly and you should be willing to spend a lot of time on making your website a success. Don't be afraid to try out new things. If it does not work you can always remove the page later, but if it does click, you have something on which you can concentrate on.

Another thing that you should not worry too much about is not so much the number of hits on your website, but on how long the people stay. There are a number of reasons why people may just open your site and close it immediately. Those who matter are the ones who stay for a certain length of time. Although, for most commercial purposes it is the number of hits on your page that matter, for you to develop a good site it is the people who stay on whom you will have to concentrate on. Only then will you know what people are visiting your site for and provide more of the same. Google Analytics will provide all of these details for you.

Always Give Free Stuff

Stuff? This does not mean that you give out free products. It could very well be a simple eBook on a particular subject or free wallpaper.

For example, if you have a website that is related to IT you could give wallpapers or screen savers that you have designed. Many people do this, but not all ask for contact information as well. Remember we talked about building a list of contacts, well this is a way to do it. Exchange email addresses for content so you can add people to your newsletters and information distribution list.

You do not always have to ask for anything in exchange. There is fine line between giving items away for email addresses and becoming annoying to your visitors

asking for some every time you give something away. Treat your readers and website visitors with respect. Give them freebies for simply being a subscribers. This builds reputation. You can even ask them to share this on social media sites for the pleasure. This also build reputations and traffic.

imagine you are opening a medical related site, giving out a short 10 or 20 page eBook on some ailment, say diabetes, will only do good. Of course if this book is not a good one you will be better off not offering it for free as the reputation that you will receive will be bad. If you give out an informative well written book, or a really nice looking wallpaper, people will talk about your site and ultimately the amount of publicity generated will be greater than if you had spend 10 times as much as you did for what you gave away. By offer awesome value or basically something you could charge a fee for, people will love and share your content.

The traffic potential of giving away a free guide takes time, but the viral aspects and out of this world. The more shares and people you have reading and distributing your eBook, the more traffic you will get. Simple.

Advertise Advertise Advertise

Advertising will of course cost money, but you have no other way round. Any startup company needs marketing and even if it is online you will still have to market your wares. There are a number of innovative ways of doing this starting from fliers posted at different places to you having your website displayed prominently on your vehicle. Depending on the route you take the budget may be high or low and have varying degrees of effectiveness.

Go with AdSense

Not only offline but you can also go for online advertising. There are many websites that offer space to advertisers for a sum and you can advertise where you think you will get the maximum benefit. Pop ups, banners and advertisements are all popular,

but the most popular is AdSense by Google. Anyone can sign up with AdSense and Google determines the kind of advertisements that go into the web-page.

If you want to advertise on other websites you must place a sealed bid for the space and if you are selected you can advertise. If you want to sell ad space, Google takes care of everything but takes a 32% cut in the income generated.

Even with this revenue loss it still makes sense to go with AdSense because a number of small operators who do not have the financial clout to do much have generated income from AdSense.

If you are purchasing ads, then the only thing that you are limited by is the budget you have. The more you have, the more you can advertise.

If you are looking at generating income through advertisements, you have to be a little careful about it. When your website is still new, and is not generating much traffic, many people will purchase ad space very cheap and then reap the benefit of all your hard work because they will be getting much more than what they paid for. It is better to wait a while until you get established before you start selling advertisements because of this.

Don't get too greedy

Another bad thing and more important when it comes to generating traffic to the website is that a site that is covered with ads just turns people off. You may start to earn money quickly by adopting this strategy, but many browsers do not like sites that have a lot of advertisements meaning that you will actually be losing traffic by advertising, although this is one income stream that you cannot afford to ignore.

How you balance your need for income generation with your website is where your talent lies, and how well you do depends on how right you get it. There is really no simple rule that you can follow here. There are a number of sites that are loaded with ads and yet do well, while there are others that do not have too many and still do not do as well. There are a number of factors that are responsible, and only time will tell whether you are right in what you did or not.

Build Your Brand

When you are developing your website, you need to have a vision of what you want from it. You are building up an organization, not just a website and the growth potential is limited only by your imagination. You need to establish a brand and live up to it.

Of course this takes time, but it is time well spent. You have to set expectations and make sure that you live up to them. If you are in the practice of putting in two posts a day, you will have to ensure that you continue to do so every day. You may complain that this means that you do not have any holidays or time off, and you will be right here. Yet, it will be worth it in the long run.

Statistics show that even if you miss one day the traffic falls immediately. Of course, if you are going to miss only one day this is not a long term impact, but if you are going to make a practice of doing this, you will start losing traffic instead of gaining it.

Plan ahead

If you feel that you absolutely have to take a break, make sure that you plan in advance for it. There are a number of things you can do starting from outsourcing this blog posting to making sure that you have a ready supply of posts that you can post from anywhere. The whole world is connected these days and as long as you have already prepared the articles, all it is going to take is 10 or 15 minutes of your time to post it every day.

If you are putting in articles regularly, make sure that the quality of your work does not flag. With success don’t become complacent. Outsource some of the more labor intensive work but make sure you check it for originality and quality. By staying on top of the work you choose to outsource your site will not lose the high standard that you want for your business.

Over time a certain website will stand for something, and you need to identify what this something is even before you start. Only then can you work towards it. If you just start without having any other goal than just that you want to earn money, there will be no direction to your site and it will vacillate here and there, never a good thing.

Using The Right Software

If you have the money for it you can always outsource the development part of the website, but this is not the cheapest thing in the world to do. Of course, you can find freelancers who are willing to do the job cheaply, but then their concept of what you need and yours may be poles apart.

Like most businesses good website designers tend to charge more. This does not however mean that you should pay through your nose to get your website developed. There are a number of CMS tools that you can use to develop your own site. There is a whole hoard of software that you can use and each of them gives you different functionality.

You could go with online ones that allow you to develop and publish everything online, or you can go with applications that allow you to develop your site locally and then publish it online. You get both paid as well as open source software and what you use depends on what you are most comfortable with.

It may take you some time to develop anything approaching what you think is nice, but it is recommended that you do this yourself if you have the time to spare. It gives you much more control over how you design your own website and you can have everything exactly how you want it.

Follow simple naming conventions

Another reason why it is better for you to develop your own site is that you can follow your own naming convention. Recent studies have showed that sites that have easy to remember addresses tend to get more traffic than those that have a meaningless jumble of numbers and alphabets.

For example if you want to have a website that reviews software, just go with www.thesitename/home. If from there you want to have a page about you, then follow the same principle except that instead of /home you will have /aboutme. This is much better than having something that looks like this www.thesitename/landing/ID=250?/etc/whatnot/somemorenonsense.

There may be a very good reason for you doing this, but it is better to have things simple. Your address is not a password for it to have alpha numeric characters.

Why this matters is really not known except that it does seem to have an impact on web traffic.

In the same way links that lead deeper into your own website needs to have meaningful keywords, not a link with click here on it. You may think that this is default, but it is very easy to overlook these small things that have a big impact on the numbers.

Using the Right Content

Using the right content is a very important factor when it comes to developing your website. Optimizing the content does not only refer to SEO or Search Engine Optimization, but also to the layout of the website as well as each page.

SEO

This is an acronym that has been used and reused so many times that many people think that this is the only thing about a website that makes it get a higher ranking. Obviously search engines will make use of keywords to index your articles, but the problem is that when writing content we can only take into account a few words or phrases that we think is what the whole world is looking for. Yet, all search engines will pull out your articles even using other keywords, words that you would not consider as keywords at all.

The best thing to do is to use industry specific words to ensure that you have a wide distribution of words. For example, if you are creating a food website where you plan on putting up different recipes, make sure that you include all the words that you think will be used to search for your article. Words like cooking, recipes, dish etc. are all different words that can be used because it is all different ways for the public to search for the same thing.

There is fierce competition with regards to optimizing the content and most of the larger websites would make sure that they corral most if not all the keywords that

they think are important. Yet, this does not mean that your site will be low down in the ranking. Ranking of a site by a search engine is based on a combination of factors and SEO is only one of them.

Layout optimization

Most search engines use programs called spiders or crawlers to index your site. These spiders or crawlers are nothing but programs that mimic human behavior but with the added capacity to tag and index everything that they visit. Generally speaking these crawlers go top to down and left to right. This means that the top left hand corner of your site is the most valuable piece of real estate while the bottom right hand corner is the least.

Knowing this will help you to optimize your layout better. For example if you are designing your home page, it would be a better idea to put in the links to other informational content on top and less important information like the about us link at the bottom.

Always tag pictures

Another thing that you should remember is that crawlers cannot read through graphics or scripts. This means that even if you subscribe to the belief that a picture is worth a thousand words, it is still a good idea for you to write a dozen words under the picture defining what it is. Only this text will be used by the search engine for its indexing purposes, which is why if you look up any result in Google images you will sometimes find that the images do not have anything to do with your search string, but the keywords would be present in its description.

Some people use this defect to leverage their site by adding in keywords that are not entirely suitable, and you are the only judge as to whether this is a risk worth taking. Search engines are always evolving, and if at some point in the future they redefine their algorithm so that they can identify such keyword stuffing, you will find that your website has all of a sudden lost its ranking. Google is definitely not going to notify the world that it is going to do this giving you time to change your site. When you find out it is already too late.

Using META Tags

If you have done a little bit of looking around before you started working on developing your website, you would have come across the term Meta tags. Many websites recommend that you use them when you develop your website. These Meta tags are nothing but HTML tags that are not visible on the page itself and are usually included inside the <HEAD> tag of the page.

Most of the advice will be towards you stuffing all your keywords within these tags. You can even put in keywords that do not occur within the body of the article itself. For example, if you are setting up a cooking website and plan on introducing various recipes and if one of the recipes have to do with making chicken dumplings, you can add this plus combinations of the same keyword like for example, good chicken dumplings, or best chicken dumplings or any other search string that you feel you want to add, but which may not necessarily sit well within the body of the article.

They don't work for keyword stuffing

Unfortunately most search engines just ignore this tag and anything within. They started doing this nearly a decade back and nowadays even the use of this tag is highly debated in certain circles. The reason for this is because many web-masters started stuffing in keywords that did not have anything to do with their sites at all just to start directing more traffic there.

Anyway the bottom line is that if you use this tag to stuff in keywords you may even be doing yourself harm because some search engines actually penalize sites that do this.

Where do I use Meta Tags?

This does not mean that Meta tags are totally useless. Some search engines use what is inside the Meta tags coupled with what is within the articles to get a better idea of what the site contains. This is why the initial advice was to only include keywords that are related to what you are writing about.

Another thing that you can do is to put in a short description of what the site is about within this tag. If we take the same cooking website as an example, you could write a short one-liner like this “A simple recipe to make chicken dumplings within 30

minutes”. Usually this line would be incorporated to some extent in the summary that is given below your website in the search results page. This does not mean that all search engines will start to display what is within these tags but you at least have some amount of control over what is said about your site. Even Google that has come out a few years back and said that they ignore Meta tags, nowadays incorporate at least some amount of what is available in the Meta tags in their summary.

Other uses

There are also other uses for Meta tags like if you do not want to index certain pages in your site, or if you do not want the search engines crawlers not to follow certain links in your site. Using Meta tags with the noindex or nofollow options will give you this. You may wonder why anyone would even want to not index their site, but there are cases when it is helpful. For example, if you have written an article on a certain subject, but over a few years you find that things have progressed and that this article may not be relevant any more, you have the option of removing that page, or archiving it. Unless you specify that you do not want this page indexed it will continue to show up on searches, and because it has been around far longer than the updated page will be higher in the rankings.

You can also use the tags to specify the content type, like if it is text or graphics, and the language used. Although this does not make that big a difference, it is really helpful, especially for those sites that offer a number of language options. The search engines will be better able to index each page separately, instead of taking everything to be duplicate content.

Your Blog

Blogging is something that most web surfers do. They either have their own blogs or they comment on others'. Having a blog page where you can post your thoughts and have others respond is therefore a good idea. A blog is not a comments page for your article. A blog is where people can share their thoughts on the articles posted.

You can therefore have a website where you give reviews and sell software, and have a blog where you can discuss everything from how a certain IT company is following trade practices to the state of the economy. These comments may not find suitable space anywhere other than your blog and having a separate page for it is a good idea.

Have your blog in your website

This is something that a number of people fail to do. They will have a website and have a blog, but they will both be in different domains. Some people actually go to the time and the effort of creating their own website but host their blogs using free software like WordPress

Leaving aside the impracticality of this, you will also be losing out on driving traffic to your site from your blog. Web traffic is not all generated through just one source and it is only by combining a number of sources that you get where you want to be. Blogs are one of these options. If you have started blogging about an interesting topic there is every reason for people to follow through to your website if it were in the same domain. By splitting them up in different locations you are losing on a certain amount of the traffic.

The best way is to host your blog as a sub-domain of your primary domain which is your website, and the worst is to use other hosting sites like BlogSpot or WordPress. By hosting your WordPress blog on your own webspace, you increase your website size and content range, by discussing and talking about your website content via your own blog. This way the search engines not only see your website blog, but they also see your website which is linking in. Creating back links to your website from blogs is an amazing way to get extra traffic.

Hold off on Comments

Most people who create their websites make sure that they incorporate a comments section. This is done so that people who visit can start to leave comments. This is very useful because many times people who comment on your section will also link back to their articles on similar topics. Of course, people do this to increase their own ranking, but it is also helpful to you if you have more unique people linking to your site. It improves your standing with the search engines tremendously.

There is one problem with this though and that this section is like a two edged sword. If you are a regular web surfer you would have come across umpteen sites where there is not one single comment written. Of course you can employ others to write in a few, but it is very easy to make out the real ones from the fake. Rather than do this it is better to leave the comments section blank.

Yet, leaving it blank seems to imply that your site really does not have many followers. It can give an empty feeling to the site and even if the content is quite good, just because there is not a single comment in it many people will not return to your site.

When do I start it?

The best way to tackle this is to start up this section after some time. During this time you will be trying various different methods to improve the rankings and improve traffic to your site. Once you find that you are getting around 500 to 700 hits

Automatic online business

 

Table of Contents 

 1: Systemization  An OverviewChapter and Benefits

What is Systemization

Why You Need to Systemize Your Online Business

Chapter 2: Begin from the Start  Making a List of Most Recurring Tasks

Step 1: Identifying Recurring Tasks

Step 2: Organizing and Prioritizing the Functions

Step 3: Developing Policies and Procedures

Step 4: Documenting the Processes

Step 5: Implement the Processes

Step 6: Diagram the Flow of Your Business

Chapter 3: Systemization Tools for Your Online Business

Asana

Ontraport

Slack

Deadline Funnel

Lead Pages

Calendly

GoToWebinar

DropBox

Google Docs 

Google Calendar

Webinar Jam

Screencast-o-Matic

HootSuite

Infusionsoft

MailChimp

Needls

Salesforce

IFTTT

Chapter 4: Documenting Your Processes  Creating SOPs 

How to Document Your Business Systems

Develop Naming Conventions

Writing Your First Procedure

Numbering the Steps in the Procedure

Creating the Action Steps for Your Processes

Implementing Your New Standard Operating Procedures

Get Employee Buy-In

Chapter 5: Outsourcing Your Tasks Effectively

Step 1: Identify Your Outsourcing Task

Step 2: Write Your Project Description

Step 3: Eliminate Unqualified Bids

Step 4: Pick 3 to 5 Qualified Candidates

Step 5: Pick the Most Qualified Freelancer

Chapter 6: Automation Tools for Systemization 

Zapier

Flow

Pipedrive

TextExpander

Alfred

IFTTT

Shortcat

Robotask

Tallyfy

Intercom

Delivra

Autopilot

mHelpDesk

Chapter 7: Scale-Up Your Business to the Next Level

Create the Right Strategic Plan

Measure Effectiveness with Accounting

Focus on Sales and Marketing

Five Steps to Build a Baseline Lead-Generation System

Implementing Marketing Controls

Hire the Right People

Conclusion: The Final Words

Chapter 1:

Systemization  An Overview and Benefits

The Internet has changed the way people think about companies, especially when it comes to owning a small business. Millions of people have tried to start an online business, with many of them finding success. While there are several reasons why one might fail to get their online business off the ground, one of the main reasons is because the owner was unable to systemize the company and utilize the available resources.

People who have found success with their online business know that they need a great idea, as well as the resources to cultivate a customer base for that great idea. They also understand that the same daily activities that are done in a brick and mortar business, also apply to an online business. They know that they will need to take the necessary steps to either learn those skills or outsource them to trusted and reliable sources is about combining the vision with the practicalities of the business world to become successful. The process of systemization is no great mystery. It is possible to learn how to effectively systemize your business and position yourself to run a successful online business that makes a profit on a consistent basis.

What is Systemization?

Many online business owners, when they hear the word systemization, turn to the idea of an endless array of meetings that create a ton of action items that must be followed up on at the next meeting so even more action items can be created. In short, people believe that systemization is nothing more than an ongoing, convoluted series of processes that only make running a business more complicated. This couldnt be further from the truth.

Having a systemized business doesnt mean that youll be caught up in so many policies and procedures that you lose all ability to work on anything productive and its not about filling time or creating the illusion of being busy. Systemization is not about creating a machine and being dominated by that machine. Systemizing your business doesnt have to be complicated.

True systemization is about creating a stable functioning procedure that knows what needs to be done, has a way to do it, and gets the job done. When you have a truly systemized business, you free up more of your time to focus on more important aspects of your business, like marketing, strategy, and product creation.

When your company is systemized correctly, the procedures make sense and always have a purpose. With systemization, everyone in the business knows what to do and when to do it. There are no endless meetings to deal with, no complicated policies to follow, and no time wasted with spinning the wheels.

This isn't to say that all the processes within an adequately systemized business are going to be fun. However, when organized properly, the tasks can be completed in a reasonable amount of time, leaving the rest of the day to work on something more interesting, like converting more prospects to buying customers, creating a new product line, or writing new sales copy. True business systemization, frees you, while a lack of systemization creates endless work and stifles your ability to succeed.

Why You Need to Systemize Your Online Business?

There are many benefits that you can gain by systemizing your online business. With a sound system, people in your organization have a clear understanding of the work they need to perform and what is expected of them. Without policies, there are many unanswered questions, and quality and service cant be guaranteed. Now that you understand why it's good to have a systemized business let's explore the benefits that you can gain.

Reduce Costs

Managing your email inbox or reading through piles of mail isn't the most efficient use of your time. As the business owner, your time would be better spent analyzing new business opportunities or developing new product lines. Delegating many of the days to day tasks that are required to run a business, can free up your time so you can focus your energy on the activities that will allow you to grow your business and increase revenues.

Without clearly documented business procedures, you cant delegate those daily tasks that eat up most of your time. By recording your processes, you can easily delegate tasks knowing that they will be done correctly, allowing you to free up your time to oversee more projects, which brings in more revenue for your growing business.

Increase Efficiency

Documenting procedures allows you to discover any unnecessary steps that you may be taking. When you record your systems, you provide yourself with the opportunity to improve the process, which can result in cutting costs and freeing up your valuable time to grow your business. It can also help you complete tasks with fewer mistakes. Taking the time to document new procedures and re-document existing procedures can provide you with opportunities to make the daily tasks more efficient and freeing up your time to focus on growing business revenue. 

Improve Performance

Businesses that lack procedures often have employees that have their own way of handling tasks. While this can make your employees happy, it can also lead to inefficiencies. Not having documented procedures can lead your team to complete the same function in different ways. Recording the best way to perform the task will allow everyone to become more efficient in his or her jobs and improve their performance.

Improve Communication

One of the biggest killers of time and profit in a business is miscommunication. When there are no documented procedures in place, internal and external communication becomes a huge issue. When you have clearly written procedures, there are fewer arguments over how things should be done.

Scale Your Business

Having procedures in place for training new staff will reduce the stress your current staff endures when training new team members. Following documented hiring procedures will allow you to hire the right people for each job and they'll be able to follow procedures without requiring additional assistance.

When your new hires receive better training, they can become more productive at their jobs. They can be trained in a way that reduces the number of mistakes being made and improve their overall performance. When your employees perform better, you can gain more sales and have fewer errors to deal with, ultimately cutting costs. 

Measure Your Progress

While the money coming into your business is one way to measure your progress, being able to measure your marketing efforts or the development process of new products will provide you with a better picture of the health of your company. If your business is organized and has clear documentation of your procedures in place, you will be able to quickly check on these things, as well as other areas of concern and obtain real-time data on how they are doing.

Meet Deadlines

Without having a basic plan in place for each day, the daily activities that are needed to keep your business operating can begin to build up, eventually creating a bottleneck and bringing other essential tasks to a halt. For example, if you aren't posting your Accounts Receivables and Payables on a regular schedule, you can find yourself with a lot of work when it comes time to pay your employees or calculate taxes for the current quarter. Having an organized, well-documented system in place, ensures that you won't run into situations where you have to drop other tasks to play catch-up.

Free up More Time

When your business is systematic in its functions and operation, it frees up your time, so you can focus on the activities that will help your business grow. Instead of spending the afternoon responding to emails, you can work on your marketing efforts or promote your business at local business events. Business systemization provides you with the opportunity to spend your time on those endeavors without having to worry that your company operations have halted because you're away from the office.

Take Time Off

Being able to take time off from the business is one of the main benefits of a systemized business. When your business is systematically organized, you can take a vacation knowing that your company will still be able to run, even in your absence.

Now that youve been shown the many benefits of having a systemized online business, its time to take a moment to evaluate your circumstance and make a list of what you want to accomplish with your online business. Write everything down, no matter how small, vague, or inconsequential it may seem.

One of the easiest ways to become burned out before your business even has a chance to succeed is trying to master everything yourself and doing it all. No matter how good you are, this line of thinking is just not realistic. Developing a logical and workable business system will allow you to build and run a successful online business.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Chapter 2:

Begin from the Start  Making a List of Most Recurring Tasks

Whether you already own an online business and find yourself constantly exhausted from the daily work, or you are planning on opening an online business in the future, there is still plenty of time for you to get into the swing of systemizing your business. Once you start working on the steps outlined in this guide, you may begin to realize that many of them are simply common sense.

Step One: Identifying Recurring Tasks

To start systemizing your business, you need to begin by listing all the general functions that you do both daily and through the course of the week. It doesn't matter if you are a brick and mortar business, an online business, or a hybrid business that involves an Internet presence as well as a physical site. Here are some of the more common tasks that will apply to every business.

Accounting

When it comes to your businesss income and expenses, you have to create some sort of process for keeping track of what comes in and what goes out. Having business systems in place for your accounting tasks will allow you to ensure that you are profitable, as well as making sure you have the appropriate records to back up your tax filings, that you have paid your vendors, and that your customers are paying you within your set terms. It is also essential to make sure that your paying your employees on time and have the right amount of taxes being deducted from their pay.

This is one of the systems in your business that you have to keep a close eye on. However, this doesnt mean that you have to do the work yourself. Financial management systems will allow you to keep track of everything from tracking credit card purchases to invoicing clients, to following up on past-due accounts. Here are some of the other accounting systems that can be systemized.

Purchasing

Tracking credit card purchases

Accounts payable

Accounts receivable

Deposits to the bank

Cutting checks

Payments on taxes

Profit and loss statements

Invoicing

Daily cash out

Petty cash

Employee expenses

Payroll

Putting these systems in place will help to prevent employee theft and allow you to have a clear picture of your businesss numbers. They will allow you to control your purchasing and ensure that you sign-off on each decision that is made.

Administration

Somebody has to ensure that the day to day tasks are being accomplished. Depending on the size of your business, this may involve a central manager or supervisor, or several managers who oversee one or more departments.

Administration is an essential area of your business to systemize because of the high turnover rate that most administrative roles see. Implementing a series of systems can help to reduce training time and keep you from having to explain to new hires how the phone needs to be answered every time a new employee joins the team. Here are the administrative tasks that should be systemized.

Opening and closing procedures

Phone greeting

Mail processing

Office maintenance

Filing

Paper management

Document production

Inventory management

Order processing

Creating orders

Marketing

No matter how good your products are unless people know that are around, there is no chance of ever getting your online business off the ground. Marketing involves creating strategies, learning how to reach niche markets, how to position your product, writing compelling marketing copy and general marketing collateral. Marketing your business is probably one of the areas where you spend most of your time. You are most likely focusing your efforts on generating new leads and getting more people to call you. These efforts can be efficiently systemized and delegated to other members of your staff. Here are some other marketing systems that you can systemize.

Promotions

Marketing calendar

Advertising

Direct mail

Advertising creation system

Social media

Content creation

SEO systems

Newsletter templates

You can use systemization to create simple systems for your business's primary promotional efforts. Any of your team should be able to pick up your marketing manual and implement a successful email marketing campaign or create a purposeful advertisement.

Sales

Many people tend to lump sales and marketing together. However, to create a truly systemized business, they must be treated as different functions within the company. While marketing is about getting the general word out about your business, sales are about following leads and converting prospects into paying customers. Some of the sales systems that you can systemize are as follows:

Referral program

Customer retention

Sales procedures

Lead generation

Lead management

Sales script

Technology and Data

It is almost impossible to operate any kind of business without having reliable resources in place that can help you keep your website functioning correctly, your servers running, and your workstations from losing critical data. Your business needs to have clear systems in place for managing both your paper and electronic organization to ensure that your sensitive business information is protected and easily accessible.

Implementing data management systems in your business will help you stay organized. When everyone on your team knows where information is supposed to be stored and how it should be handled, you can reduce enormous stacks of paper from forming around the office. Here are some other data management systems that can be systemized to ensure your business continues to run.

IT management

Data backup

Computer repairs

Electronic information storage

Client files

Project files

Point of sales system

Financial data management

You need to ensure that your data management systems include a data backup system. This will ensure your data and business are protected in the event something happens to your server or computer software.

Human Resources

Even if you only have one other person involved in your online business, someone has to make sure that you are functioning within the guidelines and regulations that apply to the kind of business you are running. Managing HR policies and procedures can get very involved, so it is essential that this particular function is controlled by someone else who has an eye for detail and who can assimilate a lot of data.

Along with creating systems for hiring, firing, and training employees, your HR systems will include documented processes for the following:

Recruitment

Retention

Incentive programs

Employee reviews

Employee feedback process

Employee training

Professional development

Ongoing training

Job descriptions and role profiles

Uniforms and dress code

Employees with clear expectations and clear structures are happier and more productive in their positions. Establishing a clear training manual will save you the time of training each new staff member.

Communication

Communication is an essential aspect of any business and is often one of the most time-consuming pieces. Sales letters, fax cover letters, internal memos, newsletters, and reports are all types of communications that need to be created on a regular basis by different people within the organization.

Most of the time the communication systems that you use in your business arent much different from one to the next. However, each one is created by a different person, from scratch. Your communication systems provide a massive opportunity for systemization. Systemizing these communication systems ensures that you will have consistency in your business.

Internal memos

Fax cover template

Letterhead

Team meeting agenda

Internal emails

Newsletter templates

Sales letter templates

Meeting minutes

Reports

Internal meetings

Scheduling

Customer Relations

Another critical area that you need to consider systemizing is your customer relations. This includes everything that a customer sees and touches in your business, along with the interactions they will have with your staff.

Establishing a system for your customer relations will ensure that any new employees will understand how your business handles customers. This allows you to maintain a high level of customer service. Theses customer relations systems are perfect for getting your business systemized.

Incoming phone call script

Outgoing phone call script

Customer service standards

Customer retention strategy

Customer communications

Ongoing customer communication strategy

Customer liaison policies

Purchasing

No matter how lean your run your online business, you will be required to purchase items for your business from time to time. While you may only be buying general office supplies, a software program from time to time, or promotional materials, having a process in place can ensure that you never run out of the items that you need. Some of the purchasing systems that you can systemize include:

Inventory

General supply orders

Shipping materials

Evaluating pricing

Policy compliance

Filing paperwork

It is essential to have someone in your company that is capable of establishing relationships with your vendors and can maintain the rapport to ensure that you are getting the best prices on the goods and services that you are purchasing.

Your initial list needs to encompass all of the essential functions that are related to operating your business. Once you have the list in place, you can begin the next step of the process.

Step Two: Organizing and Prioritizing the Functions

Once youve identified all the recurring tasks in your business, it is time for you to organize and prioritize those functions. Depending on the size of your business, you might be able to combine some of the tasks into a single, general category, as long as your business remains relatively small. It's also important to remember that you can always split categories later on as it becomes necessary. Here are some examples of how you can prioritize your essential business functions.

Product Development

Before you can even start a business, you need to have a core product or service that you can offer to potential customers. This makes product development one of the most critical functions in your business and thus should be placed at the top of your priority list. Product development is likely to continue to remain high throughout the course of business since you will need to continually improve and refine your product over time for it to stay competitive in your market. Coming up with new products that will compliment your core line will also be a function that you will have to perform throughout your time in business.

Administration and Accounting

For small businesses, combining the administration and accounting functions makes sense. You can hire a single office manager who can take care of the day to day clerical tasks as well as posting credits and debits to the books. As your company expands, you can split these two functions into separate teams. Before you can start selling your product or services, these two areas of your business must be structured and in place.

Tech Support

You cant successfully run an online business if you dont have a functioning website or if you have problems with your equipment. Having someone who knows how to build and manage a site and keep your equipment running is essential to have in place before you make your first sale.

Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support

When you are first starting your online business, these business functions can be combined and handled by one or two people. Over time, as your business gets off the ground and continues to grow, you will need to split these functions into their own department and have separate policies documented for the processes that go along with each task.

After youve analyzed your list and prioritized the functions according to their importance and need for getting your business up and running, the next step is developing the policies and procedures that will be essential for keeping your business running, even when you arent in the office.

Step 3: Developing Policies and Procedures

When you have your priorities in order, its time for you to begin developing the policies and procedures that will be at the core of your business. These policies and procedures will keep each of the essential functions of your business running smoothly so you can focus your time and effort on growing your business. It is necessary for you to keep in mind as you work through this step, that even if you are combining several functions under one umbrella initially, that each of these functions must be clearly defined with their own specific processes and responsibilities.

Developing policies and procedures is nothing more than creating a logical process that can be documented in a training manual. They must be as relevant for a team of three as they would be for a group of three hundred. Here are some examples to help you begin crafting the procedures for each of the essential functions of your business.

Accounting

You should have policies in place that include guidelines to how frequently posting should be done to Payables and Receivables, when taxes should be determined, how to handle employee payroll, and how to track expenses.

Administration

The administration policies and procedures should include guidelines on how to schedule employees, how to draft letters and general correspondences, how to arrange and maintain the filing system, booking travel for department personnel, and ordering office supplies.

Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support

The sales, marketing, and customer support departments will need to have clearly defined instructions on how to interact with the public. Marketing will need guidelines for how to create compelling ads that appeal to consumers while the Sales and Customer Support departments will be representing the company when approaching prospective customers and taking care of existing ones.

Step Four: Documenting the Processes

For your business systems to work correctly, they need to be clearly documented so that there is no opportunity for miscommunication or confusion on what should be done in any given situation. While recording your processes and procedures can be intimidating, there are some excellent resources for managing this.

Your new hires, presumably, will have some experience in the area where they will work. Draw on this experience to help you create the policies and procedures for your business. To cut down on the time you spend writing down the processes, turn to templates and samples found on the internet or obtained from other companies. There is no point in your spending your valuable time reinventing the wheel. A lot of the information that you need has already been written and can be customized to work for your company with minimal effort on your part.

If you genuinely don't have the time or resources in your company to help you document your policies and procedures, you can always hire a business consultant to help you create a training manual and a workable employee manual. The money you spend on this type of service will be well worth it in the long run.

Step Five: Implement the Processes

Once you have started documenting your processes and procedures, you'll want to take them for a test drive. Start implementing the processes to determine if the basic structure is sound. Don't be upset if you run into bumps along the way, no business, no matter the size, gets it completely right the first time. As you do a test run on the processes, consider whether the process has the potential to be tweaked along the way to ensure that your company is capable of running smoothly when youre away.

As your company grows, you will find it necessary to add positions to various departments, adjust policies and procedures to accommodate new laws and regulations, or create new departments by splitting older ones. If your primary system is sound, these new developments in your company will be relatively painless to deal with and won't require you to overhaul the way you do business entirely.

Step Six: Diagram the Flow of Your Business

It isn't enough for you to merely identify and prioritize the functions in your business. You also need to ensure that there is a logical ebb and flow between each of these essential areas.

While this may seem redundant once you've figured out what each department is supposed to do, you can think of it as creating the jewels that go into the necklace. They may be beautiful in their own right, but if they aren't correctly linked, nobody can wear them.

Here are some ideas to help you with the diagramming and definition of the communication flow within your business.

Start with diagraming how things flow through each department. For example, a new customer order begins with Sales, makes its way to Order Processing, then finds its way to Shipping, and finally ends with billing. At some point, Customer Support will need to be involved in following up and making sure the customer is happy with their purchase.

Next, identify who is responsible or accountable for each progression in the flow.

Evaluate how long it takes for the flow of the order to make its way through the process and determine if any areas need improvement.

Taking the time to diagram the various processes will help you in a couple of ways. First, it will make it clear whether or not the policies and procedures that you have implemented are working correctly. Secondly, it will help you and your team spot any areas where you can improve communication, more clearly define procedures, and which steps can be streamlined to save you both time and money.

While this may seem like a great deal of work, it is relatively easy to accomplish. The degree of detail and time that you spend developing these procedures will depend on the size and nature of your business.

While some of the steps will be able to be completed in a matter of minutes, others will take days or weeks to accomplish. Building a solid foundation when you are first starting your business will save you a considerable amount of time and money once you have your company up and running.          

                      Chapter 3:

Systemization Tools for Your Online Business

If you want to build a successful business that is capable of generating steady, predictable sales, then you need to develop systems that will allow your business to continue to run even when youre not in the office. If you are feeling stressed by the overwhelming number of tasks, email, projects, clients, and social media marketing that you are tackling on a daily basis, several tools can automate your tasks and free up your time.

The following tools will help you to automate many of the essential daily tasks that are required to run a successful business. By utilizing some of these tools you can free up your time, so you can be more productive and focus on those tasks that you need to work on.

Asana

Asana (https://asana.com), is a tool that helps you move your work forward. It is the easiest way for your team to track their work and get results. Asana can help you free up your email because any conversation that you have with your team happens in the app. While asana was designed to be used by organizations, individuals running their own business can also benefit from utilizing the tool in their business. Here are a few highlights that make this an excellent tool if youre trying to systemize your business.

It splits your to do list into actionable tasks based on when those tasks are due, who was allocated to work on the project, and by the project themselves. This feature will allow you to collaborate on larger projects with your team or focus on small, individual tasks.

It allows you to delegate tasks more efficiently.

It works with Google Drive and Dropbox, so you can easily share files within the project.

Its free.

Ontraport

Ontraport (https://ontraport.com) is an all-in-one business automation tool that brings together all your business tools, customer information, and data into a single application. It is a true marketing automation system that will allow you to market your business using email, postcards, SMS, and more. It also has a feature that will enable you to sell your programs, products, and services seamlessly with a payment processing option for PayPal or the merchant provider for your business. Here are just a few of the reasons why Ontraport is a great automation tool for your business.

It allows you to map your entire customer journey. While most marketing tools show you either how your email performs or how your pages convert, Ontraport shows how your whole business performs on one single campaign map.

You can see whos converting when, where they are coming from, and their lifetime value through the tools campaign reporting feature. The data you receive can then be tied back to your marketing activity, so you know which campaigns are working.

It allows you to build your campaign from scratch or choose a campaign from its vast library of turn-key templates that include emails, pre-designed pages, and everything else you need to launch your campaign.

Slack

Slack (https://slack.com), is a business tool that allows your team to kick off a project, hire new employees, review a sales contract, finalize your budget, measure and A/B test, and more; all from its easy to use interface. The program will help you save time when collaborating with your team by providing you a single place for messaging, files, and tools. Here are just some of the features that Slack has to offer your business.

Organized conversations, utilizing channels to bring conversations together. The channels can be organized by team, project, or client and allow team members to join and leave any channel as needed. It also features threads that keep side conversations from derailing the project or topic at hand.

Slack also allows you to search conversations and turn them into common knowledge. Users can explore everything that has been posted in channels to see if their problem has already been solved.

Deadline Funnel

Deadline Funnel (https://deadlinefunnel.com) is a program that will allow you to sell your programs live through webinars, as well as allowing your customers to enter into mini-launches, which are fully automated, using timers that countdown to the expiration of the cart. The countdown timers that deadline funnel uses are personalized to each visitor, allowing you to add a sense of urgency to your marketing funnel. With deadline funnel, you can build real, evergreen campaigns that provide each of your subscribers with their own deadline. Here are several reasons why businesses utilize deadline funnel in their companies.

You can create deadline campaigns for your product launches, with the ability to set the same deadline for everyone.

It integrates with several powerful business systems including ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, MailChimp, and Ontraport.

Lead Pages

Lead Pages (https://leadpages.net) helps businesses to build stunning opt-in campaigns easily allowing them to quickly capture leads, convert customers, and integrate their campaigns across all their favorite digital marketing tools.

Create mobile friendly templates that seamlessly adapt to your audiences favorite connected devices.

Easily build ads with the integrate Facebook Ad Builder that pulls content directly from your page to create compelling ads instantly.

Fine-tune your campaigns quickly and create maximum impact by testing multiple versions of the ad, side-by-side, so you can keep what works and get rid of what doesn't.

Calendly

Calendly (https://calendly.com) helps businesses schedule meetings without the back-and-forth emails. Calendly allows you to create simple rules and share your Calendly through links via email or embedded in your website. Calendly works with your Outlook, Google, iCloud, or Office 365 calendars, so you never become double booked. Here are some of the features in Calendly that business owners love.

They have complete control over their schedule. The program allows you to set buffer times between meetings, prevent last-minute meetings, create secret events, and more.

The program is extremely flexible and supports joint availability meetings, round-robin meetings, and one-on-one meetings.

It works with all your favorite business apps like Salesforce, GoToMeeting, Zapier, and much more.

GoToWebinar

Webinars have become a massive part of many online businesses. GoToWebinar (https://gotomeeting.com) lets you quickly and more efficiently communicate with employees, prospects, and customers. It can easily handle large groups of people and turn your presentation into a conversation and the conversation into sales.

Both large corporations and small businesses can tell their story with GoToWebinar and reach their audience. The following features make GoToWebinar an indispensable tool for any business.

The email automation feature allows users to create custom email invitations, confirmations, and reminders. With automated email templates, you can let the tool do all the work for you.

To indeed make the webinar yours, GoToWebinar allows you to display your company logo and custom image on all the material used in your webinars.

Add the ability to share videos to make your webinars more impactful. Upload MP4 files or share video clips on YouTube or share a promotional video and more with high-quality video.

DropBox

With Dropbox (https://dropbox.com) business, you can grow your company without limits, while maintaining complete control over your companys sensitive data and other activities. Flexible storage plans and team storage management are just some of the features of the powerful file sharing business tool.

With the administrator dashboard, you can monitor team activity, view connected devices, and audit sharing activity from one place.

The remote wipe feature allows you to clear files from lost or stolen devices to ensure that all your company files are kept from getting into the wrong hands.

The Dropbox paper feature is a simple, yet powerful way to create, share, and keep all the members of your team in sync, with the added benefit of admin controls.

Google Docs

Google Docs (https://docs.google.com) is a robust document sharing and editing tool that allows team members to work on documents in real time. With immediate syncing capabilities, the program reduces the chances that someone will over-ride someone else's contribution. Google Docs brings all your business documents to life with smart editing and styling tools that make it easy to format text and paragraphs. Other features include:

Hundreds of templates that are designed to make your work more professional and your life much more comfortable. With a wide variety of report, resume, and other pre-made documents you can get a head start on all your document creation needs.

Since Google Docs is a web-based tool, you can get all your documents anytime and from anywhere. You and your entire team can access, create, and edit documents from your favorite devices, even if there isn't a connection.

All the changes that are made in documents are automatically saved as you type. The program also keeps the revision history, so you can quickly view old versions of the report and sort the changes by the date they were made or who made the change.

Google Calendar

Make the most out of your days with Google Calendar (https://calendar.google.com). The newly designed app helps you spend less time managing your schedule and more time enjoying it. All of the events that you add to Google Calendar are stored online so you wont lose your schedule if you happen to lose your phone.

With the assists feature, you can create events in just a few taps. With smart suggest, you can quickly and easily generate event titles, add people, and places to your calendar.

Get multiple views of your day, week, and month. Easily invite guests to your events and view your calendar on the web.

Events from your Gmail account are automatically added to your calendar.

Webinar Jam

Webinar Jam (https://webinarjam.com) offers business owners unmatched flexibility and high-tech precision at a value that cant be matched. With the ability to invite up to six co-presenters Webinar Jammer is one of the best collaboration tools on the market. The program is compatible will all browsers, operating systems, and devices, making it easy for anyone to attend your webinar.

Draw and mark up directly on your screen and turn your whiteboard ideas into reality. You can quickly highlight and write annotations on the screen as you run presentations, training, software demos, lectures, or share mind maps.

Screencast-o-Matic

With Screencast-o-Matic (https://screencast-o-matic.com) you have everything you need to create, manage, and share videos with your team. The integrations allow you to use the platform end to end or as video editing and screen recording tools. Screencast-o-Matic is an intuitive, powerful screen recording and video editing tool for businesses of all sizes.

It features an advanced screen recorder to capture your screen or webcam while you add text annotations, shapes, or draw freehand. You can also import or export and mix in other video and audio media seamlessly.

With advanced video management and sharing, you can efficiently manage all of your videos and how they are viewed. Quickly set up channels by topic, set user options like comments and notes, and set permissions for who can see the videos.

Easily integrate your workflow into your training, communications, support, and learning management system with API.

HootSuite

Do more with your social media with HootSuite (https://hootsuite.com). HootSuite is dedicated to not only enhancing your social media engagement but helping you automate it across more than 35 global networks like Twitter and Facebook. It identifies the social media influences in your industry and automates social media strategies for you.

Save valuable time by scheduling all your social posts through an easy to use interface. Keep your business's social presence active around the clock by automatically scheduling hundreds of social media posts at once.

Track and prove your social return on investment (ROI) with the programs social analytics feature. Quickly measure the impact of your social media campaigns with comprehensive reporting. Measure each social channels conversion rates and separate ROI between paid and owned media.

Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft (https://infusionsoft.com) is an all-in-one marketing solution specifically designed to help small businesses. It allows you to automate lead scoring and capture and a segment with the tool's powerful customer relationship management (CRM), features. Quickly integrate with hundreds of third-party business services through the expansive marketplace of apps.

Get more organized with Infusionsoft. All of your customer information is gathered in one place, which allows you to review all of your previous customer interactions quickly. The simple dashboards and reports show you exactly how your audience is responding to your campaigns.

Get more customers by creating follow-up email campaigns that are targeted to your customers.

The marketing automation feature allows you to work leads down the sales funnel and build a sales pipeline that works. With easy to read analytics you can quickly see whats working and whats not.

MailChimp

MailChimps (https://mailchimp.com) primary focus is on email marketing and is one of the most affordable automation tools on the market. Its marketing automation features allow you to target customers based on specific data. Create customer workflows with scheduling and segmentation tools with their application program interfaces (API), and it easily integrates with numerous Web technologies.

Connect your store to one of the hundreds of e-commerce integrations offered by MailChimp to create targeted email and ad campaigns.

The robust marketing automation in Mailchimp ensures that your emails are getting in front of the right people at the right time. It allows you to target customers based on preferences, behavior, and previous sales.

Reach a wider audience with Facebook, Google, and Instagram ads to grow your bottom line in fewer steps.

Needls

Automatically create, target, and optimize all your digital advertising with Needls (https://needls.com). All you have to do to get started is upload your images, videos, and primary message, and let Needls do the rest for you. Stop spending hours trying to come up with the perfect ad. Arm yourself with all the tools you need to turn your visitors into sales.

Needls will quickly identify your ideal customer as they post their wants and needs to their social media accounts and then display timely ads, so you have the best chance of gaining their business.

Automatically optimize and retarget your ads, 24/7, 365 days a year.

Create simple, high converting landing pages that capture more sales, inquiries, and phone calls.

Salesforce

One of the leading business automation and customer relations management companies in the world, Salesforce (https://salesforce.com) can be leveraged by businesses to enhance your digital marketing campaigns. The powerful marketing and sales automation tools can integrate with hundreds of third-party business apps through its vast market of APIs.

Manage all your contacts and track opportunities from any desktop or device.

With predictive scoring, actionable insights, accurate forecasting, and intelligent automation turn your customer data into closed deals with Sales Cloud Einstein.

Build a single, comprehensive view of every one of your consumers to power one-to-one journeys.

IFTTT

Standing for If This Then That, IFFTT (https://ifttt.com) is a streamlined automation tool that allows businesses to create recipes that perform specific actions based on triggers that are predefined. There are currently more than 240 third-party app connections for you to automate your business across the web.

Get all your apps and devices talking to each other in new ways with a touch of a button.

These automation technologies enable you to free up the time you spend on completing redundant processes, so you can start to focus your attention on those tasks that are needed to grow your business. With the team collaboration tools and tools for documenting, you can easily stay on top of projects and work seamlessly with your employees, no matter where they are located.

Chapter 4:

Documenting Your Processes  Creating SOPs

To truly systemize your business and ensure that it continues to run smoothly, you have to document your processes and create a Standard Operation Procedures Manual, or SOP. Standard operating procedures are an essential part of the operating system for any company. The idea is a simple one and is used by the US military and successful businesses like McDonald's.

The SOP guidelines are created to facilitate the entire way that you do business. They are designed to make things run smoother and more effortless and help to prevent costly mistakes from occurring. Not only do SOPs simplify and formalize every task in your business, but they also make it, so no process in your company rests solely in the hands of a single member of your team.

The lack of SOPs in your business creates a condition that if key people were to leave, their knowledge and expertise wouldn't disappear with them. Without these systems in place, you are running the risk that your business may eventually be crippled because you have an operational reliance on the expertise of a handful of individuals who are the only ones who know the secret sauce of your business model. Having SOPs in place means you wont have to worry that the loss of key people could cripple your business.

How to Document Your Business Systems

When documenting your business systems and creating an SOP, it is essential to include both how the task is done and the reason why the task is done and the importance of the task to the overall success of the business. Your employees must understand that no matter how menial they might think a function is, it is, in fact, an essential part of the overall design for the success of the business. The initial draft of each procedure should include the following:

The Title of the SOP

The reason for the SOP

The specific action steps that are required to complete the task

These three items must be covered in the draft for the process to be successful. The method of drafting the document is simple. You want to think about it as having a conversation with a person that you want to complete the task. You are essentially having a written communication and covering every step of the process from inception to completion. You may find it helpful to include photos in the document. Illustrating the tasks could be essential for the person to be able to comprehend the task. Videos of the process can also prove to be helpful in showing a multi-step process. Your goal, when documenting your methods is to completely illustrate the task to eliminate any potential questions that might be raised as to the how and why.

Develop Naming Conventions

The first thing you need to do before you even put pen to paper, is to develop a standardized naming convention for the documents you are going to create. Having a standardized naming convention will allow you to remain consistent and will make it easier for employees to find the correct material. While you may only have a few documented procedures to start with, as your business grows, so will your SOP. Here are some tips for developing naming conventions that will help you control how procedures are written, reviewed, published and archived. 

What are Naming Conventions?

Simply put, naming conventions are how you name your documents in a structured manner. The key is to have consistency across the SOPs. Your primary goal in adopting a naming convention is so that you and others can quickly identify the type and purpose of all the SOP documents. You want to make sure you use a naming convention that is easy to follow, understood by everyone in your team, and that is meaningful. You want to avoid using obscure or cryptic terms because if they aren't practical, those tasked with writing the SOPs may stop using the guidelines. The following are important guidelines that you should follow for naming your SOP documents.

Client Name or SOP Document Owner - e.g., RAM

Project Name  e.g., PUR for Purchasing or ADM for Administration

SOP to show that it is a standard operating procedure

Abbreviated Title  e.g., ReceivingProducts

Version Number  e.g., v1_0, v1_1, v2_0

Document Number  e.g., 21

Using these guidelines, the official name of the SOP would look like this:

RAM_PUR_SOP_RecievingProducts_v1_1_21

Before you start writing your SOPs, it's essential that you give some thought to how they will be managed in the future. You need to consider how hundreds of documents, with different versions, and status controls will be managed. Be sure to create meaningful conventions and document them so that if someone takes over the process of creating SOPs, he or she will be able to use the same standards and keep your documents uniform.

Writing Your First Procedure

Your standard operating procedures are nothing more than instructions for completing a given task. To fully understand the process that youre documenting, you need to put yourself in the shoes of those who will be performing the task and write the document from their perspective. When you start recording your procedures, you'll want to keep the following in mind.

Write in the present tense. Keep in mind that the person who is following the procedure is performing the task now.

Avoid being vague with your instructions.

Be concise.

Get to the point and keep the words short.

Keep the steps in a logical order. Steps should follow each other logically.

Highlight any exceptions. You can use a symbol to flag the exceptions and how to go about handling those exceptions.

Highlight warnings. Warnings that the user must use caution when performing the task, have to stand out. If you have warnings in your procedures, use a larger font or different color to highlight these areas.

Include the meaning of acronyms before placing them in the text.

Number each step in the process.

Finally, the process of writing your SOP requires you to consider all the action steps in the procedure and perform a risk assessment before any work can begin.

Numbering the Steps in the Procedure

Every procedure should list all the actions that need to be done to complete the task. To keep things simple, record the action steps in sequential order, starting at 1 and continue working upward. The most critical aspect of numbering the actions steps is keeping the style consistent. Don't change styles in the middle of creating your SOP.

By numbering each step in the procedure, you ensure that the reader will start in the correct place and it removes any ambiguity or misunderstanding that could happen if you dont number the steps. Numbering also ensures that there is an agreed upon way for all employees to perform the same task.

Creating the Action Steps for Your Processes

The action steps are nothing more than the individual steps that are performed in each procedure. Most of the systems that you will document will be presented as a sequence. However, you also need to consider other factors, like multiple choices when performing a task, any secondary functions that may need to be completed, and other related procedures. To finalize the system, it can help to put it in context. You want to consider where the system occurs in the larger scheme of things and if there is anything the user should complete before getting started and things that should be avoided.

Procedures for Creating Action Steps

Include a summary sentence. Before you write any steps in your procedure, you will want to open with a summary sentence that explains what will be achieved by performing the process. The summary sentence helps to orient the reader, so they know with a quick glance if they are on the correct page. You want to keep the summary sentence short and concise. Below is an example of a summary sentence for receiving products.

When receiving products, there are several steps that you must take to ensure the correct quantity of products have been delivered and that the number of products ordered, accepted, and paid for are accurately reflected on the invoice.

Identify the main task. In the procedure heading, you will need to identify the primary task. Identifying the main task defines the starting point for the procedure. It should be written using a verb that ends in ING. For example:

Receiving Product Orders

Write out the action steps. Clearly write out each step in the procedure, making sure that each step is numbered in sequential order.

To verify that the items that are being received match what was ordered, you need to perform the following checks.

Confirm the product quality matches your products specifications.

If everything meets your expectations, accept the order by signing the invoice. If you are not satisfied with any of the product, follow the procedure for rejecting product and request a credit memo for the product you are refusing.

Once you have accepted the order, move the product to storage. You will need to deal with all refrigerated and frozen products first.

Include any sub-steps. If the procedure requires a series of options, instead of continuing with the numbering, you'll want to create sub steps, for example, 1.a, 1.b and 1.c. This helps the reader see that these steps occur under step number 1. To highlight this even further, indent each sub-step like the example below.

To verify that the items that are being received match what was ordered, you need to perform the following checks.

Check the product quantity and weight to ensure that the amount that is stated on the invoice matches the order that you are receiving.

Check the product unit price to ensure that the unit price on the invoice matches the unit price on the purchase order.

Identify secondary tasks. Identify any secondary functions that might need to either be performed with the primary task or if the task is complicated, the second series of steps. This shows the reader that the procedure is really two parts, preparing them for whats coming up.

Include warnings and notes. You want to be sure to highlight any potential risks that the reader may encounter while performing the task and any notes to provide the reader with more information. For example, if dangerous equipment is being used to complete the procedure highlight those dangers using icons to make them stand out.

Include Related Information. Each procedure is a part of something larger; no one system stands alone. At the end of each process, create a "For More Information" section that lists any related process.

For More Information:

Checking Temperatures of Key Items

Storing Products

Chemical Storage

Rotating Products

Your goal is to ensure that the reader has enough information to complete the task without having to ask for help or look at another document. One of the challenges that you will face when writing your procedures is being able to determine the readers experience and knowledge of the system. Here is what a process for creating a sales receipt in QuickBooks would look like.

Creating Sales Receipts

Open QuickBooks

One the QuickBooks homepage, select the Create Sales Receipt icon. 

Track the sale by entering a customer or job name into the space designated Customer Job.

For existing customers, use the arrow next to the space to select an existing customer from the pull-down menu.

Click on the item column to enter the item sold. Either select an existing item from the drop-down menu or enter a new item name in the space provided.

If the item is new, select the item type from the Type menu located in the New Item pop-up window.

Enter a description of the item in the "Description" window.

Select the account type that the income from the sale will apply to using the Account menu.

Enter the price of the item and tax code in the appropriate box.

Press the Save & Close button to return to the sales receipt window.

In the Sales Receipt Window, select the quantity sold.

Click on the Payment Method arrow to select the payment method used for the sale.

Place a check in either the to be printed box or the to be e-mailed box to select whether to print or email the receipt to the customer.

Click on the Save & Close button to save the receipt for your records.

Implementing Your New Standard Operating Procedures

After youve documented your business systems, you will need to begin implementing them in your daily operations. Before you fully implement them, you will want to take the time to test and measure each documented process to ensure that it works, without your involvement.

Implement the new systems for a period, like a week or a month. Allow your employees to use the documentation that you've created to follow the new processes. At the end of the agreed upon timeframe, speak with your staff, vendors, suppliers, and customers and ask them for their feedback. Use this feedback to revise and improve the systems. You will need to do this on a regular basis to keep all of the processes up-to-date.

Get Employee Buy-In

As you develop and revise your new business systems, involve your employees as much as you can. Your employees are the ones who have been completing the tasks and will be the ones who will be using the newly documented systems moving forward. You can even have the employees develop the initial draft of the processes, leaving you to review and establish the final versions. This can help to speed up the process and gives your staff ownership of the process.

Developing and documenting processes for your business will allow you to systemize your processes to help free up your time to focus on the more critical tasks related to running your business and keep your business running smoothly when you're out of the office.

                             

                     

                          

                         

                        Chapter 5:

Outsourcing Your Tasks Effectively

Unless you have unlimited funds, chances are you won't be able to hire many full-time employees to handle the various essential functions when you first start your business. As a small online business owner for you to have the same efficiencies as a more massive corporation, you will have to outsource many of the essential functions of your business.

When most people think about outsourcing, they envision a "superstar virtual assistant" who does everything while the owner of the business sits back and relaxes. Unfortunately, this is nowhere near the reality. In reality, no online business can run on autopilot. To be successful, you need to take an active role and be there when it comes to making the crucial decisions.

Outsourcing works best when you have an established framework and documented processes in place that allows anyone to complete the necessary tasks. It's best to hire different people who can handle small aspects of your business, rather than looking for a single person who can do it all. By outsourcing to different people, you gain the following advantages.

You get the right person because you are hiring for a specific job.

You save money because you arent employing full-time employees who get paid even if there is no work to complete.

You dont encounter a single point of failure where your business grinds to a halt if a worker gets sick or quits.

You wont have to worry if someone is right for the job.

You may think that outsourcing is a huge hassle because you have to deal with multiple people. However, it is a smart business decision, especially when you are a new business owner because each project becomes cost-effective and completed by people who know what they are doing.

Your ultimate strategy in outsourcing is to build a capable team where each member specializes in doing one thing really well. Outsourcing allows you to present a professional image while making sure each of your essential business functions is cost-effective.

Here is a five-step process for locating and hiring a great freelancer. Follow this strategy for every new hire that you make, and you will soon have a team full of talented people who are capable of doing excellent work on every single project.

Step One: Identify Your Outsourcing Task

To be successful, you have to start every project with knowing precisely what you want to accomplish. You will need to know what skills are necessary to complete the task, what outcome you are looking for, and the level of expertise required to be successful. This is the best way to find and hire the right person for a specific job.

Before you write the description of the project, you will need to answer the following questions.

What is the exact goal of the project?

What problem will it solve?

Is it an ongoing project or a one-time solution?

Have you completed the process yourself?

Can you describe the mistakes that you made during the process?

Have you hired a freelancer in the past for this kind of project?

What did you learn from the experience?

Take the time to complete this exercise and be thorough when answering the questions. This step will help you in identifying any potential problems that might arise between you and the freelancer. Plus, it's an excellent way for you to make sure the project description includes every feature and elements that you need for your freelancer to possess.

Step Two: Write Your Project Description

Most of the freelance websites that you will use implement a bidding system for projects. It's your job to write a detailed description of what you want. Once the project description is posted on the sites, people will be able to place a bid for the project by submitting a cost estimation and information about their level of expertise.

Depending on the project that you post, you could receive anywhere from a handful of bids to dozens of proposals. Trying to filter through the proposals you receive can be a daunting task and one that can quickly overwhelm you. Here are some of the ways that you can begin to evaluate the proposals you receive.

Price

Feedback rating

Prior work experience

Communication skills

Work samples

Every freelance website is full of talented freelance workers. The trick to getting their attention is to write a compelling project description. It needs to be written in a way that encourages the top-notch freelancers to respond while subtly discouraging the unqualified freelancers. Including the following seven elements in every job description will ensure that the best freelancers will reply to your post.

Element One: Include a Specific Project Title

Rather than being cute with your project title, it's better to write a short description of the work that you are looking to have completed. For instance, if you need to hire a writer for a 10,000-word social media marketing report, then you should write: "Need Professional Writer for a 10,000-word social media marketing report." Write the project title, so it focuses on the primary goal. Don't try to gain more attention by writing a catch header. You want people who are interested in this project, not bidding merely because they need the work.

Element Two: List the Required Skills

It's not enough to just post a job description, especially if you want to find the right freelancer for the project. The best way to go about looking for the right person is to ask for specific experience with the task. In other words, you want to include specific skills that will deter anyone who is a generalist, or those who think they can do an excellent job of bidding on your project. Instead, you want to attract those freelancers who can demonstrate background and expertise in completing the kind of project you are looking to outsource.

For example, lets say you need to hire someone to create press releases. Since these kinds of documents are usually written in a formal, third-person format, you wouldnt want to hire someone who only has experience blogging or creating articles. Instead, you want to find someone who has an extensive background creating excellent press releases.

As part of the description, you want to ask for examples of similar projects. The freelancer should attach these to their bid or provide you with a hyperlink where you can check them out and evaluate their work.

Element Three: Eliminating Certain Candidates

When it comes to outsourcing, some people are right for the job, and there are those who aren't. To save yourself a ton of time, its best to weed out those who aren't right for the job before they place their bid. The best thing you can do is be clear about what you need from the beginning. This way you won't waste a freelancers time if you dont think they are a good fit for the job.

For instance, when hiring a writer, you may want to ask for a native English speaker because you want the informal and conversational style that you dont usually get with someone who speaks English as a second language.

Over time youll start to develop a feel for what you need for your projects. Dont hide your requirements. Instead, post what you need specifically in the initial project description, so you dont end up wasting yours or the freelancers time.

Element Four: Provide Specific Parameters

It is essential that the description you write for the project are incredibly detailed regarding what is required. You have to include every possible element so those bidding on your project can provide an accurate bid price.

For instance, you might include the following:

Specific technical skills required to complete the project

Any programming languages

Exact word counts for the project

The niche market for the product

Description of the target audience

Example products and websites

Links to your current product line

Elements you like about your competition

Providing detailed descriptions of the project and what you need will help to weed out any lazy freelancers. Detailed job descriptions usually ensure that the people who are bidding on the project are confident in their ability to deliver a quality project.

Element Five: Create a Private Description (Optional)

Sometimes the job you are outsourcing requires a certain level of privacy because you don't want to reveal too much about your business. For these situations, you'll write a vague description informing the candidate that you'll explain more in a follow-up description for those candidates that are selected. From there, you'll have them sign a non-disclosure agreement before you provide them the rest of the details of the project.

Element Six: Include a Statement About Plagiarism

Unfortunately, when you are hiring a writer, plagiarism is something that will have to be taken into consideration. Every once in a while, you'll come across a freelancer who thinks it's okay to use the same content from someone else's website. To combat this, you need to include a "zero tolerance" policy within the description of your procedure addressing plagiarism. Inform bidders upfront that you will be checking for plagiarism on every project by running the content through a plagiarism checking site like Copyscape.

Element Seven: Embed a Code Phrase

Paying attention to details is a skill that can't be taught. Either someone understands how vital it is to read instructions thoroughly, or they don't. For those that dont, you want dont want them to be involved in your business.

A simple way to test someones attention to detail is to include a code phrase somewhere in your job description. Either at the end of the job description or somewhere in the middle of a long paragraph. To see who paid attention to the details of your project description and find freelancers who can follow direction, have them submit their bid with the code phrase at the top.

Step Three: Eliminate Unqualified Bids

Depending on the project, you'll often get dozens of bids, which can be incredibly overwhelming. While it's essential for you to examine each one, it will take too much time to go through each candidate's job history. Here's a simple system that will allow you to eliminate unqualified candidates quickly.

Eliminate any proposals that look like a template and those that dont answer your questions. Only keep those proposals that provide clear answers to your questions.

Eliminate any bids that didnt include the code phrase.

Eliminate any bid that doesnt include examples of similar projects.

Eliminate candidates that dont have any job history on the site.

Eliminate any candidates that dont have at least a 4.5 or better feedback threshold.

Eliminate candidates that dont possess the specific skills that you need.

Surprisingly, you can eliminate many freelancers with these six rules. Notice that cost isn't included on this list. Right now, at this point in the process, it's more important to eliminate freelancers who aren't a good fit for the listed project.

Step Four: Pick 3 to 5 Qualified Candidates

After quickly eliminating unqualified candidates, you'll still have a large pool of freelancers that you will have to sort through. This will require you to go through the list again and disqualify specific candidates. Your goal with this step is to narrow down your choices to 3 to 5 qualified candidates. This step can be hard because the candidate pool is now filled with excellent freelancers. Now is the time for you to carefully look at each bid and decide which is the most qualified candidate for your project.

To narrow down your choices again, look at the following criteria.

The Bid Price

This is the step in the process when you have to consider cost. When deciding on a candidate, you'll want to pick a range of bid prices that are acceptable to you and eliminate those candidates who are above this number or who fall below the figure. It is important to remember that you get what you pay for, so you want to be sure to eliminate the low bids because this is usually a good indicator that you will receive poor service.

Companies v. Individuals

Pay close attention to the language of the bid. If the proposal includes words like "we" or "us" then it's a good sign that they are representing a company. While you don't have to eliminate companies and agencies automatically, you need to be careful when analyzing their work history to make sure they are worth the increase in cost.

Personalization

Many of the bids that you receive will be a "cut-and-paste" response that shows the project description wasn't thoroughly read. While the bidder may have included the code phrase, they do so in a generic response that lacks any personality and connection.

While you are going through the bids, you want to look for freelancers who seem like they are genuinely interested in working on the project. You want to look for freelancers who include comments about how they are uniquely qualified to work on your project and who can relate parts of your description to something they've done in the past.

Project Examples

Always look at the freelancers work examples that they provide with their bid. This can be a link to an article theyve written, an app, an image, or a website they designed. You will also get freelancers who attach samples of their work history directly to their bid. Carefully examine these examples to see how they stack up to your expectations.

Past Feedback Ratings

For each remaining bidder, click on their feedback ratings and examine the work theyve completed on the freelance website. Even though a freelancer has a high feedback level, doesnt mean that they have experience working on projects similar to yours. Eliminate anyone who doesnt have related work experience.

Timeline

Even the most experienced freelancers can be a waste of money if they can't complete a project on time. Every bid you receive will give you an expected timeline for completion. Pay close attention to the delivery dates submitted and eliminate any proposals that go beyond the norm.

These few simple rules will allow you to reduce a large pool of candidates. Be prepared to repeat this specific step a few times to find the right candidates to the short-list. Once you have a few qualified freelancers chosen, you can now move forward with selecting the most qualified candidate to complete your project.

Step Five: Pick the Most Qualified Freelancer

This is where you will make your final decision and hire a qualified freelancer to help you complete your project. Each of the candidates youve selected should be fully qualified to work on your project. Now you have to determine which person is the right fit for the particular task. Here are four things you can do to move forward with making a final decision in selecting a freelancer for the project.

Create a Small Test

Timeliness and attention to detail are crucial when running a business. You can test the qualified applicants for these qualities by having them complete a simple test. Give each of the potential hires a small task to finish to see how quickly and accurately they accomplish it. Here are a few ideas you can use.

Ask them a question about their bid

Ask them to reaffirm the bid price

Ask them to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement

Ask them to provide you with another sample of their work

The purpose is to give each candidate a simple task that shouldnt take more than a few minutes to complete. Give them a couple of days for them to respond. If a candidate gives you excuses or takes too long to complete the task, its a good indicator that youll get the same kind of service on your project.

Run a Small Project

If your project is complicated, you may want to consider offering a small fee to each qualified candidate to complete a little project. The best way to determine each candidates qualifications is to give each one a similar task and see what they come up with. While this step will cost you a small fee, it is a great way to test the actual level of experience of each candidate.

Look for Interest in the Project

While you are waiting for each candidate to return the small project you assigned them, take some time to look at each of their portfolios to see if they show any interest in the market. It helps to work with someone who is passionate about the kind of project youre offering, although it is by no means a mandatory requirement. The freelancer you choose will work a bit harder and be more eager to do an excellent job on the project if they have some interest in the market.

Check References

Most of the freelancers that you have short-listed will have references from previous work theyve completed. Contact these former clients and talk with them about the freelancers job performance. Talk to them about the level of quality, communication, timeliness, and attitude toward the project.

Don't be afraid to try and a lot of feedback about a particular freelancer. This person is someone who has the potential of becoming a crucial part of your online business, so it makes sense to try and get as much information on them as possible.

Following these four action items should help you to find the one candidate that is a perfect fit for your project. At this point, you have to rely on your instincts. If one of the freelancers feel like a better fit than the others, then they are the one that you should hire. After making the final decision, you'll create a contract and begin working with the freelancer on completing the required task.

Finding qualified freelance workers to help you work on the documents you've created will help you build a successful business that is fully systemized. Follow these guidelines to help to choose the best candidates for all your business outsourcing needs.

                       Chapter 6:

Automation Tools for Systemization

As a small business owner, you are losing approximately10 to 15 percent of your time when you don't automate simple tasks like posting to your businesss social media accounts. Business automation aims to improve a companys performance by reducing costs, increasing the accuracy of data, and minimizing delays. Most standard small business functions can be handled with software solutions. Once a company automates its primary tasks, they will notice that other aspects of their business will begin to work more efficiently. Here are some of the best automation tools that your business can start to utilize to systemize your business today.

Zapier

Zapier (https://zapier.com) is one of the leaders in task automation. Zapier connects all your apps and allows you to automate your workflows by automatically moving info between your web apps so you can focus on your most important business tasks. You can integrate more than 1,000 apps like Slack, Asana, and Google Docs.

Features a visual designer that allows you to set up integrations and administer integrations without having to use code. The easy to use visual interface makes setting up your integrations a snap.

Easily connect almost any application programming interface (API), to another API. Use logical functions and multi-step algorithms for your connects to avoid triggering specific workflows when they aren't needed.

Flow

Microsofts Flow (https://flow.microsoft.com) turns your companys repetitive tasks into multistep workflows. The automated workflows that you create between your favorite apps and services will send you notifications, automatically synchronize files, collect data, and much more.

Create, use, and share automated approval workflows to respond quickly and process and approve everything from time off requests to travel plans to sales opportunities and documents.

Connect securely to your cloud base services and on-premises data so you can make the most of the data you already have.

Pipedrive

A CRM and pipeline management tool, Pipedrive (https://pipedrive.com) helps you focus on actions that matter. The visual sales pipeline prompts you to remain organized, take action, and stay in control of your complicated sales process by bringing all the sales data into a single place.

The mobile app gives you access to your contact and deal information when youre on the go. Schedule activities, take notes during a call or meeting, save call logging activities easily when youre away from the office.

Use Pipedrives reporting feature to understand where youre losing deals, forecast results, and identify opportunities for improvement.

TextExpander

TextExpander (https://textexpander.com) lets you instantly insert snippets of text from a collection of emails, boilerplate, and other content, as you type. Using the quick search feature or an abbreviation you can recall your best words instantly.

You can share your snippets with your team so that they can stay on track and on message. Access all your snippets from any device with a TextExpander account so you can give your entire support team the current answers to all your customer inquiries.

You can also streamline your email and use the fill-in-the-blank feature to create custom forms with multiple filed types and sectors.

Alfred

Alfred (https://alfredapp.com) is an award-winning app for Mac OS X. It's a workflow automation tool and a hotkey tool that allows you to navigate your interface with your keyboard rapidly. You can create and automate complex workflows that you trigger from a hotkey.

Launch applications and find files on your Mac and the web. Alfred learns how you use your Mac and prioritizes the results, saving you countless hours.

Alfreds Powerpack feature uses powerful workflows to perform tasks more efficiently, allowing you to cut down on the repetitive manual tasks that eat up your valuable time.

IFTTT

IFTT (https://ifttt.com) stands for If This Then That and is the free way to get all your apps and devices talking to each other. With IFTT you can bring the Internet of Things (IoT) into your pocket with mobile-based automation tools.

Use widgets to run specific Applets with the simple touch of a button on your iOS or Android devices.

Automate tasks between a wide array of apps, services, and devices. Their web and mobile app are easy to use and support IoT devices and voice assistants like Google Assist and Amazon Alexa.

Shortcat

Shortcat (https://shortcatapp.com) allows you to navigate your screen with your keyboard, effectively rendering your mouse useless. It helps you to boost productivity by removing the need to take your fingers off the keyboard.

It leverages the Accessibility API, which is supported by all applications that are included with Mac OS X and many other applications.

The program lets you keep your hands on the keyboard to click, which saves you both time and energy.

Robotask

Robotask (https://robotask.com) is a powerful tool for PC users who are committed to automating their workflow. The program allows you to automate repetitive tasks on your PC that range from launching applications to checking email.

With Robotask you won't have to create batch files or write complicated scripts to develop simple or complex automation tasks. It uses its visual interface to allow you to select and combine actions to fit your needs.

Create automated tasks and automatically execute them when certain conditions apply.

Tallyfy

Eliminate the chaos from your business processes with Tallyfy (https://tallyfy.com). This workflow software turns your daily tasks and approvals into automated, repeatable processes. It eliminates the pain of emails, calls, papers, forms, and spreadsheets.

You can easily map existing flowcharts or SOPs into Tallyfy templates and simplify your work into actionable steps that reflect real-life workflows.

Its open API allows you to connect to most of your existing tools.

Intercom

Catch, convert, and keep more customers with Intercom (https://intercom.com). Intercom is a customer messenger platform that allows your customers to get in touch with you straight from the web. Its perfect for sales, marketing, and support.

Use bots and live chat to automatically qualify, route, and convert more leads in less time.

Send targeted emails and push and in-app messages to quickly onboard and engage customers, turning more signups into paying customers.

Delivra

Delivra (https://delivra.com) is a results-driven email marketing automation platform that makes it extremely easy to engage your audience and increase revenue.

With its marketing automation, you can deploy smarter email campaigns that are more efficient and customized for your audience. You can create triggered responses, easily segment subscribers, send emails based on consumer behavior and create dynamic content.

With weekly reports delivered directly to your inbox, you can keep track of the progress and performance of each email campaign. The weekly insights will provide you with subject line analysis, the top-performing content, and the number of social shares by channel.

Autopilot

Spark new customer relationships and rekindle old ones with the simple and straightforward Autopilot (https://autopilothq.com) program. Engage with your customers at the right time with personalized emails, SMS, in-app messages, and postcards.

Use the program to connect to your apps and automate tasks to capture a richer view of all your contacts and engage with them based on their behavior.

Easily track your performance to get insights into which messages convert, how your messages are trending, and what is driving sales. Quickly visualize your revenue funnel and optimize your process on the fly with real-time results.

mHelpDesk

mHelpDesk (https://mhelpdesk.com) automates your customer contact, scheduling, billing, communications, and everything in between. The program was designed to supercharge your repetitive, manual business processes so you can focus on what really matters.

Track every stage of the job with complete visibility of your workflows. Youll be able to see the progress of every job in real-time. See every change in a job that has occurred using the Activity Log feature and holds your team members accountable for their actions.

Save yourself time and money and speed up your cash flow. In less than 60 seconds you can start accepting Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover with the easy to set up payment processing system.

As you start to put stable systems in place in your online business, consider adding one or more of these powerful and easy to use automation tools. Automating the repetitive and repeatable business tasks will free up your time so you can focus your time and energy on the essential functions required to grow your business.