Brent Hodgson, Copywriter

A friend recently noted how much time and effort I put into this blog, and asked me:

“Why do you do it, Brent? Surely there’s more productive things you can be doing.”

Sure there are more productive things I could be doing… And more profitable things too!

For starters, I could be billing hours to clients - there’s always more work for me to do than I end up getting done. Or I could be working on my own ventures.

But I give that time up when I blog.

My motivation for blogging is simple - I have three reasons to blog:

1. A selfish reason;
2. An unselfish reason, and;
3. A relationship building reason.

The selfish reason is simple. I blog to remind myself about the things I’ve learned, the things I know, the things I want to achieve, and the things I already do well. I blog as a journal - to keep myself focused, positive and moving forward - and as a record of how far I’ve come.

The unselfish reason is that I also blog for the people I have personal relationships with in my life - my friends, colleagues, family, and clients. I blog to share with them some of the things I know, and some of the things I want them to know. I blog to give them things I feel they may want, need or are missing, and to stay in communication and relationship with them.

The obvious thing about relationships is that they are all about constant communication.

The thing I’ve noticed is that when communication is poorly and selfishly executed, it’s called “marketing” - but when done well it’s called “relationship”.

Because of this type of honest communication in my blog, I end up connecting with other people around the world, and building relationships. People just like you. People no different to the people closest to me in my life - those who I already have personal relationships with. It’s not my primary purpose (it’s reason #3) - but I’m glad when I can help people through my blog, and end up building a relationship with them.

That’s why I don’t hold back here - with anything I say.

If I hold back here just so “I know something you don’t know”, I’m holding back.

I’m holding back from making a connection. I hold back from my friends, colleagues, clients and family. I hold back on relationships. And I’m holding back from myself.

That is the reason I dedicate hours each week to this blog, and why I’m willing to give away all of what I know about marketing.

It’s for you, it’s for my friends, my family, my clients and my colleagues - but first and foremost, it’s for me.

Popularity: 14%

I stumbled across this video today, and I want to share it with you:

It’s a speech recorded by philosopher Alan Watts, set to an animation produced by South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

Interesting, isn’t it?

What I got out of this video is a reminder to take stock of life. I agree with this life perspective, although it’s often easy to lose sight of the “present”.

What are your thoughts after watching this video?

Popularity: 5%

The idea of Geo-arbitrage is great… “Earn Dollars by selling locally… outsource your labour offshore… pay in Rupees… keep the difference”…

It’s practically a licence to print money!

WRONG!

The idea is great IN THEORY…

But IN THEORY, Communism works too.

Face the facts - (you’ll never read this in the “Four Hour Work Week”) - Geo-arbitrage is a con.

FACT: There is no “global labour market imbalance”. Economic imbalances correct themselves quickly.

FACT: You get what you pay for.

FACT: When pay you peanuts, you get monkeys.

FACT: In almost any situation - if you live in a western country, you can get the same result CHEAPER and BETTER when you hire locally.

That’s why a growing number of companies who previously outsourced are now nursing their pride, and bringing their operations back on-shore.

Why Hiring Offshore Outsourcing Providers Sucks:

1 - Lower Quality Output

Let’s face it, the vast majority of people you’ll find bidding on sites like Guru, Elance etc - they just aren’t from countries KNOWN for producing quality outputs.

Take Japan, for example.

The culture in Japan is one where mistakes are seen as a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, they’re not tollerated - but on the other, they’re embraced as learning experiences.

Companies like Toyota have built empires on this philosophy - battle-hardening and systemising the most minute details of their business, to a point where their products now out-perform, out-sell, and out-last just about about of their competitors.

As an example, compare this type of efficiency and effectiveness you experienced with your last experience with an Indian telemarketer.

Why is this?

Is it caused by culture? Capability? Lack of industry experience (caused by massive growth)? Poor management (not enough “wise and time-proven” managers leading the pack)? Lack of effective training? Are the only companies looking for work online the crappy ones nobody else will employ?

Maybe it’s all of the above.

2 - Difficulty Handling Complex Tasks

Sure, it takes time for someone to be brought “up to speed” - but if I’m hiring a company that specialises in X (X = PHP development, Virtual Assistance, whatever), shouldn’t they be able to handle something slightly more complicated than the average project?

If you haven’t outsourced before, it’s really simple.

You read about Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Work Week, and decide to hire a virtual assistant.

Let’s say you manage to find a company that actually has some experienced VA’s (not one that’s just hiring as a result of the post-4HWW-boom… ha, good luck!)

You read the introduction letter, and find out about your new VA…

“Degree in Science, Masters in Microbiology - she’s great! She should be running a laboratory, not doing my dirty-work!”

You set her a reasonably easy task to begin…

You get questions. Then more questions. Simple questions, not hard ones. Questions with obvious answers - things you don’t need to answer. Questions that show a lack of attention to detail.

Suddenly, you come to the realisation…

“Yes, my Virtual Assistant has a university degree - but she JUST CAN’T THINK!”

Did you get a bad apple?

You try again… With other Virtual Assistants… Programmers… Article Writers… Whatever.

You hire more expensive providers, cheaper ones, give them different tasks.

The problem remains the same.

For some reason, your “paid monkeys” just can’t work this one out.

3 - Constant Mistakes and Misunderstandings

Re-doing work is a killer of profitability and productiveness.

Screw-ups need to be paid for by someone.

Surely your systems should be improved with every screw up… But you still need to fix the problem in the immediate term.

Suddenly, you get drawn into “managing” the people/company who is supposed to be “managing” the task for you - telling them what went wrong, and what they need to do to fix it.

Once you’ve nailed them down on the problem, someone needs to pay to fix it.

Will your outsourcing company pay the costs? Will they expect you to pay them to fix the mistake? Or will you end up back at square one, looking for a NEW company to use?

Hang on - wasn’t this outsourcing thing meant to improve your efficiency?

4 - You Spend More Time Doing Their Job

This is another issue that comes down to “ability to think independently”.

Every minute detail has to be specified - or when you get the output back, the things you didn’t specifically ask for are simply “missing”.

“Yes, I asked for an email enquiry form on my website… But why is there no ‘SUBMIT’ button?!”

In my experience, this is particularly true for programming and development projects.

Every detail needs to be spelled out.

Every… mundane… tedious… painstaking… eye-popping detail…

Augh!

And even then, something gets missed!

You have to spend time completing review… Spend time bug testing… Spend time chasing up outputs that aren’t delivered… Spend time kicking people’s butts…

It all takes time…

How much is this time really worth to you?

5 - It Takes Longer

OK - so you’re paying $5 per hour… That’s heaps cheaper than the $20 per hour you could pay if you hired your next door neighbour, right?

WRONG… If it takes 4 times longer to generate the same output, it’s the exact same price.

In my humble experience, even “high quality” outsourcing companies have invariably delivered less output, to a lower quality, with more time spent - than similar tasks completed on-shore.

6 - You Pay The Cultural Costs

Finally - and this might be an obvious one - you lose a sense of cultural understanding when you don’t hire locally.

Think logically about what you expect from outsourcing providers…

• Getting your Virtual Assistant to organise a child’s birthday party in Melbourne… When she’s never lived in Melbourne.
• Getting a telemarketer to “sell” phone plans to Australians, when she’s never even spoken to an Australian in-person.
• Getting a writer to write an article for you in English, when they’re not a native English speaker.

It just doesn’t work.

The more time I spend outsourcing offshore, the less value I see in it, and the less I’m coming to expect from providers.

Sure, when you have a “point and click” task that can be completed by a well-trained monkey, that’s when paying peanuts offshore is OK.

But when you have “Important”, “Critical” or “High Value” tasks, you’re just wasting your time, and frustrating your guys.

It’s cheaper, more effective, and more efficient to exclusively hire from first-world countries.

Popularity: 13%

Have you ever thought about what happens when someone makes a decision?

I mean physically, what happens.

Synapses flare, neurons pulse, and an electrochemical chain reaction is set off in that person’s brain.

With all the books on selling and copywriting and influence, we might be mistaken for thinking we can actually “make” people change their mind, “make” them decide on a course of action, or “make” them come around to your point of view.

But really, we can’t “make” people do any of these things.

The decisions are out of our control.

Although we might be in a position where we can influence the sale, as salespeople we do not control the sale ourselves, and we cannot “make” a customer decide to buy.

I recently finished a book that I’d been meaning to read for some time: Wombat Selling by Dr Michael Hewitt Gleeson.

Dr Gleeson Co-founded (with Edward De Bono) the School of Thinking and is a fellow Melbournian.

Because salespeople aren’t able to physically “close the sale”, Gleeson suggests a logical alternative: Stop putting so much effort into the close.

Instead, Gleeson suggests focusing effort at the beginning of the contact with the client, making contact more frequent, and using the number of client contacts (check moves) as a measure of sales team effectiveness rather than counting the number of sales closed.

(If you only skimmed the paragraph above, you’ll want to re-read it… You just missed three big concepts.)

The book also goes into ideas like how to create word of mouth selling opportunities, and achieve true viral marketing. In fact, the title of the book is to illustrate Dr Gleeson’s ideas around this - Word Of Mouth, Buy And Tell

I’ll be honest… It’s a great book - but I hated reading it.

It’s about twice as long as it needs to be, repeats key messages in detail long after they’ve become redundant, includes several patriotic odes to Melbourne and Australia (yes, I live here, and even I wanted to throw up), uses endless acronyms and buzzwords, and the book is as much a diatribe about organized religion as it is on effective marketing and salesmanship…

…So if you choose to read the book based on my recommendation, then let me apologise to you now.

I’m sorry.

I truly am.

My apology is sincere.

It’s a painful reading experience. But if you’re in marketing or sales (particularly online marketing and sales), then suck it up. Get a copy of Wombat Selling, and read it. Then put it on your bookshelf next to other great books like “Influence” by Robert Cialdini.

Popularity: 6%

Psssst…

…I’ll let you in on a secret.

I know how Google’s will be changing their search engine ranking algorithm next month…

In fact, I know how they’ll change it next year too…

I know exactly what types of sites Google is going to reward with good rankings, and what types of sites Google will penalize with poor rankings.

Let me ask you…

If you had this information, would it change the way you conducted SEO?

If you knew about Google’s search engine ranking algorithms, and how they would change in the coming months, years, even decades - could this help you to make significant amounts of money online?

Sure it would!

SEO experts spend weeks testing, measuring, gathering ranking data - just so that they can achieve this type of market advantage in the short term!

Want to know how you can achieve this SEO market advantage in the long term?

It’s no secret. Google wants to tell you.

Read between the lines here and here, and you’ll find out what I’m talking about.

Google literally spells out in black-and-white exactly what a “good” site looks like to them.

This is the point on the horizon that Google is sailing towards. This is where they want to get to. It’s what sort of sites they want to reward with the highest rankings.

The algorithm changes that they make are simply “changes of tack” - tweaks that they make to ensure they end up at their destination.

So what sort of sites will rank well in Google over the long term?

• Sites that have lots of text-based links, both internal links and inbound links from other sites within the same topic area;
• Sites that offer valuable and useful information, where pages accurately describe content and are stored in clear hierarchical structures;
• Sites with descriptive and relevant TITLE and ALT tags;
• Sites with easily accessible pages;
• Sites that AVOID deceptive or “spammy” practices such as participating in link schemes, keyword spamming, cloaked pages and redirects;
• Sites that respect the Google’s cost of processor time, and make the Googlebot’s job as easy as possible.

Google goes into much more depth within the Webmaster Guidelines pages themselves - so if you haven’t read them, or even if you have, go have a read of them now.

Stop listening to SEO experts, and listen to Google themselves!

Brent

Popularity: 6%

Lately, I’ve discovered a lot of new and really effective Google Adwords strategies.

And most of it has come about simply by increasing the amount of information available to me when I’m managing Google Adwords accounts.

For example - previously Google Adwords would only tell me which keywords my ads had been “triggered” for.

I couldn’t see the specific search terms people were using to trigger these ads.

So, say I was advertising for the broad match keyword Copywriter.

I wouldn’t never know if people were searching for simply the word Copywriter - or other words too, like Copywriting, Copywriter Jobs in Chicago IL, Melbourne Copywriter, Hire Copywriter, How Much To Pay a Copywriter, Learn Copywriting - etc.

Knowing this long tail is like mining GOLD!

In the example above, there are several keywords that are more likely to bring me new clients (like Melbourne Copywriter, Hire Copywriter and Copywriter)…

…And then a series of keywords that are less likely to bring me new clients (Learn Copywriting, Copywriter Jobs in Chicago IL, How Much To Pay a Copywriter)

I can drill down into the “bad” keywords (like “jobs”, “pay”, “learn”), and add these keywords to my negative keywords list.

And also drill down into  “good” keywords (like Copywriter Melbourne and Hire Copywriter), add these as new positive keywords, and watch the conversion rates to make sure they DO make me money.

Think about that for a moment.

If you didn’t have this data, you’d probably see that the keyword “Copywriter” wasn’t converting profitably. You’d cut it off thinking it was just a bad keyword.

But you wouldn’t realise that the “bad” keyword actually contained some really great “buying” keywords. And you’d miss out on those sales.

The tool I’m using to gather stats and do all the exact keyword tracking in Google Adwords is Tracked.to.

I’ll be launching Tracked.to as a subscription based service in the coming months.

But if you want free access ahead of the official launch, and you’re willing to help me to gather some data for testing, sign up to the Tracked.to Closed Beta so that I can give you free access.

Brent 

Popularity: 5%

Greetings from the Sunshine Coast in sunny Queensland, Australia!

Evelyn and I decided to take some time off over Easter, and head up to Coolum for a few days.

This picture was taken at sunrise, just a few minutes further up the beach from where we’re staying.

Nice, huh?

The sun is shining, and the weather is a warm 26 degrees Celcius (79 degrees Fahrenheit for the American readers), the surf is heaving, and there’s a lovely sea breeze blowing!

…Well, at least that’s what the weather forecast said before I left.

I’m not actually writing to you right now.

“F’wah?” you say.

That’s right, I’ve “unplugged”.

But before I left, I made sure things would keep going in by absence.

I wrote this blog post and scheduled it to be uploaded automatically while I was away.

I assigned outsourcing tasks to 4 providers, and stepped away from my systems so that I know that they’re not reliant on me to work.

And I made sure everything at the office (i.e. my job) would run smoothly while I’m gone.

I’m not going to pretend that my business systems are running at full “auto-pilot” yet - there are still flaws and problems in my systems.

But I’ve seen so much progress in the past few weeks.

And I’m so frikkin’ happy that things are moving forward.

Celebrating every mouthful.

Brent

Popularity: 4%

Once upon a time there were Three Little Pigs Internet Marketers.

The Three Little Internet Marketers each dreamed of fortune, financial freedom and earning a passive income online - and one day they heard that Search Engine Optimisation was the key to their dreams.

Deciding to “give it a try”, the Three Little Internet Marketers set out to build their fortunes using SEO.

The First Little Internet Marketer

The First Little Internet Marketer came across a Clickbank site selling an SEO eBook - “Fast SEO Results Through User-Generated Content”. The salesletter spoke of overnight rankings on sites like Squidoo and Hubpages.

He sent his $97 via Paypal, downloaded the eBook and set about building his riches through Squidoo Lenses.

He worked hard, and it wasn’t long until this Little Internet Marketer began to see results - receiving a consistent stream of traffic, and the occasional sale. This encouraged him to build more pages on Squidoo, with each new page multiplying his traffic.

It didn’t matter that he didn’t have full control over the site’s content - he was making money. And there was no way Google the Big Bad G would possibly blow this sweet deal down.

“The eBook said that if the Big Bad G blows Squidoo down, and sends my pages down in rankings, I can always just to move onto other User Generated Content sites!” he squealed confidently. “I can’t lose!”

The Second Little Internet Marketer

The Second Little Internet Marketer scoffed at this strategy.

“It’s practically spamming Squidoo! It’s not for me.”

He read some blogs that spoke about the growth of video online, showing statistics, and explaining Google was now ranking video in search engines results pages really easily.

He decided to follow some tips, and create YouTube videos on longtail keywords that would generate traffic to his site.

It was a lot of hard work - but when he was done, his YouTube videos ranked well for several specific product names - all long tail keywords.

The Second Little Internet Marketer danced a little jig in delight!

These product names were “buy” keywords, and he was receiving a steady stream of new customers to his site.

He was making money. And there was no way the Big Bad G would possibly blow this sweet deal down.

“Video is the way of the future! The Big Bad G has to listen to what the market is saying.” he squealed confidently. “Anyway - YouTube is a Google asset. Why would they devalue this asset by knocking it down the SERPs”

The Third Little Internet Marketer

The third little internet marketer was skeptical of these strategies.

He’d been around long enough to see the rise-and-fall of keyword spamming, adsense article sites, reciprocal link strategies and other strategies that promised overnight result.

He decided that a more natural SEO approach was the best approach.

• Creating a site for users, not for search engines;
• Writing genuinely valuable content for his visitors;
• Building the type of site people would want to link to;
• Establishing relationships with other sites in his market;
• Building links from these topical sites;

His strategy wouldn’t get overnight results like his two friends’ strategies - in fact, it would take months - but once it was ranking well it was less likely to be “blown down” by the Big Bad G.

This was a wise approach.

Then the Big Bad G came along…

The Big Bad G was big, but he wasn’t bad. In fact, his motto was “Do No Evil”.

The Big Bad G just hated it when Little Internet Marketers exploited imbalances in his website ranking algorithm to get sites ranked with little effort.

You see, the Big Bad G was at the top of the food chain - his job was to make sure natural selection took place - that only the strongest sites survived at the top of the rankings.

The Big Bad G couldn’t allow people to achieve easy rankings!

He had to huff, and puff, and TWEAK HIS ALGORITHM.

The bit with the Huffing and Puffing

The Internet Marketer who had built his strategy around Squidoo was first.

“Little Marketer, Little Marketer, stop this at once”

“Not by the cash in my Clickbank Account!”

“Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your sites out!”

The Big Bad G huffed and puffed, changed his algorithm, and blew Squidoo Lenses down the rankings.

The First Little Internet Marketer squealed and ran to Hubpages… Then Tumblr… Then Netscape… but each time the Big Bad G would follow, penalising these sites, and sending his User Generated Content tumbling down the rankings.

Eventually, the First Little Internet Marketer gave up on SEO in despair. “It just didn’t work anymore.” he complained on forums.

The Second Internet Marketer’s Turn…

The Second Little Internet Marketer was left largely unscathed by the recent huffing and puffing… But it wasn’t long until The Big Bad G decided that video content was over-represented in results pages for long-tail terms.

Again, the Big Bad G huffed and puffed and changes his algorithm.

Suddenly, the Second Little Internet Marketer’s stream of new visitors from YouTube dried up.

“Oh well, it was good while it lasted” he sighed in dismay, and moved on.

And finally…

This whole time, the third little internet marketer’s site was largely untouched by these algorithmic changes.

That’s because he had been concentrating on building genuine value to achieve rankings, instead of a site that exploited an weakness or imbalance in the Big Bad G’s system.

So his site had been steadily creeping up the rankings.

Occasionally, the third internet marketer’s site would face the Big Bad G’s huffing and puffing algorithmic changes, and his site would go up or down a few places.

But being built so solidly, on a foundation of quality content, genuine value and natural
links, his site was steadfast and reliable in its rankings.

Eventually, his two internet marketing friends saw his results, and came around to share his view.

They realised that Google’s algorithm is designed to let quality sites “float to the top” naturally, and part of this is making it hard for sites to rank well quickly and easily. That’s why only sites that put in the effort over the long term achieved long term SEO results.

The time and effort that they spent exploiting a “trick” meant that they built no value or asset for themselves, and when the “trick” was discovered and closed by the Big Bad G,

their efforts had gone to waste.

The moral of the story is simple:

Don’t look for the latest Fast-Rankings SEO trick - focus on building a valuable website.

Sooner or later “holes” in Google’s algorithm are closed, imbalances balanced, and the SEO tricksters will be left with little to show for their hard work.

Oh, and don’t be a greed turn you into a Little Internet Marketing pig either.

Brent

Popularity: 6%

In a recent blog post, I mentioned an outsourced PHP development project that I’d estimated at 3 hours, that blew out to 21 hours, skyrocketing the costs for this task from US$35 to US$288!

Who is responsible for this screw-up?

Well, as “head system designer” for my business, when something goes wrong, it’s my responsibility.

Regardless of what happens, when a system fails, it’s my responsibility to solve this failure in the system.

In the example of the software development cost blowout, my system failed.

In fact, it failed spectacularly!

My system should have had a mechanism for formally limiting the cost of the project.

It could have achieved this by formally capped the development time allowed for this project, using a fixed-price development model, or at least required a formal estimate from the provider before work commenced.

But it didn’t.

So when the provider delivered a sub-par result, I was responsible both for fixing the immediate problem (i.e. the big bill!), and for improving my system to avoid similar failures in the future.

This isn’t the only time my system has failed spectacularly recently…

In fact, I’ve identified system failures in every one of my business procedures - everything from paying a provider a downpayment on work to be delivered, to requirements not being clearly outlined. Combined, these failures have cost me several hundred dollars already.

“Ouch!” you might be saying.

Well, actually, it’s great news!

It tells me that my most important system (process improvement) is working!

In fact, if you read the standards for quality systems (ISO 9001), they assume that there will always be defects, inefficiencies and ineffectivenesses in any system. But the ISO 9001 quality management systems require businesses to check output for defects, review individual processes regularly, keep records and receive regular audits - all to keep the systems in a state of constant improvement.

Do you have systems and procedures for every task in your internet business?

If so, are your systems in a constant state of improvement?

Brent

Popularity: 3%

When it comes to outsourcing, the price you pay is just as much about the output as the hourly rate.

Just because offshore service providers charge a lower hourly rate - it doesn’t mean that they are in fact cheaper.

Even though you pay less per hour, some providers cost you much more to deliver the same output than others.

That’s why you must have a measure that takes into account both output and input when you’re using paid contractors. You need a benchmark.

The benchmark I use is very simple.

Actual Cost of Output / Measure of Output = Effective Project Cost

The measure of output is a way of measuring the quantity of output, value of output, or comparable cost of output for that specific task.

This benchmarking tool has shown me that often, offshore outsourcing providers are significantly more expensive than their domestic (Australian) alternatives.

Let me show you a real-life example:

I recently hired an offshore PHP development company to do some contracting work for me.

The company had all the credentials I was looking for, and was advertising rates of US$12 per hour for expert PHP developers.

When they had completed the project, they billed 24 development hours.

Pretty cheap at US$12 per hour, right?

Only $288?

Well… No.

It was double the benchmark cost, meaning the offshore providers were 12 times more inefficient than domestic (Australian) providers.

But unless you had a benchmarking tool, a way of measuring the Effective Project Cost, you wouldn’t know THAT.

In this example, several Australian developers had quoted 2 hours to complete this task, at $44-50 per hour (US$40-46).

So my measure of output was US$138 (2-3 hours at US$46).

If these outsourced PHP developers at US$12 could achieve the same output in under 11.5 hours (equal to US$138), I would have been ahead… Even though the project would have taken roughly 4-6 times longer to complete.

But based on my formula (Actual Cost of Output / Measure of Output = Effective Project Cost), the numbers were as follows:

Oursourcing to $12 per hour provider in India:

288 / 138 = 2.09

Outsourcing to $44-50 per hour provider in Australia:

138 / 138 = 1

The Effective Project Cost of using this provider $12 per hour was more than double the cost of the benchmark output value (based on a comparable cost).

This calculation exposed some big flaws in my outsourcing hiring system which I needed to correct.

But it also reveals a trend where it’s cheaper to have a lot of tasks completed by native English speakers ahead of offshore non-native English speaking providers.

A simple data-collection task was performed by two providers - one Australian at AUD$15 per hour (US$13.88), one offshore at AUD$9.72 per hour (US$9).

The formula for outsourcing to the Australian provider:

$15 per hour / 13.33 outputs (pieces of data) collected per hour = Effective Project Cost of 1.13

The formula for the offshore provider:

$9.72 per hour / 7.25 outputs (pieces of data) collected per hour = Effective Project Cost of 1.34

Even though the hourly rate of outsourcing to offshore provider was 64.8% of the hourly rate in Australia, the Effective Project Cost of this project was 84% lower when keeping outsourcing to an Australian provider.

I’m not against hiring offshore providers. But the numbers have to stack up.

It certainly makes you think beyond the hourly rate.

Brent

Popularity: 4%