Blind Ape Seo

From jQuery over Photoshop to CSS - a lot of useful web development resources linked on one site.

Definitely one to check out.

Part 1 - Introduction and Description of the problem
Part 2 - Requirements and you
Part 3 - Tracking Features and Bugs
Part 4 - The little black book that could
Part 5 - Your developers - Don’t be a prick
Part 6 - Wrapping up

Introduction and Description of the problem
In this series of articles (yes, this is going to take a while) I am going to give away advice on how to manage those freelancers.
Some people who know me for a while do know that I am an IT Project Manager at day, and an affiliate marketer and SEO freelancer at night.

I have also given away free advice regarding project management.
As this was often the case in answer to some thread complaining about idiot programmers or stupid Indians, it normally fell on deaf ears. Because - let’s face it - what the people wanted was someone to chime in, not someone to tell them they have been doing it wrong.

Now, this series of articles is going to be about how not to get burned when using freelancers to outsource your work.

Every article is going to present some problem you will encounter in your outsorucing and also provide a pointer on how to avoid or remedy that problem.

In this first article in the series, we are going to take a look at

Why outsourcing sucks - the root of all evil

Looking at the complaints about outsourcing, it seems as if it is a really, really bad idea.
And often times, it is:

• The workers speak another language
• The workers do as little work as possible
• Corners are cut whenever possible
• The end result is not what was expected
• Work is not finished
• Work ends up costing more than planned

The sad truth is, that all of these are traits that are inherent to outsourcing.

Like an ugly child, outsourcing was born like this.

To understand my point, we have to look at the model of outsourcing, as it is done on the web nowadays.

Person A <— fixed offer <— Person B
Person A —> requirements —> Person B (worker)
Person A <— finished product <— Person B
Person A —> fixed payment –> Person B

What we see here is a crude diagram of how it is supposed to work. As the employer, I have an amount of cash, which I am going to spend for a product or service. The worker is supposed to deliver the products of his work to me when finished. Depending on the product, I will also have the right to some minor edits before signing off on the work, or to refuse to pay when the work done is abysmal.

This, however, is a fairy tale dreamt up by some stoned economics majors seeing pixies in the sky.

In the real world, this model quickly dissolves into a pile of horse manure. And, believe it or not, all the reasons can be found in that diagram without altering any of the ingredients.

Now, of course, comes the point where I dissect the problem. I will do this by pointing at the elements in question and explaining the real world equivalent.

It starts with the amount being paid.
This amount can be the outcome of a bidding war (freelance sites), or a fixed offer by the employer. Anyhow, this amount is often times a slap in the face of any real person having to buy food, etc. This is also why freelancing work often wanders to countries such as India or Russia, where the mighty US $ can still buy stuff.

This is also the root of all your worries. That, combined with your requirements.

The requirements are supposed to build the basis of the work. They describe the product as it should be, the form the matter on which the amount for the work is based and also serve as the document on which faulty work can be disputed.

Also, the requirements I have seen on the net so far can for the most part be described as a giant load of horseshit served with a side of sucking sweaty donkey balls. Don’t even ask about the dessert.

Combine these two and you get the current state of outsourcing:
Worker B will cut any corner he can find in the requirements to be able to still make a living on the shitty amount employer A is willing to pay.

Mostly, this state of affairs doesn’t make anyone happy.

The following articles will try to help you find a way to make it bearable, or even succesful.

::emp::

There is math behind a text’s readability.

I am not going to go into the details on word length, sentence length, Flesch readability score, etc.. here.

What counts is that you do not want to loose your readers by making your pages hard to understand.

And I have just found a nice tool that analyses your text’s readability and even provides helpful advice on what to change.

Enjoy,

Your Sightless Simian

Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.
- John Lennon

I would like to do two things today:

- Wrap up the November WebWriMo
- apologize for not updating

Last things first.

I know I owe you an apology, basically… life happened.
In between stress at work, tydying up some web business, consulting and two teeth rioting in my mouth (root canal .. yay!!) updating the WebWriMo moved to the back of my head.

Still, I am amazed at what you guys managed to do this month.

So here are the last numbers I have

InterNetAuthor - 51K+

This woman beat us all on the side, while taking care of her kids. Mad respect.

David Bowley - 30,987

David was a late starter, so the 30K words he managed are well worth the mention.

Greg from MoMoFoSho managed to write  15,816 words, grow a moustache and also raise over 1500$ for a prostrate cancer foundation! Go GREG!!

Paul Gannon managed 24K words! Yes!

Glowleaf - 30K, for lack of exact numbers, but still, he left me in the dust and led the pack for a long time!

The senile simian - due to the stuff above - ends this month with 15K words in the bank.

So the complete tally looks like this (yes, I know those numbers are probably not accurate):

All in all, those are 150,000 words!

I am amazed by the response I got to this challenge. If you would like to repeat this next year, I will make sure to get some rewards out - prizes for everyone!

So .. same time, same place next year?

The end of the year is upon us young student and thus the time for reflection has come.  Yes, that is another task for you.

You might have heard me mutter about the Pareto principle every now and then, and that is what we will usw to guide our efforts.

What the Pareto principle is, you are asking?
Well, it is mostly known as the 80/20 principle nowadays and as 80 situps with a 20liter bucket for not paying attention to you.

In broad terms, the Italian economist Pareto discovered that most of the time 20% of a business’ customers account for 80% of it’s profits. Once the rule had been rediscovered by todays economists, it has been cropping up all over the place. Alas, note that it’s reverse is also true, for example: 20% of customers are 80% of the complaints, etc…
You can do a little bit of reading on the Pareto Principle over here.

So with the time of reflection and cleanup on us, let us reflect on this and how this affects us as Affiliate Marketers.

Statistics - of course

Take out your statistics and see what has made you the most money vs. the effort it has taken you.
Kill the underperformers or sell the sites that show no further potential. Rethink the rest.

OK, so much for the condensed version. Some explanations to follow.

The most important factor here is the time/effort ratio.
Yes,this might well mean keeping a site with only small returns if it costs you nothing to maintain.

Yes, it might also mean getting rid of a medium good performer that takes tons of time and effort to get there.

But, first we have to arrive at the numbers.

As an affiliate marketer, you should have the profit (or loss) for each one of your websites at hand, anyway.
If you are prepared, you might even have an effort estimation for each site. Hours worked, for example.
if not, make one up now.
1 = no efort at all, passive income
2 = some effort required
3= major effort

Now you divide your profit by the effort.

Profit / effort = profit per hour

Sort your table by that number.
Look at it.
Decide what to do.

Ah.. a note of caution here:
I am only talking about sites that are making profit. One reason is that the calculations are not working with negative numbers and another that you probably should not hang on to sites that are leaking money.

The sections of the table
The top 20%
You should definitely keep and expand those domains. These are the ones that bring in money and fame.
Some of those might even fall into the “passive income” category. I have one of those, running for four years now. It brings in about 60-70 US dollars every year. With no effort, other than spending 6 hours for the intial setup.
This year, this equals 60$ for 0 hours of work.

But, for this site (and for your sites along this line, if you are lucky enough to have them) it also means I will have to think about expanding them, to get them to full potential.

The middle tier
Look at each one of these sites and decide if you want to keep working on it.
Does the site have potential? Do you feel passion for the site? Do you want to keep it? What amount of work would be required to make it become a star?
Expect to kill about half of the domains in the middle tier.

The good news: These are perfect candidates for selling.

The bottom 20%
Get rid of these sites. Unless you feel really, really passionate about a domain, or if you know you can and want to turn this around in the next months, get rid of it.

When all this is over, you have culled your herd down to a manageable size. And you have also freed up resources to make those sites that made it even better.

Bonus: Do what do you really want to do .. the other use of the 80/20 rule
Armed with this data, you can do even more.

Look at what kind of pages are treating you well.

What are the offers you are promoting?

Is it a shop, selling physical goods?
A PPC email submit?
Adsense income on a blog?

Think about it. Why are you doing well with this type of offer? Do you want to expand it?

Also, think about the sites in the bottom 20%.

Why are they doing badly?
Are they promoting something that goes against your ethics?

Some PPC offers, such as email leads are problematic for a lot of AMs.
Think about getting rid of this type of offer althogether.

This technique will cull your herd of offers down to those that fit your personality, your marketing strategy and your personal code of ethics, again leaving you with more time and resources for the real moneymakers.

With just over the half of the moht gone, I am going to take a few moments to reflect on what I have learned from the WebWriMo challenge so far.

Content is hard work
Generating content - lots of it - is hard work. From thinking up new topics to actually typing the stuff to linking and formatting it nicely - Content providers have new earned repect from me.

A little content can go a long way
While I did not always *ahem* manage to write my 2K words a day, it is incredible how little content is actually needed to keep some sites running. If you look, for example at a typical “fun” blog - for the sake of example, take a look at the funcaptain - you will notice that most post seem to be around 50 words long.

This means that with just 500 words, the site could be kept alive for 10 days. If you have a site like that, write 2000 words one day, pace your posts and be done for over a month of 5 post weeks.

Other sites that would benefit from this are sites that are normally lacking in the content area. Wallpaper sites that benefit from a short description of the pics (20 words each), value that can be added to funny picture or video sites with a caption or description (10-50 words). A lot of times, you only need a bit of content per item.

New workflow
This challenge also meant that I revised my content creation workflow.

Before, I would use the online editor in WordPress. With mass content creation, I use a desktop editor (Notepad++), prepare the images locally and then put the content together in the online editor.

It is much faster for me.

Seperation of Writing and Editing
Although not as beautiful as the separation of church and state, it helps to speed things up if you manage to banish your inner editor and just write write write.

Now I have several articles sitting in draft mode that I can (and will) use at a later date.

Growing a moustache
While this is not an option for me, I have learned that there is a guy who is growing a moustache to promote prostrate cancer awareness. Go Greg!

What about you?
What are your experiences so far? Let me know in the comments.

So, here are the newest numbers and new members in the WebWriMo challenge.

do3boy - 1286 words
argh - 8348 words
Greg, still collecting donations for prostrate cancer at momofosho! - 10000 words (estimate, I need to go and beat the real number out of him)
David Bowley from davidbowley.com - 10072 words
blind ape seo, yours truly - 10287 words
Paul Gannon from the paul gannon blog - 14646 words
DBWebDev - 19561 words
glowleaf from glowleaf.net - 20849 words

and we have a new leader!

InternetAuthor appearing out of nowhere on Wickedfire - 30540 words

regards,

your senile simian sensei

So here is the word count in the WebWriMo challenge so far:

glowleaf - 17665 words - Insane, I say, INSANE!

argh - 8348 words

Paul Gannon - 5682 words

Greg from momofosho has hit 8500 words for movember - donate to cure prostate cancer!

And a new writer, davidbowley has joined the fray with 2545 words so far!

Welcome David, way to go!

the blind ape himself - 5804 words, seems as if I really have to start getting on with this!

A nice welcome to Paul, who is joining us from his SEO BLog at paulgannon.com

Paul is already above 5K words, and looking forward to the rest of the month.

He is also a writer for hire, so if you want to buy a few words from him, that will make his WebWriMo even sweeter.

Thanks for joining us, Paul.

PS: Full update tomorrow.

Ok, time for another update.

glowleaf from glowleaf.net is leaving us all in the dust - 16,307 words!

Greg Harrison feeds his mustache a total of 5,584 words for Movember!

argh is at 3644 words

and the old ape wrote another 755 words for a total of 4578 words, leaving him behind the pack!

This will not stand!

Argh, young grasshopper, get your gear in order, we have to take the lead again!

And to the bystander, come on, join us at WebWriMo for fun and profit!

::senile simian sensei::