Hitting the 10,000 mark on Twitter!

May 23, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Semi-Popular, Social Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

I just hit the 10,000 mark on one of my Twitter accounts. It is kind of exciting. Not as exciting as hitting 100,000, but still good. Since that account is in a niche market, the potential for future growth looks slow. But, there is still potential in the long run, retweeted posts don’t go anywhere because the friends of industry specific people are not in the same industry. My other account which is more of a general business and social media account appeals to a much larger cut of society leaving my retweets sometimes going viral on a good day.

I know it all now — I think!
I think that the bigger issue is that I feel I have “figured out” Twitter, and Google+. I have done well on Facebook. My success path seems paved for me, although I have only achieved a small success so far. I know what to do now. I know I can get that big success. It is just a factor of doing more repetitive work, or outsourcing the work to someone else.

The most important thing is your account name!
One lesson I’ve learned about social media, is the biggest factor that can cause your ultimate success or failure is your name. Not your personal name — your account name. It’s a little like the old days. If you grew up 60 years ago in the formerly mostly Jewish Lower East Side and your name was Noddington, you just won’t be as popular as if your name was Horowitz!

I want to master more networks
I want to ultimately do social media consulting. But, I want to be the best one. I want to know the top ten networks really well. Even if I don’t physically manage them, I want to supervise and do the strategy work. For me it is all about the strategy, not the leg work, although it is good to be good at both.

I’m not sure what the future holds for me, but in my account with 10,000 followers, I’m changing the focus from acquiring more followers to posting more and milking the network for clicks. Wish me well! It will be fun to see what the future holds for my other accounts!

Do you see yourself as an Entrepreneur, or CEO?

May 15, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Management | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

I was talking to my friend the other day. Some of the most meaningful conversations I have ever had happen when I just drop by to someone’s office, or just feel the urge to talk with someone who I haven’t talked to for a long time. Well, my friend told me that I was a CEO of a technology company — like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. I don’t feel that way about myself. I feel that I am nowhere as smart as either of those two guys. Additionally, I only have a programmer and a few assistants. I don’t manager dozens, hundreds or thousands of workers. When you are in that league it is a different ballgame.

So, basically, I see myself as an entrepreneur who has moved up the ladder to the point where he has a few people working for him. I am not in a huge hurry to grow because I like stable growth based on stable clients, stable markets, and stable skills. But, maybe I am a CEO in a small scale type of a way. Or perhaps I should think of myself as one. The main real difference between me and a CEO is that they can snap their fingers and have labor resources on a particular task. I can’t do that. I have to find people myself, test them out, etc. I can’t do my tasks if I am busy hiring others. So, I am at a difficult stage in business where growth actually does hurt.

But, maybe I should gradually shift my consciousness to CEO consciousness, or start thinking more like one today. If I am going to grow, I need to start thinking like someone who is already bigger than I am. It is common sense and the law of the cyberverse. So, how can I be more like a real CEO? Well, for starts, I can put down my subscription to Entrepreneur, and start reading CEO. Next, I can find intelligent ways to delegate a higher portion of my tasks, even if it is little by little And last, I can have a weekly meeting with myself to take notes on business decisions and the conditions of the week. Top level people have reports, and keep track of their business more in writing, while I keep it mostly in my head. I guess it’s all in my head!

Maybe this is the type of question to ask my cat.

ME: Mrs. Meao, do you see me as being more of an entrepreneur or a CEO?
CAT: (sniff sniff sniff) Meao!!! (with puzzled expression on her furry face)

Putting reason aside, the topic of today’s blog entry is mind expanding. Your entire existance can be changed by contemplating this topic. Anyway, I gotta go meditate. The universe is calling me!

Pinterest is really cool with the various boards & amazing pictures

May 13, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

I am always the last one to try a new social network. But, now I feel that my future depends on it. I want to be a social media expert, so I am trying new things. I am stumbling, pinning, posting, tweeting, and might do some snapping soon too.

Pinterest is cool
The thing I like about Pinterest is that you can create different boards. Other social media platforms don’t have this characteristic to my knowledge. Google lets you have circles for your followees, and Twitter lets you have lists. Facebook is complicated and someone else handles that for me. But, Pinterest lets you have interest specific boards in your account to post on. I fill these boards with great looking pictures that other people posted and then post a few of my own articles too.

Followers?
So far, after several very quick sessions on Pinterest, I have accumulated 14 followers! Wow. And 12 were in the last 24 hours. I think I’m on to something. I can’t say for sure, but it might be easier to attract followers on Pinterest than on any other network. I’ll have to do some real research and takes notes to be sure about that. It will be interesting to see if I get any clicks out of Pinterest as well.

More clicks please…
I would love a new source of clicks. The other thing I like about Pinterest is that it is not huge yet like Facebook and Twitter. The big accounts in my industry on other mediums have between 4000 and 50,000 followers. On Pinterest, they only have about 1000, so it will be easy to play catch up ball and overtake them! I love outdoing others!

I’ll keep my readers informed as to how my future in Pinterest goes. As a general rule, if you want your business to do well these days, try to do well on social media. It can really get you a lot of customers and some great exposure!

18 ways to boost your social media marketing in 10 minutes / day!

May 5, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Popular on Twitter, Semi-Popular, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

We all love social media, but how many of us are good at it? It is a full time devotion to really be good at social media, and that is only if you are smart and keep your eyes open. But, not all of us have full time to work on our Twitter or Facebook accounts. So, what are the quick ways to get ahead? How can I take my magic social media pill and go viral tonight? Here’s how!

Here are some effective things you can do in 10 minutes per day or less!

(1) Follow people who share a lot in 10 minutes per day!
You can find sharers on Twitter, Google Plus and other mediums. If you click on articles that got shared a lot, you can see who the sharers are on Twitter. It is easy. Just be prepared to have your inbox filled with other irrelevant junk they shared. If you get shared a lot on Twitter or other mediums, you can grow fast. Following sharers will give them a chance to follow you back and share the hell out of your content. Many big accounts on Twitter only get a few shares per post. You can have a small account and get up to 15 shares per post using my simple technique. The people you follow who share must be semi-relevant or my strategy will backfire! 10 minutes a day of following sharers will change your life!

(2) The mute function on Twitter contains the chatter
Tired of people who tweet too much Twitter litter? Try the mute function. That way you are still officially following them, but you don’t have to hear any of the chatter. Oh what a relief it is. Just spend two or three minutes muting annoying people and you’ll be all the happier.

(3) Lists on Twitter isolate winning content in minutes!
You can favorite a tweet, but Google circles and Lists on Twitter allow you to arrange your favorite followers into lists. I get lots of great content to retweet by putting my best several dozen in my various segmented lists. I mostly ignore the others, but don’t tell them that. It’s nothing personal, but their tweets are not all that! Segmenting your top followers into lists takes only minutes!

(4) Boost your follow-backs by 50% overnight
We all follow people on Twitter, and we all retweet. However, we mostly do this the wrong way. Let’s say I am going to target politically interested people. I might get my followers from Obama’s Twitter. If you want the maximum percent of them to follow you back, retweet Obama’s best tweet from the last two or three days, and retweet some other hot political content. Your follow-back rate will go up by about 50% just from this simple yet logical technique.

(5) Google+ communities are a gold mine, but…
Google+ is a hard medium to grow on. The actual process of following people takes time, and they limit how many you can follow. Follow back percentage rates are low even with the most relevant of followers. So, what is the secret to Google+? The secret is to grow a community. Although it takes work to grow Google+ communities to a critical mass where you’ll be seen on big keywords, it pays. You’ll get a waterfall of new followers if you include a big keyword in your community name and get critical mass. You can grow a Google+ community in 10 minutes per day, but you would be better off outsourcing this task to India and have them spend four hours a day inviting people from 20 different accounts to your single community.

(6) Facebook: test and isolate your winning content
Facebook gets me more traffic than anywhere else. But, you cannot use it ramdomly. Use it strategically. Test out any of your content that you feel is promising. Then, track your stats, isolate the top 5% of your content, and use Facebook PPC to promote those posts. I did this and went from 300 clicks a month to 5700 three months later on Facebook. I am still in a state of shock. It takes only minutes to identify your best content, but the reward will make you happy for hours!

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You might also like:
Facebook knows you better than your mama, but how well do you know your customers?
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/10/03/facebook-knows-you-better-than-your-mama-but-how-well-do-you-know-your-customers/

How to use the right keywords in your blog titles that lead to instant popularity
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/09/17/how-to-use-the-right-keywords-in-your-blog-titles-that-lead-to-instant-popularity/

Pimp my Tweet — a BPO company specializing in Twitter
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/09/16/pimp-my-tweet-a-bpo-company-specializing-in-twitter/

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(7) Experiment with different post titles
If you post the same old thing the same old way, you’ll get mediocre results. But, what if you find hot new ways to promote your content? I will often write up to ten tweets for a single post just to see which one does the best? The way you write your post titles can affect your traffic. A winning title can get you 10x the clicks! A few extra minutes experimenting with post titles will change your entire profile’s performance overnight!

(8) Post other people’s winning content as well.
Yes, post your own content, and yes, post the best of your content over and over again. But, to gain popularity, diversity of articles sells. I run an outsourcing blog, but I post tons of general business articles from Entrepreneur, Inc., Forbes and other popular magazines. They write really interesting stuff, and I use it to my benefit. I sometimes retweet them, and other times rewrite a title and post it under my own account on various social media channels. This gets me tons of shares, tons of growth, and takes only minutes per day. If you prefer, you can spend four hours at a time, and prefer all of your tweets for the next month all in one shot. But, remember, if you post other people’s content, make sure it is winning content that your followers will enjoy reading.

(9) Post more often on Twitter
Many people post one or two tweets a day on Twitter. There is nothing wrong with this. But, if your account is big enough, you might consider posting 24 hours a day using a system that you can input the posts ahead of time. If you are posting 24 hours a day once or twice per hour, you will reach a lot of people who would never notice you otherwise.

(10) Posting 2x per day on Facebook got me 4x the clicks
2×1 = 4. In math it doesn’t, but on Facebook it does. I posted double the content and got quadruple the clicks. The secret here is that by posting more, your audience becomes more engaged and visits your page more often. If they visit more, then you will get more clicks and shares. So, 2×1 = 4 Do the math… or in this case, don’t do the math. Finding out what frequency to post is critical in social media, so experiment.

(11) Post at the right time on your mediums.
I tested out what times my Twitter audience for my notary twitter was at it’s best. 10:30 am to 3pm was the peak. I got 50% more shares then than at other times of the day. Late at night did particularly poorly. Unfortunately I’m up all night, so I do better when my social media manager can pre-publish my tweets to go off at the ideal time. Put in the same effort tweeting, but tweet at the right time, and get up to double the benefit!

(12) Try a dozen social media platforms, but focus on one
Many of us try to do too much. But, you need a pecking order for which social media platforms you use. The one that gets you the best performance needs to be first on your list. Sure it is good to be found everywhere, but certain accounts only merit a few minutes twice a week while your bread and butter deserve at least 10 minutes per day, perhaps up to an hour. If you allocate your time strategically, you’ll get a lot more out of each hour you spend on social media. I did exactly this. I used to spend an hour per month creating my Facebook post list. Now, I spend four hours, and my results went from 300 clicks per month to 5700 clicks per month. That was the account that panned out, and it became a gold mine after I allocated my time strategically.

(13) Grow it fast & milk it
Social media campaigns generally do not give you much fruit until they are huge. They have the same growth pattern as trees. Some trees will never grow that well no matter what you do while others will grow fast if given the ideal soil, fertilizer and love. Rather than spending an hour per week evenly distributed between five social media platforms, it makes sense to find the one that grows fast and delivers results and crank it. Find a way to grow it huge, and then you’ll get a Niagara Falls of traffic and perhaps SEO popularity from it. If you grow your Twitter to 100,000, you only spend 40 seconds pasting in your tweet, but it will reach 1/10th of a million people and probably get shared a lot too. If you have five accounts with 20,000, you spend five times the effort to reach the same quantity of people!

(14) Blog writing strategies in a nutshell
Write about whatever you want to. But, remember that the blog content you share can tell you a lot about what you should be writing about. If you share an article about Zen and the art of political sabotage and your crowd likes it, then you should try to write your own blog entry with a similar title, but with content designed by you. Your version of the article is likely to be a lot more popular than your average idea simply because you based it on a winner.

(15) Use what I call keyword anchors.
I’m not sure how other people use these terms in an internet context, but to me a keyword anchor is a term that is hot in the industry. It is sort of like having a Macy’s in a mall at the end of a long hallway. You know that Macy’s will attract traffic because they are famous, and they are hot. I write blogs and share content all the time, and I study what is hot. In the context of tech business, posts about Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Google, Starbucks, Cloud Technology, Apps, or other popular topics generate a lot of clicks. There are also more general anchors like pets, cats, wine, food, and other topics that please the masses. People are familiar with these people or concepts and will relate and like your articles more easily because you integrated these into your blogs. So, if you want to write about an office party you are planning. You might consider writing about how Google throws an office party and then integrate your personal office party into the blog entry somehow. Tying themes together is the secret to popular blogging — try it! It’s not hard.

(16) How to get over “idea block” which is similar to writers’ block.
Can’t think of ideas for what to write about? Just read what others are writing about. The more you create, the more creative juices you’ll have and the more you read, the most collective knowledge will be in your head which will help you think of ideas and write better.

(17) Optimize the sources you get your followers from
Are you spending an hour a day following people on social media? Are they the right people? Think of people in terms of the groups they are associated with first. After all, you are sourcing your leads from particular sources. If you get your business followers from Forbes, track how many of them follow you back in a 48 hour period. Then, follow people from Wall Street Journal. See if the percentage goes up or down. Keep in mind that the follow back rate can vary based on what you tweeted more recently, so keep that relatively constant so you don’t ruin your experiment. You can increase your follow back rate up to 30% by following a more optimized relevant source!

(18) Crank them out
Like to write blog articles? Not all of them need to be perfectly written. The important thing is to churn them out. As a blog manager, you need quantity on your blog. If you find out that a particular article was popular, you can spend two hours with your professional writer friend touching it up or rewriting it. In the mean time, see which themes are working for you. I can write an average of four articles per hour. But, if I do refined work it could easily take four hours for one piece. Four hours makes sense for something that got 1000 views so far, but for something that will only get 20 views? I don’t think so!

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You might also like:

How to choose which posts to share on social media and how often
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2016/04/08/how-to-choose-which-posts-to-share-on-social-media-how-often/

99 ways to die in social media — choose one!
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2016/01/05/99-ways-to-die-in-social-media-choose-one/

How to get half a million followers on Twitter
http://bpo.123outsource.net/2015/12/01/how-to-be-as-successful-as-scott-eddy-on-twitter-get-500000-followers/

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A tale of 4 social media managers

May 3, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Social Media | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Here is a short tale of 4 Italian brothers. All of whom were social media managers in the United States. Each brother had a different idea of how to manage their business and we’ll soon see how well each of them did.

Brother #1 Luigi.
Luigi knew that his customers didn’t know the difference. So, he hired people right out of school to work on critical social media projects for large businesses, restaurants, hotels, etc. None of the accounts got any significant growth. Posts were published with no type of efficiency in terms of # of posts per hour of labor. There was no insights about how to go viral on any of the posts, and nobody cared either. The employees were not invested in being a social media success. The boss didn’t care. And the customers didn’t know any better. These employees were the least expensive employees you could get in the United States. But, after you added in the office space they took up, medical, dental, unemployment tax, and other mandatory deductions, these inexpensive employees who produced minimal results weren’t that cheap in the long run.

Additionally, they quit their job on average after twelve months of labor which presented more challenges. Long after the fact, Luigi started to notice that the employees slacked off and didn’t do more than 60% of their responsibilities in the two or three months before they quit. They were not cheap to train either, and every time someone quit, they had to go through a long interview process to hire someone new, and then train them only to have the same thing happen again. After a few years of this, Luigi wanted to grow his business. But, his business just wouldn’t grow. He began to think about a change of pace while he sipped on his afternoon espresso.

Brother #2 Guido
Guido was a perfectionist. When he went out to eat, he would only go to the classiest of Italian restaurants that managed each detail of the entire food creation process. He would sniff the desserts from four feet away to verify the acumen of the cook and his perfectionist tendencies too. The blackberry tart filled the air with freshness that Guido treasured, and he showered the entire staff with compliments about the superior quality of their food.

Guido only hired the best. He wouldn’t even talk to you if you had less than six years of experience. Additionally, he had a very complicated social media test that even the best couldn’t pass. So, he settled for creating a pecking order with new hires based on how successful their previous campaigns had been, and how many points they got on his test. He was disappointed that the best only got 40-55% on his test, but he figured that he could teach them the rest.

To justify the costs of his expensive employees, he had to charge a lot more for his services than others. On a brighter note, his customers loved him just as he loved the Italian pastry chef down the street who made the blackberry tart. He had no problem growing, because he offered the highest quality of service which was hard… well, in actuality impossible to find apart from him. He regularly got viral posts for his clients, and their accounts grew from fledgling to goliaths in only a year or two due to how capable his dedicated staff was. His attrition rate was very low as his office was a fun place to be and he got them all an endless supply of pastries to thank them for their amazing contributions.

Brother #3 Antonio
Antonio was the international brother of the four. He loved to travel to different countries. Not just European countries, but Africa and India as well. He loved coffee, and loved the way the Indians made chai, coffee, and fresh juices. He loved to meditate in the Himalayas, and had developed some contacts in India as well. He didn’t want to pay big bucks to have some mediocre Americans working for him. He hired talented people in India and set up an office there. He got a decent quality of labor for pennies on the dollar and offered a very low cost social media service. He was popular and his business grew because he offered more service for less, and with good customer service as he was practically a native speaker of English, Italian, French, and knew five other languages as well. He hired a few others who spoke English perfectly who could do sales and customer service. Antonio’s business model was high quality, popular, and inexpensive relative to the American equivalents. He competed well with the less expensive Indian alternatives beautifully as his employees delivered reliable results with excellent communication while the competition fell on their incompetent faces.

Brother #4 Giovanni
Giovanni was the smart one of the four. He had some of the same characteristics of all of the other brothers fused together. He knew this and he used it to his advantage. He was not in love with India, but made a few visits from time to time to see Antonio and get a sense of what the country had to offer. He liked how Luigi got affordable labor, but didn’t like the quality issues. He respected Guido for being a perfectionist as well. Giovanni had all of these characteristics in one human body. But Giovanni was going to find a better way to do business.

Giovanni decided that he would create a tri-national team. He would have Americans, Filipinos, and Indians all working together. He would find the best communicators, the best analysts, the finest writers, and the least expensive source of labor to do repetitive tasks like posting content on Twitter, etc. Giovanni knew that in general, Americans were better at communicating complicated ideas while Filipinos were better at customer service. He also knew that India was a good source of inexpensive technical labor and SEO specialists. However, he knew that he might find talent in unexpected places too, so he kept himself open.

He set up his sales and analysis office in the United States which is where he started. Later on he set up a customer service and general tasks office in Manila and another office for SEO and general tasks in India. Giovanni was getting his labor for US$3.00 per hour while his brother Luigi (who took pride in his ability to save money) was paying $35,000 per year plus medical, dental, unemployment insurance and other expenses. Giovanni was able to grow a Twitter account from scratch and get 100,000 followers in just a year. He hired the best analysts from America and India to compete with each other to find the best posts. Once he found who could get better posts for each dollar he spent, he hired that person to be the main analyst. He was able to hire people in Manila to post 48 times a day for each Twitter account which got them even more followers. And they also followed 1000 people three times a week on their accounts to get them even more followers. These Twitter accounts changed the SEO ranking of the sites for the businesses they represented, and they also were experts at Facebook, and a dozen other social media platforms.

Giovanni tapped into the world market to find the best analysts at the best price, the cheapest reliable labor, SEO, article writers for every niche and more. His business was so successful that he grew out of control. He offered the best quality:price ratio of any business of its type in the world and he became a multi-millionaire after a few years as a result.

Giovanni is not a real person, but he took advantage of what I call the bi-national hybrid outsourcing business model. You can too!

A coffee house guy hired by corporate America

April 29, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Management | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

His name was Dale. He worked at a local coffee house. Dale was easy going, very sociable, smart, but also hard working. He liked music, the arts, but had also worked in landscaping, call centers, and other types of jobs. He prefered a low key profession, and hadn’t decided what he wanted to do with his life.

Then Max came around. He had just left one of his daily corporate board room meetings. There was stress, there were arguments. Many people who would have been critical to the conversation had been left out due to a combination of office politics and negligence. Max’s boss was one of the several VP’s of the company. They had decided that they needed a change of pace from this typical corporate head banging sessions. But, what to do? Max had an idea. He noticed how Dale was so pleasant to talk to, so laid back, yet attentiive to his work. A personality like Dale’s could do wonders for their insane corporate environment — if only they could figure out how to not scare him away.

So, Max went to visit Dale. They shmoozed, and talked about the regular things. Then Max asked Dale if he would like to try to work in their office as a personality coordinator. His job would be to talk with different people, compare ideas, invite people to meetings, and be a part of meetings. Max decided that Dale would need to have a serious of seminars about business, marketing, and the widget industry that they were in. He would need to be clued in to the company’s clients, their needs, and the various issues they faced.

Dale was given a little cubicle and was to manage a lot of the daily meetings. Although Dale was just learning about their business and their business model, he was so pleasant to talk to, that everyone enjoyed working there all the more. Everyone, except for Dale. But, the salary was so good. Dale finally talked to Max.

DALE: Max, I like the job I’m doing, but I don’t like working here. Or, should I say I don’t like being here. I feel so confined, there is no fresh air, and something is missing. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Let’s go out and talk about it over a cup of coffee.

MAX: Okay…. let’s visit the one down the street

(5 minutes later)

MAX: (sipping his mocha) I figured out what is missing that you can’t put your finger on.

DALE: (sipping a latte) What is it? I’m stumped!

MAX: How do you feel now?

DALE: I’m in my natural habitat. This is where my species exist in nature. At a coffee house with people chatting, browsing the internet and enjoying biscottis.

MAX: Exactly. What is missing is: coffee, fresh air, people, and the coffee house atmosphere. But, there is one thing you should know. Your personality IS the coffee house atmosphere and you bring that atmosphere wherever you go which is why we hired you. The problem is that the atmosphere we put you in is like a type of soil that your roots don’t take to.

DALE: You have figured me out to a T. So, I have another idea. Since I don’t want to give up my $60,000 entry level salary which is unheard of, let’s create that coffee house atmosphere on your property. We can build one outside, on the roof, or in the board room. I’ll need some fresh air piped in, or some plants to create oxygen. I feel so stifled in your building.

MAX: I’ll talk to my boss, and I’ll bet he can do it. Since you’ve come on board, people who never interacted before have been interacting. It is exciting to see. Marketing would never talk to Tech for example. The marketing guys were too busy to talk, and the tech guys were too nerdy and focused to interact. But, you brought them together, and now they have found common ground — or since you are in the coffee business — common “grounds.” If they would have the same interaction over a mocha, I bet the conversation would be even better.

DALE: Yeah, they could palpitate while talking about the next merger!

MAX: I have an ever better idea to add to this idea. We can invite some laid back people to hang out in our cafe once its built to create a mood. The people who hang out in our cafe now are uptight administrators, stressed our secretaries, and busy executives. We need to build a more laid back and interactive mood.

DALE: I can save you the trouble, instead of building a new cafe and inviting the crowd from the cafe down the street, why not hold your business meetings down the street. We could reserve hours, and put the tables in a circle which is the most optimal shape for a meeting.

MAX: Hmm, well, we could try it both ways. But, I like the way you think kid. That’s why we hired you!

A month later, corporate built a large coffee house that was only open to certain people in the law in front of the high rise. The open aired building had its seating section shaped in a circle to optimize the flow of conversations at meetings. Coffee and other drinks were served at all meetings. The most important fact of all is that Dale and Max were finally happy. Dale could be in his natural habitat while expanding his mind and helping others to connect ideas in a healthy way. Oh, and one final though.

In dream dictionaries, a coffee house is a powerful dream symbol. If you dream about a coffee house it represents, philosophizing, deep thought, interaction, and stimulation. If you ask me, it is my favorite dream symbol of all — besides tsunamis.

A special moment with pecan fudge & a social media breakthrough

April 27, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Of Interest | Leave a comment

You know it is amazing. Google understands this, and I’m beginning to also. The best conversations happen spontaneously. They could happen at lunch, or when you’re just stopping by to say hi, or bumping into someone in the hallway. I like my webmaster, and give him small tokens of appreciation from time to time. Generally things that are off his diet. Too many people give him wine, so what does that leave? It leaves gourmet fudge from tourist destinations like Yosemite!

But, I just stopped over to bring him some fudge. I figured if he hadn’t finished his diet, his kids could gobble it up. But, we started talking about all of my various social networks. I couldn’t figure out which one to focus my efforts on. He told me to do a detailed analysis of how much work I put into each and what the effort is per unit of work. After I finished this, the results were very interesting. Facebook won the competition. Twitter came in 3rd. So, I started really putting a lot more effort into Facebook. The results were that my Facebook got 5500 clicks this month while before I had that little chat with my webmaster m clicks were only about 300.

Wow!

We had another little chat over some Wagyu steak that was equally fruitful. We talked about how to test a web development company. We came up with a simple, but detailed preliminary test during dinner. My two experiences prove that if you want to have business breakthroughs, having something delicious on the table will facilitate those breakthroughts — big breakthroughs too.

Outsourcing programming work vs. Offshoring; what’s the difference?

April 25, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Software Development | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Outsourcing Defined
Outsourcing is commonly thought to mean the offshoring of American jobs to some less deserving foreign destination. However, outsourcing means to hire an outside company regardless of location. They might be down the street from you, but it is still outsourcing if your company hires them to do a task for you. Offshoring means to hire staff or create an oil rig not on your shore. It might be on an island, in the middle of the sea, or in a foreign country.

Hiring Programmers
It is common for Americans to hire companies overseas to handle programming tasks for them. India is the most famous in this niche while Eastern Europe has many companies that are often better than their Indian counterparts — at least for now. If you hire overseas, your choices include:

(1) Having an overseas company do jobs for you on an on-call basis, or work on a specific project until its completion.

(2) Hiring an overseas company to do a specific amount of hours a week for you such as 10, 12, or 18 hours a week.

(3) Hiring a dedicated half-time or full-time employee from an IT leasing company. This allows you to interview the indivual programmer and perhaps communicate directly with them more easily.

(4) Hiring your own employee overseas, or perhaps creating your own office.

Problems with overseas companies
The problem with hiring overseas companies to do tasks for you is that they typically have one or more project managers, and many programmers of varying skill levels. The high quality programmers are normally either completely unavailable because they are working on a large project, or they might have a little bit of time. What normally happens is that the company will try to stick you with one of their worst programmers, or at least a very mediocre one at best. You won’t be able to get quality work done with them. So, you go to another overseas company and the same thing happens a second, third, tenth, and one hundredth time. By now, you’ve learned your lesson. Hire the programmer before you hire the company. Even if you get a good programmer, there is no guarantee they won’t quit, die, get pregnant, or get run over by a rick-shaw.

Hiring your own staff
In my experience, I tend to get much higher quality work done when I hire myself. I am very picky, and only hire people I am confident in. Whenever I hire an outside company, they typically pick workers who are either poor at communication, unfriendly, not particularly talented at their task, or who quit when I need them most. You can hire your own staff in India. You can hire freelancers. You can hire someone full-time who will work from home for you if he/she has a good internet connection and reliable electricity (which is a big problem in India.) You can also rent your own office space in a place with reliable electricity and hire your own people.

My recommendations
If you need only part time help, try to find a reliable vendor in India or Belarus and interview the programmers one by one until you find one programmer and a few backups who you can test. If you need a single employee, an outside vendor or leasing company might be your best option. You still need to interview and give quick tests to the programmers to keep them honest. But, if you need two or more full time programmers in the long run, it might be better to look into getting some office space. Here’s why.

Get your own office in India
Getting anything done in India has a lot of red tape. You can get an office there, but it doesn’t need to be under your name. You most likely will not be there to manage it in any case, so you will be forced to rely on others. Be wary of the fact that people in India don’t always do what they are supposed to or what they promised to do, so you will have a few surprises along the way. Try to be tolerant of a fair amount of nonsense if you are able to get your office to function. The real benefit here is that you are no longer at the mercy of other companies for picking your employees. You pick them yourself. You would have to visit India and make some new connections which may or may not work. In the end, it may be easier to have your employee work in some other IT company’s building under their supervision if you give them a fee for their cooperation.

Optimize personalities & skill levels of the programmers
When I work with employees at other companies, I am never completely satisfied with their work. Some are fairly good, while most are miserable. If you can pick your own staff, you can pick programmers with exactly the type of personalities and skill levels / skill sets which you need for your business. If you like them a lot, you have the freedom to give them larger raises to increase the likelihood that they will not quit. In India, programmers like to play musical chairs and change jobs every few months. If you are running a serious operation, you cannot afford this. Give them good working conditions and pay so that they will stick around. You are running a company, not a circus after all.

The most important factor for creating leads for your outsourcing company.

April 23, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Outsourcing Articles | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Companies that do B2B have a very different attitude than those who do B2C. Unfortunately, this attitude is not a good one. When I personally call outsourcing companies, they rarely answer their phone. If they do answer, it is usually a lower level employee who doesn’t communicate well, or who doesn’t know anything. Most companies out there only want large customers and don’t want to bother with small companies like mine. The general attitude of outsourcing companies out there is — we want more money, but we don’t even want our existing customers. In the real world, you can’t make money without having customers.

“We chase projects — not dollars”
One company told me that they chased projects, not dollars. Unfortunately later on I realized that they enjoy projects, but hate customers. I think I need a company that chases customers, not dollars, but finishes projects on time. Hmm.

A seamless experience
What gets B2C companies business should be considered in the B2B world. B2C companies thrive when they offer a seamless, glitch-free, teflon, no friction customer experience. Amazon‘s 1 click ordering is an example of how the most thoughtful professionals handle this concept. Most outsourcing companies out there offer maximum friction and dysfunction at every step of the process not to mention talking to (or being brushed off by) anti-social people who may or may not be responsible enough to complete your work to your satisfaction.

How to create that experience
The process of finding qualified leads is up to a good marketing department. You need to find people who are in high positions in companies who hire programmers, data entry clerks, call center agents, etc. Once you have found them, the key is to not ruin what comes next. Is your website informative? Does it make it easy to know what you do, and all of your specialties such as chat support, SMS messaging, and technical support for HP products? Or does your site just ramble on about how you offer the highest quality of BPO services, and refuse to let people know what those mystical BPO services are? Many companies out there just ramble on for paragraphs about how they adhere to the highest of standards, but don’t mention anything specific that would make me want to hire their company. Your site needs to have a very elaborate services page, FAQ page, contact us page with all applicable contact numbers, contact forms, email address(es), phone numbers that go to people who actually answer their phones, as well as photos of your staff, building, and perhaps a map of your location so people can mentally place you.

The next step is being personal
These days, people normally visit your web site or social media sites to size you up. If you pay special attention to both, then you will have made a good impression on your leads. The next step is to actually talk to people. If you make it easy to talk to an informative human being, and make it easy for people to get their work done with you, you will be on the right track.

That’s all for now. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

Should you outsource your printing to a single vendor or multiple vendors?

April 21, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Outsourcing Articles | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The decision to in-house or outsource your work is one that many companies make. Both have complications, and both are tough decisions. But, if you outsource, then the question is how many outsourcing companies to hire? If you are in the printing business, you might find one company that does a good job with your business cards, and another who is better at pamphlets. A third company might be more expensive, but good at short turnaround for books. In my opinion, it is better to have many outsourcing companies on payroll. Use the better ones more, but keep in touch with a few others that function as your backups. In business – you always need backups and multiple backups are necessary since people retire, quit, go out of business, are busy, end up in a hospital, screw up, or might even cheat you.

The Single Vendor Approach
If you outsource to a single vendor, you would only need one or two pickups of orders (possibly done online) and only one or two drop offs of work per day. Your work would be mixed in with their other clients’ work, and completed at their various facilities, or perhaps at a single relatively nearby facility.

The Multi-Vendor Approach
If you hire several vendors, you can optimize by hiring the best vendor for each specific task you have. Additionally, some vendors as I mentioned above might be better at short orders while others might specialize in low prices with less favorable delivery terms.

Brokering your work
If you hire a broker to figure out how to get your work done, then they worry about who to hire. Since they specialize in outsourcing work, they might be better at it than you.

Managing Vendor
There are other vendors who would hire a third party, but manage the work done at that other company’s facility.

Dedicated Vendor
You can also hire a vendor that has particular staff members designated to working only for you. This has higher fixed costs, but they take care of the staffing, training, machines, and all you have to do is to supply orders. Having dedicated employees is very popular in call center and software development outsourcing. It is common for a US company to hire five programmers in Noida, India who work for an IT staffing outsourcing firm to work on a project for them.

The Mixed Approach
You could have all the machinery you need in-house, but in limited supply. You could do whatever work you have time for yourself. But, whatever overflow you get, you could outsource to one or more vendors. Additionaly, if your equipment breaks, you would already have your outsourcing partners in action. In business, it is very important to already have a long lasting relationship with someone when you need their help in an emergency.

Gaining new clients and nurturing them correctly

April 17, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Outsourcing Articles, Semi-Popular | Tagged | Leave a comment

Everybody in the outsourcing world wants more clients. But, they don’t always take the right steps to gain or keep those clients. In fact, in my experience, they do a perfect job at alienating clients from start to finish. It is as if they don’t want clients. Maybe when they way they want clients, they mean they want money without the hassle of the client. In the real world, money comes after you satisfied a client, not before.

I wrote other blog entries about how to effectively use your web site and social media to turn your leads into clients. I explained how a professional staff specializing in answering the phone can save you from losing more than half of your qualified leads. But, there is more…

Price Breaks
Many companies set their prices high so they can make a decent profit margin. This is a mistake when trying to get new clients, especially B2B clients who can become long term income producers. The main fact to understand is that gaining a new client is difficult, but their long term value can be in the millions. The key is to get them on board. If you lose the millions so you can make a few extra thousand in the next month, you missed the point. Give people lower prices in the beginning so you can get them on board. Once they are satisfied, then you can charge them a moderate price. Don’t try to gauge people though. You can lose very loyal clients by overcharging, so be very sensitive to the type of bills you are sending out at all times.

Problem Solving
Most outsourcing companies have the big boss who handles all problems. The problem is that the problem solver is generally not available to solve problems, and doing a hundred other things at the same time if they are even in the office which is another problem. It is easier if readily accessible employees are trained to solve commonly occurring problems. If a customer can get their problem solved easily, they will be less likely to leave. Even if the employee solves a simple problem in a way that is not beneficial for the company, at least the customer will be happy they didn’t end up with a splitting headache. Empower your employees to solve problems (unless they are a problem employee.)

Are their risks associated with your company?
Does your company have a BBB rating? Do you have testimonials from satisfied clients? What type of 3rd party credibility do you have? You need to make sure that prospective clients have an easy time finding unbiased 3rd party information about your company. They are not going to believe what you say about your company because you are a salesperson.

Making it easy
Is it easy for new clients to get a job done at your company? Do they have to call ten times to reach you once? Do you have complicated contracts that you force them to sign? Or, do you just make it easy to start with easy terms and flexible options? If you make life easy for your clients, they will make like easy for your wallet. It’s a simple rule of business!

Microsoft Windows 10 will be free for Windows 7 & 8.1 users

April 15, 2015 by 123outsource
Categories: Of Interest | Tagged | Leave a comment

Microsoft has attacked itself. They tested Microsoft 10 by trying to hack it. The good news is that Windows 10 will be fre to owners of Windows 8 and 7 for the first year after its release. This way, many of their customers will upgrade quickly and enthusiastically. Windows 10 is designed to become a traditional paid version of Windows.

Most of the upgrades will probably be switched after a year. Hopefully, word on the street will be positive enough so that skeptics decide to get this product. And finally, those who don’t want to upgrade, will get the new version anyway next time they get a new computer. So, it looks as if Microsoft has covered all of the bases.

Additionally, Microsoft is emulating Google by offering lots of free services. Microsoft is offering maps, “The Garage”, and even software training sessions. Microsoft hopes that by offering lots of free services, that will increase loyalty to its core services. In my experience, it will.

Does your company learn from Microsoft and Google? Maybe you should. Perhaps you could find some additional free services or information to your clients or to the general public that would make people more interested in doing business with you. The more positive experiences you create, the better your name will be. The most valuable asset you have in business is your name!