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You’re a publisher. Did you know that? Likely, you’re also a product developer, a marketer, a promoter (is there a difference?), a writer, an editor, a technical genius (compared to your mother-in-law at least), and a social media maven. You can sling some HTML and CSS, and on a good day, maybe even a little PHP.
You probably wear a large number of other hats, as necessary.
Such is blogging.
Now, scaling up to the Big Time requires outsourcing as much work of this work as you possibly can.
But you’re probably not in the Big Time, yet.
(Note to Big Timers lurking around here keeping an eye on the competition upcoming talent: I know you’re out there. I have evidence! No, I’m not digging around in server logs for IP addresses (snore), but all the same, I know you’re out there. And for you little timers (includes me), don’t assume you do or do not know who’s lurking.)
On your way to Fortune and Glory, you’re going to learn far more – about far more – than you ever expected. Which is probably a good thing. The not expecting part, that is. Who knew this was so much work?
Consider Darren Rowse. He’s been at blogging for years. Daily, for years. In all other fields, this is normal: it requires a lot of experience to be successful. Darren recommends bloggers personally acquire as much of the experience as they can, by building specific skill sets.
Take product launches for example, where Darren tells you the story behind product launches:
You know sometimes we hear about these six and seven figure launches and think there’s no way we could ever do that, but the reality is that you can but, but you need to look it at as a journey, and there’s a whole heap of things that you can do every day to take you a little bit closer to some of these bigger launches that you might want to do one day.
One of the (many) things in the “heap of things that you can do every day” is building your skill set.
It turns out…
…all launches are hard work.
Even a crappy launch that doesn’t go anywhere requires a metric boatload of work.
Take your email list for example.
You already know you need a mailing list. But you might need another for your affiliates. And yet a third for customers! How fast can you set up an effective mailing list? An hour? A day? A week? What does “effective” mean, anyway? In short, getting a mailing list done right requires at least the following:
- Logging in and setting up the initial list.
- Creating the necessary list support web pages (3 for Aweber).
- Writing the first autoresponder sequence (3-5 emails).
- Building and emplacing the signup forms.
- Testing. Testing testing testing. Then more testing.
How fast can you do all that work? Do you feel comfortable outsourcing it all? How much would you be willing to pay? How would you know if it’s done right?
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge fan of outsourcing. I’ve outsourced 6 figures worth of work in the past (and hope to in the future). But as Darren notes, until you can outsource, don’t be afraid of putting in the work to learn the skills for yourself.
Your turn
What skillsets are you building, right now?
Why did you choose these particular skills to build?
If you’re a VA or a similar specialist in fields related to blogging, please share your experience. I believe well-educated customers are the best customers (on average), and this a great opportunity to help people understand your service and the benefits your service provides.
As a further exercise, think about how much an employer would pay you to set up a mailing list. A good estimate is the number of hours times your hourly rate times 2+ (for overhead and profit). Example: if you make $50k/yr, and it takes about a day, start to finish, that’s $400 – $500 in cost to your employer.
If you start cold but you know the material and you’re comfortable with your list management software, about a day is reasonable.
If you *know* the material, and have it all previously written (how much did that cost?) and you’re an expert with your mailing list software, you can get this down to about 2-3 hours.
If you don’t know your list management software inside out, you won’t get it done in a day. You won’t even know what you missed doing.
Comments welcome.
This post reminds me about something long neglected…an email list. Dave, you told me oh…say 5 months ago (maybe longer)…to get AWeber, and I did.
I set up the “sign up” in my right sidebar, wrote my right now, 24 hr, and one week auto-letters…and promptly forgot about it except the occasional notification that there is a newbie subscriber and the 20th of every month when the charge hits my account.
I don’t even know how many subscribers I have…between 100 and 150 I think…and I don’t have a clue what to do with them, or how (dumb-ass me…subscribed and haven’t learned the technical end of using it).
I guess that’s next on my education list…using AWeber. Right after I figger out how to do the affiliate thing and figger out what the hell a slug is and make the first 10 slides of BPE habit, rather than having to think about it.
Hell…the writing is easy. Its this whole “OK, I wrote it. Now what the hell do I do with it?” part that is hard.
Hard. And damn well worth it.
Bob Hayles´s last post ..Obama Understands Subservience
Bob, here’s what I would do:
1. Schedule 1 day per month to write a newsletter, make it the same day every month, perhaps the 3rd Monday.
2. Write a polite, interesting email highlighting 3 of your articles, such that the 3 articles tell some sort of story.
Just do that for a few months until you get used to dealing with everything.
Doolin,
Tell me about it bro.. this is a lot of work – especially sales funnels..
Lead capture pages.
..and thank you pages
..payment process..
..upsells and downsells..
..list segmentation.
..download pages..
..follow up emails for customers..
But, if you want to make it BIG then the work needs to be done. I just finished all of this not too long ago and I gotta say.. it feels great!
Thanks for this article..
Hector
Hector Cuevas´s last post ..How To Get More Leads By Making 5 Simple Changes Part TWO
I got about 2/3 of that done on my last little launch. The notable exception was upsells and downsells. Just ran out of time. Upsell/downsell is pretty much priority one on the next launch.
First time is definitely the hardest. I’ll be able to reuse most of the machine in the future. Just swap out individual emails and web pages. The structure stays mostly the same.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Blog Post Engineering 072 ready to roll
I have been spending a ton of time building skillsets. Julievphotography.com has only a couple of pages readily accessible right now, but I’ve created and published 20+ that aren’t linked into the main page.
I’ve been buhilding a system…a site that will do a lot of advertising, selling, and administrative work for us – in essence, a third business partner that handles a lot of gory details.
A huge part of that is setting up email lists. I have set up a few already and have several more to do. I’m putting a lot of effort into these trying to create a sequence for the first time visitor that will convince them to give us their contact information, provide them with the info they want about us, convince them (if they and we are a good fit) to hire us and collect and organize all the information into a useful email list.
We haven’t even gotten to the design part – making the site look pretty.
I’m learning list-building, html/css, sales copy, trust-building, business accounting, and trying to improve my art as well. I haven’t even gotten to the blog yet. That’ll be a whole ‘nother mountain of work and skill building.
The better I set up the site and client processes, the more freedom I’ll have to create a killer, income-producing blog built on a lot of the same skills and processes.
I’ve done this enough now to stand on my time estimate: it’s a full day’s work starting from scratch to build out a new, simple list, provided you can write each email quickly.
By quickly, I mean 2 an hour. I’ve been able to get them down to 20 minutes each once in a while, but I have to really focus hard. This includes writing into the offline master copy, pushing into AWeber, and testing. And these are 200-300 word emails. Longer emails take longer, of course.
I’m just about at the ultimate limit. I just can’t type that much faster!
Scoping out an autoresponder sequence really adds a lot of time. What to give away? Which email should have the first pitch? Pitch to soon, lose trust. Pitch too late, lose trust. Time intervals between emails? Too soon, lose trust. Too great, lose trust again.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Upping Your Social Media Trust Factor Who’s in your circle
Building one or two blog is easy and not hard like people said but when it done, that’s begin hard time you will spending all of your time to do and try to working to figure it out.
Tony @ Android´s last post ..Verizon has released the Samsung Gusto- with two display
I prefer setting up one and invest all efforts on that one rather than setting up several blog but no blog get success as your efforts are split :-)
Tinh´s last post ..Can Linking To 404 Internal URLs Cause a Drop In Google SERPs
I agree, it is much better if you focus first in one objective then try to grow when you’ve already achieved that first objective you’ve set . This reminds me of a saying the faster you ran, the harder you fall.
I’m at the bottom of the Aweber learning curve. I’m trying to incorporate email lists into a couple of my websites, so I’m learning how to do this. I’m also working on my copywriting skills at the same time. Trying to get my web copy on one site to be compelling, rather than lame.
I’m a firm believer in learning how to do something before outsourcing it. It lets you know if your subcontractor is knowlegable or not and they are easier to manage when you have some understanding of the task.
Kelli Wise´s last post ..Weekly Wrap-up 13 Social connections you should make Edition
Basically, it takes about 2 years to get a good working competence, if you’re willing to put in a good day’s work every day.
It’s a marathon.
Thanks for stopping by!
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Building from Nothing- not Building from 5-000
One of the problems with VA’s is that you have to know something about what you want them to do. What I wanted was for someone to sweep away all the stuff I don’t like and barely understand and make it wonderful (whatever that means). The truth is that you have to be in charge. They may have more technical skill but they can’t navigate because they don’t know where you want to go. I am turning out to be a lousy boss but then I have been lousy at plenty of things along the way before moving along to adequate and even good.
Ralph´s last post ..50′s Nostalgia – The Evolution of Pickup Trucks
Outsourcing is often pitched as a panacea.
But it’s not.
Outsourcing isn’t some “magic pixie dust” you can throw onto a business to obtain instantly profitability.
JWZ’s rant on open source bears rereading: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
His mention of magic pixie dust at the bottom got tremendous exposure at the time. Went viral, as we would say these days.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Who’s afraid of outbound links
SHAME on me for not being FIRST on this bandwagon, Dave, after our inspiring consulting session with Ms. Diels recently. Sigh.
You know I can kill with Aweber, Constant Contact AND MailChimp, plus I write inspired copy. And I can setup some WordPress stuff and I know MemberGate forum management. And I’m funny, cute and reliably fast.
I don’t charge my clients for learning curves (look I can’t know everything instantly). I DO recommend that they try it themselves first because some of this stuff is really easy and only requires about 15 minutes of investigation.
Personally, for the beginner, I like MailChimp. Nice, easy interface and unless you have a huge email list, it is free. So…
If you need help launching, building, or jumping up and down waving your hands in the air, let me know.
Many hugs, Dear Dave.
I don’t charge for learning curves either, unless I’m specifically in research mode.
Which is where I prefer to be, really. It’s far more lucrative, when you can get the work.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Be Consistent to Write Better
Wow. You guys all seem to be very experienced and knowledgable!I am a newbie to blogging and love writing articles. If that’s all I had to do it would be great. However, I am slowly tackling other tasks and have ppl who come to my rescue when I get stuck.
Appreciate the comments about outsourcing as from what others have shared, I had the idea that as soon as I could afford it I would be outsourcing the techie stuff; but realise after this post,that it would be more fortuitous all round to know and understand the work I would be allocating to others.
Thanks guys for all the great comments. I find I am learning heaps
Patrciai Perth Australia
You have it in one: understand first, then outsource. You don’t need mastery.
Unless you have Big Bucks. Then just spray money at the problem. =)
Dave Doolin´s last post ..Building from Nothing- not Building from 5-000
Dave, thanks for such a wonderful post. Everywhere I read now, it seems that outsourcing is being pitched as let greatest thing since sliced bread. While building my new site, I did outsource the design, but everything else I am learning to do myself. I quickly realized I could not explain to others how to do something if I didn’t first know how to do it.
Keep coming with all the great tips!
What you’re learning becomes marketable as well.
Dave Doolin´s last post ..5 Semantic Web Microformats You Can Use on Your Blog Right Now