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John Jonas Interview

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Content provided by David Jenyns - sponsored by Melbourne SEO. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by David Jenyns - sponsored by Melbourne SEO or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.

John Jonas

John Jonas

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Name: John Jonas

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.jonasblog.com

Product: www.replacemyself.com

John Jonas’ Bio: John Jonas is a major proponent of outsourcing most of your daily admin tasks so you can focus more in growing your business. He has found success in outsourcing to the Philippines and is actively sharing his experiences on his blog.

With top Internet marketing gurus finally revealing that outsourcing is one of their best kept secrets on how they are able to expand their businesses more efficiently, John Jonas is at the forefront of informing people on how to do it right and get the most out of your investments.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations: Coming Soon

Did You Enjoy The Interview? Post Your Thoughts, Comments And Insights Below…

Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from podcastinterviews.com. Today I’ve lined up a call with John Jonas, really who is an expert in outsourcing, specifically outsourcing to the Philippines. I first got introduced to John Jonas’ work through a website of his called Replace Myself and it really teaches people how to outsource to the Philippines. It introduces them to different tools and gives you the systems to be able to pass to your outsourcers to get specific tasks done.

It was a great way for me to get my feet wet in outsourcing, specifically to the Philippines, and we’ve used some of his suggestions going through to Best Jobs Ph. That’s the way that we hire our staff now. He’s modified a little bit of the 4 Hour Work Week to be a 17 hour work week because he’s a big proponent of Tim Ferris’ work and getting things done. He’s really figured a lot of things out, so I’m excited to get him on the line and talk about how he outsources his business. So I’d just like to welcome you to the call John.

John Jonas: Nice to be here with you Dave, I appreciate it.

David Jenyns: Excellent. Well I’ll just dive straight in. Usually I just like to jump straight into the meat of it. So one of the first things I wanted to talk about is tying it a little bit into what we do, which is driving traffic to our businesses. When you’re first setting up a new project, and I know you have lots and lots of different websites, but maybe if you think of one of those websites, maybe take us through the process for how you launch a new website and how you drive traffic to it. It is a pretty big topic so just dive into it wherever you feel comfortable.

John Jonas: Ok, so one of the big things that I have found, is that I don’t wait until the website is perfectly done. This is something I’ve seen people do over and over again where they’re a little bit scared or hesitant to start driving traffic until it’s perfectly done. So that’s the first thing I do when I start driving traffic is I do it before the website is complete. I know that it is going to take some time to get traffic to it and so I can start the traffic generation process before it’s completely done and then I can work on finishing the website.

Second, I make sure I have a plan in the beginning. That plan is partly knowing the market and knowing where people hang out in the market and how they’re going to come to my website. Every market is a little bit different. Some markets will allow you to go into forums and participate in the forums and you can get a lot of traffic that way. Other markets, people aren’t necessarily hanging out in forums, they’re just searching. You can get them through pay per click or through SEO.

I’m not going to talk about the forum or the social method of driving traffic, I’ll talk about the SEO method that you talk about. My plan for any website that I’m going to launch includes starting off with article marketing. We’re going to do at least one or two articles right at the very beginning. The website is up, there is something there, there is enough there that the article directories will accept our work. We’re going to do some articles. I use Unique Article Wizard to submit our articles.

David Jenyns: Great service.

John Jonas: Immediately after that we are going to do directory submissions. We’re going to start doing social book marking and beyond that, we’re going to start building a mini net. I don’t know if you’ve talked about mini nets. We will build an extensive, extensive mini net. We will do video marketing so creating videos and submitting them to all the video sites and linking them back to us.

We’ll use a couple of different services that are out there to help automate link building, 3 Way Links and One-Way-Links and Linkvana and the Free Traffic System and Content Spooling. There are quite a few of them. We’ll include all of those in the plan for doing this. Those get used consecutively over a period of time; they get added to the sites, the site gets more and more links. Is that what you’re looking for?

David Jenyns: Yes. To dig in a little deeper, you start off with the article marketing you mentioned. You probably write those articles, just are we talking standard posting to Ezine Articles? Is that where you first start, because you mentioned doing one or two articles before you shift into the Unique Article Wizard?

John Jonas: Ok, here is how we do it. We always use Unique Article Wizard for everything. Every article we write gets submitted to Ezine Articles first, and then it gets submitted to Unique Article Wizard and then it gets submitted to numerous other websites, although I don’t know which ones those are, because I don’t do the work. My guys, my outsource workers, are doing all that work for me.

In fact, just today I got an email from one of them, it was actually sent from one of them to another one and they cc’d me. One of my guys has taken over as manager and he was pointing her to four other websites that the articles should be submitted to, like GoArticles, or Article City or something like that. Every time we do an article we submit to Ezine Articles, submit to Unique Article Wizard and then I think they submit it to four or five other websites also.

David Jenyns: Cool. And then from there, the directory submissions, do you do that through Directory Maximizer or are you guys hand submitting those?

John Jonas: We are hand submitting, so that they get done over a period of time. I’ve given very specific instructions. We use a piece of software called Directory Submitter and I’ve instructed my guys to submit to ten to fifteen directories per day and not to more than that. I want the links being built over time. I don’t want to slam thousands of directories all at once so Google sees that we just got three thousand links this week. I want it to be done over time. It’s a pretty permanent thing that my guys are going to be doing in submitting to directories.

David Jenyns: Then it moves into the social book marking and is that something again hand done? I know the way that you’ve structured yourself with your team, a lot of what you do is hand done, which means you know it’s getting done, and getting done to a very good quality. But social book marking is one of those things where it is a lot more effective than it was. It’s got certain benefit to it now, so I’d be interested in your thoughts on that.

John Jonas: We use a couple of different things. I haven’t done this myself in a long time but I know my guys have used OnlyWire in the past, and I think we may be going back to it now. We’ve been using Ping.fm to do some work. I know that we just started using SocialBot and I don’t know the results from that. Another thing that we’ll do is use packet sites, high page rank sites to get high page rank links. That is a whole lesson in and of itself.

So my guys do some of those things by hand. I know they’re using tools to do them, like Ping, SocialBot and OnlyWire and I believe there is one other but I don’t know what it is.

David Jenyns: Then you mentioned moving into the mini net. I’m assuming that’s through a combination of Web 2.0 and building your own sites as well?

John Jonas: Yes. It is a combination, but most of it we do on other people’s sites, so this is something I have a huge training on how to do this. In fact everything I’ve talked about I have a big training I give to my guys on how to do this. For the most part it is built on other people’s sites. I’ve found it is almost the exact same effectiveness and there’s a lot less hassle and headache.

People talk about, you’ve got to spread this out on different IP addresses, you’ve got to have all these different hosting accounts, make sure you do them right. I don’t want to deal with that, so we just use Blogger and WordPress and LiveJournal and HubPages and Squidoo. There are tons of places out there that let you build a website and link them back to our site.

We’ll do article marketing for those sites. We’ll submit those to directories and we’ll book mark those sites. Now those sites are getting traffic and they’re more authoritative than they were before, so now they’re pointing to us, which makes my main site more authoritative. That’s the process that we’re using.

David Jenyns: Then shifting into video marketing, which is an excellent way to get some quick rankings at the moment, is this something you’re outsourcing, the content generation of the video, or do you create it and then your team helps to distribute it, uploading it? I know you mentioned Traffic Geyser and things like that in Replace Myself.

John Jonas: It depends on what the website is. If the website is me, for my blog or for Replace Myself, I will create the videos, but otherwise I have them create them. There are quite a few different ways that you can have videos created by people overseas. They are effective, they’re well done. My guys do a great job of it and again I have a whole training that I give to them on how to do this and how to do it correctly so it gets done well.

They create the videos and they submit them using Traffic Geyser or TubeMogul. We use both, because I just get the feeling that we get different results using both, so that’s even better. Anything that I can let them do, I do.

David Jenyns: Then I suppose the last one you mentioned was building links through alternative services, things like Linkvana, Free Traffic System, the 3 Way Links. That is just a gradual process where you just get them to drip out those links and go in there and post to those different services.

John Jonas: Some of those services are automated and some of them require constant work. Linkvana, for example, requires any link you get requires a piece of content. My team knows how to do that. They do it for me and I don’t ever touch it. One of the things I learned over the years, and this is one of the things that I realized really made a difference to me and my success, when I realized I don’t have to do all of this at once. I just know that I need to know all these things.

They need to be done over time. All these things get done in a new website that we do, but they don’t all get done upfront. We do one thing at a time. That’s important because if you’re trying to do too many of them, you don’t do anything and it doesn’t work. What I just described is a six month to a year’s process. If you start and systematically do them one by one, you’re going to get traffic to your website, there is no question. You’re going to get traffic and that’s how I approach it.

I know if I do all these things, it will work. I’ve done it enough times to know it will work. If the market is super competitive, I know I’ll just have to wait longer to get more traffic. But otherwise it’s all the things you’ve heard of, that people have heard of that they know they should be doing and they’re not doing because there is not time in the day to do them all. I just have my team do it all.

David Jenyns: You’re right. I think you only need to actually do a few of those things and you’ll start to see traffic. So if you were doing all that, to get that traffic is almost guaranteed. The hardest part a lot of people have is tying it through to the actual execution. We talked about the different things to be done. To actually manage that process and I know you work with your outsourcers and I’m interested to know the process through which you go.

Are you at a stage in your business now where you’ve got your project manager guy who understands these steps, and you say, here’s a website, I want you to go through our process and just take it over time? I want you to farm the work out and I want you to manage it. How do you work that process?

Jim: So right now in my business, yes, I’m at that point. One of my guys has been working for me for four years, over four years. He understands everything. I can say to him, and to a couple of other people, here’s the website I want. Go through these steps and build the site and market it and tell me the plan of what you’re going to do to market it. They’ll do it.

To get to that point, there are a couple of super important things you’ve got to know. One, it is going to take time. Two, you can’t do this hiring contract workers. It just doesn’t work, it is too much effort. When I say hiring contract workers, I mean like hiring someone off Elance to do a single thing for you, or hiring someone off oDesk to get one thing done, or going into directory submissions by automating the whole thing all at once.

In what I do and what I’ve seen, it’s a process and you have to have one thing done today and you get another thing done next week and you get another thing done the next week. There are short cuts to doing things, but very often the short cuts are temporary, they only work for a small amount of time and then usually you end up getting punished for doing them afterwards.

Anytime I’m doing my work, I’m looking at it as a long term business. I want to work long term, I don’t want to put it out there and use some special magic silver, shiny bullet that is going to get me tons of traffic right now and then next week it’s going to die, because that is wasted effort in my opinion. So anything we do, we try and make it so it’s long term, standard, normal work. I just know that it is going to work.

In order to do that with an outsourced team, or in order to do it period, you’ve got to have other people doing the work. There are just too many things to be doing it yourself. This is one of the things I figured out was, I can hire full time people in the Philippines and train them the right way and do some certain things with them to where they can do all these things for me. It really lets me focus on working on my business and not in my business. That’s a really big deal.

David Jenyns: Yes. The process you go through for identifying those, you’ve talked about the different components that need to be done. I know you’ve got the systems in place as far as process maps and recording, Camtasia or ScreenFlow or whatever program anyone wants to use, recording that process, getting that system in place, training someone up to understand all those components and they can evolve to be more of a project manager and handle other assistants to give that person greater reach.

To find staff to do that, and I know you love hiring from the Philippines because of so many reasons, and you’ve outlined it on your blog, the jonasblog.com. There are so many reasons to go over there, excellent bang for your buck, very good work ethic, high quality output.

The process you go through for hiring those or identifying key players, because everybody who has read Top Grading, an excellent book on hiring, knows the importance of getting those A players. I think that is the biggest fear people have when going into some of these other countries overseas, especially with some experiences outsourcing to India and things like that, where you can have a very different experience than the Philippines. How do you go through that process of getting those stars?

John Jonas: Number one I want to mention that. If you’ve tried outsourcing before and you’re listening to what I’m saying about how I have my team doing this and saying yes, right, that is impossible, you’ve probably tried it in India before and you need to go try it in the Philippines. It’s a really big deal. There are huge differences between the Philippines and anywhere else in the world. That’s one and I go into more detail about that in other places as to why that’s so important. We don’t have time to go into detail on that.

So how do you get those A players? That’s not easy in the Philippines. There are 100,000,000 people in the Philippines, so it is a big place. But they don’t have the experienced workforce that you have in Australia or that we have in the US in terms of internet business. They just don’t have that experience.

So if you want to go to the Philippines and find someone who already knows how to do all these things, you’re going to have a really hard time. I’m not going to say that you can’t find them, it’s just that I have rarely found those kinds of people. My people that are so good, they’re good because I’ve conditioned them to be good. I’ve taught them, I’ve let them learn, I’ve let them shine over the years.

I have a guy I would trust with my life, but when he started with me, he told me a couple of months ago, I knew nothing when I started working for you. If you teach them, they are so eager to learn and to do well for you and to make you happy and to get the work done correctly, it’s amazing what they can do for you if you’re willing to work with them. If you’re not willing to work with them, it’s not going to work. You need to go and find that best person which doesn’t really exist in the Philippines.

If you’re willing to put in a little bit of effort, you can get people like my guys who I can tell an idea to and they can go and execute the entire project, with my help, from start to finish. When you get to that point, it makes it so much easier to execute ideas. You’re not going to get there right up front, but when you do, it is amazing.

David Jenyns: You mentioned a few different ways like Best Jobs Ph is a good way for hiring people and do you still have that service where you help identify potential resumes and things like that?

John Jonas: Let me tell you a little bit about where you can find good people. Again, I go into this in a lot more detail in other places. Currently the best place to find people is at Onlinejobs.ph. If you go there, you’ll see how it works. You can just search the resumes, you can find webmasters, designers. They speak amazing English in the Philippines, everyone speaks English, literally everyone speaks English in the Philippines. Everyone doesn’t speak it great, but because everyone speaks it, a lot of people speak it really well. At Onlinejobs.ph, that’s currently where I hire people from.

Where you’re talking about Bestjobs.ph where I used to hire people from until let’s say, six, eight months ago, Bestjobs decided they didn’t want to allow any new registrations. So anybody who is just getting started in this, can’t use Bestjobs right now because there is not a way to get an account and you need an account in order to contact people.

You’ve talked about Replace Myself. The only way that I know of to get access to Bestjobs is thorough Replace Myself, through my system, and that’s because we managed to keep an account. We give contact information for people you’ll find in Bestjobs. So those are the two best places to find people in the Philippines are Onlinejobs and Bestjobs in my experience.

David Jenyns: The way that you’re identifying them, are you scanning resumes to find people who meet your criteria and contacting them? Or are you putting up a job ad and then having applicants come through?

John Jonas: I do both. What I’ve typically done is, I will look through the resumes, searching through them and then scanning and looking at them and then emailing people, trying to find the candidates that I think are qualified and then narrowing it down from there. You can definitely post a job. The problem is you can’t post a job at Bestjobs, because they will delete your account. Onlinejobs you definitely can, but you’re going to get a hundred resumes and then you have to weed through them.

I just prefer to have the computer weed through them for me and I’ll just search through them. But I do both, depending on the kind of person I’m looking for, I’ll post a job and you will get lots of people applying, so you’re going to find really good talent doing that.

David Jenyns: Then the process for actually going through when you go through the hire process, do you do any initial surveying or questionnaires or do you go straight to an interview after you’ve identified someone? What is the process you go through? Ok, now how do we start to sort through all of that dirt to find the gold?

John Jonas: What I typically do is I will email lots of people. I want to see who responds. I’ve done it enough to know that if you go and look for that one single person and you spend a lot of time weeding through and you find the single person you want to hire, there is a reasonable chance they are not even going to respond to you. In that case you just waste a lot of time.

So I try and find a pool of candidates who I think are reasonable and I’ll email them all and see who responds and then I will narrow it down a little bit more. I’ll say, what are your skills, and I’ll look back at the resume. I’ll ask for references and I’ll ask for proof. I want to see you write an article for me. Send me a couple of articles you have written before, I’ll see if they’re good enough and then I want you to write an article for me. Or let me see design work you have done before or let me see programming work you’ve done before or if they’re going to be doing phone calling for me, I want to talk to them on the phone. I want to hear you speak.

That’s the initial process. When I’ve narrowed someone down and I want to hire someone, I start by giving them a difficult first task. I tell them, you have a job, a full time job and my expectations with it. A lot of things go on there. Then I give them a difficult first task. This is super important. In the Philippines, they don’t want to disappoint you. There are a lot of reasons that go into this but they don’t want to disappoint you.

The difference between the Philippines and everywhere else, specifically India, when they don’t want to disappoint you, they don’t just say yes. In other places they just say yes. How’s the project going? Yes, sir, it’s going great, when it’s really not. In the Philippines what they’ll do is if they don’t know something or they don’t want to disappoint you or they don’t understand something, they just don’t say anything at all.

So the reason for this difficult first task is to set an expectation with them, where I can tell them, I’m giving you this difficult task. I know it’s difficult, I know you’re going to have problems with it and that’s good, I expect that. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go and try to figure it out first but when you get stuck, I expect you to ask me. Please come and ask me, I know that you’re going to get stuck. I’m here to help, I want this to work out, I want it to be a long term relationship. So come to me when you have a problem and I’ll help you work it out.

So the difficult task let’s me set that expectation and it also let’s them learn a bunch of things. They know they’re supposed to be learning and they know when they get stuck, they can come to me. Often I’ll give that difficult first task, it will be set up WordPress on my hosting account. Doing that, they understand hosting, they understand FTP, they understand WordPress, they understand a data base, they understand cPanel and scripts and themes. There is so much that they understand that they have to learn.

That’s really hard if you’ve never done it before. That’s the process I go through to get someone started the very first time.

David Jenyns: Yes, excellent, I think that is key. Then do you have any sort of trial period in which you work with them? Or once you hire them, like you said, I know you keep working with them because they need to be skilled up. A lot of times they don’t have that same skill set that we might find if we’re hiring locally. How do you manage whether or not it’s someone that, yes, this is an A player. Do you have a process for figuring that out over the first few months?

John Jonas: You know, I don’t. For me, they’re cheap enough that it’s not that big of a deal. I have eight full time people who work for me and they make anywhere from $200 – $600 a month. That’s full time work. I’m not paying benefits, I’m not paying insurance, I’m not paying utilities, I’m not paying taxes. It’s a business expenses tax deductible, so take off 30% of that and that’s what I’m paying them after tax saving. Really the average person, I’m going to start them off at $US250 or $US300 or $US350 per month and they’re going to work forty hours a week.

So for identifying A players, I haven’t been able to do it in the very beginning. I have, of my eight, I would say, probably half of them are really, really good. In my experience that is about what you’re going to find. About half of them are really good and the other half are still good, they’re just not amazing, like half of them are.

David Jenyns: Then from a working with them process, we talked a little bit about hiring them and that first initial week or so as they’re learning the ropes and getting their head around the way that you do systems, when you’re actually going from a day by day process, how are you managing them during the day? Obviously it’s not something where you’re sitting by Skype and making sure you’re there at their beck and call. How do you manage that?

John Jonas: That’s a good question. There are a couple of things that I do. I guess there is quite a bit of this, but I require them to send me a daily email. All of my people are required to send me an email everyday at the end of the day when they’ve finished working. In that email I require three things. I want to know, number one, what did you do today? Number two, what problems did you run into and number three, what can I help you with? That daily email is probably my primary means of communication with them.

Second, I use chat with them, either Google Chat or Skype with a couple of them. Pretty much every Filipino has Yahoo Instant Messenger but I don’t use Yahoo Instant Messenger, so I ask them to get onto Google Chat. I also use a project management system for communicating with them. That’s important where I can keep track of what’s going on in the projects and the status of everything in that system.

Those three are the biggest ways that I communicate. Typically I try and give my people a couple of different tasks that they can always be doing. So when they run out of things to do on a single one time task that I’m giving them, they have other things that they can do. Like all the marketing tasks are ongoing tasks. Article marketing happens every week, or directory submissions happen every day or social book marking happens every couple of days, or video marketing happens every couple of weeks or every week. So there are always things that they can do when they run out of things that are a single project.

Every day with my people, I get an email from them, on what they worked on. If they don’t have anything to work on, I have a pretty good idea, because I got that email and then I can assign them more tasks. So on a day to day basis, that is really important to me, that they’re working on things that are ongoing. Otherwise it means that it doesn’t let me live that lifestyle I want to live, if I have to be constantly involved with what they’re doing. That’s really important to me.

You mentioned the 17 hour work week. That is what I do and it’s very important to me. I like my lifestyle. So I try and keep myself away from their work. This is important and it was a mindset change, a total mindset change for me and it took a while to realize I can step away from what they’re doing and get my brain working on more important things instead of worrying about how well they’re doing what they’re doing. When you do that, you can focus your brain on making sales instead of worrying about grunt work.

It’s a lot easier to succeed in a business when you’re working on making sales than when you’re worrying about submitting to directories and how many got submitted for real today.

David Jenyns: Yes, I think that might be one of the big areas where you probably see a lot of people make mistakes. I know with your website, the Replace Myself, you’re going to be dealing with a lot of new people as they’re coming on board, getting interested in the idea of outsourcing. A lot of people do get caught up in that repetitive work that is probably not the best use of their time. Can you think of any other mistakes that you’ll see people make as they’re getting their head around outsourcing and also just building an online business?

John Jonas: Yes ok, let me answer those in two separate questions. The first mistake people make before they know what is possible with outsourcing in the Philippines, is they try to use Elance or oDesk or India. That is the first mistake, is not hiring a fulltime person in the Philippines. We don’t have to go into all that and there is so much that needs to be understood before you can really do this correctly, but you’ve mentioned Replace Myself. I cover it for free there about why that is so important and it really is. That is number one.

The second biggest mistake I see people make is they want to find a person who is everything. This is so funny. I literally got an email four weeks ago from someone who said, I need someone who can participate in forums and make twenty forum posts a day and design an e book cover and make it look good and do the graphics for a website, and write a sales page and write the auto responder emails and write a twenty page e book and program the back end so it is a membership site and do SEO for it and run the AdWords campaign. How do I find this person?

David Jenyns: If she finds out, you’ll have to let us know.

John Jonas: You can’t find that person anywhere in the world. There is no such person. That’s a big mistake I see people make, is they try and find someone who can do everything. Really what you should be doing is hiring someone who speaks good English and hire them for their English. So that’s a big mistake.

Another one I see is people who won’t let go of those minute details we just talked about. This isn’t necessarily your fault, this is how we’re conditioned to think. We’re conditioned to work ourselves so hard to make things happen. It really does take a mindset change to let them do the work and let them figure it out and deal with the mistakes they make later, where it took you still ten times less time and effort to get it done correctly, even if they made a mistake than it would have if you’d done it yourself or had you watched over their shoulder to make sure they did it correctly the first time.

Those are the mistakes that I see in outsourcing. There are quite a few, in fact I made a blog post recently about the seven mistakes people make when they get started outsourcing. You can find that on my blog at jonasblog. The biggest mistakes I see people make when they get started online, there are a couple of them. Number one is not focusing. So often people will get into a program and do it once and it doesn’t work for them, so they move on to the next bright shiny object that comes from a mailing list that day and tells them you can’t live without this.

All those distractions are the biggest factor in preventing success that I see. My advice is to find something that you understand, find a system that you understand, that makes sense to you that you can see the end from the beginning and stick with it. It’s a business. You’re going to fail in business. That’s important.

I still put up websites today that totally, completely fail. I put up a lot of websites that completely succeed. There is a lot of failure involved in success and so many times the mistake I see people make is they fail once, and oh, this internet thing doesn’t work. That is just not right. So that is a big mistake.

Another big mistake I see, and this is more detailed, is not getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time. People will put their website up and this is about targeting. You put up a website about, I’m going to use mortgages. You’re a mortgage broker. So you want to target someone looking for a mortgage. That is so big and so broad and really what you want to target are VAs wanting to refinance. Then people go out and target in SEO or pay per click, they target the keywords mortgage, every keyword they can find, when the reality is, they only want to service VAs wanting to refinance.

Or if we looked at dog training, you have a product that teaches how to stop a dog from going crazy inside the house, and then they go out and bid on every single keyword related to anything dog training because this person who searched for ‘stop my dog from barking’ just might possibly be interested in teaching them how to stop going crazy in the house. Well, that’s not right.

I see so many people spend so much money and wasted time on things that were not targeted at all to what their real message was about. That’s one of the biggest mistakes I see, is not targeting your message exactly to the right person with the exact right message when they’re looking for that message.

David Jenyns: Yes, you hit some real key ones there, like all too often you see people getting caught up in their emails with the latest and greatest fads and the idea of failing just once and then giving up. You see that all too often. Then a really key one is just targeting. A message to market match needs to be really quite tight for you to make a sale and that is where you’ll make the best sales and you’ll get the highest conversion rate. They were some really key ones there.

With some of the other lessons that you have learned, that’s where people go wrong. If you look back over your internet marketing career, I don’t know if you can think about times where there were turning points where you said, once I started to implement this particular thing my business started to change. Obviously outsourcing is a huge one for you. Are there any other insights that you’ve gained over the years, which you say, I wish I’d done that earlier?

John Jonas: Yes, outsourcing is a huge one and I realized just a couple of months ago that I’ve been outsourcing for four years and since the time I’ve started outsourcing, every year I’ve doubled my income. That was a really big one.

Another big one was when I realized how good the people that I was outsourcing to really were. This was a year and a half into it. It took me this long to recognize what I could give them to do. The things they can do are really shocking when you realize it. There was a three week period when I realized what they could do and that completely changed my business.

The other big thing that I did was when I started implementing everything, that really changed things for me. When I say implementing everything, I mean implementing everything. Every product that I buy gets implemented. All the tactics that I know about that we should be doing, get implemented. They don’t get implemented all at once but they get implemented over time and they don’t get implemented by me, they get implemented by someone else.

Those three were probably the biggest keys to success in my business.

David Jenyns: With the implementing everything, I know you’re an avid course consumer. A lot of people buy courses and then they sit on the shelf and never get round to it. You basically take these courses and then get them implemented. I am interested to know, of all the ‘gurus’ in the internet marketing industry, who are the key ones who you keep an eye on? I suppose it’s important, like we talked about earlier, to not follow too many, because then you can get caught up in chasing every new, shiny object that comes past your way. But who are the people who you keep an eye on?

John Jonas: I’m going to get into trouble here. I have a lot of friends in the internet marketing space, so I hear about a lot of things from friends. I don’t follow mailing lists though. That’s where I said I’m going to get into trouble. I unsubscribed from all mailing lists. There are a couple of people who I listen to when they talk.

Keith Baxter is one of them. Over the years, Keith has had different reviews about him but I know him personally very well and the guy knows his craft. He is so smart and when he does something, he’s amazing. John Barker is another one, the original Mr X. He’s another one I follow. He doesn’t mail very often, he’s not very well known, but that man knows so many good things. He’s at adwordsblackbook.com.

David Jenyns: He’s great.

John Jonas: I don’t really follow any of the big gurus. I keep hearing about these launches that happened and I frankly don’t even know about them. This goes back to what we talked about earlier. I just don’t want the distractions. I’m at a point now where I’ve found something that we can do and do it really well and so I want to focus on it. I don’t want to get the latest and greatest most awesome thing because I have enough things that my team can do to make money.

David Jenyns: Yes, it’s time to start implementing.

John Jonas: Yes, I don’t follow many people.

David Jenyns: Cool. I think the material you’re coming out with is really great and I know people can benefit from it. If people want to find out more and keep an eye on what you’re doing, what is the best way they can do that? Do you have Twitter, or your blog?

John Jonas: I have my blog at jonasblog.com. Really what most people are interested in, is how I do this outsourcing like you were talking about. How do I build a team like the team that you have? I haven’t been able to cover some of the super important things about this but I have a free eighty minute audio at replacemyself.com, where I cover the outsourcing from the beginning to the end.

There are so many important things that we didn’t cover and it is really important that you understand certain things about it, or it will be an exercise in frustration. I learned that the hard way over the last four years. I didn’t have someone to tell me, you need to do this or the person is going to disappear. Or you need to this or they’re not going to do good work, or if you do this, it will not work.

I talked to someone today saying one of these things I’m talking about, saying oh, I tried this, and it just didn’t work. Why? Well it doesn’t work with these people. There are so many things like that. You can find it all at replacemyself.com and I teach it for free.

There is a membership component to it if you’re interested, if it is right for you, with all these trainings that I’ve talked about that I give to my guys. Those are all available as a member of replacemyself.com. So you can give my trainings to your guys, the exact same trainings I give my guys to build me businesses that make me $5, 10, $20,000 a month, you can give those same trainings to your guys through my system.

David Jenyns: Very cool.

John Jonas: Is that what you’re looking for?

David Jenyns: Yes, that’s good, it points people in the right direction and gets them started on the right track. So I just want to finish up. Thank you so much, John, for your time. I know it is very valuable and you like to keep to the 17 hour work week, so any time you do spare is much appreciated. Thanks again for that.

John Jonas: You’re welcome David. It’s been good talking to you. It’s always fun to talk to other people about how to help other people to succeed. It’s good.

David Jenyns: Perfect. Thank you.

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John Jonas

John Jonas

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Name: John Jonas

Industry: Internet Marketing

Website: www.jonasblog.com

Product: www.replacemyself.com

John Jonas’ Bio: John Jonas is a major proponent of outsourcing most of your daily admin tasks so you can focus more in growing your business. He has found success in outsourcing to the Philippines and is actively sharing his experiences on his blog.

With top Internet marketing gurus finally revealing that outsourcing is one of their best kept secrets on how they are able to expand their businesses more efficiently, John Jonas is at the forefront of informing people on how to do it right and get the most out of your investments.

Watch The Interview In A Video Playlist With Key Learning Points And Annotations: Coming Soon

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Interview Transcript: Click here to download the PDF transcript.

David Jenyns: Hi guys, David Jenyns here from podcastinterviews.com. Today I’ve lined up a call with John Jonas, really who is an expert in outsourcing, specifically outsourcing to the Philippines. I first got introduced to John Jonas’ work through a website of his called Replace Myself and it really teaches people how to outsource to the Philippines. It introduces them to different tools and gives you the systems to be able to pass to your outsourcers to get specific tasks done.

It was a great way for me to get my feet wet in outsourcing, specifically to the Philippines, and we’ve used some of his suggestions going through to Best Jobs Ph. That’s the way that we hire our staff now. He’s modified a little bit of the 4 Hour Work Week to be a 17 hour work week because he’s a big proponent of Tim Ferris’ work and getting things done. He’s really figured a lot of things out, so I’m excited to get him on the line and talk about how he outsources his business. So I’d just like to welcome you to the call John.

John Jonas: Nice to be here with you Dave, I appreciate it.

David Jenyns: Excellent. Well I’ll just dive straight in. Usually I just like to jump straight into the meat of it. So one of the first things I wanted to talk about is tying it a little bit into what we do, which is driving traffic to our businesses. When you’re first setting up a new project, and I know you have lots and lots of different websites, but maybe if you think of one of those websites, maybe take us through the process for how you launch a new website and how you drive traffic to it. It is a pretty big topic so just dive into it wherever you feel comfortable.

John Jonas: Ok, so one of the big things that I have found, is that I don’t wait until the website is perfectly done. This is something I’ve seen people do over and over again where they’re a little bit scared or hesitant to start driving traffic until it’s perfectly done. So that’s the first thing I do when I start driving traffic is I do it before the website is complete. I know that it is going to take some time to get traffic to it and so I can start the traffic generation process before it’s completely done and then I can work on finishing the website.

Second, I make sure I have a plan in the beginning. That plan is partly knowing the market and knowing where people hang out in the market and how they’re going to come to my website. Every market is a little bit different. Some markets will allow you to go into forums and participate in the forums and you can get a lot of traffic that way. Other markets, people aren’t necessarily hanging out in forums, they’re just searching. You can get them through pay per click or through SEO.

I’m not going to talk about the forum or the social method of driving traffic, I’ll talk about the SEO method that you talk about. My plan for any website that I’m going to launch includes starting off with article marketing. We’re going to do at least one or two articles right at the very beginning. The website is up, there is something there, there is enough there that the article directories will accept our work. We’re going to do some articles. I use Unique Article Wizard to submit our articles.

David Jenyns: Great service.

John Jonas: Immediately after that we are going to do directory submissions. We’re going to start doing social book marking and beyond that, we’re going to start building a mini net. I don’t know if you’ve talked about mini nets. We will build an extensive, extensive mini net. We will do video marketing so creating videos and submitting them to all the video sites and linking them back to us.

We’ll use a couple of different services that are out there to help automate link building, 3 Way Links and One-Way-Links and Linkvana and the Free Traffic System and Content Spooling. There are quite a few of them. We’ll include all of those in the plan for doing this. Those get used consecutively over a period of time; they get added to the sites, the site gets more and more links. Is that what you’re looking for?

David Jenyns: Yes. To dig in a little deeper, you start off with the article marketing you mentioned. You probably write those articles, just are we talking standard posting to Ezine Articles? Is that where you first start, because you mentioned doing one or two articles before you shift into the Unique Article Wizard?

John Jonas: Ok, here is how we do it. We always use Unique Article Wizard for everything. Every article we write gets submitted to Ezine Articles first, and then it gets submitted to Unique Article Wizard and then it gets submitted to numerous other websites, although I don’t know which ones those are, because I don’t do the work. My guys, my outsource workers, are doing all that work for me.

In fact, just today I got an email from one of them, it was actually sent from one of them to another one and they cc’d me. One of my guys has taken over as manager and he was pointing her to four other websites that the articles should be submitted to, like GoArticles, or Article City or something like that. Every time we do an article we submit to Ezine Articles, submit to Unique Article Wizard and then I think they submit it to four or five other websites also.

David Jenyns: Cool. And then from there, the directory submissions, do you do that through Directory Maximizer or are you guys hand submitting those?

John Jonas: We are hand submitting, so that they get done over a period of time. I’ve given very specific instructions. We use a piece of software called Directory Submitter and I’ve instructed my guys to submit to ten to fifteen directories per day and not to more than that. I want the links being built over time. I don’t want to slam thousands of directories all at once so Google sees that we just got three thousand links this week. I want it to be done over time. It’s a pretty permanent thing that my guys are going to be doing in submitting to directories.

David Jenyns: Then it moves into the social book marking and is that something again hand done? I know the way that you’ve structured yourself with your team, a lot of what you do is hand done, which means you know it’s getting done, and getting done to a very good quality. But social book marking is one of those things where it is a lot more effective than it was. It’s got certain benefit to it now, so I’d be interested in your thoughts on that.

John Jonas: We use a couple of different things. I haven’t done this myself in a long time but I know my guys have used OnlyWire in the past, and I think we may be going back to it now. We’ve been using Ping.fm to do some work. I know that we just started using SocialBot and I don’t know the results from that. Another thing that we’ll do is use packet sites, high page rank sites to get high page rank links. That is a whole lesson in and of itself.

So my guys do some of those things by hand. I know they’re using tools to do them, like Ping, SocialBot and OnlyWire and I believe there is one other but I don’t know what it is.

David Jenyns: Then you mentioned moving into the mini net. I’m assuming that’s through a combination of Web 2.0 and building your own sites as well?

John Jonas: Yes. It is a combination, but most of it we do on other people’s sites, so this is something I have a huge training on how to do this. In fact everything I’ve talked about I have a big training I give to my guys on how to do this. For the most part it is built on other people’s sites. I’ve found it is almost the exact same effectiveness and there’s a lot less hassle and headache.

People talk about, you’ve got to spread this out on different IP addresses, you’ve got to have all these different hosting accounts, make sure you do them right. I don’t want to deal with that, so we just use Blogger and WordPress and LiveJournal and HubPages and Squidoo. There are tons of places out there that let you build a website and link them back to our site.

We’ll do article marketing for those sites. We’ll submit those to directories and we’ll book mark those sites. Now those sites are getting traffic and they’re more authoritative than they were before, so now they’re pointing to us, which makes my main site more authoritative. That’s the process that we’re using.

David Jenyns: Then shifting into video marketing, which is an excellent way to get some quick rankings at the moment, is this something you’re outsourcing, the content generation of the video, or do you create it and then your team helps to distribute it, uploading it? I know you mentioned Traffic Geyser and things like that in Replace Myself.

John Jonas: It depends on what the website is. If the website is me, for my blog or for Replace Myself, I will create the videos, but otherwise I have them create them. There are quite a few different ways that you can have videos created by people overseas. They are effective, they’re well done. My guys do a great job of it and again I have a whole training that I give to them on how to do this and how to do it correctly so it gets done well.

They create the videos and they submit them using Traffic Geyser or TubeMogul. We use both, because I just get the feeling that we get different results using both, so that’s even better. Anything that I can let them do, I do.

David Jenyns: Then I suppose the last one you mentioned was building links through alternative services, things like Linkvana, Free Traffic System, the 3 Way Links. That is just a gradual process where you just get them to drip out those links and go in there and post to those different services.

John Jonas: Some of those services are automated and some of them require constant work. Linkvana, for example, requires any link you get requires a piece of content. My team knows how to do that. They do it for me and I don’t ever touch it. One of the things I learned over the years, and this is one of the things that I realized really made a difference to me and my success, when I realized I don’t have to do all of this at once. I just know that I need to know all these things.

They need to be done over time. All these things get done in a new website that we do, but they don’t all get done upfront. We do one thing at a time. That’s important because if you’re trying to do too many of them, you don’t do anything and it doesn’t work. What I just described is a six month to a year’s process. If you start and systematically do them one by one, you’re going to get traffic to your website, there is no question. You’re going to get traffic and that’s how I approach it.

I know if I do all these things, it will work. I’ve done it enough times to know it will work. If the market is super competitive, I know I’ll just have to wait longer to get more traffic. But otherwise it’s all the things you’ve heard of, that people have heard of that they know they should be doing and they’re not doing because there is not time in the day to do them all. I just have my team do it all.

David Jenyns: You’re right. I think you only need to actually do a few of those things and you’ll start to see traffic. So if you were doing all that, to get that traffic is almost guaranteed. The hardest part a lot of people have is tying it through to the actual execution. We talked about the different things to be done. To actually manage that process and I know you work with your outsourcers and I’m interested to know the process through which you go.

Are you at a stage in your business now where you’ve got your project manager guy who understands these steps, and you say, here’s a website, I want you to go through our process and just take it over time? I want you to farm the work out and I want you to manage it. How do you work that process?

Jim: So right now in my business, yes, I’m at that point. One of my guys has been working for me for four years, over four years. He understands everything. I can say to him, and to a couple of other people, here’s the website I want. Go through these steps and build the site and market it and tell me the plan of what you’re going to do to market it. They’ll do it.

To get to that point, there are a couple of super important things you’ve got to know. One, it is going to take time. Two, you can’t do this hiring contract workers. It just doesn’t work, it is too much effort. When I say hiring contract workers, I mean like hiring someone off Elance to do a single thing for you, or hiring someone off oDesk to get one thing done, or going into directory submissions by automating the whole thing all at once.

In what I do and what I’ve seen, it’s a process and you have to have one thing done today and you get another thing done next week and you get another thing done the next week. There are short cuts to doing things, but very often the short cuts are temporary, they only work for a small amount of time and then usually you end up getting punished for doing them afterwards.

Anytime I’m doing my work, I’m looking at it as a long term business. I want to work long term, I don’t want to put it out there and use some special magic silver, shiny bullet that is going to get me tons of traffic right now and then next week it’s going to die, because that is wasted effort in my opinion. So anything we do, we try and make it so it’s long term, standard, normal work. I just know that it is going to work.

In order to do that with an outsourced team, or in order to do it period, you’ve got to have other people doing the work. There are just too many things to be doing it yourself. This is one of the things I figured out was, I can hire full time people in the Philippines and train them the right way and do some certain things with them to where they can do all these things for me. It really lets me focus on working on my business and not in my business. That’s a really big deal.

David Jenyns: Yes. The process you go through for identifying those, you’ve talked about the different components that need to be done. I know you’ve got the systems in place as far as process maps and recording, Camtasia or ScreenFlow or whatever program anyone wants to use, recording that process, getting that system in place, training someone up to understand all those components and they can evolve to be more of a project manager and handle other assistants to give that person greater reach.

To find staff to do that, and I know you love hiring from the Philippines because of so many reasons, and you’ve outlined it on your blog, the jonasblog.com. There are so many reasons to go over there, excellent bang for your buck, very good work ethic, high quality output.

The process you go through for hiring those or identifying key players, because everybody who has read Top Grading, an excellent book on hiring, knows the importance of getting those A players. I think that is the biggest fear people have when going into some of these other countries overseas, especially with some experiences outsourcing to India and things like that, where you can have a very different experience than the Philippines. How do you go through that process of getting those stars?

John Jonas: Number one I want to mention that. If you’ve tried outsourcing before and you’re listening to what I’m saying about how I have my team doing this and saying yes, right, that is impossible, you’ve probably tried it in India before and you need to go try it in the Philippines. It’s a really big deal. There are huge differences between the Philippines and anywhere else in the world. That’s one and I go into more detail about that in other places as to why that’s so important. We don’t have time to go into detail on that.

So how do you get those A players? That’s not easy in the Philippines. There are 100,000,000 people in the Philippines, so it is a big place. But they don’t have the experienced workforce that you have in Australia or that we have in the US in terms of internet business. They just don’t have that experience.

So if you want to go to the Philippines and find someone who already knows how to do all these things, you’re going to have a really hard time. I’m not going to say that you can’t find them, it’s just that I have rarely found those kinds of people. My people that are so good, they’re good because I’ve conditioned them to be good. I’ve taught them, I’ve let them learn, I’ve let them shine over the years.

I have a guy I would trust with my life, but when he started with me, he told me a couple of months ago, I knew nothing when I started working for you. If you teach them, they are so eager to learn and to do well for you and to make you happy and to get the work done correctly, it’s amazing what they can do for you if you’re willing to work with them. If you’re not willing to work with them, it’s not going to work. You need to go and find that best person which doesn’t really exist in the Philippines.

If you’re willing to put in a little bit of effort, you can get people like my guys who I can tell an idea to and they can go and execute the entire project, with my help, from start to finish. When you get to that point, it makes it so much easier to execute ideas. You’re not going to get there right up front, but when you do, it is amazing.

David Jenyns: You mentioned a few different ways like Best Jobs Ph is a good way for hiring people and do you still have that service where you help identify potential resumes and things like that?

John Jonas: Let me tell you a little bit about where you can find good people. Again, I go into this in a lot more detail in other places. Currently the best place to find people is at Onlinejobs.ph. If you go there, you’ll see how it works. You can just search the resumes, you can find webmasters, designers. They speak amazing English in the Philippines, everyone speaks English, literally everyone speaks English in the Philippines. Everyone doesn’t speak it great, but because everyone speaks it, a lot of people speak it really well. At Onlinejobs.ph, that’s currently where I hire people from.

Where you’re talking about Bestjobs.ph where I used to hire people from until let’s say, six, eight months ago, Bestjobs decided they didn’t want to allow any new registrations. So anybody who is just getting started in this, can’t use Bestjobs right now because there is not a way to get an account and you need an account in order to contact people.

You’ve talked about Replace Myself. The only way that I know of to get access to Bestjobs is thorough Replace Myself, through my system, and that’s because we managed to keep an account. We give contact information for people you’ll find in Bestjobs. So those are the two best places to find people in the Philippines are Onlinejobs and Bestjobs in my experience.

David Jenyns: The way that you’re identifying them, are you scanning resumes to find people who meet your criteria and contacting them? Or are you putting up a job ad and then having applicants come through?

John Jonas: I do both. What I’ve typically done is, I will look through the resumes, searching through them and then scanning and looking at them and then emailing people, trying to find the candidates that I think are qualified and then narrowing it down from there. You can definitely post a job. The problem is you can’t post a job at Bestjobs, because they will delete your account. Onlinejobs you definitely can, but you’re going to get a hundred resumes and then you have to weed through them.

I just prefer to have the computer weed through them for me and I’ll just search through them. But I do both, depending on the kind of person I’m looking for, I’ll post a job and you will get lots of people applying, so you’re going to find really good talent doing that.

David Jenyns: Then the process for actually going through when you go through the hire process, do you do any initial surveying or questionnaires or do you go straight to an interview after you’ve identified someone? What is the process you go through? Ok, now how do we start to sort through all of that dirt to find the gold?

John Jonas: What I typically do is I will email lots of people. I want to see who responds. I’ve done it enough to know that if you go and look for that one single person and you spend a lot of time weeding through and you find the single person you want to hire, there is a reasonable chance they are not even going to respond to you. In that case you just waste a lot of time.

So I try and find a pool of candidates who I think are reasonable and I’ll email them all and see who responds and then I will narrow it down a little bit more. I’ll say, what are your skills, and I’ll look back at the resume. I’ll ask for references and I’ll ask for proof. I want to see you write an article for me. Send me a couple of articles you have written before, I’ll see if they’re good enough and then I want you to write an article for me. Or let me see design work you have done before or let me see programming work you’ve done before or if they’re going to be doing phone calling for me, I want to talk to them on the phone. I want to hear you speak.

That’s the initial process. When I’ve narrowed someone down and I want to hire someone, I start by giving them a difficult first task. I tell them, you have a job, a full time job and my expectations with it. A lot of things go on there. Then I give them a difficult first task. This is super important. In the Philippines, they don’t want to disappoint you. There are a lot of reasons that go into this but they don’t want to disappoint you.

The difference between the Philippines and everywhere else, specifically India, when they don’t want to disappoint you, they don’t just say yes. In other places they just say yes. How’s the project going? Yes, sir, it’s going great, when it’s really not. In the Philippines what they’ll do is if they don’t know something or they don’t want to disappoint you or they don’t understand something, they just don’t say anything at all.

So the reason for this difficult first task is to set an expectation with them, where I can tell them, I’m giving you this difficult task. I know it’s difficult, I know you’re going to have problems with it and that’s good, I expect that. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go and try to figure it out first but when you get stuck, I expect you to ask me. Please come and ask me, I know that you’re going to get stuck. I’m here to help, I want this to work out, I want it to be a long term relationship. So come to me when you have a problem and I’ll help you work it out.

So the difficult task let’s me set that expectation and it also let’s them learn a bunch of things. They know they’re supposed to be learning and they know when they get stuck, they can come to me. Often I’ll give that difficult first task, it will be set up WordPress on my hosting account. Doing that, they understand hosting, they understand FTP, they understand WordPress, they understand a data base, they understand cPanel and scripts and themes. There is so much that they understand that they have to learn.

That’s really hard if you’ve never done it before. That’s the process I go through to get someone started the very first time.

David Jenyns: Yes, excellent, I think that is key. Then do you have any sort of trial period in which you work with them? Or once you hire them, like you said, I know you keep working with them because they need to be skilled up. A lot of times they don’t have that same skill set that we might find if we’re hiring locally. How do you manage whether or not it’s someone that, yes, this is an A player. Do you have a process for figuring that out over the first few months?

John Jonas: You know, I don’t. For me, they’re cheap enough that it’s not that big of a deal. I have eight full time people who work for me and they make anywhere from $200 – $600 a month. That’s full time work. I’m not paying benefits, I’m not paying insurance, I’m not paying utilities, I’m not paying taxes. It’s a business expenses tax deductible, so take off 30% of that and that’s what I’m paying them after tax saving. Really the average person, I’m going to start them off at $US250 or $US300 or $US350 per month and they’re going to work forty hours a week.

So for identifying A players, I haven’t been able to do it in the very beginning. I have, of my eight, I would say, probably half of them are really, really good. In my experience that is about what you’re going to find. About half of them are really good and the other half are still good, they’re just not amazing, like half of them are.

David Jenyns: Then from a working with them process, we talked a little bit about hiring them and that first initial week or so as they’re learning the ropes and getting their head around the way that you do systems, when you’re actually going from a day by day process, how are you managing them during the day? Obviously it’s not something where you’re sitting by Skype and making sure you’re there at their beck and call. How do you manage that?

John Jonas: That’s a good question. There are a couple of things that I do. I guess there is quite a bit of this, but I require them to send me a daily email. All of my people are required to send me an email everyday at the end of the day when they’ve finished working. In that email I require three things. I want to know, number one, what did you do today? Number two, what problems did you run into and number three, what can I help you with? That daily email is probably my primary means of communication with them.

Second, I use chat with them, either Google Chat or Skype with a couple of them. Pretty much every Filipino has Yahoo Instant Messenger but I don’t use Yahoo Instant Messenger, so I ask them to get onto Google Chat. I also use a project management system for communicating with them. That’s important where I can keep track of what’s going on in the projects and the status of everything in that system.

Those three are the biggest ways that I communicate. Typically I try and give my people a couple of different tasks that they can always be doing. So when they run out of things to do on a single one time task that I’m giving them, they have other things that they can do. Like all the marketing tasks are ongoing tasks. Article marketing happens every week, or directory submissions happen every day or social book marking happens every couple of days, or video marketing happens every couple of weeks or every week. So there are always things that they can do when they run out of things that are a single project.

Every day with my people, I get an email from them, on what they worked on. If they don’t have anything to work on, I have a pretty good idea, because I got that email and then I can assign them more tasks. So on a day to day basis, that is really important to me, that they’re working on things that are ongoing. Otherwise it means that it doesn’t let me live that lifestyle I want to live, if I have to be constantly involved with what they’re doing. That’s really important to me.

You mentioned the 17 hour work week. That is what I do and it’s very important to me. I like my lifestyle. So I try and keep myself away from their work. This is important and it was a mindset change, a total mindset change for me and it took a while to realize I can step away from what they’re doing and get my brain working on more important things instead of worrying about how well they’re doing what they’re doing. When you do that, you can focus your brain on making sales instead of worrying about grunt work.

It’s a lot easier to succeed in a business when you’re working on making sales than when you’re worrying about submitting to directories and how many got submitted for real today.

David Jenyns: Yes, I think that might be one of the big areas where you probably see a lot of people make mistakes. I know with your website, the Replace Myself, you’re going to be dealing with a lot of new people as they’re coming on board, getting interested in the idea of outsourcing. A lot of people do get caught up in that repetitive work that is probably not the best use of their time. Can you think of any other mistakes that you’ll see people make as they’re getting their head around outsourcing and also just building an online business?

John Jonas: Yes ok, let me answer those in two separate questions. The first mistake people make before they know what is possible with outsourcing in the Philippines, is they try to use Elance or oDesk or India. That is the first mistake, is not hiring a fulltime person in the Philippines. We don’t have to go into all that and there is so much that needs to be understood before you can really do this correctly, but you’ve mentioned Replace Myself. I cover it for free there about why that is so important and it really is. That is number one.

The second biggest mistake I see people make is they want to find a person who is everything. This is so funny. I literally got an email four weeks ago from someone who said, I need someone who can participate in forums and make twenty forum posts a day and design an e book cover and make it look good and do the graphics for a website, and write a sales page and write the auto responder emails and write a twenty page e book and program the back end so it is a membership site and do SEO for it and run the AdWords campaign. How do I find this person?

David Jenyns: If she finds out, you’ll have to let us know.

John Jonas: You can’t find that person anywhere in the world. There is no such person. That’s a big mistake I see people make, is they try and find someone who can do everything. Really what you should be doing is hiring someone who speaks good English and hire them for their English. So that’s a big mistake.

Another one I see is people who won’t let go of those minute details we just talked about. This isn’t necessarily your fault, this is how we’re conditioned to think. We’re conditioned to work ourselves so hard to make things happen. It really does take a mindset change to let them do the work and let them figure it out and deal with the mistakes they make later, where it took you still ten times less time and effort to get it done correctly, even if they made a mistake than it would have if you’d done it yourself or had you watched over their shoulder to make sure they did it correctly the first time.

Those are the mistakes that I see in outsourcing. There are quite a few, in fact I made a blog post recently about the seven mistakes people make when they get started outsourcing. You can find that on my blog at jonasblog. The biggest mistakes I see people make when they get started online, there are a couple of them. Number one is not focusing. So often people will get into a program and do it once and it doesn’t work for them, so they move on to the next bright shiny object that comes from a mailing list that day and tells them you can’t live without this.

All those distractions are the biggest factor in preventing success that I see. My advice is to find something that you understand, find a system that you understand, that makes sense to you that you can see the end from the beginning and stick with it. It’s a business. You’re going to fail in business. That’s important.

I still put up websites today that totally, completely fail. I put up a lot of websites that completely succeed. There is a lot of failure involved in success and so many times the mistake I see people make is they fail once, and oh, this internet thing doesn’t work. That is just not right. So that is a big mistake.

Another big mistake I see, and this is more detailed, is not getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time. People will put their website up and this is about targeting. You put up a website about, I’m going to use mortgages. You’re a mortgage broker. So you want to target someone looking for a mortgage. That is so big and so broad and really what you want to target are VAs wanting to refinance. Then people go out and target in SEO or pay per click, they target the keywords mortgage, every keyword they can find, when the reality is, they only want to service VAs wanting to refinance.

Or if we looked at dog training, you have a product that teaches how to stop a dog from going crazy inside the house, and then they go out and bid on every single keyword related to anything dog training because this person who searched for ‘stop my dog from barking’ just might possibly be interested in teaching them how to stop going crazy in the house. Well, that’s not right.

I see so many people spend so much money and wasted time on things that were not targeted at all to what their real message was about. That’s one of the biggest mistakes I see, is not targeting your message exactly to the right person with the exact right message when they’re looking for that message.

David Jenyns: Yes, you hit some real key ones there, like all too often you see people getting caught up in their emails with the latest and greatest fads and the idea of failing just once and then giving up. You see that all too often. Then a really key one is just targeting. A message to market match needs to be really quite tight for you to make a sale and that is where you’ll make the best sales and you’ll get the highest conversion rate. They were some really key ones there.

With some of the other lessons that you have learned, that’s where people go wrong. If you look back over your internet marketing career, I don’t know if you can think about times where there were turning points where you said, once I started to implement this particular thing my business started to change. Obviously outsourcing is a huge one for you. Are there any other insights that you’ve gained over the years, which you say, I wish I’d done that earlier?

John Jonas: Yes, outsourcing is a huge one and I realized just a couple of months ago that I’ve been outsourcing for four years and since the time I’ve started outsourcing, every year I’ve doubled my income. That was a really big one.

Another big one was when I realized how good the people that I was outsourcing to really were. This was a year and a half into it. It took me this long to recognize what I could give them to do. The things they can do are really shocking when you realize it. There was a three week period when I realized what they could do and that completely changed my business.

The other big thing that I did was when I started implementing everything, that really changed things for me. When I say implementing everything, I mean implementing everything. Every product that I buy gets implemented. All the tactics that I know about that we should be doing, get implemented. They don’t get implemented all at once but they get implemented over time and they don’t get implemented by me, they get implemented by someone else.

Those three were probably the biggest keys to success in my business.

David Jenyns: With the implementing everything, I know you’re an avid course consumer. A lot of people buy courses and then they sit on the shelf and never get round to it. You basically take these courses and then get them implemented. I am interested to know, of all the ‘gurus’ in the internet marketing industry, who are the key ones who you keep an eye on? I suppose it’s important, like we talked about earlier, to not follow too many, because then you can get caught up in chasing every new, shiny object that comes past your way. But who are the people who you keep an eye on?

John Jonas: I’m going to get into trouble here. I have a lot of friends in the internet marketing space, so I hear about a lot of things from friends. I don’t follow mailing lists though. That’s where I said I’m going to get into trouble. I unsubscribed from all mailing lists. There are a couple of people who I listen to when they talk.

Keith Baxter is one of them. Over the years, Keith has had different reviews about him but I know him personally very well and the guy knows his craft. He is so smart and when he does something, he’s amazing. John Barker is another one, the original Mr X. He’s another one I follow. He doesn’t mail very often, he’s not very well known, but that man knows so many good things. He’s at adwordsblackbook.com.

David Jenyns: He’s great.

John Jonas: I don’t really follow any of the big gurus. I keep hearing about these launches that happened and I frankly don’t even know about them. This goes back to what we talked about earlier. I just don’t want the distractions. I’m at a point now where I’ve found something that we can do and do it really well and so I want to focus on it. I don’t want to get the latest and greatest most awesome thing because I have enough things that my team can do to make money.

David Jenyns: Yes, it’s time to start implementing.

John Jonas: Yes, I don’t follow many people.

David Jenyns: Cool. I think the material you’re coming out with is really great and I know people can benefit from it. If people want to find out more and keep an eye on what you’re doing, what is the best way they can do that? Do you have Twitter, or your blog?

John Jonas: I have my blog at jonasblog.com. Really what most people are interested in, is how I do this outsourcing like you were talking about. How do I build a team like the team that you have? I haven’t been able to cover some of the super important things about this but I have a free eighty minute audio at replacemyself.com, where I cover the outsourcing from the beginning to the end.

There are so many important things that we didn’t cover and it is really important that you understand certain things about it, or it will be an exercise in frustration. I learned that the hard way over the last four years. I didn’t have someone to tell me, you need to do this or the person is going to disappear. Or you need to this or they’re not going to do good work, or if you do this, it will not work.

I talked to someone today saying one of these things I’m talking about, saying oh, I tried this, and it just didn’t work. Why? Well it doesn’t work with these people. There are so many things like that. You can find it all at replacemyself.com and I teach it for free.

There is a membership component to it if you’re interested, if it is right for you, with all these trainings that I’ve talked about that I give to my guys. Those are all available as a member of replacemyself.com. So you can give my trainings to your guys, the exact same trainings I give my guys to build me businesses that make me $5, 10, $20,000 a month, you can give those same trainings to your guys through my system.

David Jenyns: Very cool.

John Jonas: Is that what you’re looking for?

David Jenyns: Yes, that’s good, it points people in the right direction and gets them started on the right track. So I just want to finish up. Thank you so much, John, for your time. I know it is very valuable and you like to keep to the 17 hour work week, so any time you do spare is much appreciated. Thanks again for that.

John Jonas: You’re welcome David. It’s been good talking to you. It’s always fun to talk to other people about how to help other people to succeed. It’s good.

David Jenyns: Perfect. Thank you.

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