Planning
Inside Tips On Outsourcing |
In my experience, contractors who are always bidding on work in Elance and those types of sites are always bidding for a reason. The contractors who are not bidding are not bidding for the opposite reason. They are good and don’t need to chase work. There are techniques to flush these guys out. A lot of them set minimum bid alerts so they are notified of high value jobs. One way is to post high value jobs to attract their attention and get conversations started with them. Another way is to search for the best ranked or highest earning contractors. Track their previous job types to see which ones match closest to your job requirements. Never measure a contractor based on the rating system because a lot of them give each other good ratings even if they’re not good to preserve each other’s scores. You should track down the busiest, highest earning contractor that has worked on job descriptions just like yours and contact their previous employers for verbal feedback and reference.
Also, never contract a big important job completely to an unknown service provider and always pay through escrow to guarantee output on providers you don’t know well. These are small tips for mitigating your risks when dealing with freelance providers. Never try to go outside of the system that you found them in, as it’s safer to work in a middle ground.
Don’t select the cheapest bids, look for quality stuff. If you have multiple outsourced talents working for you, you may want to consider hiring a project manager to interact with them. Regular meetings and teleconferences over Skype are recommended to keep updated on the work status.
The best way to work is to find outsourced talent that you can have a permanent need-based relationship with. This adds security and saves the time it takes to source new workers. Almost all of the strategies that I have discussed in this book can be offloaded to separate service providers – however you will need to plan your overall strategies in detail before getting the work started.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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Why Outsource? |
I’m sure all of you must have heard of Thomas Friedman’s famous “The World is flat” book. I find it strange when I still see people working 20 hour days (literally!) trying to keep up with all of the different threads in their event plans. It’s strange because they can actually get the same work done in a better way (through specialized professionals) without having to have complete control over every single aspect of their launch. You can get a personal assistant to manage your schedules and appointments. You can get a sales person to get to resellers or sponsors. You can hire a SEO expert to optimize your event page and website. You can get writers to send out your blog posts or email campaigns. All you have to do is the high level strategic work and people management.
You may tend to get overwhelmed with work when there are so many things to do in online marketing. Instead of compromising or having to pick and choose opportunities, a better idea is to offload the work to reliable service providers. While having your own onsite employees increases control, confidentiality and expertise; it also has the disadvantages of management overheads, facilities and costs. When you don’t have the time or energy to get the work done in-house, it makes sense to consider having someone else do it for you.
One of the biggest advantages of outsourcing is to cut down on management overheads and employee issues. With a wider worker database, you can find more specialized people at cheaper rates. The best part is that if you don’t like them, it is easier to replace them. When looking for offsite workers keep in mind that outsourcing has some cons as well. Some of them are; less control of the work, up charges, and having to prepare thorough work outlines in advance.
There are over a dozen good sites for finding professionals; I’m just going to discuss two of the most popular ones.
oDesk as an outsourcing platform: I understand that it’s difficult to rely on other people for the work when the success of your events depend on it to be completed on time and quality. That’s why, some of outsourcing platforms have incredible ways in which you can monitor the work that is being done by your contractor live - as it happens. Also, you can choose to only pay for the work that is accepted and according to your requirements. oDesk.com has these little controls in place to make sure you don’t have to spend an extra cent without getting the right value from it. All you have to do is set up an account and put up a job opening. Interested service providers will contact you by bidding for the project. You can pick and choose or interview them as you like. You can also search their database for good matches and invite them to place a bid.
Elance as an outsourcing platform: Another great site, which I have also used, is Elance.com. Elance has a huge network of service providers from all kinds of areas of expertise. You’ll find both companies and individuals there and will be able to hire them based on their interviews, past experiences, feedback scores, and so on. The risk of hiring the wrong folks is mitigated by going through their portfolios and profiles thoroughly. Weak providers can be identified and avoided easily. Again, all you have to do is set up an account and get going.
Payment Processes: Your payment methods can vary based on your preferences. Some of the outsourcing websites have built-in third party services of Google Checkout, paypal.com or moneybookers.com. Otherwise, you also have the option of using credit cards through a banks merchant facility applied to your accounts. Security is taken care when it comes to third party services, so you don’t have to worry about that.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
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RSS |
Content creators syndicate a web feed which allows users to subscribe to it. A web feed is a data format that provides updates on frequently changing web content. A number of web feeds can be made accessible in one place through aggregation; this is done by internet aggregators.
One of the most common types of frequently updated content comes from blogs. There are tools designed specifically to source content from multiple blogs in the RSS format to you, so that you don’t have to go to each blog to read it. Just like in real life, you don’t go around to all the different radio stations listening to the news at their station, you turn on the radio where each show is beamed into one place where you decide which channel to listen to. RSS feeds are like the radio channel and RSS feed readers are like the stereos that pick up the signal and play the sound. RSS readers bring information from different websites and blogs (radio stations) across the internet that you ask for into one place – so that you can read it at your own expediency.
RSS feeds can also be aggregated by the blog search engines. Many aggregators take the individual blog entries from all of the blogs they index and make them searchable. This enables people to search for specific topics and find more information about them. These RSS feeds can be pulled from the aggregation engines into other people’s sites.
I’ll discuss advanced ways of marketing by syndicating content across multiple networks to build multiple back links for SEO, whilst driving massive traffic and networking credibility in my next book. “Social Traffic 2”, which will be a detailed guide to walk interested parties through planning, building out and executing a huge revolving door event launch campaign using social media.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! Every marketing campaign starts with keyword research. If you’re serious about earning money online your first investment should be a great keyword research tool.
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Inside Scoop |
Since this is one of my main areas of interest, I have explored cross syndication techniques using every possible scenario and situation. I’m happy to share some pointers with you guys, to help you get up to speed with it.
1- These tips are about getting organized; first of all, make sure you have separate email accounts for personal emails and subscriptions. You can even implement a tracking code like adding yourself to each list using the list owner’s first name instead of your own along with your email address. This helps identify the source of each email and what other marketers are doing with their lists. If you get an email that says Dear Rodger from John, you know Rodger has sold or is sharing his list with John.
2- Get a password manager. Having unique passwords for every place that you register to is important for your security. Roboform.com, a $19 plug-in that stores all your forms and passwords works brilliantly. It enlists the sites in an alphabetical order on clicking and automatically logs in for you. The reason I use it is because it syncs up easily across browsers and users, it allows me work under one set of passwords across my entire team.
3- Google Reader account helps to parse through piles of content published daily across the blogosphere. You can subscribe to important blogs that you want to follow in the industry to help you in keeping a tap on things. I use Google Reader because it’s an online RSS reader and can hence be accessed from anywhere – since I get to travel around frequently. Also, because my Google reader shared items easily sync up with Friendfeed and Gmail. These tips are about pulling the best, recent and relevant content in your niche so that you’re the first to know about things in your market. You cannot be “the” authority in your niche if you are not on the pulse of what’s happening in it.
4- Set up all networking accounts in your real name, contact details and email addresses, as these are your signature and online footprint. Even if you are working for clients, unless a client is paying you to build them a personal profile network (not recommended) as this is personal.
5- For bookmarking and article marketing sites I use to “not” recommend setting these accounts in your name or your company name at all. This is because anything you do in these sites to promote your own stuff is considered self serving. If you work these accounts under different identities the links and referrals count. One account alone won’t generate a lot of traffic for your content pages, but if you have 5 different bookmarking accounts that you religiously bookmarked in, it will help get your content to the top for those keywords and tags. If you can get to this point you will be one step closer to the tipping point for your content being distributed to thousands by 3rd party users.
In saying that, the new Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect widgets will make the web increasingly interconnected. I can see these Social Networking giant killers pairing of with different bookmarking sites so we can sync our bookmarking and social networks, this will allow us to bookmark content to one audience across the net. That said, my advice of late is to keep everything you do under one consistent profile as the web is merging into one big web platform that we all share anyway.
These tips are to help you get organized enough to attract and manage masses of content, so that you are able to sort it and distribute it to your followers in a streamlined daily flow putting you at the top of the information trade in your niche.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! To get search engine traffic you must own software that’s capable of showing you everything the search engine spiders see.
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The Value Of Promoting On Social Networks |
I had heard about how using social media marketing tactics can greatly increase the foot traffic to the events that we plan. We decided to give it a try for one of our concerts which turned into a raging success. We had people fly in from other cities and the event ended up with an active list of supporters who now want to turn it into a cult of concerts. I was able to compare the two approaches comprehensively and would like to share them with you.
Earlier, we spent only about 11-15% of the total budget on marketing our concerts whereas the major chunk used to go to the artists and site preparations. Shows with multiple underground artists would end up with 40-50% budget allocated to getting the artists booked, accommodated and compensated. This left a measly 50% for everything else including ticketing, liaisons, production management, licensing and compliance to name a few and when ticket master and their venues swallow up to 30% things get tight. What got me into social media as a primary focus was when I initially realized that through social media we can greatly increase the outreach and promotions without increasing our budget at all. In fact, our marketing costs are reduced to almost zero overhead in some cases, if not counting our time.
Online mediums like Facebook and other such platforms allowed us to get our targeted audience really interested in the show, without us spending a cent on marketing and soon enough we had them marketing our concert to their friends for free.
It was great seeing the excitement and suspense building up all by itself, while we focused on conceptualizing and planning the event details. Another great thing that we managed to do was get immediate feedback on the preferences and choices on the music itself, and schedule the artist bands accordingly. This was great not only for attracting the right crowd, but also for making the audience feel like they were part of planning the concert. That itself was invaluable to us. We ran out of tickets to sell within three days!
An important thing to remember is that we didn’t just go online to start promoting the concert. We had a pre-launch period in which we first built a network of targeted audience with which we communicated, connected and built a level of trust. This was a very important step in understanding the audience and forming a relationship and rapport with them.
There are a number of great social networking sites that you can use for planning your events. Do keep in mind that they have to be planned meticulously and with tact to get the best results.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! The first step to being super organized is to manage all of your passwords in you’re browser. Being able to share them across your team is a bonus.
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Seed Launch Tactics |
If your pre-launch goes bust then you can say goodbye to an amazing launch. It is the pre-launch which determines whether your launch will do good or die - this is because the pre-launch is meant to build hype uo to launch. Its supposed to be like a bridge from now until the launch day.
We’re offering a world class e-book about event launch strategies applying the latest and greatest strategies using social media and ubersyndication, as part of our seed launch campaign. Our pre-launch campaign builds the perceived value of this book to be priceless as its content is cutting edge - the very best of the best.
We give the book away to some existing followers initially against video testimonies of what they think about the book after reading it. We encourage them to be completely unbiased and candid. We then contact event associations and industry leaders who have lists of event planners, club owners and marketers offering them a FREE copy. We’re also offering sneak peaks and free copies to our super promoter lists, to give them an edge over everyone else.
Then we invite them to distribute the book to their contacts list, tracking those contacts who download the book. Our system ensures that these promoters are signed onto Events Listed under the person (industry leader) who initially introduced them to the Events Listed account. We then give these industry leaders 50% of all revenue earned through ticket sales commissions throughout the life of their account with Events Listed. This earns the referrer a lifetime, in perpetuity royalty for introducing us to their lists. In some cases certain industry leaders have over 60,000 event planners on their lists - you can do the rest of the math yourself…
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Scarcity, Exclusivity & Our Word Is Our Word |
Exclusivity is a part of every good campaign, and we’ve thus used it in ours as well. Exclusivity gives us a chance to focus on groups during our launch and gives the audiences (users) a chance to be part of something bigger.
Firstly, our launch drive is built on limited access seats. We’re not bringing people into the platform all at once - we’re running open gate windows for adding interested users onto the app.
Secondly, we’re introducing our app to a limited number of early adopters first - our initial set of users, instead of opening to public.
Thirdly, we will be working with handpicked super promoters throughout our campaign - everyone can not just become a promoter if they don’t meet the requirements.
Fourthly, our upcoming - and much sought after - ebook will be available for free to a selected group of promoters.
All of this exclusivity is important for our application and our launch, alike. More than that, it is important for our users. We want our most valued users to get the attention they deserve right through the launch. It’s human nature that people in general like getting attention and feeling important. Also a part of human psyche is the fact the people fear scarcity…
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Our Launch Story |
A story is a message or impression that we communicate with people. It is meant to be consistent throughout the campaign, across multiple channels. The marketing messages, blog posts, website content, emails, everything needs to be aligned to the story. Please don’t confuse the word ’story’ with something fictitious. Its just the actual and real message that’s sent out for the world to see.
Today I”m just going to talk about what the core message will be around the time of our official public launch. We will of course let everyone know (via public announcements in our social networking groups and also through our email campaign) about the exact launch date. People who’d be eager to use the platform before that can try to get to it through existing members.
As for people who are already members and users of the platform (our early adopters) - we’d run a Super Promoter campaign with them hoping to attract those members who have more than 500 active fans (or followers) under them in their social networks. The idea is to get those members who can promote the site to the most number of people and give them an incentive to earn more commissions for event ticket sales.
Now, I mentioned earlier that we’d want a 21 days straight launch campaign to get as many new subscribers onto the system as possible. But before that, the number of subscriptions coming from existing promoters is anticipated to swell before the gates are opened to the public. This is going to be the time of the most rush…
This post has been included in our “Event Launch Guidelines” training program. Click for more information.
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Our Pre-Launch Story |
Our pre-launch campaign plays a significant role in our launch process - the better the pre-launch hype, the better the launch. Pre-launches are however tricky areas, if the product is still under development/testing when the campaign begins.
We know that we have to play with some extremely important mental triggers to get the kind of attention that we want. Our greatest challenge was to build a feeling of scarcity - because our product is free and available for the mass market. Our business model was to give access to the product for free so that adoption could spread via word of mouth. We get prospects visiting and using our site that we can later market specific services to; whereas they get a great website for their events. Its a win-win.
Our marketing strategy was to attract early adopters through delivery of good quality content through blogs - these early adopters will later lead the masses into using our products and are thus very important for our business. Our revenue model is to attract commercial event promoters and planners who would take up our ticketing & merchandising modules earning us a small percentage of all tickets & merchandising sold off their pages.
Building a launch story around this model that can instill a sense of value for the application is our next step. In our prelaunch phase, we also want to create a sense of scarcity and exclusivity at the same time that will prompt them to visit and join as soon as we launch.
In our case, it wasn’t that easy to create a story, considering the fact that we didn’t have a product to show and no social proof to help ease prospects. Yet, we had to get strangers to give up their names and email addresses to get on a queue to use it. Perhaps the toughest part of the prelaunch process. We’ve thought of adding dramatic videos in the hype phase to build a sense of anticipation, all the while touching upon some basic functionality details. Since the idea is to attract early adopters, we started to engage them in conversation and brought them into our launch process. The more engaged they are, the better it is for us - after all, these 100 or so people are going to be our beta level product users…
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Eventslisted.com - Launch Sequence Time Line |
I’ll touch on the stuff that we’ve already covered before this launch sequence was published, so that you have a better feel for our pre-launch plans.
In March 2008, we launched our brochure website, video and squeeze page to capture names and email addresses of interested prospects. We also kicked off our domain optimization work, under a 6 month optimization roadmap.
In April 2008, when the brochure website was all set up, we began working on our social networking presence to build contacts. This social networking aspect has been a constant work in progress to date and will continue all the way up to launch and beyond.
This work includes: Link baiting and networking within social media platforms to introduce a softer pre-launch campaign without any fan fair and without drawing unwanted attention. Our aim has been to add one prospect at a time into our pre-launch customer list. These prospects emerge from our conversations, followings, friending & fanning strategies, on the online social networks. The idea is to approach them as you would network in actual gatherings and parties. Except that this gathering has millions of global attendees and has multiple rooms that you can walk into to find the early adopters that you need to win over to launch our site. There isn’t any magic wand here - its all about taking time for introductions, meetings, conversations and so on.
We’ll continue with this regular social networking aspect of our launch for 3 months, attracting one new pre-launch customer at a time.
In May 2008, we launched two of our blogs on Social Media & Launch Strategies and started posting content on them daily to give our social media presence some credibility throughout the networks that we have built in the past month.
The blogs touch upon explorative and informative topics in event marketing and event launch domains. The idea is to keep the content flowing with consistent quality.
In June 2008, we launched the Event Launch Guidelines blog and began to add structure to our overall blog content. We added some web 2.0 cutting edge “tactics, tools and tips” presented in an event launch step by step manner. The aim of this blog is to position our niche as social media, internet launch and online event marketing specialists and not event planning or management specialists.
In July 2008, we are following the Event Launch Guidelines blog closely by turning our Launch Strategies blog into an ongoing case-study that follows our own launch. We want our community to learn from looking at our launch, and feel like a part of our launch. At the same time we are cementing our credibility by showing that we put our money wherever we put our mouth…
This post has been included in our “Event Launch Guidelines” training program. Click for more information.
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