This is entry #4 in the What Are You Struggling With? series. If you’d like to submit one of your struggles for consideration please post a comment in this original post. If you want to view all the posts in this series visit the Struggling Series category.

Repeat after me… THERE’S NO MONEY IN DOING YOUR OWN SUPPORT!

This goes for Customer Support or Tech Support. If you are doing it yourself you are keeping yourself from making a lot more money. The real money is made by your marketing and from your business development. Now this doesn’t mean you “do a bad job” at supporting your customers, it just means you hire someone else to take care of them for you — and it can now be done very inexpensively, so there’s no excuse.

Here’s a struggle I see a lot…

FROM: Antone Roundy

John,

I think my biggest need right now is to take the plunge and hire that first employee to take over tech support for me so that I can focus on business development (new products, upgrades to existing products, etc.). There are a lot of challenges involved in taking this step:

* finding the time

* and the courage!

* and explain to my wife that I need

* to find

* and train

* someone who I can trust

* who has the ability to learn my products well enough to answer questions correctly and efficiently (there are some people in my forum who are very helpful answering questions, but occasionally they totally miss solutions that are immediately obvious to me as the developer of the product and one who has used it a lot, so I probably have an eggagerated fear of how much hand holding and training I’m going to need to do)

* but who I won’t have to pay so much that there’s not enough left for me and my family (we’re hovering right around at the level where we’re making enough, but not extra right now)

My primary product right now is CaRP (http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/ — John, you had a link to it for a while from the extras page on your Reese Report website — I used to get a constant trickle of traffic from there, which was much appreciated!) I have plans for some major upgrades to CaRP, with which will come a price increase. I’m working on some other things right now that will lay the groundwork for that, but often stumble a little juggling tech support and development.

I also have a new product, Fast JV (http://FastJV.com/), which I believe has great potential, especially once I get the time to add a few more features to it. I’d also like to have a little more time to put it to use myself! I just need that first employee to offload tech support to to give me the uninterrupted stretches of time that I need to be able focus on other things and really move them forward.

Antone,

First of all, if you’re in a money crunch, the last thing you need to be doing is hiring an actual employee to be doing your tech support or customer service. What you need to consider is hiring a reputable service that will do all of your customer service for you (as well as other tasks, if you wish) economically, and this can include technical support.

One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is hiring an employee to a full-time position for a job that’s definitely PART-TIME. Unless you have a massive business, your customer or tech support can most likely be handled in a few hours a day — and it’s okay if you don’t have a 60-minute or less response time. Most people are thrilled if you help them within 12-14 hours of their request; a day at the most.

If you’ve read “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Timothy Ferriss (which I highly recommend), he gives some great tips on outsourcing your customer service, including the recommendation of these services…

www.yourmaninindia.com
www.b2kcorp.com

Other resources for outsourcing your customer service include…

www.customerservicedoneforyou.com
www.outsourcingdotcom.com/outsourcing.htm
www.outsource2india.com/services/customer_interaction_services.asp
www.elance.com

By using one of these services, you simply pay by the hour for the amount of work they actually do for you - anywhere from $4/hr. on up. Plus, these services train the people who work for them so you don’t have to. You simply provide specifics about your products and services that allow them to do their job, and let them go to work (potential questions with answers, refund info, etc.).

Also, by using a service like this, you don’t have to worry about firing any employees, being responsible for putting food on the table for employees, or any of the other headaches that go along with hiring people for your company.

Furthermore, whether you hire someone to work for your company, or simply hire a service to handle it for you, what would make life much easier for you would be to fire up Camtasia studio, record yourself as you teach people ONE TIME all about your product, how to handle tech support requests, where to find your FAQs, how you want them responding to people who need help, and so on.

You can take the time ONCE to gather all of the pertinent information that’s needed to train people to perform your tech support for you, and simply create your own video training that any new support person can watch from their own computer WITHOUT having to continuously waste precious hours of your time!

Most entrepreneurs ‘fight’ hiring someone because they don’t want to have to train them. The other reason is that they want to be a CONTROL FREAK and do everything — I know this all to well as I did this for many years and it probably cost me a small fortune. I started to see major growth in my own business when I finally learned to just LET GO.

Hire a service to help you — just give it a shot. You can always stop using them if it doesn’t work out. But I promise you, once you find the right service (or individual) to take over some work for you…

IT *WILL* CHANGE YOUR LIFE. (And your business.) And you’ll be A LOT happier.

I promise.

~ John

Sorry for the delay… my little ‘break’ from blogging ended up being a bit longer than expected…

This is entry #3 in the What Are You Struggling With? series. If you’d like to submit one of your struggles for consideration please post a comment in this original post. If you want to view all the posts in this series visit the Struggling Series category.

Many people wonder if Internet Marketing is just one big scam. There are tons of “get rich quick” schemes being promoted all over the Internet and, unfortunately, many people have been burned by them. Making money online also seems too good to be true to many that hear about it. And what can often make things hard on an aspiring Internet entrepreneur is when their spouse thinks it’s all one big scam or has their own doubts about what their significant other is spending a lot of their time on.

So here’s a great question for this entry…

FROM: Cy Holden

Hello John,

I know you’ll probably have plenty of these responses and this is a great thing for you to help the “little” people out.

I recently just started StomperNET SIMPLE and to say the least a phenomenal boot camp in starting an internet marketing career. But my dilema is keeping my wife pacified, in other words, I guess what are some things I could do or show her that internet business is a vialble way to make a living.

I’m doing all the things I need to do to prime the pump on a daily basis but as you know a new internet business doesn’t start making money the next day.

So if you could explain some things or exercises to keep the spouse happy until the cash starts to come in or do I just go after what I believe in? I know there’s a healthy balance somewhere I just haven’t found it yet.

Cy,

You’re right… it does take time to build up a consistent income online, but what often helps “buy you some time” when it comes to pleasing a spouse who is somewhat skeptical about the possibility of making money online is to do something that brings in some immediate income that she can physically touch.

While you build your site(s) via the StomperNet method, consider selling a few things on eBay, promoting affiliate products via PPC services like AdWords, Yahoo, and MSN AdCenter, or whatever to get a few bucks rolling in. Then physically spend that money on your wife by taking her out to dinner and a movie, getting her a nice gift, paying for a massage, or what have you, making sure that you let her know where that money came from.

One thing to keep in mind about skeptical people is that they don’t care HOW you got the money in, necessarily, just that you DID get the money in, so don’t bore them with details of how AdWords works, what your sales conversion numbers are, or any of that stuff. Just tell your wife that you’re starting to figure this online marketing stuff out, and while it may take some time to make a decent income, you are bringing in some revenue that will allow you to buy a few things.

The main point I’m trying to make is that you have to make the time that you spend implementing this online marketing stuff benefit HER in some way, and if you have difficulty convincing her to be patient while you wait for it to payoff sometime in the future, then creating some small commissions from affiliate or eBay sales to spend on her may be the way to go.

Best of luck to you!

~John

This is entry #2 in the What Are You Struggling With? series. If you’d like to submit one of your struggles for consideration please post a comment in this original post. If you want to view all the posts in this series visit the Struggling Series category.

FROM: Jonathan Bishop

Hi John,

Here’s my problem: Getting quality content for a very, very specific and tight niche, in which reputation means everything.

The niche I’m working in is martial arts, and specifically Chinese ‘internal’ martial arts. I decided to do this online because it’s my real, great passion in life, and with my parents (boomers) generation approaching failing health and expensive healthcare, I think that in addition to other great benefits, I can help people live more healthily and improve the quality of their own lives.

I’ve recently purchased a domain which I plan to use as the main anchor of my site, and I’m planning to develop it very similarly to the way you’re developing income.com. I’m watching you very carefully for specific things you’re doing actually.

So much so that while the site itself is not up, I’ve put up a blog at www.wudangquan.com/blog . . .

This is a relatively good domain, and is highly brandable for the niche.

So my eventual goal is laid out in that blog, andthe one above in my signature or whatever. I want to provide the highest quality content on this subject that’s ever been produced.

I’m so dedicated to this goal, that I’m moving from South Korea (where I’m an English teacher - I’ve been in Asia about 8 years) to China next month, to take a dramatic pay cut and get close to the source of this information, have access to original texts, and so on.

The site will be more or less a monthly/bi-monthly magazine in the front, and behind that will be a web 2.0 community type of site with lots of things for registered users to do.

Again, my problem is content. I figure that once I start doing some translations, video interviews, etc. other people will contribute, but like I said - reputation is very important, because like internet marketing, this niche is full of hacks and phonies.

So in a nutshell, my question is - How would you get experts in a very narrow niche/field to contribute their expertise, experiences, and so on to a third parties project, beyond the usual (I’ll give you a link back, exposure, etc.) stuff on a relatively tight budget?

Thanks for reading this!

Jonathan,

After reading your plans and checking out your blog, I can see that you are on the right track. What you need to do is to freely share valuable martial arts resources through your blog posts, pointing people to other blogs you’ve discovered, for example, that contain valuable tips and information.

By using your blog as a way to dissiminate valuable info about your market - whether the tips come from you or someone else’s blog - you are gaining the trust of your readers, while simultaneously figuring out who the real experts are in your niche.

As you send traffic to other experts’ blogs within your niche, these people will reciprocate by doing the same for you, and this could entail anything from sending traffic back to your blog, agreeing to conduct an interview with you, collaborating with you on product creation, and so on.

Obviously, as people see how serious you are about the niche, and as they see that you are recommending solid resources for people to check out, you will have people visiting your blog on a consistent basis, and the experts who recognize this fact will be more than happy - even eager - to help you out in any way they can.

One of the best things you can do for your business, if you haven’t done so already, is to download a valuable PDF that will help you really get exposure for your blog, allowing you to achieve the results I mentioned above. “Authority Black Book” was written by Jack Humphrey, and you can download it here: http://www.authorityblackbook.com/reese/

* This is not an affiliate link but a ‘backdoor’ to get the report without opt-ing in.

Just remember that if you work hard to give good value from the very beginning, freely recommend the blogs/resources of other experts within your niche, and so on, you can expect to not only have tons of prospects returning to your blog, you can gain the assistance of several experts within your niche who are willing to provide solid content for you.

~ John

This is entry #1 in the What Are You Struggling With? series. If you’d like to submit one of your struggles for consideration please post a comment in this original post. If you want to view all the posts in this series visit the Struggling Series category.

FROM: Jackie Lange

I’m struggling with learning about getting a LOT of video and audio on a membership site that will open soon.

I have problems converting the video to FLV files that still have a good quality. I’ve used SUPER and ULead with less than acceptable results.

Sometimes the audio sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks when I convert to MP3. It’s not loading as fast as I would like. It’s all very unreliable and that’s just not acceptable.

Plus, I’m really concerned that I will not have enough bandwidth to support a lot of people watching the video or listening to the audio at potentially the same time. Surely there’s a formula someplace.

I’ve searched high and low to find help to solve these problems and I can’t find the answers anywhere.

Jackie,

Thanks for your submission. You’re not alone.

You’re dealing with TWO factors here…

1. Creating Your Multimedia Files
2. Hosting Your Multimedia Files

CREATING YOUR MULTIMEDIA FILES

When creating your multimedia files there is a lot that will affect the QUALITY of your final files. But it all starts with YOUR SOURCE.

For example, many people complain that quality of their online videos are poor when in fact the camera (or settings) they used to create their original video was poor. So it’s important to note, you can’t get quality multimedia files without starting with a quality source.

If you know you have a quality video source (for example) then it comes down to converting that video file into something usable on the Web that will be compressed (so it’s not a huge file size) but will still look (and sound) great.

Here’s a great tutorial on converting video files into high quality YouTube videos.

That tutorial will most likely solve most of your problems. It links to some free software tools and some additional resources.

Another great tool is Tracy Childers’ FLV Producer software. It quickly and easily converts video files into FLV files.

As far as your MP3 audio files are concerned, it sounds like a settings issue with how you are trying to convert them. Start with the highest bit rate possible, create a version that way, and see how it sounds. Then try the next quality down. Try different versions until you find the smallest file size that still has quality you are happy with. Then just make a note of those settings for future file output.

HOSTING YOUR MULTIMEDIA FILES

I linked to a tutorial above for creating great looking videos for YouTube, but many marketers don’t want to host their videos with YouTube because it doesn’t look very professional.

So let’s talk about how you can host them yourself…

There are two main types of Flash Video:

1. Streaming Video
2. Progressive Video

Streaming Video is where the video actually “buffers” and starts playing before the entire video is downloaded. It also allows the user to ’scrub’ forward or back to a certain point in the video and start watching it from there. In order to serve streaming video you will actually need a streaming video hosting provider — or you will need to purchase a license for “Flash Media Server” and have it running on your own server.

DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME!

In my opinion (and many others) there really is no need for true streaming video. 95% of the videos you see online today are PROGRESSIVE video — and they work just fine. In fact, Internet users are more use to progressive video than anything else. YouTube videos are progressive Flash videos.

Progressive Video is where the actual video downloads (in most cases to a temporary directory) on the user’s machine. The user can watch the video when it downloads enough where there is something to watch. If the user’s connection is downloading the video at a faster rate than the video will play the user can watch the entire video without stopping BEFORE the entire video is downloaded. If the user’s connection isn’t fast enough then they will have to wait until it’s downloaded.

A user can ’see’ how much has been downloaded with a ‘progress’ bar.

The great thing about progressive video files is that THEY CAN BE HOSTED ANYWHERE!

You don’t need a special video hosting service. You don’t have to pay for special licensing or other fees. You can simply upload the video files to ANY web hosting account and it will work.

BUT…

You raise an important point… if a lot of people start watching your videos at the same time you WILL run into a problem. It will slow your server down and can cause others to have viewing problems. You definitely want to avoid this — especially if you’re going to be running a membership site and the multimedia files are what your users are paying you money to watch/listen to.

Here’s what I recommend…

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Amazon.com started an amazing service called “S3.” You can basically rent server space on their massive network of computers. When you upload your files it will automatically make a backup of the files across their network.

Amazon has so much bandwidth that you could have MILLIONS of people trying to watch your videos at the same time and no one would have a problem.

And the great thing about this new S3 service is that you only pay for what you use. There are no monthly fees. AND… their bandwidth/data transfer rates are extremely reasonable. They start at 18 cents per gigabyte transferred.

So just to give you an example… if you have a 30 minute video that is 50MB in size, and you have 1,000 unique people watch it one time, here’s how much that would cost you…

50MB x 1,000 = 50,000MB. There are 1,000 megabytes (MB) in a gigabyte, so 50,000 divided by 1,000 = 50. So 50,000MB = 50GB (gigabytes).

50 x 18 cents per GB = $9.00

So it would cost you $9.00 total to have 10,000 unique people watch that entire video once.

If you had 10,000 views of that same video file then it would be $90.00 in total cost.

And Amazon’s prices drop if you end up doing a lot of data transfer — as low as 13 cents per GB.

As you can see, their prices are very inexpensive. When hosting your videos with YouTube just won’t do, this is a great option.

Income.com is currently hosting all of its video files with Amazon S3 and so far we’re very happy.

* Special Note: If you go with Amazon S3 it would be good to have a ‘geek’ (any competent programmer type will do) that you can hire to get you setup. S3 can be a little complicated at first.

Jackie, I hope that answers all of your questions. If you have related questions to these issues please feel free to post a comment on this post and I’ll try and answer it for you.

~John

I want to know what you are struggling with right now in your business and with your Internet marketing!

What gets you stressed out? Or what is the biggest challenge you need help with? What do you feel is keeping you from breaking through to the next level of income in your business?

Please take a moment to submit a comment below and give as much DETAIL as possible about something you need help with.

I am going to start blogging a series of posts to address specific needs that some of my readers have. I won’t be able to answer all of the requests but I am going to pick several of the most detailed ones and post my advice for them.

So take a moment and post your problem/issue/challenge and be as specific as possible. If you would like to me to take a look at a web site or any other landing page, please post the URL and/or any other data you’d like to share.