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This is part 2 from John Cow/Jason Katzenback on how to grow a business through hiring staff. Enjoy!

In my previous post of this series “Delegate or Die - How to Hire Locally to Grow Your Business“, I talked about planning for moving your business into an office, today I am going to touch on what to look for in office space, how to find employees and how to hold interviews.

Office Space: SHOP AROUND!

As I mentioned in the previous post, I am speaking to you out of experience and sharing with you what I have found to work best through trial and error. I am telling you this because I hope I can spare you from some of the HUGE mistakes I made and finding my initial office was a big mess up on my part. You see, I was so excited to be moving out of my home office that I jumped at the first office that looked half decent, which might not sound bad but 2 months later I was packing up and moving again.

1. Location: You want to make sure that your office is easy to get to. The further you are from your office you will find that you start making up excuses as to not going to the office. Do not fool yourself and think you can hire an office manager and not even head into the office, this is something that takes time to put into place and your employees need your guidance and leadership.

It is also important to consider errands, supplies and restaurants. The more central you are to other resources, the less frustrating you will find it. If you need to get stamps, paper, repairs and even food, it is extremely frustrating when you have to plan hours of your day to pick them up.

Last of all, is your office easily accessed via a bus or subway route? If you are going to have employees, you are going to want to ensure they have no excuses for not being able to get to the office.

2. Lighting: This was another huge mistake I made. I first found a great looking office but it was in the basement of the office building and there was only one small window. I thought that I could get lights but believe me, nothing replaces natural sunlight and do not underestimate how important it is.

3. Room for Growth: This was my biggest mistake of all. I did not realize how much room one person’s work area took. You need to realize that once you sign a lease, you can not easily get out of it and room for growth is not an acceptable excuse.

You need to have a clear picture of what you expect for size requirements for a one year period. The recommended space requirement per person is 250 sq/ft, which might sound like a lot but consider that is only a little more then 15 ft x 15 ft and in that space you have to fit a working station, area to move around equipment and so on. Now personally I think that is a little much but I would never budget less then 150 sq/ft per person, you do not want people bumping into each other to move around.

4. Privacy: You are going to want to ensure that you have an office with a door on it. Your employees will constantly want to talk with you and ask questions and by having a door you can make sure that you can shut the door and have your privacy to get things done. I will talk more about this in the next post when I get into managing your employees.

How To Find Suitable Employees

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This is a guest post from Jason Katzenback, otherwise known as the current incarnation of John Cow (just like Dr Who, a new Cow is born each time the previous one quits the show)…

Have you heard the expression “No man is an island“… well perhaps to be more politically correct “no one person is an island”?

One of the hardest decisions any entrepreneur faces when starting a new business is the concept of delegating. At first we are more often then not responsible for all activities of our business including; research, planning, bookkeeping, webdesign and the list goes on and on. For most people this is not a problem for the first few months because you are in a start up mode where you are still getting your feet wet. As your business starts to grow momentum however, this quickly starts to become a burden.

Too Much To Do in Too Little Time

Suddenly it happens, you start looking at the clock and realize the day is done. Your spouse is calling for supper and you impatiently yell back “Give me a Minute”. You are frantically trying to get as much done as possible because of the complete and utter frustration of having too much to do in too little time.

Life continues like this for awhile and then suddenly tax time comes and you become exasperated because for the next week you will not be able to do anything but focus on getting your bookkeeping done and all your projects are on hold…. never mind the 150 emails you are getting every day.

STOP THE INSANITY!!!

If your business is at a point where there is revenue coming in and you just have too much to do in too little time, then perhaps it is time to consider hiring local employees to help. With today’s virtual world, there are many options available from outsourcing to hiring virtual assistants and depending on your situation these may be better options. If however you are ready and wanting to start an office with local employees then my hope is this post series will offer you some guidance.

Why Should I listen to YOU?

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I’ve been talking about it for long enough. Now is your chance to watch my latest video. Here’s the link -

This video covers a form of Internet marketing that combines the traffic and raw exposure power of a blog, with the direct marketing power of email lists.

I call it Conversion Blogging, and it’s the basis for my entire six-figure online business.

I honestly believe this system represents a much easier methodology for making money with blogs. I’m not saying you shouldn’t make money from traditional blog monetization methods like advertising (I still make a big chunk of change from sponsorship), but a blog can be so much more if you combine it with what has worked in the Internet marketing and direct marketing worlds for years (almost centuries when you look at offline mail order).

Of course for this system to work you can’t ignore blogging fundamentals - you still need to know what goes into building a great blog.

To help with this, after you watch the Conversion Blogging video, you can enter your name and email to watch my second video, a brand new visual presentation of the Blog Profits Blueprint and grab an updated copy of the text version of the Blueprint too.

I’ll let the videos do the explaining, so please go watch now, and then tell me what you think in comment replies here.

http://www.blogmastermind.com/video/

Yaro Starak
Conversion Blogger

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John Reese just released the third and final launch video as part of his Traffic Secrets 2.0 release.

You can watch the video here -

I just finished watching it and it was great stuff, just like the first two.

In case you missed John’s first two videos released last week, make sure you head to this page to watch them before watching this one, they follow in a sequence.

http://www.trafficsecrets.com/home/

Marketing With Software

Something very few people implement as an online traffic technique is to build software applications. I will stick my hand up as one of those people too and after watching John’s third video I am REALLY excited about the potential. I was busy taking notes during the video, jotting down ideas for software apps I would like to make as marketing tools for my current projects.

It’s clear John thinks big when he considers how he will generate traffic. The application of a successful software marketing strategy can result in hundreds of thousands to even millions of visitors - we’re talking mainstream big, maybe not quite Facebook levels, but at least within the same playing field as some of the most popular sites in the world.

I can see why this strategy is so powerful. Very few people do it and even fewer execute it well if they try. If you can - as John suggests - make an online user-content generated software application, the potential for growth is tremendous.

Video Breakdown

John begins the video with strategic advice regarding why this tactic works and how he has implemented it himself in the past, then presents real world suggestions for software applications and offers tips on how to find the people to build the software for you.

I won’t reveal everything from the video, but a couple things I thought worth repeating even though they might seem obvious to some when creating software are -

• Test programmers with a smaller project first regardless of how good their ratings may be within a freelance site
• Create extremely detailed specifications for your project

There’s a lot more advice and some great suggestions from John that I know will spark ideas for you while watching the video, so make sure you take notes when inspiration strikes. Here’s the video link again -

http://www.trafficsecrets.com/home/v3.html

The Sales Pitch You Just Have To Watch

The second half of the video is the sales pitch, since obviously John is promoting his new training program Traffic Secrets 2.0.

What’s interesting about John’s pitch is how he’s decided to go opposite to what’s been prevalent in the last few years with Internet marketing product launches. He’s done a completely soft approach, there’s no upsells, no forced continuity, no false scarcity - pretty much any grumble people might have had about “marketing gimmicks” and John’s decided to blatantly state that he’s not doing it.

This in itself is a clever marketing tactic but it’s the execution that has to be watched. John has a very professional and clean-cut presentation style. It’s a serious presentation (no Frank Kern or Ed Dale antics here), John’s serious about his business and he’s put it all together in a video that gets the message across without any hyperbole.

And it’s worked on me - I want this product, bad.

I want it because of the videos I just watched. I want to learn John’s traffic tactics and also copy how he markets things. With John Reese you study what he says and how he says it.

John’s presentation style suits me. I like the soft sell, I use it myself all the time and I expect it’s going to pay off for him, especially as he’s priced the product lower than recent launches.

Traffic Secrets is just $397 for the product and access to any future upgrades.

During the second half of the video you will see what exactly is inside Traffic Secrets 2.0, which includes some DVDs and manuals and access to an online training resource. It’s sort of a melding between a home study and an online community, which is a nice approach.

The product goes live Tuesday 15th July 12 Noon EST and I’ll be there to buy my copy for sure.

Even if you have no intention of purchasing this, go watch the videos, see how video and a soft approach to selling can work and learn from both the content within the video and the strategy behind the video.

Here’s that link one more time:

http://www.trafficsecrets.com/home/v3.html

Yaro Starak
Borrowing John’s Ideas

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This is the third part in a four part series of articles on customer service.

In part one we looked at a example from Starbucks customer service, where a simple free beverage voucher left a lasting positive impression on me. You can read this article here - Reputation Management: Starbucks Offers A Simple Lesson In Good Customer Service.

In part two I walked you through the typical “growing pains” of a solo entrepreneur running an Internet business attempting to deliver personal customer service and how often as a result of success, things start to fall apart. You can read this article here - Growing Pains: How To Manage Customer Service As A One Person Enterprise.

In this next part of the series, as promised, I’m going to give you a behind the scenes tour of how I handled customer service through various different Internet projects I’ve owned in the past eight years. My system today is far from perfect, but it’s definitely much better than what it was. My current set-up allows me to have time freedoms and still look after my most important constituents (most of the time anyway!).

Starting From The Beginning

To fully put this into perspective we have to take a trip down memory lane way back to the beginning of my Internet business timeline (still one of the most popular article series on this blog and overdue for an update to add the last couple of years).

My first true success online was my popular Magic card game site, MTGParadise.com started in the late nineties. I created that site as a true newbie. I learned how to FTP, code HTML, create basic graphics and spent countless nights changing my website.

To start with I wrote content for the website myself and learned some basic Internet marketing techniques to bring in traffic, which pretty much amounted to link exchanges and regular participation in popular Magic newsgroups (this was a LONG time ago, back in the Usenet heyday when newsgroups were the Internet).

My site grew slowly, but with no benchmarks to really compare against I was happy enough with my few hundred daily visitors, adding another ten or twenty new readers per month, treating the project purely as a hobby.

Eventually I started to receive guest articles from other people who played the card game, which helped lesson my writing load. I spent most of my time back then struggling to make HTML do what I wanted to do and did not write nearly as much as I do now as a blogger and information product creator.

My Magic site didn’t become a big success until I added a forum to it. I made the decision on a whim because Magic players, at least in Australia, were used to using email newsgroups to communicate with and spent the rest of their time reading static websites. There wasn’t a forum out there at the time for Australia magic players because they were content with newsgroups, which had a critical mass of users.

I didn’t exactly see this as a business opportunity at the time. What I was interested in was playing with the forum script and seeing if I could get it to work (I was a real glutton for punishment back then, wasting time trying to make technology work when I wasn’t a coder). I certainly did not expect what would happen next.

My First Taste of Success

One of the reasons I enjoyed Magic had nothing to do with playing the game. What I loved was to trade cards. As an entrepreneur at heart, sometimes I preferred the act of performing commerce rather than playing the game, so I did see the potential for my forum to become a hub for card trading. I just didn’t expect it to become THE card trading site for Australian Magic game players - but it did.

Within a few months the forums began to really take off thanks to the increasingly active card trading community.

If you can create a site that is based on user generated content fueled by a strong hook - a reason for people to come back to the site every day - well, then you have struck gold in Internet business terms. Many multi-million dollar web business today are based on this principle (think eBay, Facebook, YouTube).

My Magic site did not become a multi-million dollar business, but it did carve out it’s own little corner in a very specific niche. As a result my traffic grew to over a thousand visitors a day, which I joked was probably the entire online population of Magic players in Australia (it’s a popular card game, but Australia doesn’t have a large population). I made my first real online income thanks to advertising sponsors on MTGParadise.com.

If you are interested to learn more about how I made money with my Magic site, see - How to make money from your website using advertising.

The Empire Starts To Grow

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