Outsourcing and Blogging Your Way to Bigger eCommerce Profits

welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular
interviews tips and tools for building your business online
[Music] well hello and welcome to the e-commerce podcast
my name is matt edmondson and this show is dedicated to all of those of you who
are running your e-commerce business that's right welcome to the show uh this is a podcast
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uh i'll explain about jesse in just a minute so we have a great guest coming up when we do that when we record the show
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so welcome to the show as i said at the start my name is matt edmondson and this show is all about e-commerce
now you may have noticed uh dear avid listener viewer that um that we've changed the
branding and in fact we've changed the name of the show it used to be called the curiosity podcast
now we just call it the ecommerce podcast just to make it a little bit cleaner and a little bit more understood so this
is the ecommerce podcast with me matt edmondson welcome to the show this is the very first episode
of season three so we decided to launch the new name and the new branding at the
start of season three right here right here at the beginning so uh yeah it's great fun uh just sort of
seeing how the podcast evolves taking on board all your comments all your thoughts all your ideas all your
suggestions mashing those things together and seeing where it leads and
you know when we started this back in season one i had no idea we would end up right here where we are right now uh no
one could predict covert no one could predict any of that sort of stuff and yet here we are and so these things evolve and
move don't they as we go on so uh as we are broadcasting over facebook live the
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everything will be there for you no problem so like i said welcome to season three it
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the ecommerce podcast formerly known as the curiosity podcast i dare say you'll hear me talk about this for the next few episodes until we
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without further ado should we bring our guest on i think we should let me introduce him before we do now we are talking to jesse tonight
jesse schoeberg um and jesse is currently living in manila when we had the sort of
the pre-call uh i was talking to jesse a few minutes before we went live on the show i said jesse where are you he said i am in
manila he is living in america in manila he's one of these guys that spends his life traveling around the world running
his businesses from wherever he is at um he's been managing remote teams
for like over years now so he's got a good idea on how to do it
and he is going to share with us all his magic and all his insight on how to outsource remote teams and
we're also going to talk about uh his latest venture um which is going to help us understand
why we should as e-commerce website owners e-commerce entrepreneurs why we
should be blogging and how we do that why that's important he runs a
a website called drop in blog we're going to get into all of that content marketing we've got a lot to get through so
without further ado jesse let me bring you on uh it's great to have you thanks for
being here welcome to the show thanks for having me on matt
for some reason sorry let's try that again now we'll be able to hear you
welcome to the show jesse thanks for having me on matt no problem small technical glitch right
at the start there uh now as i said you're in manila right yep currently uh currently in manila
during the lockdown yeah is that a good place to get locked down or or not uh it's actually been i mean considering
uh yeah it's it's been all right they've been handling it all right and and uh there's been access to resources
and you know i'm set up in a pretty good spot so uh no no complaints no complaints that's awesome now um
at the time of recording it is in the uk it's just before p.m what what time is
it for you uh we're pushing a.m now yeah a.m in the morning so you're
you're kind of like used to this sort of late night working thing
i imagine because of the time zone when you're over in in this southeast asia you know
constantly working with people in europe and and the states you know we work all kinds of different schedules so
you get used to that's it thanks for being on the show so let me
ask you a question how did what's the short version i guess how did you know how did you end up from
uh you're from the states originally i can tell by the accent um how did you end up in manila
uh well uh i left the states uh in okay uh i lived in latin
america for quite a while so i was mainly uh living in panama and
yeah kind of i mean originally it sort of happened accidentally uh it was
like i was running an agency at the time and was kind of looking for a new
location in in the states to live and remembered that i had been to panama before and liked it and kind of thought
oh you know maybe should just move there instead of move to denver or something you know and
uh ended up being one of the best decisions of my life and kind of uh jump started the kind of expat
uh location independent lifestyle and you know it took a while you know i
lived a normal life there and then i kind of slowly started traveling more and more and more and then um maybe about four years ago
uh kind of relocated here to southeast asia and been all over so it's
thailand indonesia malaysia vietnam uh here in the philippines
taiwan this whole region quite a bit so basically yeah based here in the
philippines uh you know for uh a while as well um and uh yeah it's uh
it's a great uh region for sure so what what sort of kept you there rather than
going uh you know what interesting if i'm going back home uh well i mean if
once you kind of start living the location-independent lifestyle and you get to experience all
these cultures and the food and the language and the people and everything it's uh
it it's pretty pretty amazing so uh i i'd have a hard time uh considering going back to living uh
you know buying a house in the suburbs in wherever usa that's just not on the radar wow
wow okay so what does what does a typical day in manila look like for you and how would it be
different if you're living living back home i mean we could say it could be similar to you know if you were in a major metro
i mean all of the cities that i like to go to are i generally live in more metro areas so spend a lot
of time in bangkok or saigon or these kind of places and so you know it's uh
well not not these days but generally would be go to the cafe and uh you know uh work out do
do the the morning grind in the cafe and then uh you know maybe meet uh someone else
another entrepreneur for lunch uh you know then uh catch up with some meetings like this
uh you know manage the team you know do the same things everyone else does you know it's just uh it's just
in new places but what makes it interesting i find is that you know when you're when you live a
normal uh kind of life pattern it's
the same the same same same every day where you can you can take that pattern and you can just put it in another city
and then everything's interesting all of a sudden because the restaurants are different the food is different the culture is different the people have
different things you know the weekend getaway is somewhere you've never been not the place that you've been times
you know so um that makes i i find that makes life quite interesting and
and makes it so that you can learn a lot more about the world and and it's it's it's quite fascinating and
it's a part as well so that you don't get too uh you know you're not on vacation you're still
living life working out years yeah but what's been the biggest thing
that surprised you like if someone came to you from back home and said i'm thinking of doing what you're doing what would you say oh this
is going to be the thing which i think will surprise you the most what would it be uh that at first it there
there's some major adjustments uh especially when there's just routine
things that break or you know things that don't work in different places or that function
differently or you know the internet doesn't work or you can't find a cafe or or you're you know the airbnb that you rented
didn't turn out to be what you thought it was gonna be these kind of stumbling blocks especially when you're first getting started
you're just bound to hit these these walls you know and and things fall apart and you think oh
this was a lot easier when i was back at home and it was but with some time
and practice these things become very normal and you kind of know what to look for and you know how to kind of pivot
and and build a more optimized life sometimes than you would have had back
at home because you have other advantages like your currency arbitrage and uh
you know there things you know you can have things like
staff and you can have meal prep and you can have like sort of things that you wouldn't normally get uh in
in your home country sometimes so because the the dollar goes further where you're living you're able to do more yeah
yeah definitely definitely and some of that is cultural too but like that's that's a huge factor you know um
you you can definitely get a better life uh in and and still a very modern life you know we're
not talking about living in the middle of nowhere right it's just uh you know in these major cities there's just more services uh
and you know you're you're you can live live a pretty interesting life that way yeah so
you you go around from city to city house what sort of length of time do you spend in each place or is
there not a formula you just kind of yeah it varies uh can be
i try not to do anything less than a month uh so usually like one to three months is
kind of the sweet spot and then what you find after you've done it for a
long time well when i lived in panama i had like a more normal like i had a i own an
apartment there and then then i would just travel like maybe half the year and kind of do a month away
kind of thing but when i moved to asia i decided to be full-time uh in the more nomad style and
then i just do one to three months per city but then what happens is you know you
start to get to know cities and then you then it's not this huge reset because that's that's the other
thing talking about that when you first start doing it you know you go if you go to a new city every month
it's confusing right you have to understand how things work and get settled and that's that's a disruption in your life but if
you do it for a little while you know you can feel at home in any of these cities so
you know any of those cities that i just mentioned here in southeast asia i feel at home in all of those cities
i've spent enough time in all of them that i can just show up tomorrow and you know i know where i like to work
i have friends that are living there i know you know enough of the language
that i can you know go down to the local corner shop and order a local dish instead of just you know getting western
food at the tourist spot you know this kind of thing so uh once once you get into it a little bit more
then then that becomes uh pretty exciting because you get to live almost multiple lives at once because
you know you you're you have friends in multiple cities and then you know you get the the excitement of
different things that are happening in the different places so okay and so do you i'm just genuinely
quite curious here but do you have like you sound like you're going to be living you know out of a suitcase all of the
time is that so you do you travel really light everything fits in a backpack and you just you're not accumulating
stir-fries i'm not that light as uh some people that live how i do
art are super crazy minimalist um i'm a little bit in the middle i mean compared to normal people i have barely
anything but compared to the super nomads i'm kind of heavy so uh since about five or six years now
i live out of a inch suitcase which is the smaller check size and a duffel bag in
my laptop bag that's it so what tech do you what's your essential stuff on your little travel
list then sure sure so uh and then i will say to just kind of augment that one one of
my kind of hacks is that when i land in the new spot in the new apartment i'm not afraid to
spend a little bit to fix up things or buy a couple things that they you know so if they if they don't have a uh the right
kitchen stuff that i want you know i'll go out the first day it's kind of one of my rules that like go and get
your stuff and set it up how you want it set up yeah yeah you go spend bucks on the this random little things that that they
didn't have good ones and like oh maybe you just need like a desk lamp or something like this instead of suffering you you know you just go get
those things and be done and call that part of the rent um and like this particular place that
i'm in now i've been staying at this particular apartment on and off for
almost a year now and so i kind of keep keep adding and you know now now it's
like has everything right so uh that's pretty great but yeah i mean my tech stack is like i'm apple guy so it's
i mean pretty pretty lightweight though i don't i don't i don't travel with an external monitor so i'm just macbook pro uh iphone ipad
um i'm kind of a music guy so i've got a couple different
headphone things going on um and that's pretty much it uh pretty pretty
pretty late tech stack kindle um that's it yeah i don't know uh no
standing inflatable desk or anything well how many pairs of flip-flops do you
have one pair just the one pair okay yeah yeah so with all this i mean i could
spend all evening talking to you about how you do the nomadic travel thing because it just i find it curious i mean that was um and
i think we've all got sort of stories but um that's not why we're here uh so um
i have to force myself to stay on track so what what we want to talk about is outsourcing now it sounds like if you've
been doing this for years and you've been running a business and growing a business and starting
multiple businesses on routes um that you've obviously done this whole
outsourcing thing and you've kind of figured it out and that's that's the start point would that be a correct assumption
yeah definitely i mean that's been the business model the whole time you know uh so while it's kind of
interesting now this is extra trending because of uh the current situation
uh you know it's been uptrending the last few years we'll say right but uh and there's been more and more
books about it more and more um yeah yeah yeah i think that for me
it all sort of got kick-started in my head when i read the four-hour work which is where i'm sure most people sort of started that
from and then vagabond and all that sort of stuff yeah that was kind of the first big you
know aha you know moment for a lot of people you know and i i think i i read the four
hour work week actually after i got to panama and so it's kind of that came out right around the time
after i had left so for me that was a big validation just kind of like oh yeah
cool this guy this guy kind of like uh organized all of my thoughts you know
thanks to yeah yeah but i will say that most people in
my community uh you know read that book and change their whole life
you know it was like somehow that book fell into their hand and they said screw this job screw this
commute screw the suburbs you know and and really headed that yeah because of it but that
was a long time ago that's been years yeah it's been a while it's been a while but you're like you're right it's been becoming more and more
people the world's becoming a much smaller place isn't it yeah definitely and there's been a lot
more modern you know that book while it's very inspirational
uh you know there's you know like the signals guys have written a couple of
books about about uh remote working and remote themes and and this kind of stuff and you know
there's some more current uh uh information than that but but that was definitely the
the fire starter for many many people yeah as a company i've not had any dealings
with them because i think they only operate in the states called belay solutions um and they keep they keep sort of doing
really well you know from a business point of view they're featured a lot i hear the name a lot actually belay solutions
and they're all about outsourcing you know give us you know your virtual pas and all this sort of stuff that you hear
talked about so can we get into this right how did you
where where to start right i mean what's a good place to sort of start whilst talking about this topic i'm kind of
thinking you know what i have a wife i have three children knickers too i'm gonna take them out of school and i'm moving to
manila and i've got to outsource my business what's what's justice you know what's jessie's guide to doing that
well i mean to be fair it's interesting you kind of have this remote work outsourcing thing they go hand in hand
but a lot of people think you know when you say that like but how much of your job that you're doing right now has anything to do with
you being in your physical location right yeah not a lot
not a lot right and especially now because it's we're in lockdown yeah yeah yeah right here next to me
like it wouldn't make no difference because i have to zoom everybody right yeah yeah and so i mean for me i feel
like this particular moment in history it's just kind of showing everyone that oh yeah i guess we could be doing it
that way you know like all of your clients or or or customers or whatever your business
is you know uh especially in this internet based or anyone who's in like consulting or agencies or this kind of
stuff you know they they think oh well i can't do that well no actually look turns out you can turns out you know there are ways so uh
as far as that part of it like can you do it like it can be done but then yeah when you start getting into the
outsourcing part uh which now it's getting even more interesting because that used to just
mean yes like again with this currency arbitrage thing you know you've got you know many countries that
that the the normal wages are less than they are in in the the western countries so there's a there's a
good win-win there for people you can get great talent that's a little bit less expensive than the talent that you would get uh
in the west and that's uh there but now see now it's getting
really interesting there's so much more happening because you know you have a lot more people that are living all over the place
and then you have a lot more people in the western countries that are also working remotely right so now it's not just about it's
not just about saving money and and trying to get the cheapest
labor that you can because it's not always about getting cheaper it's just also about getting the best talent
now all of a sudden you're not sourcing from your local community right you're sourcing from the whole world
and you know so it's oh maybe there's uh someone uh in arizona or maybe
there's someone in south of france or maybe there's someone in thailand or maybe that you know it kind of doesn't matter right it
doesn't matter you're right i mean i i i discovered recently recently for the last few years um
one of the things that we've been doing is we've realized that actually um mums returning back to work after
having a break for the looking after the kids yeah well they're just the most remarkable people on the planet right
there they're used to dealing with stress they used to balance in things in the air they can multitask like nobody else they
they know how to work and nothing seems to stop them if they've got a cold they'll just keep going whereas me i'm
out germain and it's and the key thing that i found to um
this sort of particular group of people coming and working for you and doing well is being flexible with where they work
so they can work remotely because they need to be at home they need to pick up the kids they need
to be flexible in their hours and if i can give them that that's more important i think
than the salary than the job title i found it quite a fascinating sort of
thing yeah yeah and what's neat is there's a lot of these kind of niches popping up you know that it's
really interesting so that's one that's been definitely popping up and what's uh you know and again for you
like what do you care if like your podcast edit is done right now or in an hour and
a half from now right like it needs to be done in two weeks like it's fine right so the fact that they have to run and go get the kids
from school or whatever it doesn't matter it's all about output and that's kind of the other thing
kind of zooming back into the topic here like you know it's you have to change this
mindset that's more about output versus uh just like the you know oh i hired them
for this many hours and they're they're you know just are they are they at work because that's always the
concern about the remote hire right is that well when we when i have them at the office i can look over their
shoulder and make sure that they're getting it done you know where it's about changing your mindset into
output and saying like oh no well i just need her to finish the edit on the podcast and you know that's it it doesn't matter
doesn't matter what it gets done as long as it gets done by this time and the quality is good who cares right
yeah and so uh you know to talk about that a little bit and and some of the pitfalls people have
switching to that is you know you really need to work on your processes and your expectations and
and you maybe have to define that a little bit more than if you were doing the in the office higher right because in the office you can okay
when you talk about um defining your processes uh and your expectations when you're hiring
someone remotely they're managing their time they're much more autonomous is probably a good way to put it they they have to be i think a much more
responsible kind of person do you mean a high caliber type person but i i just want to clarify what you
said they i have to be clear with the processes and expectations for that person
right because if i'm not is that where a lot of the problems lie exactly because if you don't create a
lot of expectations of the output that you want then they might just be sitting around
all day you know especially i mean we'll get into this too like hourly versus full-time salary or part-time salary you know when
you when you put some on a salary then you know if you don't have them if
you're not feeding them stuff to do and aren't very particular about the things that you want then there can become a miscommunication
there where you said hey what did you do the last two weeks and then they say what do you mean you
didn't send me anything or you know there's this kind of thing where where if you say okay like every
friday i want this and and by this date and this date i want this and you know three times a week i want you to check in and do this thing
and you know the more you can define those exact output items
the the better it can be of course this varies widely by rule and by level and this kind of stuff but
learning to define that is a skill that does take some time and you will stumble a little bit and uh so on that you know talking about
how do i matt kind of get into this and what do i do i i generally recommend to start by
hiring someone in an hourly situation uh so then if you screw up on the
expectations and you forget to send them something because you get distracted you're not
burning all this extra cash and there's not this thing where you said well i was paying you last week
what did you do and they say well you're talking about i i pay you for the hours that you work and if i don't send you any work
then you've not worked and therefore i don't pay you right right and more of like a freelance style situation versus
a uh you know salary part or full time yeah okay so find someone that's hourly at the
start and um spend as much time as possible defining the process and the expectations for
that person i and i would say i mean i had um a virtual pa um for a number of years actually she
lives in manila and she lives somewhere in the philippines lovely lady still in touch with her actually
um yeah and i found at the start um i had to
over communicate my expectations and over communicate the processes because not only was she
remote but she was another cool church that was another language jeremy and her english was awesome but there
was still this this barrier that i had to overcome and so i get why you would say define
the process define the expectations um sean here has put on facebook
um how do you know the people you're outsourcing to will do a good job
do you research or get reviews so you say start with someone hourly how do we how do we find a good person sure sure
so yeah i'll get into that a little bit uh that's a good question uh so my hiring process what i like to
do is first of all for these hourly people uh there's there's a lot of places you can
go but i'll drop a couple places here so the biggest one that's kind of the most famous
is upwork uh and that's where you can hire hourly people um
another one that we've been using a bit uh recently that's been really great as well is called free up and
yeah uh they're kind of uh they kind of do similar to upwork but they they have
a curated they curate a little bit more for you so they control a little bit more
who delivers the services yeah yeah so so that that can be quite helpful and uh we recently did a
hire with them and uh have been pretty happy so so that's that's been well but uh you
know that can save you some of the the trouble i guess
i think i've lost your audio there
suddenly dropped and i have no idea why no settings or anything changed okay so uh we are back on
facebook live i've got jesse back hopefully you guys can hear me um i'm just gonna go on to facebook
uh give me a second here jesse whilst um fortunately we can edit all of this out for the podcast
and i will um i'll just let the guys know we've uh we've restarted
okay yay sean you can hear us okay which is great
um so sean's back okay so uh hopefully people will come
and find us again let me just share ah
i don't want to share to that
lauren hansen haha thanks but appreciate that oh dear technical technical issues
what can i say um let's just share now
and we'll give people a few seconds here to to rejoin us
okay very good so um [Music]
okay good now we're back phew all right thanks jesse thanks everybody for
rejoining us uh people are rejoining now uh and i'm getting mocked mercilessly in
the comments which is fair enough i wish i could tell you why that happened but it just anyway let's not go there so
jesse we were talking about um before i uh got cut off there we were talking about
um how you source uh your um how you source people owling
you talked about up work and you talked and you started to talk about free up yeah so
uh we'll we'll start with upwork so with upwork you know you're dealing with a gigantic
pool of people so uh this is everything from the bottom of the barrel
to all the way to top-end uh western people as well so uh upwork has
really kind of become a huge gamut of talent now yeah uh so that the good thing about
that is that there's a huge gamut of talent the bad thing is that you know you get a lot of a lot of uh
applications and a lot of raff so there's a lot of dirt to sift yeah exactly so so
back to the the question here uh what whether it be with upwork or hiring from
anywhere uh what i like to do is give people a test a real test so you know this this uh
idea of of uh you know people's resumes and of course that's useful and everything but until they actually do
the work you know who cares where they went to school or or what prestigious company they worked at
if if they can't do the task that you want them to do it doesn't really matter you know so you have
you you create a test which you then upload to the site and people complete the testing you
judge them on the basis of doing that yeah so this is not every applicant these are like the ones that you've
you know so maybe like three people four people per position or whoever comes in that you think actually is a
valid looks like a valid candidate right um i mean what tests would you give them is it a complex test do you pay them for
that test i definitely pay them for the test um and it's usually something that'll take like
two to four hours maybe okay um and you know of course it depends on the position you're hiring
for right and then uh what i like to do if it works out is i like to give
all the people that i'm considering the same task so something like you know this is an
action and usually it will be a task of something that i actually want done
uh but i will i have them all do the same tasks so then you can actually compare apples to apples
you know um and you can find out if if there was because otherwise if you give different
tasks then maybe there was a hard part in one of the tasks that you didn't realize and then
you think oh this person's just an idiot but no actually it was hard and they would have all missed it or something you know what i mean
so yeah i like to give the same task and again it depends on what the project is
so let's say it was the podcast editing right so fine you have them edit one podcast but you have
all three people edit the same podcast you know not different ones let's see what comes in that's
interesting give them the same instructions this kind of stuff and then you can also compare their uh
actual cost to do it so the hourly rate also kind of matters kind of doesn't because
you know if this guy's an hour and this guy's an hour and this guy's an hour and but you know depending on how long
it actually takes them to output the work you know this is back to thinking about output you know yeah and so then you can compare
oh well maybe the guy that was an hour got it done faster than the an hour guys so even
you know you can then say oh well the total cost here maybe he did a great job and he got it
done in less time so it's not always about race to the bottom for hourly rate you
know that's definitely not helpful that's uh something that a lot of people get caught in is they
think like oh outsourcing low cheap save all this money you know which you definitely can save money
but you know if you if you just dive to the bottom of the barrel you're probably gonna have a bad
experience because first of all you're also new to outsourcing so yeah
you know and then if you hire someone else who's new to being a freelancer it's a recipe for it to go wrong isn't
it and this is where people get burned i think and go oh that just doesn't work so yeah yes they hire someone for two
dollars an hour to do some tasks and and then it ends up being a failure and they say oh all these guys are idiots
and we they barely speak english and and we can't communicate well yeah you hired the the bottom person but you know
hire someone for you know an hour and and you'll you know then
then things change you know yeah that's right so yeah sort of like that the task
give the the tests compare the tests and then you can make them know that
you've given them a test yeah yeah you say okay i'm going to give you a test task like you're one of the final candidates
like i liked your resume i liked the conversation we had or something so i'm going to hire you for a paid test task so you hire them at
the rate and you give them that and you so they know and then it's great and then they're paid for it so they don't feel
like oh man this guy is trying to get me out of free work because a lot of people do that and freelancers are aggravated
about that yeah and this is why you pay them because they're much more likely to do it while i'm right okay yeah and whatever you know for you you spend
a few hundred dollars to make sure you got the right person it's a very good investment for you right so it's you you go and find
someone let's say to do the podcasting you find someone the guy that actually is doing our podcast editing tim um
we outsource to him he's going to have a heck of a job tonight let me tell you uh but tim i'm not looking for somebody else but i am curious
is going to be sweating what's going on um do you stick them with the same person or do you
do you kind of do you go and find other people do you have like two or three people that would do the podcast
um i try to i try to bring in the one person and kind of turn them into a
team member you know okay and maybe that team member only works for me for five hours a month to do that one task
yeah but i try to you know nourish that relationship instead because it's a lot of work to
go back to the drawing board and find the longer they're with you the more they get to know you the idiosyncrasies
and and so on so i mean shawn's been busy here in the comments which is great he's
obviously got a lot of questions um how do you avoid dishonesty or scams
well i mean again starting with the hourly and starting with upwork is a good way
to start because you with upwork they actually have a time tracking
software okay that that they have to like clock in with their
computer and it actually takes screenshots of their computer every minutes of what they're doing
oh wow and it will if they're not like active it clocks them out so it's like
minute increments of billing so you only pay for actual work time okay
uh which is pretty cool because then you can actually pay them a little bit more than you might have been paying someone else
who is just a freelancer just roughly billing you by the hour and you know
then they're getting also truly paid for their actual time that they're putting their time in
too so it's it's a two-sided thing but then how do you not get scammed is you know you look over
the screenshots and you see were they on youtube the whole time or were they in the editing app right yeah and what i've found a lot of people
there's a lot of controversy about these these tracking apps and and that uppercase and there's a
bunch of third-party ones if you're not working with upwork uh i i found with any any
good freelancer you will know within the first couple of weeks probably within the first couple of
tasks yeah whether or not you i mean i never i never look at those screenshots
after the hire because or like after the first like week or month or something because
once again you start looking at the output and then it doesn't matter you know and then the good freelancers
are honest with that stuff and and you wouldn't know right away when you do the test and one guy took hours and the
other guy took two hours and then you know you can go see what he did and spectrum isn't it because they need to
be like everyone's done two ones done it's alarm bells are going to start
ringing right yeah yeah and and you'll know right away i mean there's there's a lot of professionals
that i mean everyone just is trying to earn a living right and there's a lot of people that have been
uh doing this freelance stuff for a long time and they're they're working hard and doing a great job you know so
have you ever then had bad experiences yourself i mean a lot of what you're talking about sounds like
this is born out of your experience have you had yeah definitely tons of times like uh you
know you will inevitably hire people or at least attempt to hire people that are bad at
what they do or don't aren't a match for what you thought they were going to be or uh you know this
the scam thing doesn't really happen like that's just not part of it like i mean maybe you'll bring someone on and
even with upward you can even you can even uh dispute those hours so
uh how they work is is uh i think the the weekends on sunday at midnight and
then you have until thursday to dispute the hours and then that's when you get billed for that week
so it's also kind of handy because it all auto bills so you don't have to worry about getting
making the payments and dealing with invoices and the freelancers also safe because they don't have to
worry about collecting money from deadbeat employers right so it works out
really nice that way but you you have that that window so uh you know again the scam thing is just not a lot of
people think like again this is how if i'm not looking over their shoulder where you kind of can look over their shoulder with the
apps yeah yeah so it's kind of my experiences from what i understand
from what you've just said tend to be around um hiring people that aren't maybe the right fit or the right skill level that
and i guess the beauty of what you're doing with how um hiring audi is you just stop that you go and then start again yeah yeah
and so then you know i i generally recommend you start like this way and then you can kind of work your way up
uh so again uh one thing to kind of bring up is aside from upwork is the this uh free up
company that that we've been using a little bit they take some of that guesswork out for you so
uh they have a very similar business model uh but they vet everyone so they're kind of
pitches that you know you only get the one percent and so they actually you put up the job
post and then they just drop one or two people in your lap and then they say this is a good person like interview
them try them out see what you think you don't like them we'll give you another person so uh that that has a lot of potential as
well and then after this it once you have a little bit of experience managing these kind of
people and this kind of stuff then is where you might want to have look into hiring people more like salary
based you know so whether they take the person the freelancer you're hiring alien would you make it a more permanent
thing with them maybe if you need that um but i'm just kind of talking more of a
general you as an experienced employer outsourcing employer remote employer i should say
uh you know i'm just saying start with hourly before you dive into full-time and part-time salary
people so that you get to learn how to manage someone that works for you two hours a week instead of right
like it's it's a lot of tasks and work and management to get all that stuff we
talked about earlier in place so how do you manage someone that works for you just two hours a week
is it just your emailing you're just wanting reports yeah yeah mostly email or with uh we use
project management system so you know whatever you use some people use you know whatever trello or base camp or you know this
kind of stuff and then you just assign tasks like once you kind of get in the groove usually we start out with email
just simple and then kind of move them into the system once they're you know a little more vetted and we
know that they're going to be more part of the team and then it's very clean i mean a lot of people like to do all this uh
you know slack and daily stand-ups and all that kind of stuff and uh you know once you get more of a
team and they're more hours and this kind of stuff that kind of culture part of it can become very helpful but
you know when you're starting off and you're just doing this smaller stuff it's it's pretty straightforward you know you you it's it's about
defining what you need to be done and then you just you know you send them that assign the task to
them and say okay like here's our new podcast like you know uh this is this is how it's
going to be edited and then they turn it back to you and then that's that's it you know and or you you know
go back and forth about the edits or or whatever this kind of stuff you know but again at the beginning you're going to need more communication
to kind of zero in on things yeah because they are remote that they need
all that extra so um i take it you've hired people
um remotely all over the world yeah definitely would that be a correct assumption and have you found that there
are certain countries which work better than others or is it it's
not about interest it's more about depends on what you're looking for so there's been certain regions that have
kind of emerged as leaders in certain categories
uh and now the kind of new emerging area is actually the west which is kind of funny
because we started by jumping away from that so like this talking about the moms at home that like
used to be the career woman has all these skills that she's not putting to use like that's this new available category
right uh but as far as the the you know the other like non-western countries kind of the
big ones are so uh here the philippines is a big one uh and the philippines kind of thrives on
things that you need english as your first language for so you've got a lot
of native or almost native english speakers here so we're talking about stuff like
customer support or uh content uh writing or like
assistant stuff like how you said your pa was here you know this kind of stuff uh anything that has to do with the
phone or uh any customer service or uh also creative work is is good for here uh any any of that more
kind of personal stuff that uh that that especially with the english and also the thing about the philippines is
uh versus a lot of other uh regions their culture is
more western influence and is closer to the west so while there will still be a culture
gap uh you know the influence here of the music and and the the movies and
just culture in general that like the pop culture of the west is very alive here and
you know while you think that that doesn't matter like if you're hiring someone for a social media management it does matter
like the the the little jokes and the and the the right the right emoji that
kind of you know i don't know these things like those little cultural details they matter right yeah they matter so yeah i think
and one of the things i remember when i was um when we had the the thing going on with
the lady in the philippines somebody said to me you should pay them for months out of the year
they sort of had this you pay them one month twice was it december you paid two yeah yeah so uh here in the
philippines again this would be only if you were hiring them full time uh that they do uh what's called th
month uh a lot of countries do that actually in panama when i was living there they have th month as well
um and it's essentially a way for it's like a creates a savings
account for them sort of but you know you as an employer you just build that in your head to the salary and then
you know christmas presents and and the end of the year stuff like that but i mean when you're dealing with this hourly stuff this is
not really going to be on your radar yeah which is where you start and warm yourself up it says here in my um in my outline
jesse we've got copywriters and productized services um what's smacking my microphone maybe
that's why it stopped working earlier um but what what do we what do you mean by that let's
sort of get into that a little bit sure sure sure so uh quickly one little last point there
uh that i'll slip in about the the regions uh so philippines for
that kind of stuff copywriting actually uh is something that you can get here as well
yeah um but then anything that's development uh any type of development is eastern
europe uh so uh there's a really good site that i can recommend there for hiring
programmers but this is going to be more for full-time positions or part-time positions not hourly it's
jobrack.edu um yeah so so that's a that's a good one
for hiring from eastern europe and and we love to hire from eastern europe for development uh just really good coders
really good work ethic it's it's great so that and then uh yeah so now back to
copywriters and productized services so uh copywriters uh
you can hire here in the philippines or now in the west as well so then i'll
drop one more uh place that's good to hire remote people if you're hiring part or full-time and
there's a lot of westerners here which is really good is dynamite jobs it's dynamitejobs.com
they have a probably the best remote job board
that's more of like a job board versus like a freelance marketplace so again if you're and there's a lot of westerners on there
so if you're looking to hire a copywriter or an editor or a project manager and
you want someone from the west or that you know here from the philippines that's very western fluent
uh that's a really good spot for that so and is that an hourly place or is that uh more salary-based more salary-based
yeah okay so uh yeah so uh anyways kind of yeah
moving into copywriting and stuff so these days i mean content is king right and especially now
uh it's it's the way that everyone's driving traffic and and it's really the the way to do it so uh
one thing that we've been seeing a lot of is just hiring out your own copywriters uh to start developing your
own content or now they're kind of emerging a lot of these productized services uh and by that i mean services where you
know you pay more fixed rates like you know this many articles for this price or this kind of
thing it's more of like a it's kind of like an agency but a productized service is where they take what's traditionally a
service product and they turn it into traditionally a service and they turn it into a product yeah so instead of
paying this hourly thing they say oh no we do this many articles for this much or whatever so
i don't have any specifics to offer on that yet for for sources but uh we're working on some partnerships uh
for that maybe so uh maybe we can put some uh offers together for you guys
for that as well yeah it'd be interesting to see because i've seen that more and more it's like um
you're heading back to what you said right at the stop where you need to think about output and productize services is basically i'm paying you
four or five blog posts i'm not paying for hours it takes to do them i'm paying you for the
the output in fact i say to the guys you know in our agency in our consulting business
one of the worst things that i think we can do is sell an hourly rate is to sell ourselves an hourly rate
you know bucks an hour bucks now whatever the hourly rate is i think that's a really tricky sell because
if you're paying someone for an hour's worth of work and they only work minutes you're not happy do what i mean whereas
if you if you focus on selling outcomes and the onus on me is to deliver that outcome as
best as i can in the time frame that's the most efficient that i can and actually outcomes for me seem to be
an easier sell i don't know if you've noticed that or if that's just me it's trending huge right now
i mean i've seen so many agencies that are now pivoting into productizing and so it's
like just deleting the entire agency model they don't do quote requests anymore
that you know it's just no we just do these four things and this is how much they cost and it's
add to cart you know and what's so cool about that model is it allows the
service provider or the agency or the productized service agency or whatever you want to call them
to really hone in on their processes and make that really efficient so then
they can start to increase their margins while at the same time the product gets better so and this
isn't just for copywriting i mean this is for everything you know so uh you know there's stuff
out there for design and for marketing all just every aspect of stuff this is just all
over and i'm a hugely for it we've been using it a lot uh and it's it's really cool
and it and it also gives agency people that are providing services a way to actually scale
because they can start to really hone in on this and get really awesome at that one thing instead of in
general as an agency you got to be kind of like pretty good at a bunch of stuff you know uh so yeah very very cool
uh trend that's emerging right now and uh yeah we've been using it for all kinds of stuff
so let's talk that because we started talking about copywriting you can get copywriters in the west you can get them
in the philippines um i said right at the start you're the co-founder of drop-in blog
right um so let's talk about this sort of content aspect of it so i can obviously go and
outsource my copywriting um and use those sites you mentioned you know and
um at work free up what was the other one dynamite jobs um and use those sites that you
mentioned but but why would i why would i want to do that i think it's a great question so you've
obviously written this drop in blog system let's talk about that
sure so i mean just you know if you think about your e-commerce uh platform or or wherever whatever
you're trying to sell right uh you know you need to get customers right so if if you're running your own store uh
you need to drive traffic and so you know the the easy way to walk in is to do paid traffic and that's what most
people start with right and the great thing about paid traffic of course is that you get results
today right but the bad thing about paid traffic is you have to pay for it usually yeah yeah a lot of money yeah
uh so the good thing about content marketing is that over time you can start to build that
organic traffic and replace or augment that paid traffic and then eventually have a
bunch of free traffic that's coming in that just you know essentially prints money for you right
uh and so it becomes quite important uh and what we've seen become really
popular with that is you do the paid advertising and then you know what keywords work so you don't have to
do the normal keyword research write all this content and then see what happens and hope for the best if you do the paid stuff first you
already know what's coming in that that works and is converting for you so then you say oh great like here's
this keyword cluster that is just crushing it for me but i'm paying four dollars a click to get these
people to my site and it's killing me and then you say okay well maybe now we need to put together a
content plan to try to fill up the rankings with our
results so that we can drive traffic into our e-commerce store and you know a lot of people are
short-sighted so that that sounds like a lot of work and that's a long time from now and and it
is it takes a little while but you know if you're in this for the long game and you want to win you'll see anybody who's serious about
ecommerce is going hard on content and that's because once you fill up that search engine
rankings like you know the the traffic just flows in forever and so uh yeah so that's that's the deal
so we kind of wanted to solve that uh for a number of platforms so originally uh dropping blog it's
basically a blog product to put on a website that is not built in wordpress so uh there are a lot of ways you can
make websites that are not wordpress and usually if you want to add yeah usually if you want to add a blog to
them then you end up having to install wordpress in a subdomain and then you have to manage two systems and
all of this kind of stuff so drop and block solves that problem we're our own blogging platform and we just do
blogging where wordpress wow great it does everything which is sometimes great and
sometimes a real pain so uh drop and blog just does the
uh blogging part and it does it very well and we kind of fit into almost every
platform we're agnostic so uh back to to the topic at hand here
when it comes to e-commerce we just recently released a app for shopify and we dropped right
into the shopify existing yeah and i was i was stoked about this because when we had the pre-call and we were talking
about this she just launched it on shopify because if there was one there's one complaint i hear more and
more about there's there's probably three or four key complaints you hear about shopify but one of them definitely
is that their native blogging system is just pants right and so you've got
every man in his dog who knows what they're talking about where uh marketing is concerned going do
content marketing is flipping brilliant and then everyone who's got a shopify's like oh yeah that's genius but how do i
do that and so the net result was like you say a lot of people would set up a blog on a subdomain so
blog.myshop.com rather than which has seo implications doesn't it it knocks you down the rankings a little
bit so it's not as good as doing it on the main domain um right and so with your system
if you're on a shopify site and you want to do blogging well they should definitely check it out because you've actually made blogging easy
for shopify right yeah it's uh it's a much better platform than what they have
built in i mean for shopify you got to realize that the blogging platform that they have that's just a thorn in their side they
don't care about blogging they they care about e-commerce and they do it very well yeah right and then everyone says
oh but we need to content markets today okay we'll whip together this thing and you know they've barely made any
updates to it since they started it you know uh so we kind of decided to flip that on
its head and build a really great blogging platform uh that that is very simple and clean
and has all the features that people need and you know we made it for example that you can inject products directly into the
blog post which you can't even do with the built-in shopify platform which justifies known
logic yeah in fact any ecommerce site where you write a blog post and you cannot embed the product that you're talking
about in that blog post to me that that never made sense as an e-commerce site owner germany it was
just yeah it's kind of right
so it's kind of got bad and then also we have like a built-in seo analyzer that that you know most people don't know
everything about seo and it's it's a lot to keep up with so we kind of cover the basics for you where you can
kind of put in your keyword target and there's a couple meters that tell you like oh you know you should put that again in
your title or you should add it into the this part or you know just kind of it's like a kind of guide to helping people
that don't really have the yeah yeah agree to try and get better at yeah even
even if you know it it's just nice to have it all figuring it out for you so you don't have to just remember oh did i put that in the
alt tag you know whatever like it just kind of does it for you uh so with those things combined it's
been a real win and everyone's loving it in shopify so it's it's uh quite useful for for people and
it's been fun for us to be developing that community because we've had dropping blog for quite a few years just kind of
people putting it on custom sites and uh you know we work kind of out of the box with many
platforms even like uh other e-commerce like uh like big cartel or or some of these smaller ones and
stuff we just work out of the box for those guys but with shopify we did a real full app
deep integration and that that's been live um for a number of months now um yeah
about two or three months now yeah and how's it going so far it's been fantastic actually you know
we're not from the shopify world so uh you know i've worked with it a bit
and i know it and it's it's i like the system and so it's this
was kind of our first like uh dive into that community you know and
uh it's been great you know uh the users are welcoming uh they definitely have questions
and and ideas and and lots of stuff happening so we've been we've been hitting it hard and kind of
adding little tweaks and and trying to accommodate people uh with their ideas and also like
developing a lot so it's been it's been pretty fun and we've been really well received so it's been very exciting actually so
what's um what's some of the things you've learned about the shopify community you're new to it what's the
what's some of the things you've kind of got oh i would never have guessed that well one thing that i i've i've noticed
is that a lot of them are just kind of new to marketing uh so they they have they have their
ecommerce store for whatever reason and you know where you know a lot of the
the internet nerds that we're used to doing with it they think marketing like you know where a lot of these guys they
they're more sales you know or product makers you know it's like oh uh you know we recently had a girl who
has a jewelry store who signed up a physical she has a physical jewelry store in san francisco
and you know so she has a physical store and then she added the shopify store so she could sell online
and now she's starting to look into content marketing you know and it's like her she doesn't know a lot
about internet marketing and so us kind of seeing like oh wow having this seo
analyzer has been so helpful for her where she can kind of walk through and this kind of stuff and so it's kind
of helped us solidify our onboarding and make it easier and we've just kind of
it's forced us to look at our product and try to make it as simple as possible and easy to use as possible
as best as you can yeah yeah yeah i've always found that key with software
you've got to onboard super well right i mean just super well because if people are paying for it
i think we're able to be a little lazy with uh when we're dealing with the more uh developery community you know
this is a little bit less it's not a developery community so we we had to kind of dumb it down a little bit but which was
actually great we should have done that before because i'm sure we were losing business from our regular customers that
thought it was too techy or something you know so now this has really uh you know catapulted
us to the front of simplifying everything and making it really uh just dead simple to use you know
okay so um for someone who's new to content marketing and the whole seo
thing then um and it sounds like a daunting experience um what would be some of your top tips
on on getting started there i would say you know start out with
putting together some keywords and just thinking about you know what what would you search for you know
and if you're already doing paid ads then like i said before that's kind of
the easy way that you can already see what's been working but if you haven't got that far
you know you can do some light keyword research and you can start to put together a plan based on things that you people
think people would search that you want to come up for right and then then you know put
together a basic plan and start writing out that content or hiring someone to write out that content
and then you know put together a plan that that you know it's not just today right content marketing is a long
term play so you know you need to sort of six months down the line haven't you i
think that content yeah yeah because it takes a while to create the content to publish the content for google to
pick up on the content this kind of thing yeah and obviously there's a big category but it's one of those things where you need to start
now and you need to be consistent so just you know you need to put out content and you need to put out content that is
relevant to the searches that you want people to get to your site with relevance community and like you say for me
consistency is key with the whole content acting if you can't do it consistently and this comes back to one of your
original points actually if you're not good at content marketing but you know you need to do it this is
one of these i i ideal things which you can outsource um and sorry to build a remote team they
can do the copywriting they can do the seo research um you can outsource the graphics to get
all that done they put the whole thing together and um you know you're involved with it but the majority of the work is done
by a team you've outsourced which is super cool um and that just works super listen
jesse i'm aware of time um and uh how incredibly early in the
morning it is for you right now um just want to say thanks really got a lot out of this i've got lots of notes
i'm going to be checking out all those websites we will link to all the websites that you mentioned in the show notes if people want to grab
them jesse real quick if people want to get a hold of you if they want to get in touch with you
what's the best way for them to do that sure uh well you can always check out
drop and blog at dropblog.com uh or search us in the the app store on
shopify uh if you wanna get in touch with me uh you can check out my personal blog at showbird.net and
we'll put that in the show notes as well yeah we'll put all those links there showbig.net is where you're blogging which is cool
uh listen jesse it has been an absolute pleasure to chat with you my apologies again for the
blip we had the technical issue in the middle um it all seems to be working well now um which is great uh
thanks everybody on facebook for the comments and making fun of us when it did all go wrong that's okay uh it's been
it's been real fun jesse really really appreciate it thank you so so much for your time but thanks a
lot for having me on matt really appreciate it it's a lot of fun yeah it's great thank you okay
so i hope you enjoyed that interview with jesse wasn't he fab uh just sharing all his insights and
wisdom on outsourcing i don't know about you but i got a lot of notes out of that and we
will put all of my notes in the show notes uh to this podcast we will of course
edit the video to take out the technical blip in the middle and if you're listening to the podcast wondering what was going on we had a technical blip
that's all you need to know um make sure make sure you subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your
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for listening uh do subscribe do get in touch head on over to mattedmanson.com to
get the show notes and all the links for today's episode all that's left for me to say is thank
you so much for being involved thanks for being a part of what's going on and i will see you in the next show
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