It’s also the most fun.

Don’t be afraid to put a significant amount of mental energy into your headlines…

Your title is what audiences recall, even more so than the content itself.

It’s what’s displayed in the search results and their bookmarks menu – setting the stage for the entire blog post.

I invite you to create a word document with about 100 headlines for inspiration and reference it anytime you’re creating new post titles. Alternatively, you could just use the 110 headline templates in Traffic Domination.

Straight up, if your headlines sucks, your posts won’t get viewed and your site won’t keep as many visitors.

10 Post Titles Guaranteed to Get YOU Results

1. Classic How-to

A lot of popular blogs and websites have discovered formulas that deliver results every time.

One headline formula that’s been incredibly effective for more than a century is the classic how to. This is a great way to increase engagement, just be sure to deliver on your promises.

They don’t even necessarily need to start with the words “how to” to be a how to headline.

“How to Have a Healthier and More Productive Home Office”

“10 Step To Successfully Outsourcing Your Online Business”

“21 Ways to Dominate Youtube: The Ultimate Guide”

2. Identify and Solve a Problem

One of best ways to get new readers is to Identify and solve a problem with trigger words.

The top companies use emotional triggers in nearly every headline – another classic style that’s withstood the test of time.

You’ll notice major companies like Cosmopolitan, DailyMail and Yahoo using this style often:

“6 Instant Confidence Boosters”

“Parenting Guru: From Chaos to Access”

“Gene Breakthrough Restores The Sight Of People With Inherited Eye Disease And Could Save Thousands From Blindness”

3. Make A Statement

Sometimes we get writers block and can’t think of a clever headline… This is where making a direct statement is the easiest and most effective way to engage your reader. 

“Twitter Goes Public: 21 Things You Should Know”

“Tips That Show Anybody How To Make Money Online – Guaranteed”

“Thousands Already Make Millions Online And So Can You”

4. Strike A Note Of Controversy

Blog posts that have controversial titles grab more attention.

Riding the wave of controversy is good for blogs that want to pull audiences in, get them emotionally involved and commenting on your site.

“Why All Guys Cheat, Fresh Insight”

“Which One Deserves To Die?”

“10 Reasons Civilization May Collapse Because Of Organic Foods…”

It’s a very effective tool for generating attention. Just try not to land on the wrong side of an issue or be disrespectful.

You don’t want to offend your primary audience unless of course you’re trying to not make money.

Remember, you want to pull readers in not push them away.

5. Shorter Titles Are Great

Concentrate on keeping your headlines to the point.

People like short and sweet and have limited attention spans – especially online!

“No Cellphones – By Law”

“Rob Banks Legally”

“Fat Makes You Thin”

Try to avoid wordy headlines as they dilute your message and distract from the point of your post.

6. Ask Questions

Using a question as a title is an excellent opportunity to get people to click through to your post.

When people spot a question in a title, they’ll automatically think of a response. It’s natural…

“Are You Too Clever For Success?”

“Want To Immediately Reverse All Your Health Issues?”

“Six Types Of Investors – Which Group Are You In?”

Increase the chance the question resonates with your audience by being certain it’s relevant to your demographic.

An easy way to do this is by installing a survey plugin like YOP Poll or FluidSurveys and asking what type of posts your readers want to see more of.

7. Use Headlines That Offer Explanations

Explanatory headlines make things instantly clear to readers by doing exactly what the name suggests, explaining something…

“How I Doubled My Money With Facebook Ads”

“For At Risk Youths, Learning Digital Media Is A Luxury”

“New Shampoo Leaves Your Hair Smoother – Easier to Manage”

Sometimes it pays to have breaking news in the title itself.

When you turn your news into explanations, your audience knows exactly what they’re getting into before they ever start reading.

8. Go For An “Intrigue” Style

Write a headline that makes people do kind of a double take when they read it.

Make them wonder and ask if it’s even possible.

National Enquirer is notorious for this…

“Father Goes For Kidney Treatment – Leaves Hospital As A Women”

“How Jack The Weakling SLAUGHTERED THE DANCE FLOOR HOG!”

“Wall Street Getting Kicked In The Face By Asian Techs!”

9. Try A “Finality”

Another way to generate interest is by using finality style (power) words like ultimate, best, exclusive, only, guaranteed et cetera.

If you can deliver after somebody clicks the headline, you’ll almost certainly earn a new reader.

“The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Online”

“Every Internet Entrepreneur Regrets Not Doing This Sooner”

“This Blog Post Will Make You More Money Guaranteed”

10. Craft A “Top List”

This is one of the simplest formats to follow, and it’s ideal for SEO and getting ranked in the search engines for the more competitive terms.

Put the topic first, ideally optimized for popular search terms, and then use a “emotion-provoking” description.

Numbers grab attention and tell your audience you’re an authority. It lets them know you have something specific, concrete and real to offer them.

“24 Rules I Follow When Creating Successful Websites”

“5 Ways to Make More Money Online – Even If You’re Just Starting Out”

“Top 10 Facebook Advertising Mistakes To Avoid”

These types of posts get us over 100,000 visitors to this website every month, click here to learn how.

Headlines are a critical element because they’re what draw the reader into the body of your post.

Recognize what posts captivate you and start a list of the headlines that compelled you to click – I bet you’ll notice something strikingly similar about each.

Identify that “something” and use it to your advantage.

If you want to learn more about how we get millions of visitors to our sites every year, I recommend you read the following posts:

• 7 Lessons From 50 Blog Posts That Send Me The Most Traffic
• 101 “B.S. FREE” Ways to Drive More Traffic To Your Website
• 9 Reasons Why You’re Not Getting Search Engine Traffic

The post 10 Article Headline Examples That Got Us 10 Million Readers appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Check out these blogging resources!

33 resources and tools for bloggers looking for their next viral post!

Sometimes, contagious content takes you by surprise.

Sometimes ‘ordinary posts’ do go viral.

But they are the exception.

Those bloggers who have regular viral posts have specific strategies and tools they use.

In this post we will share some of the best!

After all creating content that’s consistently engaging, popular and even viral, cannot be left to chance!

Dishing out epic content is an art, and like any other art, it can only be mastered through practice.

The more you practice, the more SUCCESS you will have!

To put them into context, let’s say you’re writing a blog post entitled ’20 Richest Teen Entrepreneurs Online’.

How could you make this blog post stand out?

Viral Content – Find Trending Keywords

Finding the right keywords to attract the most readers can be time-consuming. Simple research using the Soolve tool can be carried out across any number of platforms of your choice to display keyword suggestions based on your requirements.

Simply input your keyword phrase (i.e. ‘teen entrepreneurs’) and check what various search engines, social media platforms, online retailers and other platforms can come up with. You can save your searches and compare with previous results, or even check if your current keyword phrase has made it in the top Internet keyword list for that day.

Get Keyphrase suggestions with Soovle

For Viral Content – Consider Foreign Readers

Similar to Soolve, UberSuggest is an online tool that allows you to select the keyword language and then adds some characters to your keyword phrase to show you the effects of a slight variation in it.

This free tool displays suggestions based on real user queries from across the globe.

Check Social Search Engines

Spezify is a social search engine that brings up a mosaic of images related to your keyword.

The phrase ‘teen entrepreneur’, for instance, currently brings up an Instagram image of an Endevvr Summer Incubator event, where teen entrepreneurs meet to exchange ideas.

Get Involved With Online Discussions

LinkedIn (B2B networking site) users are well-informed and more knowledgeable when it comes to business than most members of the public. Opinions and information are shared freely in industry group discussions that can be accessed by anyone with a LinkedIn account.

After installing the Discussions extension in your browser, whenever you google a keyword and click the Discussions button, you’ll be able to browse everything that Google could come up with on your topic based on comments on review sites, question-and-answer sites, etc.

For a bit more oomph, search for posts on Quora, Yahoo! Answers, and just about any other question-and-answer website where there’s some mention of your topic.

For Viral Content – Add Fun Facts

Let’s stick with the teen entrepreneur example.

When you’ve come across the names of your teenage biz wizzes, but would like to spice up your content with some fresh bits of news or fun facts, you could use Topix.

Much of the information you’ll find online is geo-specific, it’s great to find a marketing research tool like Topix that allows you to set a specific location to get local results in a flash.

Check Tweet Counts

If you’re going to write about teen entrepreneurs, you might as well know what to expect in terms of Twitter competition. There are several ways to go about this. To begin with, you can use a tool like keyhole to check the tweet count for each one of your subjects, or for the topic, in general.

You can also check posts from Chinese, Japanese, Russian Twitter users, among others, and find influencers for your topic.

Install Browser Plugins

If you’ve heard of SEOQuake, you know that this browser plugin will not only allow you to set your own parameters to how your search results show up, but also to find specific types of content in certain parts of the news pieces, such as the word ‘infographics’ in the body or title of the article.

Use Velocity Graphs

Mashable and similar websites have had great success posting simple visual guides to show the rate at which a certain content is picking up momentum for example.

You can easily create graphs with something like CreateAGraph or FastGraph.

Scan Blog Directories

Look into Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, and Yahoo Buzz.

You may even want to give ListVerse a try.

You can pick up important bits of information from the blogs themselves, as well as from their comments. They can serve as indicators of the best time to publish your next post.

Increase YouTube Views

If you’re adding video content to your blog post, it pays to research other videos on the same topic. These videos will have the same reach you’re looking for.

With the YouTube advanced search operator ‘intitle:’ and the filter and sort tools, you can easily figure out what the masses are more interested in at the moment, as well as pick up some helpful background information on your teens.

Visuals

If images speak louder than words, then you don’t want them to scream out ‘copyright infringement’.

To that end, give Flickr, FreeImages, FreeRangeStock, Pixel Perfect Digital, Unprofound, MorgueFile and StockVault a try, and see which is more to your liking. Try to always optimize your images with alt text.

There are various other websites you can use to create your own visuals in exchange for money or completely free. Canva offers myriads of images, templates, icons etc., some of which are complimentary. PicMonkey is similar, but it also allows you to edit your images.

Get Reliable Opinions

Whenever entrepreneurs are in the spotlight, you can’t go wrong with The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, Wired, and similar magazines that enjoy impressive global circulation figures and rely on a steady stream of online subscribers. Some journals may require a subscription before they grant you access, but it’s a small price to pay in return for access to some of the brightest minds in the industry.

Use Accurate Figures

When you’ve pinpointed your main sources, remember to check your facts. Using figures from Business Insider articles is fine and dandy, but double-check everything before you put pen to paper.

Even figures in a Forbes article are subject to change, and it always pays to check the date of the article for comparison with other articles on a given topic.

There are net-worth registers that provide reliable information for a fee, such as Rich Register.  And Forbes is regularly updated.

Find Influencers

There are various ways to find key influencers for your specific topic, and to monitor their posts for similar content. One is Realtime, another is Topsy, and yet another is the Content Strategy Helper Tool. GroupHigh will help you whizz through millions of blogs for a specific topic, and Bitly will allow you to pinpoint the people sharing the most popular posts. When you find your influencers, get in touch, establish some level of trust, and then ask them to share your content.

Quiz Your Users

Quizzes are a fun way to engage your readers without dishing out expensive interactive features.

There are various tools to help create and embed them into your blog post, like PollDaddy, QuizzRevolution, Gnowledge, Quizworks, etc. Some are free and some come at a cost.

Use Thumbnail Previews

It goes without saying that if you have a captivating image to add to your blog post, you may as well create a thumbnail version of it to share on social media platforms. The thumbnail is, after all, the visual element that’s likely to hook in most readers.

WordPress and other content management sites allow you to automatically set a thumbnail for your post.

Time it Right

The Zimmerman Agency recommends publicizing the blog post at 9 a.m. and lunch time, which is when people turn up for work but have a few minutes to spare.

Buzzsumo claims the best day to publish an article is Tuesday, while Hubspot social media scientist Dan Zarrella claims people tend to share and retweet more on Friday, according to a recent blog post.

Contently, on the other hand, recommends publishing content often, rather than saving it for a certain day of the week.

Avoid Exaggerations, Fluff & Filler Content

There’s a limit to how much a writer can embellish a post without going over the top.

Anyone with aspirations to create viral content should know that limit. A good writer will never cheapen their work by writing content without substance. Therefore, don’t expect reliable sources to share content with ‘filler’ text, as they like to call it in the industry.

Keep your sentences and paragraphs short and concise.

Don’t Plagiarize

Never quote or cite without revealing your source.

Be it text, image, shared opinion or number, its author must be given credit for the work put into making it public. It goes without saying that the citation can’t be taken out of context and used to further your goals, however positive they may be. They must be true to the author’s perspective and intentions.

Systemize Your Content

The best way to save time on your posts is to automatize your writing to the very last detail. Google ‘letter count’ and find a website that will count your characters for you.

This comes in very handy with meta-descriptions. Then look for websites that will handle title capitalization for you, whichever style you may be using, i.e. Chicago Manual, AP Style, Oxford, etc.

Create something you’re confident in and proud of.

Potentially viral content can be created any time. If you get the marketing right, you can leverage the internet to achieve a viral effect regularly.

Remember, people engage with and are more likely to share content when they discover it through friends and people they trust.

If you liked this, check out how I get 100,000 visitors a month with top list articles.

To our success,

David Aston

The post How To Find Content For Your Next Viral Post appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

But not all KPI’s are the same as they vary from company to company and depend on priorities.

Whether you’re running an online or offline business, you should regularly monitor revenue, cart abandonment, cash position, receivables, payables, and basic accounting reports. If you sell physical products, you can utilize an accounting system such as QuickBooks or FreshBooks to monitor your cost-of-goods sold and daily gross-profit.

You’ll also want to incorporate and monitor pay-per-click advertising reports, social media metrics (likes, shares, clicks, comments etc), email marketing results, and marketplace sales (such as internal, Cj.com, Clickbank, Amazon or eBay) to identify areas of needed improvement.

Any measurement can become a KPI as long as you have a means of capturing the data.

12 KPIs For Successful Online Business:

#1. Monthly, Quarterly & Annual Sales

We track many metrics based on our current top priorities.

One thing that doesn’t change is tracking monthly, quarterly and annual sales (and the breakdown of which channels the sales came from, which products sold most in which geographical areas and WHY).

We keep a weekly scorecard, based on the process outlined in Traction by Gino Wickman. I highly recommend the book and resources at http://eosworldwide.com for anyone with a leadership team in their company.

If people are paying us every month, they must be happy. Revenue allows us to pay our developers so we can build more awesome features to make our customers even more happy.

#2. Email List Activity

The size and quality of your email list can reveal much about your business. From the number of people opting in daily, to the number of people opening our messages and actually reading them tells us where we need to focus our efforts.

Major email services such AWeber and iContact will automatically track most important KPIs…

Here are the key performance indicators to focus on with email marketing:

• Open rate
• Bounce rate
• Purchase rate
• Click through rate
• New subscriber growth

And here are 14 ways to make more money from email marketing.

#3. Customer Acquisition Cost

Another important KPI is the cost to acquire a customer. This usually comes into play when you’re paying for traffic and means you’ll need to know the exact cost to acquire each customer or risk losing a ton of money advertising. 

You can discover how much each new customer costs by dividing the total marketing costs by total amount of new customers during a specific time period.

For example, this is how you’ll measure Pay Per Click advertising costs… 

PPC results vary by industry and competitiveness, but for examples sake, let’s assume the following:

• Total Click-Throughs: 5,000
• Total Campaign Cost:  $40,000 (includes set-up, landing page design, ad expenditures, etc.)
• Conversion Rate:  8%

So out of the 5,000 who clicked your ad and were taken to the landing page,  400 visitors converted to a “sale.”  We know the cost per acquisition is $40,000/400, or $100, which is $100 less than our initial threshold.

#4. The Traffic Sources Of The Sales

The main things that we track, are sales and the traffic sources that are driving those sales. OntraPort is something that helps organize and structure all of this data so we can then implement new strategies accordingly. It’s supercharged business and simplified many lives.

The Traffic Sources metric measures which traffic sources are driving visitors to your website, and provides a comparison of each of those sources. Search traffic, for instance, can be analyzed according to the landing page and associated keyword rankings; referral traffic can be broken down into categories such as social referrals, blog mentions, or service listings.

#5. Number Of Daily New Users

Set a goal for the year! Divide this number by the number of days in the year to give you the exact number of visitors you’ll need to hit daily in order to reach your goal. 

Analytics is a great tool for tracking daily traffic – and it’s free. 

The best way to increase the number new website users is by frequently posting high quality content.

#6. Unique Customers

Revenue is always the de-facto KPI for most other businesses, but we’re also believers in Vishen Lakhiani’s “smart number” methodology. The smart number we use internally is monthly revenue / number of new unique customers that month.

If this metric goes down month to month, it indicates we either acquired less new customers or generated less revenue overall, both of which are signs something is “broken” or needing attention. 

#7. Incremental Sales

The incremental sales KPI compares your marketing efforts to increasing sales revenue over a specific period of time. This is a consistent way to measure your marketing return on investment as it demonstrates new revenue that can be directly attributed to a marketing campaign.

Here are several examples of return on investment.

#8. Sales Funnel

The sales funnel analyzes your customer acquisition process, revealing how leads discover your product or brand and, more importantly, how they eventually become customers.

Analyzing conversion rate from one stage of the funnel to the next is the key to a successful sales funnel. The strength of the funnel lies in the ability to highlight your strengths and weakness. For example, you may have great brand awareness due to large web traffic, but your ability to convert leads into sales may be weak.

If you need help setting up a successful sales funnel, there’s no better resource than Brian Moran’s Get 10,000 Fans!

#9. Goal Completion Rate

Goal Completion Rate or GCR for short, measures the number of users completing a specific marketing goal, such as signing up for a webinar or subscribing to a mailing list. Goal completion rate is an important part of your sales funnel as it suggests your conversion rate from the awareness stage to the consideration stage.

#10. Keyword Performance

The Keyword Performance metric measures your keyword rankings to understand how effective your SEO efforts are at driving organic traffic to your website. Keyword ranking is a leading indicator providing valuable information about your ability to improve existing rankings or rank for new keywords.

Ahrefs is the tool we use to track all our keywords and I would highly recommend it.

#11. Social Media Interaction

The Social Interaction KPI measures the ability of social media campaigns to create positive user engagement. When measuring social interaction, remember not all social interactions are created equal. For instance, you could argue retweets are more valuable than favorites on Twitter because a retweet ensures content circulation.

At the moment, I can tell you that each new subscriber we get on our photography project is worth a bit more than $3 after 45 days, and that’s valuable information to know when you’re investing $10k plus a month on growing subscribers with FB ads.

You can use software such as Buffer to track, automate and analyze all of your social media marketing.

#12. End Action Rate

The end action rate KPI or EAR for short, measures the effectiveness of marketing your campaigns by monitoring the final action taken by your users. The EAR  supplies your team with actionable information about your marketing campaign performance.

12 Key Performance Indicators To Track Right Now

1. Track monthly, quarterly and annual sales and the breakdown of sales origin, what sold most in which geographical areas and WHY.
2. Monitoring how many emails you send compared to how many are opened.
3. Track customer acquisition costs by dividing the total marketing costs by total amount of new customers during a specific time period.
4. Track sales and the traffic sources that are driving those sales.
5. Set an annual traffic goal and divide this number by 365 days to give you the exact number of daily visitors needed to reach your goal. 
6. Know your smart number – monthly revenue / number of new unique customers each month.
7. Incremental sales measures the contribution of your marketing efforts against increasing sales revenue.
8. Monitor your sales funnel because this analyzes customer acquisition process to reveal how potential customers discover your product or brand and, more importantly, how they eventually become customers.
9. The goal completion rate or GCR for short, is a metric measuring the number of users completing specific goals, like webinar registration.
10. The keyword performance metric measures your keyword rankings to understand how effective your SEO efforts are.
11. Monitor the final action taken by your users in order to determine the effectiveness of your marketing.
12. The social interaction KPI measures the ability of social media campaigns to create positive user engagement. 

Now you know what each of our key performance indicators are, but what are yours? Your success depends on you and now you know exactly what to track in order to achieve it.

“It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises but only performance is reality.” – Harold S. Geneen

Read more: ‘9 Things Most Sales Pages Are Missing’

The post 12 Key Performance Indicators For Successful Online Business appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

In 2011, at just 21 years young he founded a high end biking boutique, Worldwide Cyclery. Since launching, Jeff and his team doubled business every year, pulling $3 million in sales in 2014.

They do everything from custom bike builds to changing broken spokes; and do it for pros and weekend warriors alike.

Here’s why you should listen to Jeff:

• Earned $3 Million in Sales in 2014.
• Over 6,000 positive testimonials on Ebay.
• 25 year old official dealer of some of the highest quality biking brands in the world.

Jeff knows exactly what it takes to turn your passions into profits.

Today we’re thrilled to have him shed light on what exactly it takes to be a successful physical retailer in a digital world.

Meet Jeff…

Jeff Cayley Interview 

You’ve got over 6,000 positive testimonials on ebay alone. What sets Worldwide Cyclery apart from so many other retailers out there? 

It’s definitely a combination of a lot of things, but customer service is the big reason. We want our customers to be more than satisfied, and always go the extra mile to make them happy — even if it means that we lose money on some sales. Having phenomenal customer service in my eyes is a way to build a sustainable business and maintain a loyal customer base.

Worldwide Cyclery was founded in 2011 and has seen nonstop growth; in fact with 8 employees, you nearly cleared $3 million in 2014. What’s been the biggest factor for your continuing success?

I think the biggest factor is our focus on progression. We are always thinking of ways to make every aspect of the company better. From the smallest of changes to the largest, we constantly step back and look at how things are being done. Then we come up with any different methods we can use to make us more effective and more efficient.

You cater to a global customer base and offer everything from chain lube all the way to custom bike builds. How do you go about shipping and handling all of the merchandise that you sell? 

On the shipping side of things, good software plays a big role. ShipStation is an amazing platform we use to manage all of our shipping logistics in one place. As for handling, we’ve set up a properly organized warehouse with defined systems and protocols in place. But of course a lot of credit goes to the knowledge we have gained over the years.

The majority of your business is online, but you also have a retail shop. How has having a shop influenced the way you do business? 

Having a physical place customers can come to is great. It mostly benefits the nearby customers, but also shows the legitimacy of our company — not only to the customers, but to the manufacturers and distributors as well. I really believe omni-channel retail is the future, so it is import to us to be wherever the customer is at any given moment. If they want to walk into a store, buy directly on our website, buy on Amazon, eBay, etc., they can — because we are where they are.

At Worldwide Cyclery, you specialize in high end gear and are an official dealer of every brand that you sell. How’d you manage to form a relationship with each of these unique brands?

Because we are riders ourselves and have been involved in the industry for years, we know which brands are reliably the best, and which ones we want to sell. With that knowledge, we spent some time building the legitimacy of our shop, and then went after the brands we wanted. If you are doing a great job as a retailer, any brand would be happy to have you sell for them.

What are your favorite 3 online tools, why?

• Xero – Hands down the best cloud-based accounting system for a variety of businesses, but it works especially well with our model and is a vital tool for us.
• Google’s array of products – Gmail, Google Calendar and Drive are incredibly useful tools for anyone or any business.
• ShipStation – Their robust cloud based shipping platform is phenomenal. I could spend hours talking about how much time it saves us. Simply, ShipStation is one of those tools that gives us the ability to be as efficient as we want to be. A must for any company that ships products.

You’ve doubled your business every year since 2011, what’s your secret to this success?

I feel having a great team of people — each with the right mindset — is the biggest factor. It is unreal what you can accomplish when you find and partner with the right people. If you want to have a great company that is enjoyable to work at, turns a profit and keeps going up, you simply need the right people on the team.

If you could go back to 2011 when you were just getting ready to launch, what would you do differently? 

A ton of things! The amount I have learned about business since then is unreal. The biggest mistake I made was just being the typical small business owner. I didn’t really know any other way at that point than to just do everything myself. The first year I was the typical super stressed-out, overworked, one-man-show business owner. The most important thing I have learned is that you cannot run a business without learning to delegate. You should find qualified people, spend as much time necessary training them, trust them and make it a team effort. If someone has a talent for sales and innovation, he or she shouldn’t be packaging boxes or cleaning windows.

As a former professional mountain bike racer, you’ve undoubtedly made a ton of connections in the industry. How much of a factor were these connections when you decided to launch your company? Are you still actively networking in the race community? Do you reach out to riders directly or just show up at events?

I did create a lot connections while I was racing, but surprisingly they didn’t do much to help the business. The racing side of the sport and the average rider/consumer-of-bike-products are kind of segregated. Almost all of the people on the racing side of the sport don’t know anything about retailing products, or how that aspect of the industry even works. They just get sponsorship dollars from brands and go about their racing. One thing that did help was learning a lot about the products, since my friends and I were using them all the time.

I do continue to travel to some races and network in the race community, because many of my close friends are still racing or working in that part of the sport. I am sure those friends will be some good help when we decide to put some marketing dollars in that direction.

You’re quite a marketer and implement a lot of the latest internet marketing tactics on your website. What worked well and what didn’t work as good as you expected?

There are several things that are working really well for us; to name a few:

• Clean, easy to use website with responsive design – (www.worldwidecyclery.com)
• Free U.S. shipping on everything – No one on earth wants to pay for shipping, so a good retailer should have the math skills to factor the expense into their margin. We have done that and people love it.
• Being on every sales channel – That is easier said than done, and requires some good software. However, it is vital as a modern day retailer to have your products for sale on every channel possible. Get on all those third-party marketplaces, post items on industry forums, have a great website and top it off with a physical store front.

Some things that did not work so well:

Social media. I don’t know if it is just our specific industry, but we have not been able to quantify much from advertising there. Of course you need to have a social presence — and a good one at that. But for us, marketing dollars there seem to do very little. I personally like quantifiable marketing strategies, ones with hard data that back them up. If you don’t have data substantiating your marketing strategies, you are just gambling, and probably not even knowing whether you win or lose. That isn’t the kind of thing a small company can afford to do.

I’d say that mountain biking is definitely a passion of yours. What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs looking to turn their passions into a legit business? 

If you like business, then DO IT!

Mountain biking is a huge passion of mine, but second up is business and entrepreneurship. That is what has helped me succeed. You can’t just be passionate about something, you also have to have a passion for business to some extent. Because although you will be in the industry of something that is your passion, you still have to run and build a business. And that is no easy task. So if you have no interest in the business side of things, I would suggest just getting a job within that industry. That may be a little blunt, but I feel it is the truth. 

What’s the best advice you have ever been given?

“Where there’s a will there’s a way.”

My Mom said that to me about ten years ago, and for some reason it runs through my head every time I feel stuck, overwhelmed, at a dead end, etc. It is just a simple saying, but it can move mountains if you believe it.

The post Jeff Cayley Interview – How A 25 Year Old Mountain Biker Earned $3 Million Online In A Year appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

For months, even years, we weren’t 100% satisfied with our shopping cart solutions. We tried everything from Clickbank and PayPal to JVZoo, you name it. But none of the solutions gave us exactly what we needed.

We needed to setup and run split tests with the click of a mouse, we needed to be able to quickly create and list products, we needed to be able to create upsell funnels and needed to provide affiliates with custom affiliate links…

Nothing covered all bases in a simple manner.

To make it worse, most solutions charged us a percentage for each sales. The more we worked, the more we made, the more they took. 

At our wits end and on the verge of creating our own solution, last October we got an email from Brian Moran inviting us to beta test his new Shopping Cart solution, SamCart.

After logging in for the very first time, I had our first product created and listed for sale within the first 30 seconds – no joke.

Today I’m going to show you the 10 reasons why you should dump your current shopping cart solution and get started with SamCart today!

10 Reasons You Should Switch to SamCart Today:

#1. Ease of Use

Your current shopping cart has 20 different steps just to list a product.

With SamCart, you can create and publish your first product in under a minute – literally. Their simple design and user friendly interface make selling digital products online simple.

Here’s how to list your first product with SamCart:

Step 1: Open an account.

Step 2: Log in to the dashboard.

Step 3: Click ‘Products’ on the lefthand menu.

Step 4: Click the blue ‘New Product’ button on the top right of the page.

Step 5: Fill out the fields that popup (Product name, Short description, Thank you page redirect, Billing Frequency, Price).

That’s it, you’re all set!

#2. Split Testing

Not one of our former Shopping Carts offered the ability to easily split test our checkout pages and sales funnels. As any successful digital marketer tells you, split testing is your bread and butter.

This was one thing that immediately stood out about SamCart, and like everything else about this shopping cart software, they made it easy to do.

Here’s how to setup split tests with SamCart:

Step 1: After creating and listing your products, select one that you want to split test.

Step 2: After clicking the product you wish to split test, locate the “Upsell Funnels” section under the “Customization” tab and select a funnel from the drop down menu.

Step 3: Click “Split Test” and add other upsell funnels you want to test between.

I told you it was easy. 

#3. One Click Upsells

Again, this was something that used to take valuable time out of the day. We always have an upsell that adds value to our products because this enhances user experience as well as conversions.

SamCart nailed this too!

After making a purchase, customers are presented with an upsell allowing them to add a product to their cart without providing all that order info again.

Look how easy it is to create a 1 click upsell:

Step 1: Click “Upsells” on the lefthand side of your dashboard and then select funnels from the drop down menu.

Step 2: Click on “Upsell Funnels” on the top right…

Step 3: Click the blue “New Funnel” button, add your funnel name and a short description, then click “create funnel.”

Step 4: Select how many upsell upsells you’d like to add from your product list and then select “enabled”. You’ll have the option to add up to 5 upsells and 5 downsells.

That’s it! Your customers will go through the upsell funnel just the way you set it up. I’m telling you, everything about SamCart is awesome!

#4. Branded Checkout Pages

As it turns out with many of the other carts out there, the checkout pages look nothing like your brand. This can be intimidating and sometimes means the difference between a sale and a bounce.

Every one of SamCarts landing page templates is customizable, and designed to convert. No more generic carts – your checkout page is an important part of your marketing strategy. 

#5. Multiple Templates & Variable Elements

I’d bet the shopping cart you’re currently using, only has one style of checkout page. Am I right?

That’s lame.

SamCart provides you with several high converting templates to choose from. Each template is designed by marketing professionals with several years of experience in digital sales and a firm grip on what sells in today’s market.

On top of that, most of the elements on your checkout pages can be customized, this just adds to the effectiveness and convenience of split testing.

And since you’ll be split testing everything, this is a great way to truly see what works for your demographic to increase sales.

#6. Fully Responsive

A major chunk of our traffic comes from mobile devices. And this is something that’s likely also true for you. In 2014, there were more than 1.2 billion mobile users surfing the web. Mobile is becoming a bigger and bigger chunk of your online traffic. 

Every single SamCart checkout and upsell funnel is mobile optimized. So there’s no reason to reduce conversions because people are trying to act on offers they saw while checking gmail on their phones. Brian told me that many customers are already seeing 10-30% increases in sales.

Is your current checkout page mobile optimized? If not, you’re losing money.

#7. Quick Page Loads

People have very short attention spans online, and one of the easiest ways to lose sales is by having a page that takes too long to load.

I noticed that with other shopping carts, I’d find that some of our checkout pages took more than 3 seconds to load in some cases. That’s ridiculous.

Quick page loads allow users to smoothly move through your funnels. If things take to long to load people will get distracted, lose excitement and possibly the desire to purchase all together.

Page load speed should NEVER be an issue, and with SamCart, it’s not.

#8. Guarantees

Guarantees prove that you’re willing to stand behind your product. While it’s standard to have a guarantee on your sales page, it’s not so common to see them on checkout pages. 

This gives your customers a sense of security and can be the final selling point that enables your user to complete the sale.

Every SamCart checkout page comes with a section to post any guarantee you have.

#9. Security

With so many instances of hacking online and even in the media these days, it’s more important than ever to secure your own as well as your customers data. Every SamCart checkout page is SSL encrypted, meaning your customer’s data will be safe and you’ll have one less thing to worry about with your business.

#10. Bonus Section

Having the right bonuses to accompany a good product can make or break your offer. 

When you have a customer on the fence, oftentimes a reminder of the great product and offer they’re getting is enough to finish the checkout.

SamCart nailed this too, as each checkout page comes with a prominent section dedicated to reminding your customers of exactly what they’re getting. 

There you have it, the 10 reasons why you should make the switch to SamCart today.

Click here to get started.

Enjoy,

David Aston

-Team IncomeDiary

The post Your Shopping Cart Sucks – 10 Reasons You Should Switch to SamCart appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Daniel Cid has spent well over a decade securing people’s websites, so they don’t have to. The Founder/CTO of Sucuri specializes in intrusion detection, log analysis (log-based intrusion detection), web-based malware research and secure development.

He’s known for creating the free open sourced OSSEC HIDS (Intrusion detection system) and founding Sucuri. He’s also the co-writer of the Host-Based Intrusion Detection book.

Here’s Why You Should Listen to Daniel:

• Sucuri defends against 33M+ monthly attacks.
• Protects more than 250k+ of his clients websites per month.
• He’s fixed several security holes for IncomeDiary and monitors our sites.

What are the most common rookie mistakes website owners make when it comes to keeping their sites secure?

The most common mistake is that they underestimate their risk and the importance of security. In fact, security is the last thing in their mind when pushing a new site live.

We hear this all the time:

“Why would anyone try to hack me?”

“That would never happen to me.”

This lack of appreciation and understanding of their risk when they put something online, leads to bad security practices that only change when they actually get hacked or attacked in some way.

Before we used Sucuri, some of our sites had a lot of downtime due to viruses/malware/hackers etc. Then we got Sucuri and it stopped happening. What is it that Sucuri does that works so well, that other software and plugins don’t do?

Security is the core of what we do as a business. We think, live, and breathe it daily. When you pour that much energy into any one thing you have the opportunity to identify and address a number of problems.

We invest heavily in security; this includes hiring some of the brightest minds around the world to build out our research, response and remediation teams. We’re united in the one ideal that website owners should be able to operate online safely against those trying to destroy what they’ve built. This level of focus allows us to stay ahead of the threats. It’s the devotion to being the best at website security that is our biggest differentiator, and in my opinion what makes us so effective.

We are a company owned and operated by security professionals first and foremost, not by marketing, sales or even developers. This keeps us true to our values and ensures that everything we build is addressing a real website security problem.

Your company is a leader in website security, when people are told they can’t do something, they want to do it even more. How often do hackers take on the challenge of taking your site down and what measures do you have in place to prevent it?

We are attacked very often and I won’t go into technical details around what we do to protect ourselves.

However, I can talk about our thought process when thinking about security: it comes down to keeping things simple. Complexity is securities worst enemy; complex things break in complex ways. We always break our systems down into simple, manageable solutions that are isolated and work independently (a concept known as Functional Isolation).

We also operate under these assumptions:

• That someone else is reading our emails.
• That our private content will be shared publicly someday.
• That our data will be lost.
• That our servers will be compromised.
• That our software has security bugs that we do not know about, yet.
• That someone is trying to hack us right now.
• That someone, smarter than us, is trying to hack us. 

It may sound paranoid, but it guides our security decisions.

Once you think about them, you will understand why we encrypt and backup our data. Why we remove old content that is not in use anymore. Why we use multiple layers of security (Defense in Depth). Why we use a WAF to protect our sites. Why we monitor our logs. Why we restrict our employee’s access to internal systems. Why we set up honey traps for attackers. Why none of our servers talk to each other. Why we use multiple hosting providers. The biggest thing we do is place security first before convenience; it’s often the very opposite for most organizations, convenience often trumps security.

It is all about reducing our risk and increasing the chances of us detecting and blocking an attack before it can do any damage.

Most of the time sites go offline it’s because they have been hacked. Every second your website is offline, it’s losing money. What is the very first thing you should do to get your site back online if this happens?

Breath. Calm yourself down. Don’t panic or do something crazy.

Once you’re calm, it’s amazing how much clearer things become. I honestly recommend talking to an expert in the security field to help you out. My company, Sucuri, focuses on website remediation and cleanup, but there are other people that can help as well. Unless you are a hard-core developer or a security professional, do not try to do it yourself. This isn’t meant to be a shameless plug, but the reality. Security, contrary to popular belief, is not a Do It Yourself (DIY) project; we have to learn to leverage professionals in their respective fields, there is a reason they exist.

A business owner wants nothing to do with their security issues; they want to focus on running their business. A website that is infected can cost you a lot, a website that stays infected or continues to get reinfected can be catastrophic.    

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu with some of the team at the Sucuri 2014 Team Meeting. Exercising the mind & body.

Time machines are real, you travel 5 years into the future. What new website security problems do you see happening?

The core security problems will still be the same: Someone will still be trying to hack you, profit from your work or take you down. 

That has been the constant for years and won’t change. What also won’t change is that the bad guys will keep trying to exploit the easiest path. If your application is secure against SQL injection (SQLi), they will move on to Cross Site Scripting (XSS). Once the website is safe from XSS vulnerabilities, they will move to brute forcing or phishing. If all that fails, they may try to take your down via a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).

You use live chat on your site. So do we. How has it effect sales and support? Does is provide a positive return on investment?

One of our big focus these days is trying to humanize security. How can we humanize if we don’t have real people engaging directly with website owners? That’s where things like chat and phone come into play. It provides a mechanism for our new and existing clients to engage with us.

It also allows us to touch and hear directly from our clients, in the moment they are the most vulnerable: hacked, infected or under attack. That gives them assurance that we are here for them and working on a solution. And it also allows us to listen to their needs and make sure we are addressing their needs.

What has been your biggest set back and what did you learn from it?

So many setbacks, that it is hard to pick one.

In fact, I think that running a business is like a rollercoaster; it has many ups and downs. You have to keep going though, you can’t allow yourself to be distracted from your focus. Some clients will be upset some days, sometimes most days. It’s hard to ignore the squeaky wheel.

Employees will mess things up; growing pains are a natural piece of the puzzle. Yes, your servers will crash; your networks will get congested. You’ll likely underestimate the impact of social media, and it’s impacts; all of a sudden everyone has an opinion. Remember though, the fact that you have these problems is a good thing; I’d be more concerned if you didn’t.

The key to it all of this though is to continue to learn and push your own boundaries. Improve and don’t allow yourself to make the same mistakes over and over.  Repeated mistakes will kill your company.

Sucuri is one of the most important services we rely on, what are the 3 most important services & tools that your business relies on?

We are a remote and distributed company, with employees in over 19 countries; communication and tracking services are the ones we rely on the most. I would say Hipchat, BitBucket and Jira are the three most critical for us in our day to day operations.

What advice would you give to other developers thinking about creating their own SaaS business?

You have to be able to solve at least one problem that you users (clients) are having. People will buy from you to get that problem solved.   That’s how we started. People needed to get their site cleaned from malware and that’s all we did. That allowed us to learn our customers and their needs, before expanding our services and offerings. 

If you try to do too much to start at once, you will likely not do any of them well. It is better to start with a bicycle, than with half of a car that won’t start.

What’s the best advice you have ever been given?

Never stop learning. Work Hard. Do more than what is expected from you. Persist.

Thanks a lot for the brilliant insights Daniel…

If your website gets hacked, it will cost you a lot more than Sucuri will. Time, energy, and emotions are expended when you’re websites are compromised, we’re not just talking about finances. Great security means more profits and peace of mind.  

-Team IncomeDiary

The post Daniel Cid Interview – Defending 250,000 Websites From Hackers Every Month appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

His website is dedicated to everything kombucha and as it turns out, he’s quite the internet marketer.

Here’s why you should listen to Dave:

In a relatively short amount of time, he’s turned a passion into profits and reaches thousands monthly by  leveraging social media, blogging and eCommerce. His website getkombucha.com is ranked the #1 kombucha website, based on customers, subscribers, and positive reviews!

He’s done a great job of using the internet as a tool to build a brand and create a healthy (pun intended) passive income selling physical products. 

Today, we’re going to show you exactly how he’s done it, and how you can do the same.

Meet Dave…

Dave Lindenbaum Interview

#1. You sell a physical Kombucha making kit online. There are so many things needed to start selling, where did you start and how did you prevent yourself from being so overwhelmed?

Started small… like really small! 

I started out of my apartment and whoever my roommate was at the time got free rent to help me bag tea and ship, etc. The biggest “investment” was buying a logo for $55 which years later I realized resembled a cross between the HerbaLife logo and a marijuana plant!

My friend was working for breathalyzer.net and they had a Yahoo merchant account (I know!  yahoo has their own shopping cart!!!).. so that’s what I went with too. I approached it from what the objective was.. which was share this incredible discovery with others. This discovery = excitement, passion and the unknown… so really share all these positive emotions with others. I’d apply all these things I was learning at the time like SEO, eCommerce, sales, marketing… so I could see what worked and what didn’t and continue to learn even as I am writing this… not too much has changed!!  

2. Your standard kombucha kit has over a dozen different items, including:

• Certified lead free porcelain brewer
• Hand crafted wooden stand
• ONE Fully Grown Organic Kombucha Mushroom Culture – 6 inches in diameter
• BPA free bottles, etc.

How did you go about sourcing all these products, getting the best price, packaging it together and storing it?

Continuous improvement. Our brewers started out as a 5 gallon FDA bucket. I literally had my friend come visit me from NY and I had him drilling holes in all these plastic buckets! We’ve just recently upgraded our bottles. The way we grow cultures have been upgraded so that it lasts much longer when packaged long distances. 

Getting help from others has also been a huge help in making this all possible. One of my mentors is an ayurvedic healer and master tea blender, he’s the inspiration behind our boosters wealth of info in tea… I trained under him for 2 years.

We also work with a non profit called ARC Southeast Industries http://www.arcselac.org/ they allowed us to scale.. but more importantly, they take so much pride in their work.. they did a way better job than I ever could. We are a sponsor of their annual walk for independence… one of the best moments of my life was when we saw that GetKombucha.com was right under CocaCola on their shirts!

Only recently we began working with a fulfillment center. This took a very long time for a lot of reasons.. we are not shipping out just tee shirts! So it had to be a group that “got us”… these guys are incredible.. They also have the proper facilities that allow us to work with them.

As for finding the best price, I really have not placed my focus too much on this because I’ve been working with the same vendors forever… and sometimes you get what you pay for. My thing though, is not to get the best price.. but to know what the price is.

Example.. I love ARC because they charge per job vs per hour. The fulfillment center works the same per shipment vs per hour and it’s much easier to quantify. You can always get a better price later when you scale.

#3. Setting up a kombucha brewer can be quite complicated, what have you done to prevent your customers making mistakes along the way?

• Insane customer support – I used to personally deliver cultures to people and then spend the afternoon showing them how to set it up. I still personally respond to every email anyone sends me. And 95% of the time the only mistake is them not believing that they can do it, but I don’t blame them.. I remember the first batch I made.. I was like wtf! it’s a science experiment gone wrong  always push the envelope. I send snagit screencasts instead of typed emails.. they love this!
• Leveraged online media and technology- Took the top 50 questions I get asked most and made 50 videos answering each one. Then I hired someone on fiverr to transcribe each video…boom… a year supply of weekly videos and blog posts. This was something I sucked at and payed for dearly. 
• Building a community that helps each other – This was in the form of a Facebook group and an active Facebook page.

#4. You offer free shipping throughout the US, pros/cons? How has this worked out for you?

Too soon to tell.. Just recently started doing it. We used to charge shipping upfront and then had a shopping cart abandonment program that would offer free shipping on the 3rd and final response.. so it was good leverage.

#5. We love great domains here at IncomeDiary and GetKombucha.com is a great domain. How important has it been to have such a perfect domain for your business?

Glad you like the name! I don’t think it is too important now-a-days with the updated Google algorithms. But I was really, really into seo in the early days… almost to the point that I lost focus on so many other things… I’ve had branding growing pains recently on whether to drop the .com from the name or not.

#6. You use all the social media sites. If you could only use one for your business, which would it be?

YouTube. Not for SEO, but for credibility, for trust, for teaching, for selling, for building a relationship for authority, and for transcribing into blog posts.

#7. You do a lot of YouTube videos. If there is anything we know about entrepreneurs doing videos, is that they struggle. So often I’ve seen friends shoot 10 videos before they even perfected the way they said hi. What advice would you give other business owners wanting to shoot videos, but lack the confidence to pull it off in a timely fashion?

Set yourself up to win. Use my strategy of batching the shoot over an entire weekend and you’re set up for the whole year of steady content. How would you talk if you were playing World of Warcraft with your buddy you’ve known since middle school? If you know what you are talking about, it is much easier do tons of takes.. they’re free  sure you want nice production value… but do not use that as an excuse not to get going!!! Try different styles (bullet points, memorizing a script, interview techniques, etc) and see what works for you. 

DECIDE VERY EARLY ON.. WHAT IS THE OBJECTIVE

#8. I love how you implement lots of the latest internet marketing tactics on your website. What has worked better then you expected and what hasn’t worked so well?

It’s not the tactic, it’s the execution. When I follow through it works or when I find the right person to execute, it works.

#9. Time machines are a real thing. You can jump in one, travel back to 2007, what would you do differently?

I’d do several things differently, for instance:

• Would have hired a better designer.
• Hired a developer.
• Hired a virtual assistant.
• Deployed a fulfillment center.
• Wouldn’t have done everything myself.
• Invested more time and money in the business and myself.
• Would have held my business in general to a higher standard.
• Networked more, purchased more programs, joined more masterminds.

#10. From what I can tell, Kombucha is your passion! What would you tell other entrepreneurs wanting to pursue a business they are passionate about?

Kombucha is not my passion. Upgrading my belief systems in what is possible from life and sharing that excitement and sense of empowerment with others is my passion. Living life on my terms to pursue many  interests from playing guitar to being able to visit my family and vacation with my wife is my passion. 

The only reason I still get so excited about kombucha is because I get to live vicariously through someone who has just discovered it and now is purchasing one of my kits.. that feeling is awesome.  It’s like discovering your neighbor has never heard of the Beatles before, and you are the lucky one who gets to bring over Abbey Road and play it for them!

The post Brewing Online Success With Kombucha – Dave Lindenbaum Interview appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

In 2009 and armed with only a couple grand, Bryce Maddock opened the first TaskUs office in an old building on the floor above an elementary school in the Philippines.

Since then, he’s grown TaskUs to more than 1,500 teammates providing customer care and back office support to 60 of the world’s most innovative companies.

His company is committed to invest at least $25 million in the Philippines over the next three years, so that he can fulfill their mission of bringing meaningful employment to as many people as possible. It’s their goal to employ 10,000 Filipino people by the end of 2017.

Bryce Maddock Interview – CEO of TaskUs

Why should any business owners in 2015 outsource?

Do you know that President Barack Obama only has two suits – a grey suit and blue suit? Think about that: why would the most powerful man in the world only have two suits? To quote him directly:

“I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”

The President acknowledges that focus is critical for effectiveness. If he is worried about what suit to wear, he will have less attention to give to the things that actually matter. Organizations are no different. Focus is critical. To build the best product, come up with the most creative marketing program or write the most efficient code – but whatever it is you do, your organization must be focused. This means eliminating the distractions of back office work like content moderation for social networks or photo retouching for ecommerce companies, and reducing your internal customer service team to focus on only the most business critical items. In order to do this successfully, you’ll need a partner you can trust to deliver on these repetitive but important functions. 

Which is more important, price or quality? Are you able to achieve both when you outsource to someone you never meet?

The more time I spend in business the more I realize that you get what you pay for.

Outsourcing is not something you enter into blindly. I would never recommend outsourcing to someone you have never met face to face. At TaskUs we provide a U.S.-based Client Success Manager to guide our clients through the outsourcing process for precisely that reason.

Unfortunately, there are many companies who simply want to “do it cheaper,” and compromise on quality and process, but they quickly realize their mistake, as they are left to redo most of the work they outsource, while attempting to provide feedback to their outsourcing partner on how to improve. This often means the work takes longer than if the company just did the work themselves.

One of the reasons we are growing so quickly is because we believe it is possible to deliver great quality at a good price. We will never be as cheap as hiring someone working from home in India. So for us, the more important question is, “How do we deliver value?” We are really focused on being strategic partners to our clients. Our team challenges the status quo and looks for more efficient ways to do the same process, even if this means reducing the size of the team we have working for a client. On the customer service side, our team is fanatical about the brands we service. We work with a lot of fast growing, exciting startups that our teams in the Philippines know about and use in their daily lives. When hiring, we look for people who are passionate about the products we support.

That’s why we have such great loyalty. We function less like an outsourcing provider, and more like an extension of our clients’ team.

Most IncomeDiary’s readers won’t know this but we used TaskUs way back when they first started. We use to get you guys to do the research for our top list articles. Those articles have gone on to receive millions of visitors. What things can business owners outsource and get the best return on investment from?

Yeah, it is pretty incredible to think that you can outsource quality content with viral potential.

There are a lot of things that business owners can outsource. “Back office” outsourcing is worth considering for any repeatable process that consumes a lot of valuable internal resources. For some of our clients that can be photo editing, content moderation, lead generation or data management, for example.

These days we are also working with some of the world’s best brands to deliver high quality customer care for a fraction of the price of doing it in-house. We are increasingly the go-to partner for today’s fastest growing companies when it comes to customer support solutions, including phone, email and chat. We utilize that capability to help businesses find, retain and support their customers – so business owners can outsource a wide range of services, it really depends.

Each business has its own specific needs, areas of expertise and pain points. The best thing to do is to pick up the phone and talk to one of our Client Success Managers, in order to get the advice and support you need.

You have hired 1500 full time employees in the past 5 years. How do you work out who to hire? Are there any tests you use? For example, when we hired our last programmer, we asked that they use a subject line we mentioned in the job listing, if they didn’t use that headline, we knew they couldn’t follow instructions.

We take recruitment very, very seriously. Today we hire less than 8% of applicants. TaskUs teammates are responsible for our clients’ success and the continued success of TaskUs. We have a very structured and thorough recruiting process regardless of what role we are hiring for. We evaluate and test candidates for their ability to do the job they will be responsible for doing using specific skill tests. We also test for cultural fit and a range of other attributes including creativity, alignment with our core values, problem solving, communication skills, vision and leadership. Our interview process is multi-stage and very in-depth.

With all that said, because of our size, we have to screen hundreds of applicants every week. To do this efficiently we start with simple, quick screen mechanisms. The one you describe with the subject line is brilliant! We generally start everyone with a multiple-choice test that requires both Internet research and some creative thinking. This test eliminates more than 50% of our applicants, saving our recruitment team countless hours.

1500 employees sounds like a lot of experience delegating work. What’s your top tip for making sure an employee follows through on your instructions?

I love this phrase: spend 80% of your time hiring, so you only have to spend 20% of your time managing. If you hire the right people, management is so much easier. With that said, one of the biggest challenges in our business is the number of cultural differences between our U.S. and Philippines office. In the U.S. we are much more confrontational and in the Philippines, we are much more passive. To get around this I believe that face-to-face communication is essential, at least a few times a year. Get on a plane and go meet the people you are working with! Beyond that, I believe in clearly outlining a project, with objective milestones or metrics and deadlines. After you talk about it, document it in an email so that you can return later and say, “We agreed that this would be done by now – here is the email, what happened?”

How do you get customers to keep coming back time and time again? What systems do you have in place to encourage them to use you more and more?

We realized early on that the entire outsourcing industry was focused on the wrong thing. People started outsourcing to control costs, and I would be lying if I told you that this wasn’t the primary concern of most of our clients. But that doesn’t mean that cost is the only thing a customer cares about. In most cases, a very close second is the desire to maintain the same quality of service that they built their reputation on. Today, the entire outsourcing industry is in a race to the bottom, trying to beat one another by reducing costs. TaskUs is not the cheapest option and we never will be. But we are the world’s best outsourcing company for companies who care about quality, preserving their culture and brand voice.

We have a lot of younger readers who are struggling to decide between going/staying at university or working on a business. If you could go back in time, would you still choose to go to university or not and why?

I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer here. This is a deeply personal question. I graduated from New York University (NYU) and if I could do it again I would. Attending NYU gave me the leadership, critical thinking and business skills to accomplish what I have today. That said, attending college is usually incredibly expensive. I got a partial scholarship, packed in extra classes to graduate in three years (rather than the four it normally takes in the U.S.) and worked the whole time I was in school.

For some, a traditional college education is the wrong choice. But be honest with yourself. If you aren’t going to school and instead using that time to build a business or you’re taking online/alternative courses, then that’s great. But if you’re still sleeping in the bedroom you grew up in and spending most of your time on the couch watching TV, then a more structured education might not be a bad thing.

It’s so so so cool that you started your own charity called TaskUs Foundation that helps send kids in the Philippines to better schools. Tell us everything you can about this. Why are you doing it & what’s the long-term goal? What advice would you give to other companies that want to give more to the communities they work in?

When my business partner, Jaspar Weir, and I started TaskUs we had just graduated from college and were living with our parents. Our goal was to build a business that made us enough money so we could get our own apartments and maybe take a girl out on a date once in a while. It took us more than three years to make enough money to do that!

But once we did, we realized that there had to be something more. At that point we had 200 employees in the Philippines. These were people who depended on TaskUs to put a roof over their kids’ heads and put food on the table.

We thought long and hard about what we could do to further our investment in the communities that we were hiring people in. Education was the most obvious answer. To us, education represents the future. The goal of the TaskUs foundation is to empower the children of TaskUs teammates with the knowledge and access to build better lives than their parents have. Who knows, a few of them might even start businesses of their own someday.

You enjoy yoga, meditation and marathons. Do you think these things contribute to your success and how?

Absolutely. Meditation and yoga are a great way to stay grounded and develop the ability to focus as well as sit through uncomfortable situations in life. Both these practices keep me humble too.

As for triathlons and marathons: I believe in pushing my boundaries – but I am also very passionate about being efficient and effective. You definitely learn how to be both effective and efficient from endurance sports.

I should add that I’m not the only one who practices meditation. Our entire company has access to a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction meditation program and the amazing app Headspace, which we pay for as a company. We believe it’s really important to support our teams. We’re a dynamic company that is growing – fast – and our people put a lot of time and effort into their work and we support them in finding useful tools to distress and decompress. A growing body of evidence indicates that meditation not only does both those things, it also helps make employees more productive and engaged.

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You have given some great advice today, but what is the best advice you have ever been given?

Just yesterday I was talking to my dad. I was going over a long list of challenges that exist in our business today. Believe it or not, as your business grows, so too do the list of problems you have to deal with!

My dad looked at me and said, “Bryce, enjoy the challenges, you’ve earned them.”

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