Freedom from EMAIL BONDAGE.

I get 200-300 emails a day.

About 20 are ones I actually should read and respond to. And about 15 of those 20 I can have a trained assistant answer for me.

The others, are just auto responders, spam, viruses and scams.

I’ve been teaching about using virtual assistants as a way to bring about business leverage since 2007, you’d think I’d have this one “wired” by now, right?

Well, like most, I am stubborn and proud.

I thought, “Only I can answer my emails, this MUST BE THE THING I DO.”

What a fool I have been!

I’ve even read the Four Hour Workweek where Tim Ferriss talks about reducing email time waste by only checking it 2 times per day. But I ignored it and made myself “busy” with a Non-Money Making tasks. (Focus on the money generating tasks!)

Now, would you like to know exactly – step by step, what I did to liberate myself so I only have to read 10-20 emails
per day and not be drowned in emails?

Remember, I can train you to do the exact same thing – but the problem is – you’ll need someone to read and answer all your emails first!

I can help with that problem.

I actually can get you an email reading assistant or basically – whatever kind of assistant you need, provided by a happy and skilled worker from the Philippines.

WATCH WEBINAR SHOWING YOU HOW TO HIRE FILIPINOS

I have a team of 7 staff members now, many who have been with us for over 2 years now. They are fantastic workers, and all great human beings. We love our Filipino staff.

This year, I was able to do something VERY SPECIAL – I was able to send each one of our workers an iPod Touch.

Now they can text me, do facetime video chat, use mobile apps, and experience all the fun, music and games that the iPod touch brings. It’s basically an iPhone, just… without the Phone part.

Here are some pictures of my team showing off their brand new iPods [these cost a lot if you buy them in the Philippines].

So, you came here today to learn a lesson on email management, and you got a bonus too – that bonus was – TAKE CARE OF YOUR OVERSEAS WORKERS. They are FAMILY, treat them as such and they’ll work with you for a long long time!

Outsourcing Email Management

1. Create a new private email, that only your staff, friends and family know – don’t add it to any lists or newsletters. This is email is ONLY for personal communications.

2. Have your email assistant receive all your emails. You can do this two ways. (1) Forward all your email to their email address. (2) have the VA download the email to their outlook in pop email.

3. Establish rules for your VA to follow

• What kinds of emails can be deleted
• what kinds of emails are scams
• what kinds of email they can personally respond to for you as your executive assistant
• what kinds of email they need to forward to you for record keeping
• what kinds of emails they need to forward to you to answer personally
• 4 hour digests to send to you until they get the hang of answering all your emails

The trick is, you know everything, the VA does not.

So, if they are going to be answering your emails, they need to know what you know.

The only way they will know this is if you start CC’ing them on all your correspondences so they see the “tone and feel” of your writing style.

Also, your VA should send you a 4 hour digest, where they collect emails they do not know how to answer and send you the MAIN QUESTIONS in 1 email as a list every four hours or so. In the beginning, it’s possible you’ll miss an urgent email or two, but really… email should not be treated as urgent and if it is, start telling people to CALL OR TEXT you if things are really that urgent. Tell them you don’t see your emails anymore or if they are a close friend, give them your private email.

When you get your digests, you go through the email, and go question by question and answer them and send that email BACK to your VA to send responses for you. Don’t get fooled into thinking you need to send these emails yourself with you answering them to the originators, if you do, you’re back doing work your VA’s can do for you.

I found in emails, people just want ANSWERS, and they don’t care WHO sends them the answers. As long as they get the info they are looking for, they will be happy, even if it’s not from me personally.

Have your executive assistant/email reader, use a professional email tag/signature line saying something official at the bottom of all the emails they send for you, like…

Their Name

Executive Assistant to YOUR NAME

Email for Assistant/phone/skype contact

To make this work properly, just realize this is not a QUICK FIX procedure. It can take at least two weeks of trials and errors before you can truly walk away and know your virtual worker is gonna do the job just right and now you can focus on other more important money making tasks. Be forgiving and make sure to over communicate during the two weeks when you take yourself off email, so everyone learns as much as possible to be able to do their jobs the best way they can for you.

Resist the desire to “check email constantly”. I know it’s hard to get away from it, but you can do it, especially if you start doing other things you’d use your email checking time for, which produces better results for your business!

If you are buried in 200-300 emails like I used to be, using a virtual worker to screen, read and respond for you will save you at least 2 hours per day from time wasting emails and allow for them to answer for you simple ones that they can be trained to respond to.

If you need a virtual worker, email reader, blog poster, SEO link builder, article writer or other types of virtual workers, I started my own hiring system, using the same principles we’ve used to hire our team of 7 VAs from the Philippines for the last 4 years.

Make sure you spend 1 hour to review my free webinar, showing you how to get great workers at low prices to do all your hard and boring internet marketing work, including email management. Watch the Outsourcing Secrets Revealed Webinar.

Ryan Magin says, “YES!”

In a recent webinar/video, Ryan and Jeff show newbies the step by step simple system that shows people the REAL DEAL on how to make $100 a day online. You’ll use ClickBank.com and WordPress and that’s pretty much it!

Can you do this? Yes! Watch the video by clicking on the picture.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click on this link to sign up for coaching site, then watch the replay video in the link in the email you got.

JOIN JEFF’S COACHING PROGRAM FREE for 30 DAYS

Sign up for the Profit Offline Seminar – Tickets are $69.95 and prices increase to $1997 on June 13.

Some of the main questions I get are:

1. How do I know if my virtual assistants are doing the task right?
2. How do I know how much time they take to complete tasks?
3. How can I track everything really easily under one roof?
4. How can I know if I am getting screwed by deceptive workers?

We’ve been using Google Docs and having team members report a DTR (daily time report) on a spreadsheet each day. (free)

Recently, my project manager, Melody turned our team on to a new program called Time Doctor.

Time Doctor allows managers to see exactly what their team is working on, all at the push of a button. Managers can easily see a work in progress dashboard which shows everyone in your team, if they are online and what they are working on right now. This is one of many great Time Doctor features.

Project Managers have a different log in than do virtual assistants to keep things separate.

There are multiple time management principles that are used in the software to increase productivity.

Tracking how much time each person is working – every minute of the work day is tracked. This is not the same as entering a time sheet, as time sheets can easily be faked and the person can enter whatever time and activity they want. It is by actually tracking the exact start and finish time for each activity.

Tracking what your team is working on at all times - are they on a break, and what exactly are they working on. Priority tracking – the software helps the person to manage their top priorities and sends them daily to their manager. It also tracks what percentage of their time is spent on priorities versus lower priority items.

Ways for you to verify the information is accurate – there are multiple ways to verify that the person is really spending time on the activities that they say they are working on. This includes screenshots, recording if the person is using web sites such as Facebook or other potentially time wasting activities.

Reports for managers that show what their team did each day – Managers are aware of exactly how each team member spends their day. With Time Doctor, you have a much better idea of exactly how long it takes to complete each task.

Removing multi-tasking and interruptions - Multi-tasking is proven to be a very ineffective way to work as every time you get distracted, it takes several minutes to get back into work. The software helps to increase the person’s focus on their highest priority tasks, and remove distractions during this process. Visibility of priorities between the team, and team leaders – This means that as a manager you are immediately aware of all of the priorities of your team. You also know if your team are working on these priorities or not.

The importance of tracking the exact use of time each day - This is surprisingly not a normal business practice. It is one of the most powerful things you can do to increase productivity. When you track the exact use of time for the entire day, productivity will automatically improve. This kind of scrutiny makes it very difficult to waste time.

This is a great accountability check with your staff, knowing “big brother” is watching.

By using the  Time Doctor, one can easily see how better reporting and accountability will increase production and tasks should be getting completed ontime.

There is a free demo video on the Time Doctor site, which explains how it works in great detail. If you want to know if this might be a good solution for your virtual office structure, take a look at the Beta release of Time Doctor.

Warning: This is not for every business

If your virtual work force is in-front of their computers 70-100% of the time, then this will work great for you. Also, being “watched” or “accountable” at a deeper level will scare many Virtual Assistants away.

Let’s be honest here. I know some virtual workers work for OTHER people too, and HIDE it from their employers. Knowing they could be “found out” might mean they won’t work for you if you enforce this. You’ll have to evaluate if your virtual assistant is rocking it, and doing a great job, and they want to quit if you enforce this tool… is that something you are willing to risk? Again – it might be right for your company or it may not be.

Enforcing this upon new workers as policy should be easy, but if you are mid stream with a virtual assistant, who has become comfortable with your systems and reporting for several months, and then you all the sudden ask them to use this new reporting feature, it could cause some problems, or trust issues.

So make sure you smooth it out when you go into enforcement mode by telling your workers, you are using this program because time is money. And you want to keep track of time, tasks and talents with better accountability and reporting to make sure everyone is working at the top of their game. You would like to see your workers working at full capacity instead of “just getting by’.

COSTS

Many people will be excited to know the cost of this program is FREE. It is in beta though, and they programmers expect you to help them if you encounter any bugs by reporting errors. After December 2010, the program will no longer be free. So, as of the time of this post, you’ve got a good 6 month run to play with this time saver and implement it into your business.

7 ways that Time Doctor that can recover wasted time in your company

• Time Doctor accurately tracks every minute of the work day. View exactly how many hours each person has worked, and what they did. Employees will not waste time because they know their time and activities are always tracked.
• You will know what the top priorities of your team are at all times, and you know if they are working on these priorities This is actually the most powerful productivity feature because you can make sure that everyone is focusing on priority tasks.
• The software emails a report every week with a record of time spent on poor time use websites such as Facebook. Time Doctor prevents use of unproductive web sites during work hours. You can prevent use of unproductive web sites at work.
• You can log in at any time and see exactly what everyone in your team is working on. You can immediately spot if the team are working on productive activities, and adjust their priorities if needed.
• The software sends a daily report with a list of what everyone on your team did for the day and what they are planning on doing for the next day. This saves you time getting updates from your team, and makes sure you always know what is going on.
• Managers will get an email once per week showing how much time your team spent on emails, internet chat, a list of web sites they visited and software they used. Identify if your tam is working on product activities, and it their use of email is productive.
• Your company will receive simple but powerful daily time management tips to help train your employees to be more productive at work.
* Survey from Aol and Salary.com

Go to the Time Doctor website and download and run this program on your workers machines.

In the video, I wanted to remind you about 3 items:

• Boost Seminar and the Sell Out Expected any moment
• I’ll be Speaking at a London Seminar – Join me there this weekend as an Outsourcing Speaker the tickets for the London Seminar are FREE!
• Looking for coaching clients in London

Click here to view the embedded video.

Listen to Replay Audios and watch some videos from our Boost Seminar Speakers

Contact Jeff for an appointment in London. Or meet me at the London Seminar – Join me there

Reverse outsourcing is when foreign companies hire American workers, especially when a specific skill can only be found among U.S. talent.

People call it reverse outsourcing because normally, they assume the USA is the main user of offshoring and outsourcing jobs from other overseas nations. But remember, the United States is not the only nation looking for great workers who can do jobs better, faster and cheaper.

Sure, companies can — and do — hire low-cost workers worldwide to perform technical tasks and other back-end work.

According to ABC, they said “But in many cases, Americans have the edge when it comes to customer service and support, public relations, Web site content, branding and marketing to a U.S. customer base.” Let me know if you agree with that comment? Is that true? Post your comments below.

Watch the video for more reverse outsourcing info:

For more information about how reverse outsourcing can help your business, listen to Jeff’s free MP3 or CD. Learn his outsourcing secrets to save you time, money, and headaches trying to do all the work yourself.

I’ve made some additions/modifications to it, so if you want to see the original, just hit the link above.

As you may know, partnering with a virtual assistant may not be for everyone. Here are some things to consider before opting in for outsourcing as well as some great benefits for hiring a virtual assistant.

* Getting personal: If you’re squeamish about handing over personal information like user IDs and passwords, you may want to think twice about using a VA, or at least limit any personal tasks you hand out. But when you use Filipinos, I’ve found you can trust them with ALL your personal data and they protect it with their life. One of my friends has his team buying stuff for him with his credit card, all the time. Remember, Virtual Assistants want JOBS

* Tech issues: You may have to familiarize yourself with programs like ClientSpot or Skype in order to pay and communicate with your VA. Using tools like xoom.com to pay your VAs in the Philippines is easy. Biggest hurdle is that you may be an inexperienced marketer, trying to find a VA to do your internet marketing work. But, you don’t know enough yet to know if what they do for you is working or HOW it works. My suggestion is… FIND OUT… Work your butt off getting knowledge and stay laser beam focused on learning a technique. THEN pass it off to your VA as you’ll have a better idea what it’s supposed to do.

* Time investment: You’ll have to spend some time filling out request forms and signing agreements. You’ll also have to train your assistant, and there will likely be a learning curve before you get your work rhythm down. One of the best ways for training your VA’s is to let us do it for you. We have several trainings in my Train My Money Maker product. We only sell this via webinars.

* Language barrier: You’ll need the time and patience to be extra clear about your expectations, and keep in mind that slang or shorthand might be lost in translation. When you use Filipinos, they speak pretty good English. Most are totally fluent in writing and some in speaking.

* Time difference: Your VA may not be at your beck and call. If you need someone who’s available during US business hours, make sure he or she can accommodate you. The Philippines is 14 hours ahead of where I live in the USA. I stay up at night from 7:00 pm to 1:00 am working with my team, answering questions and delegating assignments.

Some useful sites

* International Virtual Assistants Association (ivaa.org)  allows you to post a free “request for proposals” outlining your needs, to which VAs can respond. Prices might be higher depending on where you end up getting your VA from.

* Find Virtual (findvirtual.com)  offers a virtual assistant directory that you can search according to criteria like pay rate and skill set.

* Alltop (Virtual-Assistant.Alltop.com) is an aggregator of virtual assistants’ blogs and Web sites.

* Assistant Match (AssistantMatch.com) is an agency that, for a fee, connects clients to assistants who’ve been screened and background-checked.

* Ask Sunday (asksunday.com) is one of the largest virtual assistant agencies. Others include Elance.com, GetFriday.com, Brickwork India (b2kcorp.com) Odesk.com, Freelancer.com and DoMyStuff.com.

* See my www.freeoutsourcingcd.com site for more information about outsourcing and hiring Virtual Assistants where I answer the top 17 questions that my students have asked me.

Hiring virtual assistants will really help you many the “tyranny of the urgent” stuff that you do each day as an entrepreneur, from mundane tasks, personal assistant work, and doing online marketing work for you.

Having an SEO company like the Minneapolis SEO Experts Trafficmills.com is also useful in doing all your SEO and SEM work.

• I don’t do BPO talks.
• I don’t do bookkeeping outsourcing talks.
• I don’t talk about corporate downsizing and the effects of the worker force being laid off.

My focus is to speak to Entrepreneurs, Solopreneurs, Small Business owner groups who are over worked and burned out trying to do the hard and confusing internet marketing work of their business.

You’ll see that I am a popular internet marketing speaker as well and what I can bring to your event is to help your audience grab some great take home ready content that will have them buzzing and think that you are the hero for bringing in a hired gun like me! Often I hear I am one of the more popular speakers at the events I speak at.

So, I am throwing my hat in the arena to be either your hired gun speaker or your free speaker, and I’ll be that guy who is known as the outsourcing speaker that people go to in a jam or in a well planned future event, any where in the world.

Here is a summary of what I speak about:

Jeff Mills is an internationally renowned Personal Branding and Outsourcing Expert. A former self-professed surf bum from Huntington Beach, California, Jeff became a full-time youth pastor in the Midwest and later pursued his desire to start his own business and work with other entrepreneurs.

Since 2004, Jeff’s ingenious strategies, tools, and resources have taught tens of thousands of entrepreneurs and small business owners how to easily outsource the day-to-day details of their businesses, and increase their cash flow AND their time off.

What You’ll Walk Away With:

Jeff will be sharing his focused methods for outsourcing so that you can make MORE money doing LESS! You’ll get more done, letting others assist you doing the work you don’t want to do or don’t have the skills to do.

You’ll discover:

• How to outsource the details of your business so you can spend more time GROWING it (and your income) instead of just RUNNING it
• Real-life international outsourcing case studies – including costs, risks and rewards
• The MUST HAVE tools you need for 100% outsourcing success
• The simple three-step plan to true entrepreneurial freedom
• Where to find outsourcers, how to “screen” them for quality, and how much to pay them
• Where to find English-speaking college graduates for $1-$3 per hour
• How to get your VAs making you money making websites as an affiliate marketer, hands off
• How to get your VAs to build you a giant email database that earns you income when you mail to it.
• And this is just a small taste of what you’ll discover!

So, if you would like me to come to your event as the outsourcing speaker, just contact me here, you’ll see all the places you can get to reach me. I answer my own phone and emails, I don’t outsource that stuff, cause you need to do all you can to connect with your clients and customers.

Jeff Mills – Jeff @ jeffmills.com PH# 651-769-2189

Here are some of the ideas Maria will address, and if you’ve ever thought about going “offline” to coach, consult or advise local businesses on how they can expand their reach online with local web traffic, then this is a must attend event for you.

Here is what Maria will be sharing at the Outsource Workshop!

• What is a consulting business and how to structure one

• Why it requires little upfront investment and gets you fast checks

• You’ll laugh your derriere off or be shocked at this one LIVE CLIENT example of mine

• How to use the ONE HOT “MYSTERY” Piece of Paper to get $1,500, $3,000 and $5,000 Checks

• The 10 things to Avoid when starting up your offline consulting business.

• Just one example – how I got a $50,000 consulting contract in less than 30 days.

• How to get $2,500 per month from just one client alone!

• How to use this system part time so you can still make thousands of dollars per client, only putting in a few hours a week (tops!)

• The best pricing strategy to use – and how to avoid the “underpricing trap” most people make when starting out (meaning you get extra thousands of dollars for the same amount of work!)

• How to go after the “big fish” who have tens of thousands of dollars to invest in your services – and who are most likely to say yes to having you fix their “broken” website

• How to scale your business so you can handle the massive amount of clients these techniques will produce

• How you can start using this system tomorrow – even if you don’t have your OWN website (yep you don’t even need your own website to build others…)

• The absolute first “rule of thumb” you must follow to make maximum money in minimum time with this system

• The three words used in email templates sent out that generated an insane amount of response and high paying clients

• The secret “offline/online” Joint Venture Strategy you can use with your new clients to explode your bottom line

• How to get a closing rate of 41% on all clients you approach – right out of the gate!

• How to handle the “can we see your client portfolio” objection by explaining you work with NDA disclosures – this means you don’t have to have any credibility or previous results to get your first client!

• Pricing Strategies that get clients to pay $10,000 upfront and around $1,000 a month!

Maria was able to make over $100,000 in her first two months when she started her consulting business. These results are not typical and certainly not to be construed as average. Average people can expect to make $1000 a month based on average group performances. Many people never make money… period for all kinds of reasons.

But hey… $1000 a month is way better than just doing zero dollars per month trying to do all the work yourself.

Now, why would you want to make yourself WAY MORE BUSY doing the SEO and SEM work for other companies?

It’s simple when you learn our strategies at the outsource workshop, because we’ll show you where to hire all your fulfillment staff overseas from the Philippines to be the outsourcing virtual assistants who will do the work for your clients.

Many clients will book between $1000 to $5000 and hire your team to do their internet marketing work.

You’ll get to keep the lion share of that, after you pay your staff.  Most people think paying employees and staff is expensive, and you are right, if you are using employees, but when you hire virtual agents or remote assistants, you don’t have the financial burdens that local employees give business owners like – taxes, sick pay, vacation pay, bonuses and laziness!

Virtual or Remote agents work from their homes. They are happy, thoughtful and diligent workers that get the job done right, and often time, better, faster, and cheaper than you could do it for yourself.

If you would like to discover how this works and how you can go back to your community and add massive income to your bank account, I strongly encourage you to attend this upcoming outsource workshop.