Outsourcing Video 1: How To Build a Team of ‘A’ Players
ontent/uploads/2011/11/Teamwork-300x198.jpg" alt="Teamwork" />Following on from the great feedback we received from our recent Conversion series, today we want to kick off a new series targeted at another area in which a lot of online business owners have MAJOR problems, which is ‘Outsourcing’.
You’ve probably already realized that with keyword research, content creation, article distribution, social media and all of the other aspects of building an online business, it’s virtually impossible to do all the work yourself.
Now, more than ever, online marketing is a “Team Sport”.
The reality is, if you have a great team, you can get more done with less work, and achieve far greater results. In fact, I don’t know anyone who is really kicking goals online who doesn’t have a strong team behind them.
The Secret Of Noble Samurai 8217;s Success
Here at Noble Samurai we have built a pretty amazing team and this has been one of the real secrets of our success – We know the power that comes from having a passionate and capable team.
So how can you start building your own team?
One popular option is Outsourcing, which involves hiring individuals to complete specific tasks, or bringing ‘virtual team members’ onboard to become part of your online business.
The Double Edged Sword
However, Outsourcing is a Double Edged Sword.
If you do it right, it can be the best thing that happens to your business, BUT if you get it wrong, it can also be a disaster – wasting loads of valuable time and money.
To help you discover the ‘right way’ to approach Outsourcing, we’ve asked two of our good friends Dave Jenyns and Pete WIlliams to share some of their most valuable Outsourcing strategies with you.
These guys are the real deal. They live and breathe this stuff, and the information they are going to share with you in this series is Pure Gold.
In This Video
In the first video of this Outsourcing series, Dave Jenyns shows you how to build a team of ‘A Players’ using the “George Foreman Method”. This is the exact method he uses to attract, filter, pick and train team members for his online business.
You’ll discover how you can model this same process to build a high impact team at a fraction of what you might expect to pay.
In this video you’ll discover:
- Why being the bottleneck in your business will cripple your results, and lead to failure;
- The simple 7-step “George Foreman” process that makes top candidates “float to the top of the pile”;
- How to make your business stand out from the rest, and attract top “A-players”;
- The websites to use to consistently find the best staff;
- One simple question you can ask an “A-player” that no B or C-Players want to answer;
- A real-life case study example of how Dave found a recent team member;
- Why Richard Branson avoids the cliche “customers are #1″ and what his alternative is;
- And much, much more.
And remember to leave your comments and feedback below. We’d love to hear what you think of this video!
Read MoreOutsourcing Video 2: The Content Leverage System
In our last video, Dave Jenyns shared his “George Foreman Method” which is a proven 7 step process for building a team of ‘A Players’ that can help you to take your business to the next level.
In the second video of this Outsourcing Series, Pete Williams is going to spill the beans on his incredible ‘Content Leverage System’.
This is the first time that this content has been publicly available. The last time Pete presented this material was at an exclusive closed-door seminar held by Ed Dale. When Pete finished his presentation he received the ONLY standing ovation of the entire seminar.
So today, you’re in for a real treat.
In This Video
- How to become a market leader in your niche in just 30 minutes a day.
- How to systemize content creation to produce high quality videos, audio and reports – all on auto-pilot.
- Why you should only work on the core elements of your content creation, and outsource the ‘mechanics’
- How to ethically hijack traffic from some of the most popular web properties like: YouTube, iTunes and top article directories.
- The 11 step process that quickly and easily creates thousands of high quality, backlinks to your site.
- Plus much, much more!
We hope you enjoyed this series. If you need more help with Outsourcing, click here to see how Dave and Pete can help.
Read MoreThe Best Kept Secret in Market Samurai
So you’ve found a great keyword – It’s got good traffic levels, high commercial value and it’s extremely relevant to the product or servic e that you have for sale.
Sounds like a winner right?
Well – maybe…
You see the biggest mistake that new online business owners make is that they select keywords that are just too difficult to rank for!
It’s the SEO equivalent of a tiny 80-pound weakling going up against Mike Tyson – They just don’t have a chance!
What’s worse is that many new website owners THINK they can win if they just work hard enough, so they put in weeks and weeks of manual work but still get NOTHING.
Others try to win the SEO battle by employing outsourcers to build links for them, but after spending thousands of dollars, they often realize that they’ve been trying to win an impossible battle and that all the money they’ve spent has been completely wasted.
To make sure YOU don’t fall into these common traps, you need to learn how to assess the true competition in your niche.
Now what if there was a step-by-step BLUE PRINT that told you not only how strong your competition is, but also exactly what you need to do to outrank them?
Your SEO Blue Print
The good news is that this BLUE PRINT does exist and everything you need is already built into Market Samurai ’s SEO Competition Module.
BUT only a small handful of SEOs actually know about it.
In fact, it’s probably fair to say that this is the Best Kept Secret in Market Samurai.
AND what’s really cool is that this powerful feature just got a HUGE boost in performance, which means you can now systematically demolish your competition faster than ever before!
Here’s How It Works
We’ve just struck a deal with Majestic SEO, the owners of the world’s largest and most frequently updated back link database.
This means that we can now analyze the back links to your site AND your competitor’s sites faster than ever before.
Literally, what used to take 10 minutes, now takes SECONDS!
To show you how this powerful feature works and to walk you through your SEO BLUE PRINT, we’ve put together a video that reveals how you can apply this in your business RIGHT NOW.
Enjoy!
Read MoreUpdate: The State of the Market Samurai Nation
If you’ve tried to launch and use Market Samurai in the last few days you’ll have noticed that there are large areas of functionality that are broken.
What Happened?
As you know, Market Samurai pulls data from dozens of different search data providers so that you have all the data you need in a single place to make the most informed decisions about your online marketing opportunities.
In order to obtain this data we often need to perform large numbers of queries and searches through free services such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing on behalf of our users.
For example, tracking the rankings for even a few keywords can require thousands of searches. By performing these queries on your behalf, using our servers, we saved you hours, days or sometimes even weeks of time compared with doing these queries by hand.
Several days ago, Google made some significant technical changes to its services that make it impossible to reliably perform large volumes of free queries.
As large portions of Market Samurai currently use Google’s service, this has temporarily broken a range of functionality in Market Samurai (and related prod ucts, including modules from Domain Samurai and Article Samurai – although the core syndication functionality in Article Samurai is unaffected).
It’s also worth noting that most other SEO software has been affected in some way by these changes. Edit: we had received reports that other software was affected.We have since discovered that this is incorrect and other SEO packages are not being impacted by this change.
What We’re Doing About It…
We’re working tirelessly around the clock to restore the vast majority of this functionality, and we estimate that most of the application will be functional within the next few days.
As there is such a large amount of functionality that is currently built upon Google’s services, we’re prioritizing the high usage modules such as Keyword Research and SEO Competition, and then moving on to the other modules.
What Are We Going to Use In Place of Google?
It’s important to note that much of the data that we supply in Market Samurai could have easily been provided from other search engines. (eg. locating articles about “dog training” in our Find Content module).
In these simple cases we’re going to just replace Google with Bing.
As you know, Bing has made some big improvements in recent years and there are many who are saying that Bing’s algorithm produces more relevant results than Google for many keywords.
As an SEO marketer, it is important to understand that Bing’s index is rapidly approaching the size of Google’s, and as they also power Yahoo!, they have rapidly grown to capture over 30% of the search queries in the US.
But why is this important?
The increased use of Bing as a search engine is important because competition metrics, such as SEOC (“SEO Competition”) and SEOTC (“SEO Title Competition”), measure the scarcity of keywords on the Internet. The idea behind keyword scarcity is that keywords that have a high scarcity are likely to be more useful keywords for your marketing campaign. A good candidate for a more detailed competition analysis, by using our SEO Competition module matrix, would be a keyword where there aren’t many pages on the Internet containing that keyword in the title or body of a page – i.e., keyword with a low SEOC/SEOTC value.
These high-level competition “scarcity” numbers can also come from another search engine, as long as the index is of a comparative size to Google. We believe this is the case with Bing.
It’s important to note that making a keyword decision based solely on a scarcity metric such as SEOC or SEOTC will provide poor results. It’s not a substitute for doing a detailed analysis by using the SEO Competition matrix and a backlink analysis.
The scarcity metrics help us quickly filter out keywords that are highly likely to be TOO hard to rank for (because they have a lot of relevant content out there competing for rankings). They DON’T tell you that a keyword will be easy to rank for. (i.e. use these numbers only to disqualify tough keywords)
Until this change is implemented, we’ve unfortunately had to introduce a manual check for SEOC values, similar to that for the SEOTC/SEOUC values. We understand that this is frustrating and time-consuming, but it was the only way we could keep this data available.
Changes to Rank Tracker
The module most affected by these Google changes will be the Rank Tracker module.
The Bad News…
With over 400,000 users now, tracking the ranks of your keywords on your behalf results in literally millions of Google searches every day. Google’s changes mean that it will be simply impossible for us to continue doing this on your behalf.
Unlike Bing and Yahoo!, Google has no API (commercial or otherwise) which is suitable for tracking rankings. The APIs that do exist for Google often produce results that are significantly different from actual rankings, making them useless for SEO purposes.
There are third-party companies that do have accurate APIs to Google, and we are currently in negotiations to get access to their data.
The particular company that we are talking to provides the ranking data to major SEO tools such as the excellent Raven Tools product, for example.
However, this data is expensive (Raven Tool’s cheapest plan costs $ 99 a month to track 1,000 keywords), and the underlying cost of ranking data is a large part of the reason for this price.
We’ve evaluated many options and it seems, at this stage, that the only way for us to offer Google Rank Tracker functionality to our users is to buy this data.
However, with a fixed-price product and so many users, it’s simply an economic impossibility to provide the same rank tracking functionality on an ongoing basis. In fact, it would cost us over $ 40,000 a day to purchase this data!
So, we’re left with the difficult decision of having to pass this costs on to our users in some fashion (most likely a monthly paid service).
Please know, if you’re an existing Market Samurai buyer we’ll try to keep this cost as low as possible. Potentially we will even try to offer a free level of service for a small number of keywords.
Unfortunately, this change will take a while to implement, at least several weeks. So until that time you may need to check your rankings manually, or perhaps try the 30 day trial at Raven Tools until we can get the new version of Rank Tracker out the door.
We’ll be releasing an updated version of the existing Rank Tracker module shortly, that will enable you to check a very small number of keyword rankings in Google (up to 10), by using your own connection rather than our servers to perform the searches. This is a temporary workaround until we can put a more permanent solution in place.
The Good News…
However, the news is not all bad. Rank Tracker has always been a very slow module to use due to the higher numbers of searches it requires.
The new Rank Tranker module built on the paid API will enable us to check your rankings in the background from our servers each week, so that when you open Market Samurai , you’ll instantly be able to see your rankings report—instead of waiting upwards of 10–30 minutes to check all your keyword rankings.
What To Do Next
We know the implications of these recent Google changes are very disappointing and will cause some anger amongst our users.
We understand this, and while we these changes are beyond our control, I want to apologize on behalf of the whole Noble Samurai eam. We’re very grateful for the support of our customers over the years – you’re the reason we can do what we do! We deeply appreciate your patience through this difficult time.
Our current estimate is that we’ll have the vast majority of Market Samurai ’s functionality working again within the next few days. The revised Rank Tracker module may take us several weeks to fully implement, though you can still check small numbers of keywords manually in Rank Tracker, as well as checking Bing and Yahoo! as normal.
Please be assured that as a small software development team, we understand that delivering great value is what keeps us alive and what built this business in the first place. When the dust has settled, we’re determined to do whatever it takes to ensure the investment you made to own Market Samurai is the best Internet Marketing investment you’ve made.
However, if at any time you don’t think Market Samurai is worth your initial investment please contact our help desk for a partial or full refund—just be aware that our help desk has a high volume of tickets at the moment, so it may take a little longer than usual to get to your requests.
Once again, I’m very sorry for the inconvenience that this has caused our customers.
We’re working around the clock to get this fixed.
Please leave any questions, concerns or encouragement (we could use a little bit right about now!) in the comments below.
Yours sincerely,
Eugene Ware
CEO
Noble Samurai p>
Hot SEO Tool Market Samurai is back!
A quick update on our progress in restoring Market Samurai functionality and some answers to common questions.
First up, a big thank you to all of you who’ve posted, emailed and tweeted various encouraging words (our users are awesome!). As mentioned in our previous post, we’re genuinely sorry for the outage.
Keyword SEO Made Easy
Hot SEO Tool Market Samurai is back!
The good news is that thanks to a big weekend and some late nights by our development team, we’re mostly up and running again. Here’s a breakdown…
What’s working?
The good news is that with the exception of large scale rank checking, Market Samurai functionality is now restored. Here’s a breakdown of the status by module.
Keyword Research – Fully Operational
Please note, we continue to use Google for keyword generation, traffic and CPC estimates.
We have intro duced Bing for some competition estimates (see below for why Bing data works here).
SEO Competition – Fully Operational
Please note, the SEO Matrix continues to show the top 10 results from Google
Viewing (and sharing) a competition matrix has been restored and works as it previously did (including showing Google PageRank for the top 10 competing web pages).
As some users will be aware, when looking at a particular URL, the SEO Competition module allows you to explore and see the anchor text and authority of each of the top 1000 back links for that URL. This is a great way to explore competitor back links and see linking opportunities.
We’ve temporarily substituted Google’s PageRank in this detailed analysis for ACRank (an alternative and less accurate authority). We’re talking to data providers about a more robust measure of authority (e.g. PageRank, MozRank or equivalent) and will revisit this in coming months.
Rank Tracker – Operational from the local machine
Please note, we continue to track rankings from Google
As a temporary measure, we’ve modified Rank Tracker to use your local machine to check rankings in Google. Rank checks for the other engines (Bing & Yahoo!) continue to run via our servers. Checking rankings via a locally installed application works for users monitoring a small number of keywords, but for larger volumes will generally result in your service from Google being temporarily degraded.
Obviously this isn’t ideal and so we’re working on a replacement rank tracking service and we expect this will take 2-3 weeks to implement.
To date we’ve collated our usage statistics, made contact with six potential data providers and drafted an updated user interface for developers to begin working on. You can read more about this below.
Domains – Fully Operational
Monetization – Fully Operational
Find Content – Fully Operational
Publish Content – Fully Operational
Promotion – Fully Operational
Common Questions
As you’d probably guess, our support staff have received a deluge of queries, and so I thought I might help to answer a few common questions:
Will Market Samurai become a monthly subscription product?
Or as one user put it – is this all just a ploy to move to a monthly payment scheme? The answer (to both questions…) is no.
With the exception of Rank Tracker (see below), Market Samurai will continue to be a one off cost. Users who’ve been with us from the beginning (over 3 and half years ago) have received approximately 450 free updates as we’ve kept up with all the various changes in the SEO landscape – and there will be many more to come!
As many have already realised, we believe offering a high value, one-off payment product is the best way to build a loyal user base.
With the demise of Yahoo Site Explorer (previously used to power back link and Anchor text analysis) we moved to a commercial arrangement with Majestic SEO (at a 5 figure monthly cost) and have absorbed the expense without passing a cent of this substantial cost on to our customers.
Will Rank Tracker have a monthly cost and what will it be?
Google’s recent changes mean that we can no longer viably pull rank data for our user base (over 400K users in total).
As mentioned in the previous post, initial estimates put the purchase cost of our daily data requirements at $ 40,000 per day, a cost that we’re unable to absorb. So our intention is to buy ranking data from a reliable wholesale supplier and make it available on a subscription basis through the application.
We don’t yet know what the cost for Rank Tracking will be and how the offer will be structured. All we can say is that regardless of the reason, we understand that taking one of our modules that was “free to use” and making it “pay to use” isn’t great news for our customers.
We can say with confidence that we’ll be in a position to offer a highly competitive price structure on our revised ranking service. This is possible because we’ll be buying the data in bulk and we understand offering a great deal will be an important way to keep faith with you, our users.
Obviously any such package will be optional and we understand if you’ve recently purchased Market Samurai for Rank Tracking and feel you didn’t get value from your purchase you’re entitled to a refund.
We also feel this move will give us the capacity to improve the functionality in key areas also.
Can I use Rank Tracker on my local network?
As indicated above, Rank Tracker has been temporarily updated to make use of your local computer and we’ll soon be offering a revised service that again pulls data from our servers. Checking a moderate to high volume of keywords from your local computer can result in a temporarily degraded Google service for all those on the same network as you. In corporate environment this should generally be avoided.
Where does Market Samurai now use Bing data?
Important – we continue to use Google for:
- Keyword generation
- Traffic estimation
- CPC estimation
- SEO competition is still based on Google search results
- Rank Tracking continues to track rankings in Google (as well as Yahoo & Bing)
However, we have moved three data points within our Keyword Research module to Bing (via their excellent API):
SEOC – the number of competing pages containing the target keyword phrase.
SEOTC – the number of competing pages with the target keyword phrase in the title tag.
SEOUC – the number of competing pages with the target keyword phrase in the page URL.
The great news is that many users rely on SEOTC as a competition metric and due to restrictions on query volume, we previously required users to click on each keyword to trigger the data collection. With Bing integration, we’re now able to revert to automatically pulling this data for all keywords making it much quicker and easier to filter out keywords with high SEOTC / SEOUC competition.
Is Bing a valid measure of competition? Aren’t I trying to rank in Google?
Important – we continue to use Google for:
- Keyword generation
- Traffic estimation
- CPC estimation
- SEO competition is still based on Google search results
- Rank Tracking continues to track rankings in Google (as well as Yahoo & Bing).
SEOC (and the related SEOTC and SEOUC metrics) all help answer the same basic question “how many pages in the world have my keywords in them?”. Or put another way, if a keyword has a low SEOC metric, it’s ’scarce’ or ‘less used’ online than keywords with a high SEOC value.
These measures serve as high level filters to help you weed out prospective keywords that will likely have strong competition. There is a reasonable correlation with low SEOC and low competition. We should note, we have seen many cases where keywords with high SEOC values could be ranked for easily and some with low SEOC values being impenetrable.
Ultimately, in SEO, you only have 10 competitors, and they are those sites taking the top 10 rankings that you must displace in order to pull traffic. SEOC (and related measures) should be used as a basic filter, but NEVER (let me repeat that; NEVER!) as the sole basis for selecting a keyword, particularly one of the primary keywords on your site. Once you’ve filtered out the likely high competition keywords, it’s by reviewing results from the SEO Competition module (which continues to be based on the front page of Google) that you can determine with reasonable certainty your capacity to gain a ranking.
The SEO Competition module allows you to see at a glance the key SEO metrics for each of your competitors ranking in the top 10 positions.
So is Bing OK for high level competition analysis?
Given that our approach to high level competition analysis comes down to ‘how many other web pages have my keyword in them?’, then Bing is a great data source.
Bing indexes the same data (e.g. web pages) as Google and despite being somewhat of a late comer to the search game, they now boast a massive dataset (and have captured a strong market share – approximately 30% in the US including their results via Yahoo!). Remember, this has nothing to do with search algorithms.
We’re not comparing the relative merits of Bing vs Google in returning good search results (although Bing has come of age in this space too). It’s about the size of each search engine’s index – and Bing’s index is now easily large enough to give good competition metrics.
Furthermore, whilst many SEO tools include an SEOC style measure at a broad match level (e.g. your target keyword can be broken up as separate words mixed anywhere in a page), Market Samurai pulls SEOC data on a phrase match basis. This means that with Market Samurai you’re seeing how many target pages contain your keyword as a complete and intact phrase. Whilst SEOC will only ever be still a high level filter, the use of phrase match data is generally more accurate.
Why are other SEO products not affected?
Over the past three and a half years we have become very familiar with Google’s tolerances for high query volumes. Late last week and over the weekend we observed three specific and quite radical changes in this tolerance which we were unable to resolve despite the deployment of additional resources.
As one of the largest players in the market, it’s difficult to determine if Market Samurai was specifically targeted or if Google implemented new policies and we were simply active enough to trigger limits. This is quite possible as were previously one of the only tools to offer real time rank analysis on an unlimited volume of keywords. How other tools will fare, only time will tell. The good news is, we’ve been able to respond and resolve most issues.
Will Market Samurai be offline for six months?
There have been estimates from external parties in the SEO space that the issues at hand will take us six months to resolve. It’s now 5 days since we observed the change in Google’s tolerance for large volumes of queries and we again have 100% of our modules fully operational.
We anticipate a solution to large scale Rank Tracking within 2-3 weeks.
We’ve got 400,000 users, why can’t we just absorb the cost?
As you can probably understand, there are limits to what we can afford when selling a one-time payment software package which requires ongoing staff, infrastructure and data services to maintain and deliver the software.
We have a little over 50,000 paid users, with the remainder using the free edition. Whilst we are fortunate to have a profitable business and cash reserves, the cost to purchase data we previously pulled directly is beyond our means. The only silver lining is that with the user base we enjoy, we expect to be able to negotiate and in return offer ranking data on a very competitive basis.
Thank you again for your support!! (seriously!)
Finally, we would like to apologise again for the inconvenience caused by our down time. All our staff have worked some very long hours to make the required updates and I’d personally like to say a heart felt thank you for all the positive comments, emails & tweets we’ve seen come our way.
We’re as committed as ever to making Market Samurai the best Internet Marketing software, SEO Tool and investment you can make.
Eugene
Read MoreTotal Search Engine Domination!
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