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You are here: Home / Archives for Start an Online Business

Start an Online Business

Successfully create your future! Get the help of a virtual assistant to help start a online business about your fun hobbies! It’s that easy – I have done it and I’ll show you how you can do it, too.

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February 15, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

Effectively Using The Free Online Survey Tool – 5 Second Test

When you have to make a decision, collecting the wisdom of the masses relatively quickly can help you out a lot. That’s why you should know about using the free online survey tool “5 Second Test” effectively.

We’ll teach you how to use the service more efficiently to save you time and money.

How you will profit from our tips on using the five second test

The Click Test
User Guide

quick surveyes with 'the click test' user guide  
or

  1. You will learn how to use the free online survey tool to the fullest without paying for its premium service
  2. You save time explaining how to do this by sending your virtual assistant step-by-step instructions from our ebook.
  3. You’ll get unbiased answers on all sorts of topics, fast.

Where this fee online survey tool comes in handy for you

For all things that you can put in pictures and have other people to choose between the options by a single click, the click test is a very useful free online survey tool.

Do you want to get a vote between two possibilities?

Put it to the test.

  • It could be a choice of pets.
  • It could be a choice of haircuts.

How would you do that?

Just edit your picture with Photoshop to have a few different haircuts and put them to the test with the click test.

Or

Ask a few questions about your style and what people could give you for tips.

Ask this girl if she can answer your survey questions!

If you are an online entrepreneur, then of course you can use it for a lot of different reasons.

  • You can split test different designs and ask for opinions.
  • You can get votes for different titles for your pages in order to maximize your click through rates.

Hint: There is a lot of profit for you if you are using this tactic.

  • Or you can monitor which different illustrations for an eBook cover (for example) have the biggest impact?

What sorts of tests get completed the fastest?

In general, the navigation and click tests will be those where you get responses the fastest. Perhaps even in a day.

Those sorts of tests are popular because you can complete them in literally one click. This also means you can get 1 Karma point in a few seconds yourself.

I have made the experience that the five second tests take the longest to get responses.

On the other hand, those five second tests are the best when you are looking for honest and neutral feedback.

For Example: 

I have put both my website designs with a screenshot to the test and asked five questions about the design.

The responses were pretty drastic and honest.

How can you use the 5-second test website effectively if you don’t want to pay lots of money?

  1. The only way to get more free credits is to complete tests every day.
  2. This takes a lot of time.
  3. On the other hand, the subscription plans are a little bit too expensive for my taste.

So my fast an effective trick to circumvent time and money waste:

Ask your virtual assistant to create an account on his own and conduct tests on a regular basis, in order to keep your karma credits high.

  • If you want clear instructions for your virtual assistant to take care of the tests for you,
  • or if you want to get more insights into this service… 

Download your eBook now – for a tweet or like! 

Quick surveys with Five Second Test - User Guide

      

Filed Under: Start an Online Business Tagged With: 5 second test, click test, five second test, free online survey tool, make a decision

February 3, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

Why You Need An Email Marketing Assistant To Be A Successful Online Entrepreneur

girl holding an email signDo you know that your subscriber list is your most valuable asset in your online business? Having an email marketing assistant help you

  • build the list
  • get more leads and subscribers
  • and analyze the statistics and data from your subscribers

speeds up your success with your online business at least ten times.

What if you are not an expert on email marketing? How are you going to explain things to your virtual assistant?

I was in the exact situation. Luckily, the best email marketing system, Aweber, comes equipped with LOTS of training materials, videos and discussions. It’s simple to send your virtual assistant to the Aweber interface, and give him some time to figure things out.

Since the first month with Aweber is almost free (1$), you have enough time to train your email marketing assistant before spending lots of money for nothing.

Simplify your email marketing efforts

The goal is that you can send your virtual assistant a simple form of the newsletter content

  • an email
  • a word document shared via Dropbox
  • a simple voice recording that he has to transcribe first – this is the fastest method, but it requires your proof reading

and he can format, fine-tune and set it up in your email marketing system.

Milan Kundra's famous quotation for marketingHe can

  • set up links,
  • include images
  • even split test messages,
  • or set up blog newsletters and more for you.

The best of both worlds

  • Free time to manage your online business.
  • An effective email marketing strategy set up by your virtual assistant in a fraction of the time it would have taken yourself.

What about analytics?

Email Marketing AnalyticsIf you have a big subscriber list already, you probably know that you are sitting on a big amount of valuable data and statistics. But who has the time?

Luckily, if you have entrusted your marketing assistant with it, he can dig into the data, dice and splice it and give you valuable suggestions:

Your subscribers jump off the wagon after the 10th email? Perhaps there is something wrong with its content.

Free up your time and stay productive.

What does an email marketing assistant cost you?

Good question. What is your free time worth to you?

An administrative assistant that is not yet trained with email marketing can be found for 1-2$/hour on Odesk. You’ll need some initial time to train him, using Aweber’s training tools.

Then, he can do transcription and formatting of your email content which you have to deliver to him.

Depending on how many newsletters you set up, you’ll pay him on an as-needed basis.

Easy, right?

If you instruct your email marketing assistant efficiently, your return of investment will be huge.

Filed Under: Start an Online Business Tagged With: aweber, email marketing assistant, email newsletters, outsourcing, virtual assistant

February 1, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

How to Get Totally Free Stock Photos

If you are running a small online business, or if you want to start an online business, one question will definitely come across your mind many times:

"How to get totally free stock photos?"

Stock photos are essential for any website. You always need them in order to illustrate your pages so that they look more attractive and alluring. Also, pages with beautiful images increase the overall visibility of the page. Using images without permission or infringing on the copyright of images is just like stealing someone’s work and it can get you in legal trouble. Most people wouldn’t agree with this argument, but still this is true that one can sue you if you’re using their images without a copyright license. But the question is, once again, how do you get stock photos?
Francis Francis: My Virtual Assistant illustrates my web pages for me, doing the research and optimizing the pictures. Here he shares his secrets of how he finds the needed free images.
 

Use CreativeCommons Images

The first and most simple answer is to use CreativeCommons images. Creative Commons have a royalty-free license, which allows you to share and distribute your work with others.

Under this license, you can use an image on your website, but it’s not true for all online images. It’s only applicable to those images which are shared under a CreativeCommons License.

Also, mostly CreativeCommons license demands that you also credit their work by posting a link back to the image. In other means, you cannot use someone’s work without a link back to where the actual image is placed.

Creative commonsBuy Stock Photo Images

Another straight forward method is to buy stock photos. But as I mentioned earlier, if you are a small entrepreneur, it would be hard to buy lots of images when you have just started your business.

The prices of these stock photos usually start from $2 an image and usually you will need to add at least 2-3 images on each page of your website. This money can add up fast!

So How Can I Get Totally Free Stock Photos?

Well, I have a proven method with which you can download and use stock photos totally for free. And the best part is that you can use them legally.

Here I will let you know how I do it, step by step, to get free stock photos.

  1. A lot of stock photo agencies offer free sign up promotions, vouchers and coupon codes that allow you to download a set of particular images for free.
  2. You can search Google for these promotion/coupon codes
  3. Here are some terms that I have used in order to get some helpful results:

a) Free stock photo coupon codes

b) Free stock photo credits

c) Stock photo coupons 2014

d) Totally Free stock photos

Google search result for free stock photos

  1. You will find a lot of free stock photo promotions. Obviously, some of them work, some don’t. Sometimes, I find offers that allow me to download 5 images per day up to 7 days (35 images in total)
  2. So, I go ahead and click on that link to check if this is the real deal. Spoiler alert: It is 🙂
  3. This specific example is offering two different promotion codes. One is offering 3 free credits whereas the other offers 5 free credits.

Free stock images coupon codes

  1. I am feeling a little optimistic today, so I will go ahead and click to 5 credits offer.
  2. They ask me to sign up for the service in order to get free credits. And that is what I am going to do.

Signing up to the service in order to get free stock images

  1. Well, where do I find my promotional code that they are asking for…? Let’s go back to the page where I have found the offer… May be I’ll get it from there.
  2. Here it is, I found it. Will it work…? Finger’s crossed. So, I will go ahead and fill out the form to sign up.
free stock photo voucher code
  1. Hurray, It worked well for me. I found 3 free credits. I was looking for 5 credits, but still 3 are also good.

Here is the proof that I actually got 3 free photo credits

Getting Free Stock Photos Works With Promotions – How to Get More

Now that you know how you can get totally free stock photos, there are a lot more search results that also offer free photos/credits.

Just check out more websites and get as many free credits as you can!

Websites Where You can Get Multiple Stock Photo Promotions

Apart from the method mentioned above, there are also some great websites that offers free multiple stock photo offers. I have bookmarked some of them and look into them whenever I need free stock photos.

Research done for you

Here are some of these websites:
  • www.stockphotosecrets.com
  • www.retailmenot.com
  • www.tjoos.com
  • www.coupons.com
Go ahead and get yourself some high quality images for your online use! If you appreciate my assistant's research, feel free to drop a comment for him below!

GET 100+ STOCK IMAGES ABSOLUTELY FREE

 

My Virtual Assistant has researched 6 more of the best free stock photo sites with step-wise instructions and promo-codes ready for you!

Go Get Them!

 

Filed Under: Start an Online Business Tagged With: download free stock photos, free stock images, free stock photos, Totally free stock photos

January 27, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

How To Successfully Outsource Your Craigslist Phone Verification

[contentblock id=5]Using Craigslist to generate traffic can be very effective, if you have the right audience for it. Because I’m based in Germany, I needed a workaround for a craigslist phone verification to be able to post to the US.

OVERVIEW

  • What worked
  • Step by Step instructions
  • Asking a friend in the US to verify for you
  • Outsourcing the verification to oDesk
  • Seriously – use Fiverr for this

What Worked: Getting a Phone Verified Using Fiverr

On Fiverr, you can easily research services that do Craigslist posting and account verification for the US for you.

Here is the service I have used. 

Fiverr Gig for getting a phone verified account

Pros:

  • Hassle free (I got my account verified in under one hour)
  • Minimal cost (5$ is less than it cost me to have my VA looking for solutions for this challenge)

Cons:

  • None. You have to make a free account for Fiverr.
  • The whole project cost me a whopping 5$ and about 10 minutes of my time. Not really that big of a “con”.

Investing 5$ for a Craigslist Phone Verification – Step by Step

Cough up the 5$ (pay via credit card or Paypal). You automatically receive a notification with what further info is needed from you. In this case, my login info.

Fiver Craigslist gig discussion with the worker

Note: by the Terms of Service on Fiverr, you’re not allowed to share your email address.

It’s recommended to write “(at)” instead of “@” and “ema1l” instead of “email”.

This lowers the risk of your Fiverr account being banned. Just like the service provided did in his answer (see below).

Providing craigslist login details to the provider

Note that I gave this unknown person access to my Craigslist account. This strategy of getting US verification for your Craigslist account is only recommended if you use a new account that does not contain personable or sensible information.

I checked my email five minutes later and copied the Craigslist notification as well as the activation link to the service provider.

The actual work by the Fiverr service went within one hour, and we exchanged a few messages to clarify what was needed. It all went very smoothly.

He even let me play around with the newly phone verified account as long as we both still had access to it.

More discussion with Fiverr Gig provider

When I tried posting to San Francisco, US, the ad went live without any problems.

You Can Also Successfully Verify Your Craigslist for the US Using the Same Method!

Successfully Posted an ad to the US

It took a few weeks of testing out different ideas until I finally cracked the problem with bypassing the Craigslist phone verification step. Naturally, I was pretty happy when it finally worked 🙂

After the gig, I changed my password for my Craigslist account back to another safely generated password using my favorite password management tool, LastPass.

For the sake of completeness, let me tell you about what I have tried out before finding out the method described above.

What I Tried Out First: Asking a Friend in the Us to Set Up the Account for Me

You can always ask a friend in the US to verify a Craigslist account for you.

When my friend set up another Craigslist account from the US, I still had the problem that I needed phone verification for that account.

Further action required to complete the request

[contentblock id=5]
Unfortunately, my friend already had used his phone number for his own account.

When you do this, note that:

You can’t use

  • a toll-free number
  • a prepaid phone card
  • any number from outside of the US.

Third Option: Hiring Someone on oDesk to Post Craigslist Ads to the Us

My VA already had prepared a backup solution if the account verification with Fiverr would not have worked:

He proposed to outsource the process to a freelancer on oDesk. (You can also read about it in his diary posts)

What my VA had to say about posting Craigslist Ads to the US

About the Craigslist task where you asked for my feedback, I think it’s really good that the referral traffic from craigslist is spending much more time on ideal-helper on average.

Keeping in view this performance I strongly recommend that we should increase the quantity of ads. 

But as you know around 50% of visitors come from the US and Canada and at the moment we cannot even touch those 50% traffic.

I think first we should sort out a way to post ads to US. 

I know it is possible. You can either 

  • Purchase phone verified accounts (I don’t recommend this method because sometimes craigslist asks you to re-verify your phone number if they have suspected it).
  • Or hire another person for this task, I did a short research on odesk and found these two profiles (both VAs from Pakistan) who are doing this job for $3.33/hour.

      1. Naeem Afzal

      2. Khurram Bin Khalid

It’s an easy and straightforward job if you have some friend or relative in US. A lot of people have their relatives and friends in the Europe and USA, especially if you talk about India, Pakistan and Philippines. 

So I think we should really try this out and hire someone for this particular task. I think one can easily post more than 10 ads/hour and then see the results if it’s worth spending money on this task. 

Save Time, and Use the Fiverr Workaround to Verify Your Craigslist Account in The Us

Seriously, my assistant and I went through some trouble finding this solution. We really hope you can save yourself the time and the hassle.

And as soon as you have set yourself up to post to the US, you can publish and refresh your ads as often as you want.

Even Simpler: Get Your Ads Directly Submitted To Craigslist (Even in the Us) As A Service

If you don’t want to post yourself, you can use Fiverr to have your ads submitted to Craigslist (or similar sites) yourself!

Here are some people who provide these gigs (my Virtual Assistant actually researched them):

5 ads on craigslist and 10 on Backpage for $5
5 ads on craigslist and 10 on Backpage for $5

Happy posting to Craigslist!

Filed Under: Start an Online Business Tagged With: bypass craigslist verification, craigslist phone verification, traffic generation

January 18, 2016 By Francis Leave a Comment

6 Best Free Stock Photo Sites That Give You Free Stock Images

In another post, I have shown you how you can get a lot of free stock images, here I will discuss some of the best free stock photo sites. These sites offer free promotions and credits and you can download dozens of stock images free of cost.

 1. IngImage – 7 Days Free Trial

Sign up and get 35 free images

Ingimage is one of the best free stock photo sites offering a 7 day free trial promotion for all subscribers who signs up to their website using a promotional link.

With their 7-days free trial, you can download 5 images daily up to 7 consecutive days, which means that you can download total 35 free stock photos.

Click Here to Sign Up and Get a 7-days Free Trial

2. BigStock – 35 Royalty-Free Images

Bigstock is also offering a free 7-day trial for signing up to their website using a special promotion link. By signing up to this trial offer, you can download upto 35 free images, 5 images per day for 7 consecutive days.

Click Here to Sign up and Get 35 Free Stock Photos

3. Deposit Photos – 5 Free Credits

Click here to sign up and get 5 FREE Depositphoto credits

Deposit Photos is one of the leading and best free stock photo sites. They have placed more than 26,000,000 images on their website and currently offering a promotion that gets you 5 free credits. 1 download usually costs 1 credit, so you can download up to 5 images with these 5 free credits.

Click Here to Get 5 Free Depositphoto Credits

4. StockFresh Promo Code – 5 Free Credits

StockFresh is another best free stock photo site that offers a promotion of 5 free credits if you sign up to their website and use the promo code: microstockshop.

Click Here to Sign Up and Get 5 Free Credits

5. Dreams Time – 3 Free Credits

DreamsTime is another stock photo agency that gives you 3 free credits when you sign up to their service.

Be sure to use the promotion code rtw123 when you sign up to the website.

Click Here to Sign Up and Get 3 Free Credits

6. Real Stock – 20 Free Credits

Sign up and get 20 free credits

Realstock is at the moment new in the top free stock photo site’s list, but they are also offering 20 free credits when you sign up to their website using a special promotion link.

Please follow these steps in order to get free credits:

  1. Sign up and register to Real Stock Photos
  2. Click on buy credits and add 20 credits to cart
Click on buy credits and add 20 credits to cart

3.

Go to the cart, use spsdiscount discount code, click apply and then checkout.

4.

Agree to the “Purchase agreement” and check out.
RealStock photos free credits proof

Filed Under: Start an Online Business Tagged With: best free stock photo sites, coupon codes, free stock photos, stock photo promotion codes

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