Podcast: Michael Dunlop – Retire At 21 Blogger

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Michael Dunlop – Retire At 21 And Living A Life!

Today’s interview is with Michael Dunlop who is a very successful young entrepreneur, an inspirational blogger and business owner. At the age of 20 his achieved quite a lot where he owns 9 websites that all generate a substantial amount of income every month. He lives a life that most people don’t get to experience until they retire, where he can travel around the world and socialise with top Internet Marketers.

His famous for his blog Retire At 21 which showcases other young entrepreneur’s success stories. This was the reason why I wanted to interview Michael and find out what got him started and what is his secret to success. He mentions to me that his also dyslexic and dropped out of high school before he was 18. It is an inspiration to see that Michael takes action on what he says which has attributed to his success.

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Marketing Your E-commerce Business Through Social Media Networks

A popular way to generate traffic to your e-commerce business is through social media networks. You can market your e-commerce website through places such as Digg.com, Twitter.com, Facebook and MySpace. The goal with social network marketing is twofold:

1. You are trying to enhance your site’s community by establishing outposts on social networking sites so people who share your interests, or are interested in your products and services, find you and your site.
2. Getting involved in social networking multiplies the number of places that your site and your products can be found by search engines, which is critically important to the success of your e-commerce business.

How To Leverage Social Media Networks To Our Advantage?

Simply, we are trying to spread the word about your e-commerce business. You can take your product reviews or blog posts and spread them as far as possible online enlisting the help of these sites. It’s important to make sure the content you’re promoting is interesting and helpful to the audience you’re trying to reach. Remember, people like to do business with their friends if they’ve never met you offline. By being reasonable and participating in social networking, you’ll expand your credibility and potential customer base in many important and helpful ways.

It’s also important to recognize that these social media outlets were designed to serve as conversation platforms, and not as overt marketing channels. Sending messages that are overly promotional or commercial is often compared to shouting at a party where everyone else is chatting quietly, and the backlash can overwhelm the benefits of participation. As an ecommerce business owner I recommend taking a couple of weeks to monitor the various sites to get a sense of the patterns and informal rules before posting anything.

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Moving Your Business Online

Most owners who start selling online usually have an existing bricks and mortar business. The reasons why a business owner may go online could be to expand their customer base, increase sales revenue, or just to have an online presence and I am sure there are many other reasons as well. I am starting to see a stronger trend from brick and mortar businesses to move online and use online e-commerce systems to run their business instead. Also, for new business owners coming online for the first time I see them starting a blog as a low cost and easy to set up alternative. Let’s have a look at some of the statistics. According to the 2008 Australian Commonwealth Bank Investment Trends Business Owners Survey, they found 42% of business owners had a website, but only 18% of them allowed consumers to buy online. I was quite interested to read this because it shows there are still more opportunities for business owners to capture their share of the online market.

Why Do Business Online?

There are many benefits in doing business online and I have outlined five most compelling reasons:

1. Make money 24 hours, 7 days a week. Imagine waking up and turning on your computer to see that you have made hundreds of sales overnight! In today’s time poor consumer market, we see people shopping online at any time of the day, so having a 24 hour, 7 day a week shop can capture sales you didn’t even know about.
2. It is easy for consumers to shop online and no more waiting in lines. One of the secrets to shopping online is no more waiting in lines to get what you want. Make it easier for consumers to buy from you and they won’t even need to leave their home.
3. Reduces your overheads. The cost of running an Internet business is quite minimal and once your systems are in place your customers become your most profitable asset. With no customer service staff and no overtime to pay, your Internet business can be very lucrative. I am an example of this, as my dragonboat business is an automated system with only one staff to run it.
4. Allows you to focus on a niche market. Some of the most successful small businesses carve out a niche market where they don’t have to compete on price alone. This allows them to expand their customer base globally and dominate their niche market.
5. Streamlines your systems and improves your cashflow. It is very easy to automate your systems with an Internet business as technology is so advanced that it can do virtually anything. It allows you to feed information into your back-end systems and allows you to control where money goes. Additionally cashflow will be improved with faster electronic transactions without having to wait to go to a bank to deposit the money.

Getting Started With Your Online Business

Once you have decided that your business is suitable for capturing online sales, you will want to begin planning how to put it together. There are many parts to an Internet business and more in depth knowledge to acquire, though here is a summary of the components you will need:

The Front End:
Another article I wrote discusses about the front end in more detail showing you how to capture leads: Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 1: Generating Leads. This will help you understand more about the processes involved.

• Setting up a website. This is the easy part, and also the presence of your business online. First step is to register a domain name, chose a hosting company and build your website.
• The shopping cart. Once your website is setup you can either have an integrated shopping cart with your website or add a shopping cart software. Both with do the same job, the difference is to do with how much you can afford to spend on the website. I’ll explain what is included in a good shopping cart:
  • Marketing tools and information including cross selling tools
  • Order management tools
  • Pricing rules allowing you to offer bulk discounts, special time sensitive pricing promotions and so forth
  • Stock management tools

The Back End:

• Payment gateway. This is important for you and the consumer to have. It is a secure connection between your website and the bank or merchant provider that will send private transactional details. A consumer will feel safe when they are purchasing from your website and provide security from fraud.
• Merchant provider. This is the financial institution that will validate credit card details and make the payment into your bank account. It can be either your banking institution or an online provider such as Paypal or eWay. Shop around to see what is suitable for your business that will provide you with the best package possible.
• Accounting system. More and more e-commerce systems have an accounting package module built in and also give you the option to export data into a well-known accounting system such as Quickbooks or MYOB. No matter what accounting software you use, make sure you have this in place as it will save you time and money over the long term.

There are more components that can be added to both the front and back end of an Internet business. I have provided a basic skeleton to get started for any business owner wishing to set up their business online. If you want to find out more about how to create a successful and profitable back end system to add onto these basic components, be sure to read:
Converting Traffic Into Sales Part 2: Profiting From The Back-End

Tyrone Shum
Helping Business Owners Move Online

How To Find A Virtual Assistant That’s Right For Your Internet Business?

In the last 3 weeks I have been trialling a couple of virtual assistants (V.A) to assist me with administrative tasks and I have learnt so many new lessons along the way. The first thing for business owners wanting to outsource their work to a V.A is to interview them first before making any contractual commitment. You can trial their services for a 2-3 week period and it would provide sufficient time to test their abilities and resources available. Also be ready to pay for their services as nothing does come free, though it is definitely money worth spending to save you many precious hours.

How Will A Virtual Assistant Benefit My Internet Business?
Are you getting frustrated and overwhelmed with your work? I have been and that’s why I decided to find a virtual assistant to take over a majority of my administrative tasks. The reason for hiring is to eliminate non-dollar productive tasks that requires someone to complete and can be completed from virtually anywhere in the world. Hiring a virtual assistant can be the most rewarding feeling as well, because it also teaches you to delegate and to become a business owner rather than the person who runs the show all the time. Some of the benefits I’ve seen from my virtual assistants are:

• Gives me more time to focus on business tasks where my strengths lie
• With the right virtual assistants in place it allows you to create a smooth system that runs on automation
• I can spend more time having fun and being outdoors rather than behind the computer

Watch Out If You’re Not Careful…
My very first virtual assistant I hired started with good intentions and showed promising signs. Though when I gave her an editing task to proofread my eBook and convert it to PDF with website links, she ended up spending over 10 hours on it. I was quite specific and laid out in detail what I needed and specified a deadline and time frame to finish the eBook by. Unfortunately I didn’t realise her English was average and she did everything completely wrong. Here is what I emailed to her:

Subject of TASK: Proofread and convert to PDF including links
TASK:

1. Please proof read and check for any Grammatical errors. If errors are found, please update. Also please find any words ending with “zing” or “zation” and change to “sing” or “sation”. E.g. customization to customisation.
2. Add links to websites mentioned in the document. E.g. if FaceBook, add the link to document of http://www.facebook.com. You will see examples in the document of what I have done in the first few pages.
3. Once you have checked through the document, please convert to PDF. Make sure all links are converted to PDF as well and check to see if they work in the document.

Can you do this? If not, please advise. Please reply and confirm what you will plan to do to complete this task.

DEADLINE: Please get started after your next email and stop at 1 hour and email me your work. Please begin this task now if possible. The deadline is Tuesday 5pm AEST.

Thank you for your fastest reply,

She did email me an eBook but it was not the same document I emailed her to convert and it had other people’s advertisements in it. I got quite angry at first and was going to send a really nasty email. But I decided it wasn’t going to be constructive. So I requested for another virtual assistant from that same company specifying for an assistant with excellent English. I received a much better response and managed to get the correct eBook sent back. Though, I did mention to them that the previous assistant needed to receive more English training.

The lesson I learnt here was not to accept what you’re given, but to keep trialling until you find an assistant who meets your standards.

Where Do I Find Virtual Assistants That Are Suitable?
To date I have found my most reliable virtual assistant for $3.50 an hour on eLance and this is the site I continue to use to look for other people to work for me. There are many other websites that I recommend below:

• Hire My Mom – A website to help you find female virtual assistants
• eLance – Type “Virtual Assistant” in the search to find a variety of assistants from around the globe
• Workaholics For Hire – A great virtual assistant service that helps you with urgent tasks for people with adhoc projects
• Able Virtual Assistant Services – Virtual Assistants located in Canada

What To Look For And Test In A Virtual Assistant?
Here are some guidelines I have used to look for a good virtual assistant:

• Give them sample work and see how they perform
• Evaluate their skills
• Ask plenty of questions from the short listed candidates
• Check their previous work and feedback statuses
• Get a few recommendations for the Virtual Assistant you wish to hire from previous clients
• Monitor their day to day progress by asking them to send you updates of their assigned tasks

Good virtual assistants are not expensive to find and there are many who are qualified to fit your budget. I would recommend giving it a go for a couple of weeks and it is the only way to know if a virtual assistant is right for your Internet business.

Tyrone Shum
Virtual Assistant Recruiter

Outsourcing Increased My Productivitiy By 200%

Recently I’ve been testing some new ideas with “outsourcing” for Internet Business Path and from what I can gather, it’s been able to increase my productivity by at least 200%. What I did before outsourcing work to people was to create a mindmap of what the business needed in order to grow and continue to run without my input. Below is the mindmap of my businesses in it’s simplest form:

If want to create one, a really good software to use is FreeMind. It’s very easy to learn and very powerful for any business because it allows a business owner to laid down their ideas in a logical path. Since applying a mindmap to my business I’ve been able to design the system to increase my productivity by 200%.

How Do I Outsource If I Don’t Have The Money?
Firstly let me say, if you don’t have the money to afford $3 – $5US an hour to pay someone to handle your tasks that needs to be done repetitively, then you shouldn’t be in business. Okay, I’ll be fair and tell you this: I had the mindset previously to do everything myself because it was always about not having enough money. I know how you feel when you first start running an Internet business or is still a one man show, but it’s having the courage to step out of your comfort zone and learn to delegate tasks to other people to do. It’s not going to be perfect at the beginning, but with a little training, some trial and error and time you will be able to leverage your time and increase your productivity.

Outsourcing Administrative Tasks
An example that I’ve been able to outsource for $3 US an hour is the ability to get my virtual assistant to check and reply to customer service emails every second working day. Provided that I have given the guidelines and information for how to respond, I have eliminated at least 10 hours a week of my time that I used to spend replying and following up emails. When you think about it, it only costs me around $30 US for a virtual assistant to free up 10 hours of my week. Isn’t that worth the trade off when my time is worth $500 per hour? There are many other examples I could give you on how to outsource your work, you can read more of it in my Internet Business Blueprint report.

A Web Developer Will Solve All Your Website Issues
If you’ve read my business timeline, you would know that I graduated with a Computer Science degree from UNSW. Even with a degree in Computing Science I’m still not a good programmer and I choose not to be. I would rather leave the technical issues for a web developer that I can hire on an ongoing basis and pay them to work on my projects. It would take them a couple of hours to do something that would take me all week. Hence the websites I design and this blog you are reading has been designed by a web developer I hire and I simply project manage the process to achieve a great result for my clients.

A Bookkeeper Will Keep The Tax Office Happy
If you’re like me and hate seeing piles of invoices and accounts unreconciled, then I know you would hate book keeping. It’s a crucial part of your Internet business and without it there’s no way to measure how well your business finances are doing. There are systems that allow you to keep track of your business online, but not all of them are compatible with the tax laws within your country. Therefore I still purchase accounting software that is meeting Australian standards, such as MYOB Accounting. I hire a book keeper to help make sure my accounts are up to date and to generate reports to show me the financial health of the business. I hire a book keeper on a monthly basis where I can have all my paper work batched and she will enter the information at one time. She makes sure that my books are up to date and tax is paid on time and I don’t get calls from the tax office. She would save at least 20 hours + a month of book keeping that I would have had to do myself, all for the cost of a dinner with my partner.

I’m Still The Writer And Internet Marketer
I love writing and expressing my ideas on Internet Business Path and will continue to do so for a very long time. I found that it’s a great way to communicate with people from all over the world and I love receiving feedback and comments. I do this because I’m passionate about Internet business and if you know me I usually share my ideas with my friends and family most of the time. I could outsource the writing to a ghostwriter quite easily and let someone else do the marketing, though I have learnt that these are my strengths and communicating and promoting my business is my passion.

Tyrone Shum
Outsourcer

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