Wow it has been 10 month or so since my last blog post, I need to get back into the game. I have been getting people sending me messages and emails about updating my blog, so I’m gonna work on getting better at it.
So what have I been up to? A lot. If you have not seen I have shut down developerhut.com, I didnt sell it or anything I just shut it down. I do not like client work so I decided to focus 100% of my time in ecommerce. I forgot when exactly I shut the company down but I can tell you that I dont miss that job one bit, too much work. I still have a full team of SEO peeps that do my own work plus some of my business partners, but other then that I dont do SEO like that anymore. If you are looking for good seo work, always check out wickedfire.com!
So I shut down the SEO thing and I now focus 100% of my time on eCommerce, and I am telling you that is were the money is at. Fuck client work, I was getting 40+ emails a day. Well actually its sort of funny, I switched off emails for Skype now, instead of writing emails all day I now write Skype convos all day. I usually have 10 chats open at one time. I now work at night time because most of my team is overseas in India, Pakistan, Philippines, and China. When I ran developer hut I had about 7 full time people working with me (I never say for me, thats weird) and they could work on there own time, most of them were for submissions, but now my team consists of designers, developers, writers, and customer support. I found out fast that not much gets done unless you talk to people and get updates pretty much daily, so I now work at night usually from 9pm-3am my time. I do my busy work during the day like coding, accounting, long ass emails, shit like that, but at night I am talking to people and working in basecamphq, skype and doing normal emails.
Speaking of the devil, basecamphq totally changed the way how I work, I’m kind of pissed off that I didnt use basecamp before. It makes managing work so much easier! I highly suggest it for anyone that uses freelancers. Basecamphq, authoritylabs, clicktale.com, and getclick.com are 4 websites I could not do business without!
I also outsourced customer support for 1 of my businesses to Pakistan, and I am loving it! You cant really tell that they are from Pakistan either, that has not been a problem whats so ever. Currently I have 1 dedicated agent for 8 hours a day, plus 5 non-dedicated agents for 24 hour online chat (adding that increased sales a ton!!). I am in talks to add 24 hour phone support, and then another dedicated agent for 2 of my other businesses. I have found that a lot of people like to talk to someone over chat or phone before they make an order/lead online, adding 24 hour chat is a great way to increase sales and leads!
Right now I am working on a process for commission for them, I cant go into detail but basically the other agents need to get there share of the commissions, but it has to be fair. I cant just give the dedicated agent 10% of a sale, I have to split it up fairly with the others. Once that has been decided I will start with cold calling and such to increase wholesale orders. I also want to test call backs and see the success or fail rate of that.
I need to get customer support down to a science pretty soon, I am launching 3 new businesses in the next 30 days. Two of them all normal eCommerce with both retail and wholesale sides, the other is a deal of the day site. Yes yes I am going to try out a deal of the day website, and I have the script, if you are interested in a deal of the day script let me know we can work a deal (I have access to 2 different ones). I am splitting the 2 normal ecom sites with just 1 agent, I will start interviews and stuff like that probably next week. For the deal of the day biz we will test out the process ourselves at first then hire and train someone when we have the system down, my idea for that is to focus 100% on word of mouth sales, so my thinking is to focus on really good products and deals/coupons, then people will tell there friends and such about the deals. I plan on hiring someone to cold call businesses all day to set up the daily deals, and they would do basic customer support (I will def add 24 hour support on the site as well, I think all bizs of mine will have 24 hour chat support now), but I need to get the process down before we start spending good money on that team.
When I first started this web shit I was 15, so 9 years ago. My very first business was a skateboarding rail company, I had the idea to have a website were people can submit skateboard/snowboard rails onto (like have some pretty flash thing to make your own rail), then the welder (me) would make the rail (during high school hours of course). I loved making websites so much I slowly learned the basics of design, coding, ftp, domains, blah blah blah during high school. By the time I graduated high school I knew html and css like the back of my hand. After high school I hated working at home depot so I worked my ass off to start a network of content websites, thats were I learned SEO and other marketing methods.
I then got into arbitrage, now that shit was fun, but way hard! Then in 2007 I found the love of my life, eCommerce (I did abri and ecom at the same time for 2 years or so I think). Now fast forward to 2011, my job is basically to be the boss now, I hardly ever do any coding anymore for my own money websites (I still do a lot for fun projects and such), I have a team of developers so I can not be switching the code on them because they build everything offline, so they have to have full control of the code so they know whats going on. I don’t do css/html anymore, I’m too lazy. My job now is basically to be a business man, I have to manage everything and make sure everything runs smooth.
A typical day for me is to wake up around 1pm (I work at night), and then make sure all businesses were running smoothly while I was sleeping. I then go through fucking fraud orders (people using other peoples credit cards to make orders), I get about $100-200 a day in successful fraud orders and about $200 or so in declined credit cards every day. Its a big pain in the ass. I never get fraud orders from the states, my biggest fraud country’s are Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, and Mexico. I get orders almost daily to Norway, France, Afghanistan, and Iraq with no problems (Brazil is starting to pick up). I cut out a bunch of other country’s, but a order from the 4 country’s above have a 50/50 chance of being fraud, so I have to sort them. I will probably stop shipping to Mexico and Sweden from now on, to much of a pain.
After I deal with fraud or held up orders I then check all my bank accounts, paypal, and merchant accounts and input any expensie into my accounting set up. Also check out wave accounting, its pretty kool, I coded up my own accounting shin dig but I would use wave if I didnt. After that I tend to emails and basecamp. Then I take a break and then start working at around 9pm or so. The reason is because around 9pm my time, its around 8am in India. I jump on skype and see were everyone is at with basecamp work. During that time is when I usually do some coding work for smaller projects and play around with sales letters. I use clicktale.com and fuck around with sales letters all the time. Want a tip? Make your shipping page as detailed as possible, a lot of people read the shipping page before they make an order, I have lost a lot of sales from bad shipping pages.
If I dont have a lot of work to do, I usually jump on call of duty; modern warfare 2 and have a few beers and pwn newbs…. yes while Im working. People dont believe me when I say “I work and play xbox” haha. But I do. I just make sure Im on skype and check my email very often. Once basecamp is updated there isnt much work for me to do :-s
So there you have an update by me, now thats settled I want to do some blog posts about business and marketing, I have lots of tips for you guys! I have learned a lot in the last 10 months since my last blog posts haha.
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John,
Glad to hear you’re doing well. May I ask what you retail through your ecommerce stores?
Hi Jon, is there any new outsourcing jobs there. I am eagerly waiting for that from you. I am ready for the interview…
Man, you know your shit.
I’m just starting out with content sites and I thought I was on my way towards a nice and reasonably fast success. But this post made me realize I’m waay behind!
I’m kinda shocked, actually. You know, this means I’m radically changing my goals and expectations for my future business. Your job is exactly what I’m looking for, and I’m planning to get it somehow! Like yourself I’d say I can manage css, php and so on, so that’s encouraging.
What I’m saying is great blog! (or at least great post, I’m reading browsing the bolg in a minute) Looking forward to future updates =D
its very nice post great job and thanks for sharing.
so you have buy goods wholesale or dropship?
its very nice post great job and thanks for sharing.
GET BACK IN THE GAME!
I think you life is very busy. I also do SEO but I dont have so much work but I am not a professional yet. I will be looking forward to your new posts concerning business and marketing.
I’ve 2 suggestions and a question:
1) You should read the 4 hour workweek of tim ferris. I believe some of the work you’re doing can be delegated to a VA, and the book of tim is pretty much about that
2) If you work and play, you should try minecraft (or better don’t try it if you want to remain a productive person
)
3) getclick.com is a parked domain, maybe http://getclicky.com/ is what you ment?
hey nico,
1. i think i might have talked to him before, or another guy that does that type of stuff im not sure. but yeah i will be hiring one soon, i just want to make sure i have a good system set up, and i dont mind doing the work myself right now.
2. haha ill have to try that on out it looks good, i have been addicted to tiberian sun for a long time, thats the only computer game i have ever really played.
3. yeah i meant getclikcy.com thanks for letting me know ill fix that
and thanks for reading and leaving a comment
Always a pleasure to read your blog. Specially when you talk about eCommerce and the systems (not code, conceptual systems) that you create to run your business.