 That means I can skip the introduction. That's good. Saves me some time. All right. So yeah, this presentation is both for site owners, people that want to set up sites, but also for people who build websites. It basically applies to everybody. So what I'm going to tell you about is why I thought of this problem, what the problem actually is, and then we'll compare the myths that people have about building websites, operating them, having them, versus reality. Then we'll go into opportunity cost. Actually, we'll talk about opportunity cost, return on investment and scalability. And I'll give you tips on how to succeed with at least a mix that includes outsourcing. All right, so I have a background in large systems, both implementation and support. So that kind of gave me a balanced experience, but also I worked specifically in an outsourcing company that outsourced SAP-based payroll. So way back when, one of the clients wanted to save money and wanted to leave us. And of course, they wanted us to help them migrate the system. And what happened was we asked them how they were going to save that money. So of course, half-powered server, no redundancy, no disaster recovery, no off-site tapes. So they weren't comparing apples to apples. They were saving money, but they weren't getting the same thing. So that got me started thinking that outsourcing actually has a lot of merit. It actually delivers value, although sometimes people don't realize it. Yeah, that continued with, I mean, when I switched to small clients, I started getting things, especially when I got involved in the WordPress meetup and more people knew me. I got things like, can you tell me why is my site not being indexed properly? You forgot that tick box in WordPress that says, let search engines in. The thing is, people don't know. And they don't know what they don't know. They just see that their website's been up there for six months and nothing. And not even getting into sites completely disappearing. Anyway, this works through some myths. So essentially, people judge things from their own perspective. And that can be horribly wrong, because we don't sell to ourselves. When we set up the site, we write things that we already know about. We never read it like somebody who doesn't know, because we already know. We know who's in the pictures. And we know what they mean. And we know what we're trying to communicate with this. But we have no idea what people are going to perceive when they look at it for the first time. So that's one myth. It actually, I'm calling this the road to nowhere, because I've met people who have gone on Weeks or WordPress.com, or Squarespace, or whatever. And it led them nowhere. They basically got stuck. So they used the site builder, and they built the site and looked nice to them. But that was about it. In reality, just look at the green ones for now. People often don't know that they need to register a domain. So they might go with Weeks. And then a year down the road, they'll go, oh, hang on a second. Some other people have this domain that's theirs, and so on. So this is just to give you a taste. Obviously, it's not a complete list. But I'm guessing when you look at it and you see it listed, you go, oh, yeah. But some people don't realize that these things even need to be done. So they just go on their web adventure, not knowing about this. Myth number two, if you build it, they will come. All I need is a website. If I put it up, people are going to start inquiring, subscribing to my newsletter, and I'll start getting business. Well, in actual fact, the middle column is all about marketing. If your marketing's not set up, you get nothing. You can have a really great site, and you can have it written from the perspective of the customer and all that sort of stuff. And it can be functionally sound. But if nobody knows about it, that's it. I had one particular client had a website that basically disappeared and needed to set that up. So I recommended WordPress, recommended WooCommerce, and I gave him a quote, it was a decent quote. And I said to him, look, 40% of this is to install WordPress, the theme, and all that sort of stuff, load everything up, and customize and make it look nice. 60% is structuring your catalog. Because if I structure a catalog properly, then Google will love you. People will know how to find everything. Things will make sense, and your site will do well. So he went across the street and found somebody, a developer, that did it for 10% less. He got a 10% discount. And for the following about five years, paid me handsomely to adjust everything that developer did incorrectly, because he wasn't an SEO person. And he just didn't realize. So he had a bunch of products, 1,800 products in groups and colors and sizes and whatnot dresses. So they just chucked them in. She'll be right. And it wasn't. So essentially, you only get traffic when your website is set up for marketing. Myth number three. Yeah, now I've got the site I'm all set, right? Get traffic, awesome, new. For example, a colleague of mine, an affiliate of mine, had a bunch of clients. We decided to go it along with posting. And that was a really bad thing. And that was a really bad move, because the site got hacked. And we had massive problems. We had these 50 clients screaming at us to get it up. And the main reason that sites get hacked is because they don't get updated. They don't get maintained. So old software has known holes. And so the site gets hacked. So you have to keep the site up to date. And that's ongoing. You can't set it up right and just keep it there. If you keep it there, people will find the holes and then get in and hack you. And WordPress is so popular that if you have a WordPress site, people will know fairly quickly how to hack your site. And also, it's built in layers. So if you update core, there's going to be a whole cascade running through your WooCommerce or your form's plug-ins or whatever, because everything has to be then retrofitted to the new. Because nothing is forward compatible, right? You put in an underlying new thing, everything has to be retrofitted to suit, including custom code, if any. Yeah. I mean, there's the whole notion of anyone can do it. It is propagated through internet marketing seminars. And it's what my wife calls wishful thinking. So you're not on the bit. You're more in the water getting inundated. All right. So the reality is that even if nothing wrong happens, you still need to keep your content fresh, adjust your products, adapt to your market, respond to people on social media, whatever. But you can't just leave it and think it's going to be all right. Discontinued products, people try to buy something and you're out of stock. That's embarrassing. And then they'll never come again. All right. Now, people that do it themselves, they go, well, I don't cost me money, right? So worst case, it'll take me longer, but I'll get there. But where's there? So without the knowledge, without the skills, you can take a long time getting nowhere, really. So let's work through some scenarios. And I invented all of the data, right? I put it in through a spreadsheet, but really it's all bogus. It's just for demonstration purposes. So this is the mythical profitability projection. It assumes low initial costs, no ongoing costs. I'm doing everything right. So if it's just me, it doesn't cost anything. The returns are immediate and there's moderate growth and it's linear. So the site will just keep growing. I'll keep working on it, it'll keep growing. That's great. Mythical first year total is around $76,000 from my bogus data. The reality is that if you do it yourself, there are unexpected initial costs, like your domain-themed premium plugins that you didn't factor on. There's unexpected ongoing costs. Like you need to upgrade your Wix account to a premium hosting because you want your own domain and that costs monthly. You want to connect to MailChimp for your newsletter marketing and MailChimp will charge you or you're going on content delivery network, whatever. Then there's no returns until you're done setting up the site. If you do it yourself, that can be a very long time. Then you need to set up your marketing to actually get traffic. If you do it yourself, that can be a very long time. So you get nothing in the meantime. Gross is very slow. And it's limited by your time, by how much time you have. And if you're not making money, you're going to keep your day job. And so you will keep not having much time. It'll be limited by your experience and experience tools, whatever. It'll be limited by your budget. And it'll be limited by the fact that you're a single person. So in my calculations, first-year total is minus $750 and a ton of frustration. And this is assuming everything runs smoothly because in month six, this happens. Google changes something and you're screwed for two months trying to figure out what the hell you do about it. Then WooCommerce changes the database layer which they did some time ago. It started spewing deprecation notices. And it just so happened because you did it yourself. You didn't know that the add-on that you put in is no longer supported. Well, it hasn't been in a year and a half, but you didn't read. And so you put it in and now it's unsupported and it's no longer compatible. So you spend another month trying to fix that up. And then month 11, your site gets hacked and you're really screwed. Because you forgot all about backups. So let's look at a real scenario when you use somebody else to help you out. The initial costs are higher. And they're mostly for building the site and setting up the marketing connections and monitoring and things like that. Ongoing costs are moderate. They're not horrible, but as you can see, because it's done professionally, you pretty quickly start to get traffic and you start to make sales. So you're actually profitable fairly quickly. Straight after launch, there's rapid growth. Because initially that's what happens. Google throws you up there. If people like your site, you stay up. They continue to send you traffic. And the nice thing is your growth is scalable. Because you can always put more men on the job. So if you need more operational help, or if you need more people to maintain your website or whatever, just add more people to your team. Because you're not doing everything yourself. And I deliberately put this in month 8. You can see that the cost is increasing. So this graph goes down, because I added, I think $500 or something to the marketing budget. So you up your advertising costs, because now you know your conversion rate. You know that you're doing well. And you know your return on investment. And you know that by adding budget, you will actually make more money. So first year theoretical total here is $72,000. But if you think of next year, see next year, it starts here. So remember the other graphs, they ended somewhere here. That the DIY graph ended somewhere here. This is where you start year two. Year two is where you're really kicking ass. All right, what about the challenges we had before? No problem. Mobile first indexing, no problem. The site's already responsive. Any professional would have set that up for you to begin with, would have made it mobile friendly, would have made it fast, put caching on, whatever. WooKamers database layer changed, no problem, because your foundation is sound. They've already peaked something that is well supported. It might have cost you $25 or $49 or something, but you know you're getting something decent. In month 11, there's two scenarios. One is the site got hacked. But because you have a backup, it gets restored. Somebody looks at your site, figures out what the hacking was at Titan security. But really the most likely scenario is that initially they put on WordFence or iThem security and they use a security-conscious hosting provider. And so you're safe. Like somebody tries to hack you, but fails. Okey-dokey, so the important bits. This is where you need to perk up and listen, because the points are really important. If I went up to anybody here and said, give me two bucks, and I'll give you five, how many lots of two bucks do you want to give me? Yeah, everything in your pockets, right? And some from your bank account. Yeah, but think about it this way. The way I phrase it, how many do you want to give me, it implies that I'm taking something away from you. And most people have a loss aversion. It's a thing, it's a brain fault that we all have called loss aversion. So if I ask you to give me something, the first reaction is, hang on, let me think about it. And you take a step back. So this is what's happening here, really. If I say to you fork out $10,000 for a decent site, and I'll give you sales from month three, and by the end of year one, you'll be so far ahead that you'll never look back. Most people will say, I'll give it a try for 12 months myself, see how I do. It's stupid, because there's opportunity cost. You could have made $72,000 in the first year, despite spending $10,000 upfront, despite spending whatever, $2,000 on marketing a month afterwards, despite increasing your budget in month eight, you're still $72,000 ahead. And it's time to call your boss and say that you're quitting because year two is going to be even better. And it's not like you didn't lift a finger, but most of the work wasn't done by you. So you could continue making money elsewhere and affording it, basically, funding it. So opportunity cost is the money that you could have. And essentially, what you want to do is borrow from the future. So your future is $72,000 that the graph was projecting. All you're doing is you're borrowing from your future and just investing it now and getting the return sooner. Now, the second point is return on investment. Again, when I do advertising for my clients, they ask me, how much should I advertise for? And I go, well, let's make sure that we're getting a good return on investment. So I'll use whatever, $100, $200 to run an experiment. But once we know the return on investment and we know that we'll keep optimizing so we'll only get better, the sky's the limit. Like, how deep is your pocket this month? And yeah, give it to Google and it'll give you the traffic or Facebook or whatever. So spending more is better when you have a good return on investment. And it's similar with outsourcing. When outsourcing delivers more results, better results, than you would on your own, then spending more on outsourcing is a good thing. The last thing on this slide is that outsourcing makes your system scalable. So for example, I wanted to do link building for my clients. And it just takes forever. And you have to keep track of things. That's not something I wanted to do. And if I actually did it for my clients, it'd be really expensive for them. So I outsourced it. And granted, it's a second tier outsourcing. But still, my clients are now paying hell of a lot less than they would have paid me. I still make a margin. I still have to manage everything and focus on the right keywords and things like that. But I can take on probably 15, 20 times the amount of work that I would have, plus I don't do any of it because I had it. Yeah. Well, because I get choice. So essentially, how to succeed? So first up, in order to enable you to work with outsourcing providers, you have to own everything. And that way, you can kick them out. So you give them access. They do work for you. But they don't own anything. You couldn't get rid of them if they owned it. Like, it'd be theirs. They'd kick you out. And then you'd be left with nothing. The first thing you need to do as a baseline is own everything. So on your domain, on your hosting account, always have access to it. All of your financial accounts, that includes PayPal, Stripe, merchant accounts, of course a bank account for the business. But also Google Ads. There's some crafty providers that will siphon the client's money through them. So they'll have an account with Google and they'll charge the client for a click cost. Never do that. Never. Always pay your advertising platforms directly. This way, you can get people to manage. But you can kick them out and get somebody else to manage for you. And then there's software components and services like MailChimp I mentioned. And also, yeah, cool. And affiliate programs and that sort of stuff. OK. And social media profiles, of course. And all of these services, AdWords, Facebook, whatever, I think even MailChimp, they'll let you add users to the account. So it's all possible. Second step of success is figure out what your unique selling proposition is. That's like the foundation of marketing. What am I really, really good at? What do I do effortlessly and I enjoy? And so that brings an added emotional benefit to doing that bit. And do that yourself. Side note is, if you have a personal brand, then also do everything yourself on social media. Don't let anybody pretend to be you. But on the other side, outsource absolutely everything else. Don't do anything that makes you feel tired when you think about it, because it'll just exhaust you and you won't be creative when you do it. So it's not your thing, let somebody else do it. With the caveat that you want to find an expert. Now, in actual fact, a lot of people are afraid of outsourcing overseas. So it's a good point to mention here that outsourcing doesn't mean overseas. So my clients actually outsource their digital market to me. But I'm right here. They're all in Brisbane, and so am I. If you demonstrate value as an outsourcing provider or as a provider, then it's an easy choice to choose you. And it's the same the other way around. If the outsourcing provider can demonstrate value, can demonstrate results, then go for it. Good return on investment, welcome aboard. The advantage of this is, when you use outsourcing, you pay linear fees, but your site gets built up, so you get exponential returns. Your turn.