PPC Ads

What is it?

PPC, or “Pay per click” ads pay you a fee each time someone clicks on your ads. Unless you’re a black-hatter, which I assume you’re not, Google Adsense is the best starting point.  Google has put together a great way to monetize sites that are specifically not in a very profitable niche.  How do they do this? By serving up ads that their customers want to see, regardless of what your site is about.  Have you ever searched for dog collars then went to a random site, and saw ads for dog collars? This is because Google knows what you’re searching for, and that site you visited is serving up Google ads.  Essentially, you’re delegating a spot on your site for Google to serve those custom-tailored ads to your visitors.  Due to the nature of how Google collects information, you’re much more likely to get a click and get paid.

How Have I done?

I find Adsense a great way to monetize sites that don’t have high paying affiliate offers, or are not laser targeted at a specific market.  OK so I haven’t made millions in pay-per-click ads, but in my best month I’ve gotten a check for over $1,200 from Google Adsense, during a holiday shopping season. Sure, I’m not the guy who you see pictures of online getting $132,000 checks from Google every month, but I can’t complain.

Affiliate Marketing

What is it?

Affiliate marketing is essentially me driving sales to an existing outside site, and getting a commission. It is a $3b+ industry, and every major online player has an affiliate program of some sort.  You sign up for an affiliate network like Commission Junction, then find advertisers that are relevant to your site.  Then you put your affiliate link on your site, and anyone who clicks on that link and performs a purchase will give you a nice little commission of usually between 2% to 40% or even more for information products.

How Have I Done?

I’ve consistently earned a monthly income of hundreds of dollar (thousands some months) from affiliate offers over the past few years.  The cool thing is, I get checks or auto-deposits from several different networks, and my income stays diversified. I won’t say how much I’ve earned on this but i will say I see a huge potential, and it’s nice to get a raise every single month.  Essentially, I build a site, rank it, promote products, get commissions, then repeat. Some sites are big earners and some not, but I learn from my experience each time I am building a site.

Selling a Product

What is it?

Another term would be ecommerce.  You have products you are selling on your site, with a shopping cart and a checkout process.  Products can be something you produce, have a deal with a manufacturer to sell, buy wholesale, or even an information product.  It doesn’t really matter, the main thing is you are selling something.  This is different than affiliate marketing where you are driving traffic to someone else’s site and earning a commission. Your site is the point of purchase.

How Have I done?

As of early 2012, the majority of my online earnings have been from ecommerce.  I’ve sold many different products in dozens of niches.  It has its pros and cons.  The cons being that you have to deal with the customers, you are responsible for shipping and product procurement, etc.  But the pros are a higher profit margin, and control over pricing.  In 2007, I sold refurbished game systems on eBay, and made around $70,000 in 3 months; I’ve sold specialty As-Seen-on-TV items on Amazon, earning several thousand dollars; I’ve created a micro-brand that has done nearly $700,000 in sales in its best year; I’ve even created a niche specialty site that netted $3k a month and sold that site for a cash lump-sum.  The long and short of it is, if you can find a niche, rank in that niche, and have the capital to fund the project, there is money to be made.

Subscription Fees

What is it?

So you have an idea for a service or some kind of software product or membership type site? Congratulations, if you can actually acquire paying customers, your business is worth 5 times a standard online business.  Why? Because you’ve nurtured your customers. You give them something worth paying monthly for. Netflix is a great example of this model.  The best part about this income stream, in my opinion, is that the payments are automatically deducted from your customers’ accounts.  Why is that good? Well, mainly, because your customers don’t have to think about sending you the money, it is auto-deducted.

How Have I done?

This is my newest method of earning an income, and I’m still trying out new things, however I have earned a few hundred dollars a month for the last few months on… drum roll please….. a game server.  I give people a place to play a specific game online, which they can play for free, I pay hosting. So how do I make money? I have 4 levels of subscription, from $5 to $35 a month, which gives the players more and more permissions and in game money as the level of subscription increases to use as they wish.  As of today, I’ve had about 50 paying members, and I’m only the 248th ranked server for this specific game.  The next few months I’ll be looking at driving traffic to this server, as I haven’t spent any money on marketing to get to this level, I can only imagine what a small marketing budget being applied towards it could produce. It’s a beautiful thing when people pay you for virtual goods.  Some of the players who are paying each month haven’t even logged in for a few months! They have signed up for the $10 or so monthly fee, but don’t find much time to play. They don’t want to cancel, cause it’s such a nominal fee, so everyone wins, and the best part: They don’t have to remember to pay the small fee- it’s auto-deducted.

Direct Banner Sales

What is it?

I sell a banner ad spot directly on my site.  No middle man, just a fee I charge. Depending on your niche, your traffic, and your site’s popularity, you can earn HUGE with this. There are some cons, such as having to manage the customer, having to acquire customer, etc.  But if you just slap a page on your site called ‘Advertise with us’ with a form to fill out, and put your rates for each placement, you might get some inquiries.  The nice thing about this is that you don’t have to rely on clicks or actions, you simply need to get an advertiser willing to pay that price for that placement.

How Have I Done?

I’ve done this method with one site, but changed strategy 3 months later for other reasons.  But when I did have this method, I charged $600 for the main header site-wide banner for a month.  That site had 30,000 monthly visitors, and it was a very specific niche of customers looking for that kind of item, so the rate was reasonable.  My customer seemed happy, but turns out he was using the banner ad for an affiliate offer I could make more money myself by posting my affiliate offer in the same spot! But the main point I wanted to make here was that you can, and some sites do, very successfully, make gazillions of dollars managing site-wide or page-specific banner ads in-house.

There are tons of ways to make money online, and I hope to dabble in several more, including Kindle, iPhone and Android app development, mobile ads, CPA, and even CPM ad placements.  I just figured I’d post this as candidly as possible showing you what I’ve been successful with.  I wish you all the success in the world with your online income earning efforts!

Remember, not all links help you.  It’s better to have 5 good links than 5,000 junk links! If you’ve been blasting your site with spammy scrapebox type marketing, stop, and read my simple strategy. Disclaimer: This strategy is not guaranteed to work for every site, but I have had success, and that’s why I’m sharing. To be honest, I can’t believe I’m giving this information out for free!

For Starters

Before you waste your time building links, you need to get your keyword research done, then do your on-page SEO.  I’ll write about those another time. For now I want to focus on backlinking. The rest of this post will assume that you know everything you need to know about keyword research and on-page optimization. OK, so now your on-page optimization is done, time to focus on off-page.

Step 1: RSS Syndication

RSS is a quick way to get tons of quickly-indexed links.  But there’s more to it than simply creating a single RSS feed to your site. I use RSS Link Bomber, which is a WordPress plugin that automatically creates a new RSS feed for each post and page, submits it to over a dozen RSS directories and pings each feed.  Also, it allows you to use spintax to create a header for each feed, with anchor text links to your home page and or whatever page you’re trying to rank for that anchor text.  It uses your hosting’s cron to randomly submit a random feed to random directories.

In addition to this, I also create a Feedburner feed for the money site, then use the RSS Link Bomber cron job to throw that feed in with the auto submissions. Also, each article site you submit content to, your Youtube account, Twitter account, etc. usually have RSS feeds.  I use the RSS feeds for each, and submit to the cron within RSS Link Bomber.  This alone will create over a thousand dynamic quickly indexed links with your anchor text.

Step 2: Article & Web 2.0 Properties Marketing

First, I’ll create 5 pieces of content (this is part of on-page SEO).  I will either write them myself, or outsource to a writer on Elance.com.  These 5 pages will be content-rich, very useful, top quality articles.  These will be on my website.  Each of the 5 pages will be targeted to a specific keyword (which I’ve spent hours researching with Market Samurai.

Next I’ll re-purpose this content.  Its MY content, and my goal is to get my content out there, on the web.  So I spin the articles, 16 times each.  Don’t use a crappy one-click spinner, use SpinChimp.

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Once I get about 30-40% uniqueness from each article version, I will submit 8 to web 2.0 property pages like Weebly, WordPress.com, Blogger, Squidoo, HubPages, etc., then post 8 to quality article submission sites like Ezinearticles.  The key to the web 2.0 properties pages is to put a link to your homepage, then to the subpage for that keyword, then from one web 2.0 property to the other.  The simple term is ‘linkwheel’.  For example, you’d link the HubPages hub to your Squidoo lense, and link your Squidoo lense to your Weebly page, etc. This passes the beloved Google link juice of these inherently high pagerank 2.0 sites to each other, giving the links going to your site more juice.

I’ve seen many juvenile depictions of how a proper link wheel should work, but nobody ever explains about which pages are you linking to, etc.  Simple, you have 1 main keyword that you’re trying to rank your home page for, then 1 keyword you’re trying to rank 1 subpage for.  Each article on a submission site or 2.0 property should have 2 to 3 links.  Don’t uniformly do 3 links, or 2 links.  These 3 links are:

1. To your homepage (With anchor text to your money site’s primary keyword)
2. To your subpage (With anchor text to your subpage’s keyword)
3. To another 2.0 property in your link wheel (With anchor text or variant to your money site’s primary keyword)

My depiction of how these links should be connected are a bit more intense than the simple ‘link wheel’.  For those of you who are visual, take a look at this info-graphic I made showing the overall strategy in color coded graphics. You can download this info-graphic (PDF) by clicking here. Once each of these are posted, I’ll use pingomatic.com to ping each article, which helps them get indexed faster, and once the wheel is in motion, the magic Google juice will start pumping into your site. Give it time.

Step 3: Social Bookmarking & Voting Links

We all know Google’s heading at a high speed towards social searching as the new way to search.  Since Panda, we’ve seen it start to take place.  Experimentation with Google Plus has proven to have a direct effect on rankings.  One site was #100 ranked for a term on Google, then 3 people clicked the Plus 1 button on that site, 10 minutes later, that site was now ranked #78 for the same term.  Google likes to see that people are actually socially throwing props your site’s way.  There are a lot of secret weapons in this field, which I’ll address in a later post entirely.

But the main thing is, you need to put out link bait to get potential customers interested in clicking the Google plus button, the Facebook Like button, Diggs, etc.  A diverse drip-fed flow of these kinds of ‘votes’ is further proof to Google that your site is an authority in your field.

Step 4: Massive Blog Network Link Wheels

This step isn’t absolutely necessary unless your keyword is highly competitive.  It takes time and is a little more risky to the layperson, and also requires a little investment (Monthly fees of between $20-200). The point of this phase is to flow more link juice to your web 2.0 properties, and your posted articles.  You definitely do not want to link these directly to your money site! This will harm your SERPs more than it helps them. Doing this, you’ll get the link juice, without any penalties from Google, because the high authority web 2.0 property sites act like a filter, filtering out any fishy effect from the massive influx of the blog network links. After subscribing to a link network, you’ll then re-spin all your content into thousands of versions and submit to the blog networks.  The quality and uniqueness of these articles doesn’t need to be as extremely high quality as your money site and your 2.0 properties.

To Wrap it Up

Remember, Google loves link diversity.  Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.  Also, don’t build your links too fast and furious.  This is a red flag in Google’s algorithm.  Article marketing alone used to be able to rank a site quick, but after Google’s Panda update, we have to be smarter. Keep on top of the changes in the web, and adjust your strategy accordingly. Also, if you have any tips you’ve found successful yourself, please comment below.

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You can find stuff as bizarre as hiring people to post on your facebook wall in order to make your girlfriend jealous, or sing happy birthday to you by name in a bikini… But the most useful applications I’ve found come in some of the SEO related gigs. Namely, social marketing, article writing, link building and even video testimonials.

• Social Marketing
  Buy yourself hundreds of facebook fans, facebook shares, Google Plus 1 votes, tweets, social bookmarks on dozens of sites, etc.  These kinds of things can help an SEO campaign, but take hours doing them yourself.
• Article Writing
  For $5 you can generally get a decently written 500 word SEO article in the topic of your choice.  This is a bargain for those of us who crank out tons of web content on various niches, but hate writing.  I’ve done a couple of these through Fiverr, and they weren’t the worst I’d seen, especially for how complicated the topic I gave them was.  It certainly was around the same quality you’d get from another outsourcer on Elance.com, for half the price.
• Link Building
  Be careful with this one.  There are some valuable links to be gained, but simply going for the ‘too good to be true’ 50,000 links in 3 days is not going to help your campaign.  Google knows what looks fishy, and some of the link wheels and highly spammy offerings on Fiverr will only hurt your efforts.
• Video Testimonials
  There are dozens, if not hundreds, of men and women of different races and languages that offer up a 1 to 2 minute honest, professional product review by video.  Though this could be used less ethically, you can also send your product to the reviewer for an honest review.  Video testimonials coming from different people mean more to consumers than if the testimonial was coming from you. Not bad for $5!

If you’ve been thinking about outsourcing some of your internet marketing tasks, Fiverr is the perfect way to get your feet wet.  You can check the gigs out, check the feedback of the contractor, make sure they’re good, and risk your $5 and sit back, while someone else does your dirty work.  Once you get your feet wet, you’ll be on Odesk and Elance hiring a full time team.

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Don’t do it the hard way.

My first idea was to form a Nevada corporation. I would then register that entity as an Amazon affiliate, and that corporation would pay me as a shareholder.  But that would not only add time, but cost several hundred dollars. Not to mention this process would add more red tape at tax season. This intimidates most affiliate marketers of the badlands to just forget about it and move on.  Then I found a secret weapon.

Do it the easy way.

I found Viglink. To put it in simple terms, Viglink is a very large affiliate aggregator.  They’re not registered in one of the banned states, so they qualify for Amazon affiliate.  Also, due to their volume, they get the top 8.5% commission rate on all Amazon items. What they do is allow you and I to monetize our sites with their affiliate account, as kind of an ‘affiliate’s affiliate’. So you’re not actually an Amazon affiliate, but you’re kinda a contractor for Viglink.

You install a snippet of code on your site and from that point on, any links you post out from your site (that can be affiliated) will automatically convert to an affiliated link.  Have a WordPress site? It couldn’t be any easier.  Just install the plugin and add your Viglink key.  You can also set it to automatically add affiliated links to your pages.  For example, the application saw that I typed ‘Amazon’ on this page, but I didn’t create the link, Viglink did. This makes affiliating your pages much simpler- and automatic.

The bonus, Viglink has thousands of merchants, not only Amazon! You don’t have to apply to dozens and dozens of affiliate programs, only to be rejected, then weed through the specific pages and products you want to link to.  Simply go to the page you want to link to, copy the URL, paste it into your site, then Viglink will automatically convert that link to an affiliate link.  Viglink takes 25% of whatever the affiliate program pays.  The good news for someone in an Amazon ‘banned state’ is even after their 25%, due to the fact they get the 8.5% tier, you actually get 6.4%, which is still more than most Amazon affiliates make at the bottom tiers.  So what are you waiting for? It’s a very simple workaround, and trust me, it will make your life easier.

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They have developed an algorithm that when you enter your site URL and keywords, and do your onpage optimization, you’ll get a price spit out at you, for what you’d pay for which search engines.  It also will tell you if it’s a good SEO opportunity or not.  The two tools you can use before even committing or even creating an account are the ‘keyword opportunity tool’ and ‘keyword suggestions’.  Their system undoubtedly ties in to Google’s keyword tools to calculate their risk on taking on an SEO campaign with your URL and keywords.

The ‘keyword opportunity tool’ will tell you how much you’ll pay per month if your site ranks in a certain position in Google, or Yahoo/Bing.  In this screenshot you can see that you’ll pay $149 a month for this particular keyword if you rank in the top 3 in Google, and $87 a month if you rank in the top 3 of Yahoo/Bing.  So, yes you’ll have to pay, but let’s be honest, for the cost and the risk, it’s not that terrible of a proposition. Many people put thousands of dollars into an SEO campaign that may not even produce results, at least with RankPay you can see what you’ll have to pay if you rank. If you’ve ever thought about outsourcing your SEO, you might want to finish reading this review.

Did RankPay Work for Me?

I used RankPay for 2 different websites, way before I knew anything about SEO. I was stuck way at the bottom of search results and the research I did do on SEO made me nervous that I would screw something up and get red-flagged by Google, so I figured I had nothing to loose.  I was right, after a month, I didn’t see any immediate improvement.  I got a bill from RankPay that was $0.  In that account breakdown, they showed my starting rankings, along with my current rankings.  No change, no charge.

Now that I am well aware of what it takes to get a link-building off-page SEO campaign going, I realize that RankPay‘s approach to ‘slowly but steadily’ build diverse links was the right way.  Google likes links from diverse sources, from social bookmarks, forum posts, blog comments, high authority links, social votes, directories and the like. Google also doesn’t like when one day you get 500 backlinks and the next month you get none.  RankPay slowly posts quality, diverse backlinks to your url, and in your dashboard you’ll be able to see what kind of links are being added.

After the second month, my rankings started to gain traction, and in several keyword terms, I was ranking in the top 3 results.  Seeing that I was doing no other off page SEO, I credit the increase directly to RankPay.  Once the rankings were in a good position, I moved them to ‘maintenance mode’ which is half the cost, and RankPay simply works to maintain those rankings by doing necessary link-building.

My RankPay Review

Pros:

• No risk
• Cost is up-front and fully expected
  
• You only pay if you rank
• It’s fully managed by SEO experts who know what the heck they’re doing
• You can manage SEO campaigns on many many sites and keywords

I would definitely recommend RankPay to anyone who wants automated SEO who has inadequate knowledge or time to build links, but also is on a budget.  If you are sitting on an excellent site, which is onpage optimized, content rich, and wondering where your traffic is, you should give RankPay a shot, as you have nothing to lose.  If you don’t rank, you don’t pay.

Cons:

• You have to pay a price for both major search engines, not just Google
• Some keywords can be expensive to rank in
• If your site gets stuck at 1 position that you have to pay monthly on, you have to pay that each month even if you don’t improve beyond that (for as long as the keyword is active)
  

Pretty much the only kind of person I wouldn’t recommend RankPay to is the SEO guru who has a firm handling on link building and has a team to carry out that method, or perhaps if you have a much larger budget and are working with a fortune 500 site.  But those guys probably aren’t reading this right now.

All in all, my RankPay Review is positive.  RankPay is a great low-cost, low-risk way of dipping your toes in the waters of search engine optimization.  Its also a great way to manage many different SEO campaigns without having to manage your own team.

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But I’m small potatoes… I can’t go global…

You may run a 1 or 2 man operation and be intimidated by the prospect of expanding your business overseas.  Maybe you’ve settled with offering international shipping, and settle for the ridiculous shipping price that nobody ever would pay to have your items shipped to them in Europe.  There is a way to expand your reach to the far corners of the world, and it’s easier than you might think. It’s called product fulfillment.

Seriously? Then where?

What I did was start with the largest English-speaking market outside of North America- the UK.  I recommend if you’re starting out, do this as well.  You can always expand to other English-speaking markets, like Australia, and even go so far as to have your site translated to different languages and use shipping fulfillment there to reach the market.

In the UK, I use Shipwire. Basically, I ship cases of merchandise to Shipwire’s warehouse in London, and as I sell to customers in the UK and Europe, it ships from the warehouse in London.  It ships quicker, cheaper, and more professionally than if I tried shipping from here.  Not to mention, customers tend to want to buy items in their own country – go figure.  Shipwire allows me to have a UK operation without actually being there. It worked so well I ended up using them for even my domestic shipping, for pretty much the same reasons, and to free up our own time.  They charge you a per-shipment fee which varies, based on your shipping volume.  Usually it’s around $1.90 per item.  For a small operation like ours, it’s FAR more feasible to use fulfillment like Shipwire for a simple fee of $1.90 per item than it is to hire a UK lawyer, set up a company, an office, staff, etc there in the UK.

If your product can be sold in the UK, and has equal demand in the UK, you can easily expand your customer base by 65,000,000 people, or 20% (assuming you’re in the USA).

Step-By-Step Instructions on Expanding your eCommerce Business to the United Kingdom

•  Step 1: Research Demand

Even countries as similar as the USA and the United Kingdom have many differences that could possibly void demand for your products there.  If you sell electronics, make sure you are selling the right voltage; If you’re selling DVDs, make sure you’re selling the right versions; Don’t expect American political humor items to sell well in the UK; Etc.

• Step 2: Build a UK Site

Make sure to snag your .co.uk domain.  This would be best if it were the same domain as your main domain.  This is the best for obvious SEO reasons in that country, as you begin your SEO campaign for this site. The next best would be to use a subdomain like uk.yoursite.com. Change nuances like British slang, change currency to pounds, add your toll free number, and you’re set.

• Step 3: Get a UK Phone Number

Depending on your volume, this could be as simple as getting a simple Vonage UK phone number, and forwarding it to your local line, or as complicated as hiring an outsourced call center to manage your phones in the UK.  Either way, when a UK customer goes to your site, and sees a local toll-free number, they are at ease knowing they’re dealing locally, and apart from YOU, they are.

• Step 4: Sign up For Shipwire

Go to Shipwire and sign up for a free trial, send some product, give it a shot.  Your packages will have your chosen company name on the “From” address, and your customer will get their orders quickly and be as happy as can be. One benefit of the United Kingdom is that the country is so small, shipping from the Shipwire warehouse in London is fast, like 2 days, even when paying for a cheap mailing service.  Your customer will not have to even pay customs, which is another huge plus and marketing point.

• Step 5: Sell

Once you are all set up and have all aspects of your UK presence in place (.co.uk site, toll free UK phone number, Shipwire warehouse) you are now accessible to 65 million new potential consumers, and with very little risk.  I mean, for a few hundred dollars, IF THAT, you’re in business.

Disclaimer: Make sure to at least consult a UK accountant if you start seeing a significant volume of sales, because once you get beyond a certain number sales you’re required to pay VAT and register a UK entity.  I keep my sales there under the threshold and never had to deal with this.

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In previous conversations with friends the issue has been brought up about morality.  A specific question some may be brought to is:

“Is it morally acceptable for me to outsource this task to a guy in the Philippines for $1 an hour, do it myself, or hire a company in my home town?”

The generation that brought us union culture has also given outsourcing a stigma as somehow causing the decline in jobs in the US.  Let me challenge that with my own explanation of this issue. In short, money is amoral, meaning it doesn’t know good from bad.  You can use $100 to do evil, like buying rat poison and feeding it to a dozen puppies.  But with that same $100 you can also do good, like helping out a family that’s down on their luck pay their utility bill for the month.  My main point is, money itself is a tool that is amoral.

My epiphany on outsourcing

A few years ago, I used an American company to do my web development for one of my websites.  Boy was that stupid.  It wouldn’t have been if they added value, but they didn’t.  They began to treat me like I was small potatoes and that they had bigger fish to fry, and dropped the ball on a couple projects, so I began to shop around.

I found out about web developers on oDesk , a website where you can post your task or job and have tons of foreigners who are completely qualified, bid on the job.  I got a guy who specialized in the CMS I was using for that website, and only bid about 1/10th of what I was paying before.  So I gave him a shot.  Long story short, he finished the job 10 times faster, for 10 times cheaper, and he was 10 times more helpful and accommodating than the US based company.  I later found out that the company I was hiring in the US was actually outsourcing all the work themselves to the Ukraine… So wait… I’m paying you $2,000 to do something, you pay $200 to a guy in the Ukraine, and keep $1,800… What value are you adding for $1,800?

 My question to the guy who says it’s wrong to outsource work is this:

What is more moral? For me to spend $2,000 to hire the American company, and he sends $200 overseas, and pockets the $1,800? Or is it more moral for me to spend $200 on a guy overseas, and keep the $1,800 to invest in my kids’ college fund, or do anything else I feel like doing with that money?

Why do we feel somehow morally obligated to keep overpaid, underperformers employed at the expense of our own personal financial situation? My first moral obligations are to my family, not the “US Worker”.

What’s your time worth?

Here were my 3 options:

1. Do it myself

2. Hire a local company

3. Outsource overseas

Let’s see, I could do it myself but it would take me about 2 weeks of full time energy… If I can get it done for $200, and save myself 80 hours of work, I would say that’s a smart decision, wouldn’t you? Or, I could hire a company and keep loyal to an American company… But then I go bankrupt and don’t have a job myself… So I conclude that I need to outsource.

I’m still pretty new into outsourcing, and still have several areas of my businesses that I need to optimize and outsource, but the principles learned in that experience have given me a new outlook on the issue. Instead of looking at it as I’m destroying someone’s job here, I look at it like this: I’m creating MY job, and with it, my income gets funneled down through the local economy through my spending.  Not only that, but I’m helping a fellow human being overseas who is JOYFULLY working for $2 an hour, even happy to have a job at all.  How is that immoral? Americans are the only ones who deserve jobs?

In summary, my primary moral obligations are to my wife and kids, and so yes, it is a morally better decision to outsource some of my tedious tasks than for me to waste my time on them, or overpay another entitlement-minded US company.  Not only this but I can multiply my productivity, and be a more fruitful contributor myself.  Macro, micro. My tasks are now macro (big picture), while delegating (at a very low cost) tasks such as data entry, research, copywriting, etc.  The possibilities are pretty much endless.

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