What is skillpages all about
It was rebranded as Skillpages in Finding people with skills within your network — Importantly, the site will also highlight if you the skill seeker and the potential contractor have any commonalities within your network on Skillpages. The Skillpages team claims that people looking for skills are 4 times as likely to message someone who is directly or indirectly within their network. The age-old surmise, we all like to do business with people that we know. The Experience of Using Skillpages as a skill provider.
The login process was easy as it immediately created a basic profile using my Facebook account details. It does take about 30 minutes to really get your skills page up and running with all the details. The site has a clean look — not too dowdy and not too casual. You can display your portfolio as per each category of skill I wish Elance would add some of these neat looking features. The site interface is extremely user-friendly and just as easy on the eye. So no complications here. Is this site any good for sourcing freelance writing jobs?
So you tie revenue directly back to expenses. And, of course, with the viral loop, you end up getting even more people going through and…. Andrew : …and making that Bing more valuable. Do you get paid by Bing per every time someone clicks that button that says, yes we want this offer, or do you get paid only when they activate?
I mean, I thought I was going to have to fill out a whole new form once I said, yes I want to take the Bing offer. And move on to the next step. Andrew : I love that.
What else did I want to find out? Iain : Thank you very much. Andrew : Sorry? I had the founder of Zarly on here. I think we recruited him as a guest on here. Does it burn you that people are talking about Zarly? But SkillPages is being ignored in the popular conversation. As long as our user growth is continuing to grow, which is reflective of our ability to gratify our users. And sometimes it can be a bit, you know, just a little bit distracting.
Andrew : Fair enough. The PR is taking care of itself right here with Mixergy. Andrew : How are you doing on time? Do you have 15 more minutes? How much time do you have? Andrew : Eight more minutes.
You still have an issue where you have a marketplace getting a lot of users of one side and not enough of the other is a challenge. How did you deal with that? Iain : Yeah, so I suppose we started off by targeting people who had skills and who were looking to get found. So they were in the creative web presence for their skill, thus their skill page. And they use that as a sort of a website for their skill. And so they were gratified by just doing that. But the people that were finding them never really came in the early stages to SkillPages.
They were just on Google or on Bing, or Yahoo. All we had to do was fill the directory of skilled people and the seekers look after themselves. And so you get all the… I guess it makes sense to focus on one first and let the others just show, the others is easier. So you get the people who have the skills. Users who are searching find you on Bing, on Google, they end up on the page of the person who has the skill. So every page on the site is another potential advertisement for, not a potential, another ad, for skillpages.
Every time someone comes in you ask them to register and the whole flow keeps growing. Iain : Mm-hmm Yup. Andrew : Am I missing anything else? Iain : You know what? There is no silver bullet. There is nothing that any of your audience can go out and do today which will result in massive growth in their users tomorrow. Andrew : You watch a lot of entrepreneurs flounder from the outside. I know how to market, how to get users.
And the one piece of advice that I would give you is. What would that be? Iain : Start with the end in mind, is the first thing. So, what I mean by that is get absolutely clear in your mind about where you want your business to go. What scale you want it to be.
What market you want it to be in, what customers are you going to look after, how are you going to satisfy your users? And when you have that very, very clear in your mind, come back to where you are right now and work out a sequence of steps. Just work on the next step. But a lot of entrepreneurs kind of move on to action before they think about destination.
And I really feel if you get really, really clear about your objective, and our objective in SkillPages is to deliver one place to find skilled people. So in the same way that you go to eBay to sell something or you go to Amazon to buy a book, we want to be the one place to find skilled people.
And if we constantly focus on doing that, it keeps us disciplined and it keeps us focused, and an entrepreneur sees gold bars everywhere. Andrew : You had a bit of an obstacle, where you were sending lots of emails. Can you talk about that challenge and how you overcame it? Iain : So, this is one of the examples of everything is not going to go perfect in your business. There are ups and downs, and sometimes the distance between up at the top and down at the bottom can be a matter of hours in entrepreneurship.
Just keep on going. So an example of that was we were growing, and we were very excited by our pace of growth.
It was driven [?? And we began to increase the volume of emails which had been sent, so our users were sending upwards of half a million, even more than half a million emails a day with invitations to their friends and families to join the platform. And when they were doing that, we were very happy with that pace of growth. But then we came in one day and suddenly our response rate to those emails had collapsed.
So we checked our correspondence service. It was working. The mail had been sent. No delivery at all. So we then had to very quickly upscale in an area which we now realize is totally essential for a business like ours, and that is deliverability with an email. So it took us about eight months to overcome that problem. And it means getting certified directly with the ISPs, adopting best practice, warming up your IPs, having a relationship with ISPs, so that they recognize that you are legitimate and that you abide by absolutely best practice when engaging in any form of correspondence through email.
Andrew : Somebody throws a couch at you, and you have to keep on running. All right. All right, a final question. What do you think of the process? What can we do better? If I did, I promise you I would tell you. Andrew : All right. Andrew : Well, thank you.
I appreciate you going through this whole process and also helping our audience by getting into as many details as I could pull out of you. Iain Mac Donald of SkillPages. Watch this video to learn about him. You might have too much text on your site. I recommend you go to Revolution-Productions. Learn how your comment data is processed. U r absolutely rockinnn I tel u! Never knew u'd be so much talented! Really good article.. We have developed an intelligent way to prevent spammers.
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