Wednesday, 18th March 2009
EchoSign is a very popular electronic signature service. I have been using EchoSign to sign contracts between myself and my freelancers. I am using the free version, which allows me to sign 5 documents per month. According to a news report, 67.4% of Fortune 500 companies are using EchoSign.
EchoSign lets me create custom forms with PDF documents. I created forms in OpenOffice and exported the documents into PDF format with a few blanks for me and the recipient to fill in.
You save money by not wasting money on ink, paper and telephone charges. You save time by not wasting time on writing, scanning, faxing and waiting a long time for your recipient to sign and fax the contract back to you.
Although I use EchoSign to eliminate faxing, you may still use a fax with EchoSign. In fact, you may even integrate EchoSign with eFax. EchoSign recently released version 4 of their service with a lot of new features.
I highly recommend EchoSign to everyone who needs to have contracts signed quickly and easily….
Tagged As: contracts, EchoSign, Electronic signature, Fax, OpenOffice.org, PDF, Portable Document Format
Saturday, 7th March 2009
A lot of countries are still not PayPal-friendly. People in Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines and a lot of other developing countries have a vey hard time trying to get PayPal to work.
While this is none of our business if you we don’t live in these countries, it is our business when he hire freelancers from countries like the ones above.
I have used 3 of them – Western Union, Xoom and MoneyBookers. I cannot use eMoneyGram because I am not an American. I have not tried iKobo because you need to use their iKobo card to withdraw money from an ATM machine. It seems like an interesting idea but I have not tried it yet.
I would avoid Western Union because the fees are quite high and process of sending and collecting the money is a pain in the neck. You may only send money online through Western Union to a handful of countries. Otherwise, you would have to visit your local Western Union branch to do it.
The best one I have used so far is Xoom. The money goes straight into the bank account of …
Tagged As: PayPal, Western Union
Tuesday, 3rd March 2009
My friend introduced me to Dropbox because he wanted to transfer some songs to me. I was impressed with the download speeds and the ease of use of the Dropbox so I decided to use it to share files with my freelancers.
Dropbox Plans
The free verision comes with 2 GB of disk space. You can get up to 3GB of extra space free just for referring your friends to Dropbox. Each new friend you refer to Dropbox will enable you to have an extra 250 MB of space. What that means is if you refer 12 or more new people to Dropbox, you will get 3 GB of free space added to your free account. 5 GB of free space is quite a lot if you’re only planning to share documents and instructional videos like me.
The paid version comes with 50 GB of disk space. at $9.99 per month. The free disk space promotion applies to the paid accounts at double the size. Instead of a maximum of 3 GB of additional space, you get 6 GB. Every new member you …
Tagged As: Dropbox, Virtual folder
Friday, 28th November 2008
If you have not downloaded John’s free call on how he replaced himself in his business, please visit ReplaceMyself.com to get it. I recently tried his 2 week trial and here’s my review of the Replace Myself membership site.
Tagged As: Filipinos, john jonas, Outsourcing, philippines, replace myself
Friday, 28th November 2008
I signed up for a trial of John Jonas’ Replace Myself membership site. I paid only $4 to try the site for 2 weeks so I was not expecting much. The regular price is $97 per month, which I find a little too costly.
Anyway, I think my expectations were about right. I did not find any new information that wasn’t vaguely discussed in his free telephone call MP3. I already know where he hires Filipinos before I joined the site and I was looking forward to learning more about the ins and outs of hiring Filipinos. I wanted templates like non-disclosure agreements and sample employment contracts with the unique Filipino benefits and terms.
What I found instead was lots of information about pay per click marketing though some of his previous seminars and some simple tips on how to use the job site and some software that he recommended. Most membership sites I joined have a members-only forum but not on this site.
John recommends using eMoneygram to send payments to Filipinos but that service is not available for people outside of the USA. So that’s out for me. Most likely, I would have to use Western Union to transfer money …
Thursday, 27th November 2008
The 4-Hour Workweek might be one of the most important books you will read if you’re concerned about working less and enjoying life in your own terms.
I have completed my full review of the 4-Hour Workweek. Most of the information is good but I pointed out some of the bad points of the book, which I feel were not accurately portrayed by the author.
I have been implementing some of the tips in the book and I shall see how much of a difference it will make in my business and lifestyle. I have also been selling off, giving away and throwing away lots of junk at home to make it easy for me to move out of Singapore when the time comes to start my “mini-retirements” overseas.
Furthermore, I am in the hiring process of getting a full-time employee from the Philippines to help me out with my business. I just can’t grow at a quicker pace if I have to do all that time consuming SEO work.
Tagged As: 4-Hour Workweek, freelancers, Outsourcing, tim ferris
Thursday, 27th November 2008
This is my full review of this amazingly popular book on how to live the lifestyle you want.
I must say this is one the rare books that I have re-read multiple times. I have highlighted the important keywords of some paragraphs in the book for easy re-reading and I have re-read the book a minimum of 3 times. I have even listened to the audio book once.
I have completed the exercises in the book and I have also implemented some of the ideas I learnt in the book.
The 4-Hour Workweek contains great information on how to work less and enjoy your life more but information alone is useless unless you apply it. Amazingly, not everyone wants to work less or maybe they are not ready to work less.
The Good…
Tim Ferris advocates a “low information diet”. That is, don’t watch the television (except for a few hours of leisure programs per week), don’t read newspapers, don’t read magazines that you are not part of your business niche or hobbies and don’t read books that contain information you don’t need to use right now.
To …
Thursday, 13th November 2008
The 4-Hour Workweek is one of the most important books I have read in my life. Some of the information in this book might not suit certain people, but it suits me very well because I am a free spirit and this book gives me a roadmap on how to achieve a free and easy lifestyle.
I have read the book 2 and a half times and I am in the process of completing the exercises in the book. I am in the process of completing Tim’s Ideal Lifestyle Costing worksheet. It really is quite amazing how cheap I can live my ideal lifestyle outside of my country. Tim helped me to get out of my old and outdated idea that I had to be rich before I could travel and live in multiple countries.
According to Mercer’s 2008 Cost of Living Survey, Singapore is ranked the 13th most expensive city in the world, ahead of New York City, which is ranked 22nd. I plan to move to Australia next year and before that, I am planning to schedule a “mini-retirement” to Thailand. …
Tagged As: 4-Hour Workweek, freelancers, Outsourcing, tim ferris
Monday, 1st September 2008
I think John Jonas and I must have been reading the same books. I have read the E-Myth and I am reading the 4-Hour Work Week. I love these books as they are teaching me to free up my life to do the things I want to do. However, I have experienced a lot of problems putting the knowledge from these 2 books into action.
That is where John steps in. He’s done it and he is sharing with us how he did it. I have outsourced work to Singaporeans as well as freelancers online but I have had mixed results. I have had terrible experience with freelancers from India just like John did. Singaporeans are a bit too expensive for me at the moment. John recommends hiring people from the Philippines to work for you full time from their homes for about USD $250 per month, which is a pretty decent wage in the Philippines.
I know for a fact that Filipino maids earn about SGD $360 per month in Singapore, which is about USD $250 per month. Filipino maids are on the higher pay scale of domestic workers in Singapore probably due to their superior English language skills and their …
Tagged As: Filipinos, freelancers, Outsourcing, Southeast Asia
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