Guide To Outsourcing Part 2

This is part 2 of 2 in the Guide To [tag]Outsourcing[/tag] post.

If you didn’t see part 1, Click Here

3. Get recommendations from a friend:

When I need something done now, the FIRST thing I do – that’s before going to Elance.com, Rentacoder.com or anywhere else, is ask someone I KNOW.

When you get a recommendation from another business owner who’s had similar work done by a person they can tell you the good and bad about them right from the start. They can tell you the information that you won’t see on their Rentacoder bid and MORE…

Obviously this is where it pays to have acquaintances in the same business and hence, spend some time on hanging out at industry seminars, posting in forums online and so on. But even with no acquaintances, you can even go straight into some forums and just ask “Can someone recommend me a PHP coder/article writer/tech support worker/?” and so on and so forth.

The point I’m trying to make is that free lance sites are great but if you’ve ever used one you’ll know it’s not always smooth sailing. It’s ALWAYS hit and miss. You might get someone great and you might get someone horrible, no matter HOW good they seem from their initial bid. Getting a recommendation (generally) eliminates the hit and miss which saves you BIG time and money.

The other reason that this is great is that you can even ask the recommending friend how much that person charged them for the work they had done. Find out what they did and how much they charged and it will give you leverage when negotiating the price of the project/work with the freelancer.

You can find out whether they’re cheap or expensive and whether they’re worth it rather than finding out using your own time and money.

In the event that you can’t get a recommendation, its time to head to the freelance sites.

I’ve primarily used rentacoder and scriptlance for high quality technical jobs and low quality writing jobs and elance for high quality writing jobs.

The biggest (and perhaps most obvious) tip I can give is “Focus on Feedback”. And I don’t just mean look for someone with good reviews, I mean look for someone who cares SO much about the feedback they get that they’ll do ANYTHING not to get a bad review.

A particular coder we started working with is in the top 20 coders and is actually featured on one of lists at the freelancer sites – ALL his ratings are 10′s so if he even gets a 9, he slips out of the top ranking and I’m guessing loses a decent bit of business… You think he cares about delivering a quality project? You bet he does!

Don’t even bother with anyone who doesn’t have a high volume of GREAT feedback, and if possible, someone who whatever reason, REALLY needs to keep getting good feedback.

Find people who can show examples of high quality work that is as similar as possible to that which you’re getting done.

If you’ve done everything right up until now and you have to use a freelance service, DON’T expect it to be smooth sailing.

Let me put the icing on this outsourcing cake.

4. The Ongoing Journey Of Outsourcing.

Basically here’s a general rule.

You’re not going to find the perfect person first shot, and even when you do find the perfect person, they’re not going to do a perfect job first shot. If they do, you’re on a MAJOR winner, it just doesn’t often happen.

So what do you do?

Start small.

Whatever you’re task you’re wanting to get done, don’t give them THAT task immediately.

Take MAJOR advantage of test projects. And not just one, but a number of test projects, gradually increasing in size and importance.

As the person proves their reliability and quality to you, you give them bigger more important projects.

Not only that but as you work with a person, you get a real feel for their work ethic, their values and their goals in THEIR businesses. You find out how good they are at doing what they say they’ll do – how they handle unexpected changes – how they take feedback, particularly negative – and ALL of this you can find out before you trust them with something so important that getting it done on time or not could be the difference between thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in your business.

I can’t tell you how much time and money I would have saved if I’d known this from the start.

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Finally I thought I’d include this section on what I personally outsource, partly for interests sake and partly for the benefit of some of you too.

I primarily outsource:

1. Programming work: I have no technical knowledge whatsoever so this one’s a no brainer. Whenever I can’t work out how to get a blog theme looking right, need a new plugin programmed, and of course with the software programs we develop, quality coders have played an important role.

2. Article Writing and Submission:

The next biggest thing I outsource is Article Writing and submission. Interestingly this is actually something I’m quite good at. Why do I outsource it? It’s not in my 20% activities that’s why. It’s cheaper and more profitable to get it done by other skilled writers than get bogged down in it myself. I work with a small office of writers out of the Phillipines who are the BEST freelancers I’ve ever met – I’m lucky to have gotten in contact with them.

3. Link building:

I am on the client lists for a number of people who do link building work. Basically they have large databases of sites and large numbers of clients who they help to acquire links and advertising opportunities for. I get notified periodically of new link and advertising opportunities for our niche sites every so often and tell them which I want to accept, after which they organize the link or help me organize the payment etc This was a REALLY hard one to find a good person for. We tried a LOT of guys who sucked before finding the ones worked well at this.

4. Tech Support/Emailing/Management

I don’t really classify this outsourcing because this person is as close as possible to having another ME running around AND this one I’m extremely fortunate with… I was able to enlist the help of my girlfriend to manage our finances and other personal matters like emails etc Obviously I wouldn’t entrust things like these to someone I wasn’t particularly close to so this has worked well. She’s also great as she’s able to oversee and MANAGE alot of the other staff we have which helps me out alot too.

5. Accounting obviously. Both bookkeeping and tax preparation.

With the exclusion of a few other random tasks here or there, that’s about it.

It takes time and money to develop a team you can truly rely on to produce quality output and increase your businesses bottom line but then again, it’s pretty tough to build a real business and make a PHENOMENAL income without it, more so than ever in the virtual world.

If you follow the steps above, and approach your outsourcing with these ideas in mind you’ll have the greatest chance of success.

I hope you’ve found this two part post helpful and I wish you all the best in your own outsourcing endeavours!

Andrew