Outsourcing Experiment Part II

It’s been a few days since I updated you on the outsourcing experiment. During that time the learning curve has been steep but I’ve learned a lot. Here are 3 tips that i learned.

1 . I mentioned in the original post that the first thing I learned was to break the tasks down in to small simple tasks , i.e don’t advertise for someone to submit articles and backlinks. Instead advertise for someone to post backlinks and someone to post articles. Since then i’ve learned more.

2 . Rather than hire 1 person to do 40 hours work it is far better to hire 2 3 or 4 people to do 10 or 20 hours each. You then have the option of increasing the hours of the good workers and reducing the hours of the ones that are so good.

3 . The next tips is to advertise for people who have done the work in the past, so if you are using backlink packages from of of the well know suppliers then say in your ad that preference will be given to people who have done this work before. You don’t want to pay to train someone if you can avoid it.

Feel free to haggle with providers but the rates that seem to be standard so far are

Back linking $1.50 to $2.00 per hour
Article submission $2 -$3 per hour.

I have had several bids of below $1 and a low bid of $0.67 but I declined these

By far the best person I have employed is costing me $2.94 to post articles but she does almost twice as much as the other person doing the same task.

Both the article posters have shown initiative, some of the article sites I asked them to post to were having problems so they submitted new sites , in fact both of them provided me with lists of sites they had submitted to before.

I am about to take on 2 more people today which will bring my “workforce” upto 5 people giving me 80 hours of work a week for less than $150. I only need 5 of the 25 sites they are woking on to make 1 extra sale to justify the cost.

Stay tuned to see what happens next.

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I have hired a few people in the past to do the occasional task i couldn’t do or didn’t want to do.

However up to now I’ve been an idiot!

I should have been using outsourcing for so much more, backlink building, Article submissions etc in fact everything I hate doing and avoid doing because it’s so mind numbingly boring. But because of some horror stories I’ve heard about I have avoided hiring people. This is about to change.

I am about to take on 3 or 4 staff maybe even more depending on how it goes.

I have looked at elance and Getafreelancer and also companies like Agentsofvalue who will hire you staff on a full time or part time basis but I rejected them all for different reasons. I have decided to use Odesk.com.

Odesk allows me to monitor exactly what work the provider has done for me and I only pay for an hours work if they have worked for an hour. It also has various tests which providers can take which gives an indication of their abilities.

Because this is my first foray into hiring multiple workers for multiple tasks I am creating videos and documenting my progress , the videos are available as part of Augusts step by step project in the WordPress Goldmine forum. (previous documentated steps by steps include, Article marketing, Niche reseach and site Building and site reviews. All this and much more is available for a one time payment at Wordpres Goldmine…end of advert!!)

So what have I learned so far.

Well the first thing I learned is to break the job offers down into small tasks. I initially posted a job offer for a Virtual assistant, backlink builder and Article submitter. This got me 24 applicants in 24 hours, but many were over qualified.

I created a new ad for someone just to post backlinks and mentioned that people with previous experience would be preferred. The advert made it perfectly clear to them what would be involved and anyone who had done this particular type of backlinking before would immediately know the process. I’ve had 50 applicants in the past 5 hours. Most have done this before and know exactly what I want.

The difference In hourly rates are also noticeably lower.

It’s very possible that I’ll hire 2 people to do the work, I’ve had bids from people with good rankings for similar tasks charging less than $2 an hour. At prices like that I am happy to give them a days work just to test them out. I am more than happy to give a pay rise or a bonus to keep a good reliable worker once they have proved themselves.

By outsourcing all the stuff I try to avoid doing for very little cost I can concentrate on what I do best.

I’ll keep you informed as to how my outsourcing experiment is going. So check back or better still subscribe to the RSS feed email notification at the top of the site…(a retweet using the Tweet button at the start of the article wouldn’t go amiss either!!)

Outsourcing experiment Costs/Progress/income

August 6th:
Costs so Far $0
Backlinks submitted 0
Ranking Improvement N/a
Page Rank Improvement N/a
Additional Traffic over July.. N/a
Additional Income Over July N/a