When Is the Best Time to Start Outsourcing?

by Phil Gabriel on February 23, 2013

 

The absolute best time to start outsourcing was five years ago. That was before everybody jumped on the outsourcing bandwagon, salaries in other countries went up, and the outsource worker pool filled up with quick-buck chasing “workers”.

The SECOND best time to start outsourcing is NOW.

The absolute WORST time to start outsourcing is:

TOMORROW!!

We are barely into a new year, with new challenges and opportunities. Challenges that will test you and opportunities that may escape you. You’re going to need help.

Think for a moment how you will want to be at the end of 2013.

Will you still be reading blogs about Internet Marketing, thinking “Someday, I will try to make money online”?

Or will you be thinking, “Wow. Setting up the blog and putting out the newsletter wasn’t that hard. I should have done this years ago!”

I am all too familiar with the “paralysis by analysis” phenomenon. It wasn’t long ago that I thought I had to become a master of Microsoft’s FrontPage to build web pages. Since then, I have found that details are unimportant and can be easily farmed out. What counts is getting things done and published.

Now, while I pride myself on being able to do most webmaster work; I don’t feel the need to HAVE to do it. So instead of me updating ads on one of my sites, for example, I send a message to my webmaster and have him take care of it. That leaves me more time to concentrate on other items.

So, how did I get started? After a year of research (paralysis by analysis), I finally bit the bullet and hired an outsource worker. Was this worker a shining star who made my life as a marketer perfect? No way. I had to go through a painful learning experience. But that experience has made me a much better manager for the workers who followed.

Make this the year you finally get started on outsourcing!

Speaking of getting started – now is a great time to visit ReplaceMyself.com and follow the link to their online jobs search. Using the techniques I’ve covered, you can soon be on your way to outsourcing those tasks that are preventing you from achieving online marketing success!

 

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Single Task Outsourcing

by Phil Gabriel on February 16, 2013

There are several items that you don’t want to dump on your outsource worker or Virtual Assistant.  Some examples would be tasks that are far outside your VA’s capabilities. If your VA is a Webmaster, assigning her the task of creating Apps for Android devices, for example, would cause nothing but headaches. It would frustrate her as she tries to please you and interfere with the tasks you hired her to do.

In cases like this, I recommend outsourcing the task to a specialist. I refer to this as “single-task-outsourcing”. There are a lot of choices when it comes to outsourcing. I have used Fiverr, Elance, and Odesk for single tasks.

My experience with Fiverr was poor. Some of the tasks I found were done well and quickly, but most reflected the adage, “Pay peanuts and you get monkeys to work for you”. Even the feedback system doesn’t work as well as it should. I really should have sent some negative feedback about poor quality work, but for $5.00 tasks, it wasn’t worth my time.

My last experience with Elance (for developing a WordPress Plugin) resulted in a lot of applications that bore a remarkable similarity to each other. From my experience, it appears that a few companies in India have flooded the system with proposals. Within minutes of my posting, I had received answers from these companies. What put me off was that these companies were acting as intermediaries; taking on tasks, then finding a random programmer to work the project. The problem with that is that you would never have a chance to evaluate the work of the person who actually does the task.

My best experience has been with Odesk. A clearly defined task and a good offer will result in applications from talented individuals who want to work for you. For example, I have found a bookkeeper on Odesk who does great work at a decent price. Once a quarter, I send her an exported file from my QuickBooks program, Excel spreadsheets of my business accounts (downloaded from my bank sites), and any other files she may need. She then does all the data entry for the quarter, assigning all entries to the correct US tax categories. She then sends the file back and I incorporate it into my QuickBooks account. This takes care of tedious data entry and frees up my time to work on the things I do well.

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How NOT to Hire a Virtual Assistant

by Phil Gabriel on December 6, 2012

During my last round of Virtual Assistant interviews for a position with my company, I heard several variations of the same question.

“Sir, is this an affiliate position?”

“Well, I expect you to know something about affiliate promotions, but that won’t be your job. You’re interviewing for a Webmaster position.”

“No sir, will this be a salary job, or only affiliate commission? I can’t accept affiliate position.”

A bit of questioning revealed that many would-be employers have had the great idea of hiring Filipino VA’s on commission, or only paying them once they started generating enough affiliate income to cover their wages. What a great idea! A true bootstrap operation.

Unfortunately, reality intrudes upon this dream. The type of worker who would accept this proposal is either;

1. Independently wealthy, or (much more likely),

2. Going to send you plagiarized crap scrapped from the bowels of the Internet in the hope that you will pay them before you are slapped with a DMCA notice.

For a moment, put yourself in their position. Do you ever wonder if your employer has enough money to make payroll this week?  Will McDonalds sell enough Double Quarter Pounders to keep paying minimum wage? Silly question, right?

Not if you are a Virtual Assistant working for a person you’ve never met. At least if you work for McDonalds and they don’t pay, you could use your key to the freezer room and steal barter your time for enough hamburger patties to eat for the week (and a few extra to give your landlord in lieu of rent this month).

The Virtual Worker has no such recourse. No matter how highly you may value your thoughts, websites, and articles; they are not really resalable on the open market for cold cash. So stealing your articles and trading them at the local market for baby formula is not really an option.

This explains why presenting yourself as an actual business is essential when working with Virtual Employees.  At a minimum, this requires a tax ID, a business checking account, a PayPal Merchant account (which you can’t get unless you have a business checking account),  and enough cash to pay your worker for completed work.

Sounds like a lot of trouble and expense to set up, doesn’t it? Not really. In the US, these are all fairly simple to set up and almost all can be done online. Even the IRS, noted for archaic ways, will now issue tax ID’s for businesses online. For my readers outside the US, you are going to have to jump through a lot more hoops to get recognized as serious.

As for the expense, the tax ID is free. Setting up the bank account can be very low cost (as long as you refuse the upsell to “Premium Business Checking”). I used $50.00 to open my business checking account at my local credit union. And the PayPal application is free.

It CAN get expensive; if you go overboard and pay for a logo design, a website, business cards, letterhead stationery, and all the other crap that you have been enticed to believe “real” businesses must have. Stick to the basics. A real business is one that makes money, not one that gives out fancy business cards.

Yes, this is the boring part of business, and yes, it has to be done. You have to be set up to both make and accept payments to be seen as a “real” business.

 

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