Outsourcing means getting work completed by freelancers, agencies and companies. It means that rather than hiring a new member of your team, or handling the job yourself, you are instead letting someone with those skills and expertise complete it remotely.
Outsourcing has a number of advantages for big business:
- No need to handle the paperwork or admin of hiring full-time staff
- No need to give up office space
- No need to limit yourself to the local talent pool
But outsourcing also has benefits for internet marketers and small entrepreneurs too.
Outsourcing for Internet Marketers and Webmasters
Running a website is a complicated process that involves a range of different tasks and tons of admin. Often you will feel as though you are being torn in a million different directions and sometimes you will find yourself getting crushed under the weight of all that work. There are e-mails to answer, images to design, dead links to fix and guest posts to secure. And that's before you've even written any content…
If you are facing all this work alone though, then you should know that you really needn't do. These days, outsourcing is becoming more and more of a necessity for people in all works of life, and the net is making it easier than ever before. Why waste your time on fiddly admin tasks when you could outsource them and give yourself more time to work on the important parts of your job that only you can handle? Read on to find out how to get your outsourcing down to a fine art and how your website can benefit as a result…
Basic Tasks
When it comes to basic tasks, there are now plenty of places online that can connect you with people willing to do the work cheaply and efficiently. Fiverr for instance can connect you with some surprisingly professional individuals who are happy to help as much for the love of it as the profit.
Designers for instance are a dime a dozen on Fiverr, making it a great place to get a new background designed for your site or a new button for one of your links. The services are easy to find and you'll find that the work itself tends to be high quality and quick to arrive. PeoplePerHour, UpWork and Guru will all also offer similar convenience. They can also offer writing, programming and more.
Ongoing Work
Some work however is more long-term and specialist and not particularly well suited to a site like Fiverr. For instance, if you're looking for someone to handle your SEO, then Fiverr isn't really the place. However, there are plenty of other places to connect with SEO services online, whether that's through the companies' own websites, or through webmaster forums such as Digital Point forum or Warrior forum. Simply look on here for adverts from SEO providers, or try posting your requirement and wait to see who you hear from. This way you can also find web designers, coders and more.
Personal Assistants
Having a personal assistant is something that we tend to associate with wealth and success, and that we tend to assume is generally out of our grasp. However, this is an area where once again the web makes more things possible - and if you want to try a virtual assistant then you don't need to be some kind of real-life Tony Stark to afford them. These companies offer the full range of services that you would expect from a 'regular' assistant, but without the hassle or the expense. From $100 a month you can have someone answering all of your fan mail, finding research for new article topics and generally helping you to run your entire empire without lifting a finger. If you’re willing to outsource overseas and stellar-English is not a top requirement, then you can get this even cheaper.
A virtual assistant can complete any task that you would normally have to complete yourself that doesn’t require their physical presence. This can help you to find contact emails for outreach purposes, to send out emails, to do keyword research and much more.
Top Mistakes When Outsourcing
While outsourcing makes the process of getting work done considerably easier, less time consuming and less expensive, there is still an ‘art to it’. You still need to know how to approach this correctly, if you’re going to get the best bang for your buck and avoid potential disasters.
Here are some common mistakes to avoid when outsourcing.
1 Looking for the cheapest deal
As a rule, you will get what you pay for. And if you are outsourcing any job, then it’s important that it be done well. This is crucial if that job is in some way going to reflect you (for instance, copy on your website, or outreach with big brands) but even admin jobs need to be done well to avoid errors.
Don’t cheap out here – invest in high quality work if you want to run a high quality business.
2 Communication overhead
Communication overhead refers to the amount of time – and therefore money – that is often wasted simply through communicating with team-members, members of staff and in this case, service providers. If a simple job requires ten emails to be sent back and forth, then you are wasting time and the value that the outsourcing is providing is diminished. Find a good work flow and then let it run on autopilot.
3 Not checking in
That said, you don’t want it to run on autopilot to such an extent that you aren’t occasionally checking in with the provider and making sure they’re doing a good job. This is particularly important when it comes to using an SEO company. There are lots of bad SEO companies out there, many of which won’t do any work at all and several of which will likely get your site penalized by Google. Make sure you know what they’re doing, that you’re agreed on the strategy and that they’re sticking to their side of the bargain!
