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Outsourcing For Profit Without Being A Dick
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FTC Now Requires “Sponsored Post” Disclosure
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Outsourcing: The Art Of Knowing What You’re Shit At

Outsourcing For Profit Without Being A Dick

Last week I laid down a few reasons why outsourcing can be a great help to your business. I think most of us have probably dipped in to a site like Elance at some point. If you’re working on your own, there’s only so many hours a day you can commit to work until you start glancing sideways for somebody to lift the burden. By getting smart and outsourcing parts of your typical working day, you can free up more time for the creative decisions that shape whether you ultimately succeed or fail.

Many affiliates are reluctant to outsource because they see it as falling in to a black hole of having to shave down their margins. The truth is, you’re probably selling quite a few berries already, right? You can afford to spend a couple hundred bucks on the chores that stop you from moving in to that next big money niche. I know a lot of affiliates are just getting started, and if that’s you, fine. You should probably focus on learning the ropes yourself before you start managing somebody else.

For the rest of us, the Internet is a gaping hole of opportunity when it comes to recruiting talented freelancers. I slag off the Warrior Forum and Digital Point at least once every two posts, but in this case, I’m gonna have to go out on a limb and recommend them both for picking up some good talent. These forums might not know shit about affiliate marketing, but they do have skilled professionals who are often willing to work for very competitive rates. Wicked Fire, as you’d expect, is a good starting point for finding 85% of everybody who’s ever installed a flog.

If you visit a marketplace like Sitepoint or 99 Designs, you can go one better and post a contest. Crowdsourcing, as it’s called, is the process of setting a fixed price for a piece of work (usually design based) and then letting a bunch of willing freelancers submit their best efforts. You only pay for your favourite. This is great if you’re looking for a logo or a banner, but it’s not the best idea for a full landing page design.

Beyond the social networking landscape, you have a few dozen subscription based outsourcing sites. These are dedicated entirely to connecting freelancers with people looking to hire. Oh and they’ll nip a percentage of your project fee in return. You can attempt to swipe a contact’s email address and run your transactions through Paypal, but they will generally suspend your account if they catch you asking for it. So don’t be a retard and go hunting for AIM screennames after just depositing $5000 in to an escrow. I’m pretty sure they’ve got a “search, find and destroy” button to outlaw that shit. I’ve listed a few of the big sites below:

Elance – Probably the biggest and most respected site for outsourcing. You can pick up some quality freelancers with rates varying from competitive to fucking outrageous. Elance also has a structured membership system which prevents any old mope from applying to your posting. You can require that only gold members have access, for example. And these are the guys that are paying however much per month just to be a god damn member so they must be earning something. My favourite site for outsourcing.

Odesk – Okay, I’ve had limited experience with Odesk. But from what I can tell, it’s an absolute crapheap. Most projects are awarded on a “pay by the hour” basis. So instead of candidates bidding a set project fee, they will usually post their hourly rate and leave you to play ip dip sky blue over who’s best equipped to get shit done. Odesk also uses some bizarre remote desktop like application to record your minions while they slave away. I don’t know about you. But I didn’t outsource the work so that I could watch it being done in all its 4 frames per minute glory. Give Odesk a try if you want. I’m still pissed off from paying out a month’s wages to a chick who was working on shit that I didn’t even know about.

Get a Freelancer – This site is budget. Everything from the homepage design to the freelancers I’ve worked with through it. I can’t imagine it’s earned anybody more than a bowl of rice. If you want to have 400 articles written for $20 in 24 hours, this is the place to come. And yes, you do get what you pay for.

The success you have on any job hiring site will boil down to how you carry yourself and your business. Before I got in to affiliate marketing, I used to write a lot of articles for various contractors. I wrote full fucking ebooks for peanuts before it clicked in my head that marketers were selling on my work for many times the fee. While my rim still aches from the exploitation, that’s just the way this business goes. I’ve come a full circle but I’m proud to say that I haven’t forgotten where I arrive from.

Some contractors are cheeky enough to demand legit samples before they even award a project. I can understand the temptation to “try before you buy” with some random unknown service provider – but it’s not something I agree with personally. If you’re requesting design work, and you want some guy to submit creatives to you, you should be paying him. It’s that simple. By all means request some samples of his previous work. But expecting work for nothing? Get off your high horse.

Many workers in India will happily work for nothing in the hope of securing your services. I’ve never allowed this. If somebody’s going to submit even a single 500 word article to me, I’ll pay them for it. It’s time out of their day. You might be willing to take on some third world kid at no risk of your own, but I haven’t descended so far up my own arse that I’ve forgotten what it feels like to work for these kind of cerebral dickheads.

If you’re that worried about your margins, go ahead and cut the corners. Get some kid to work for free. I think it’s bullshit personally, but your business is your own. You reward good work with a bonus, right?

Bonuses are so few and far between with contractors these days. It makes me feel like a digital Mother Teresa when I start jacking out freebies for good work. I’m not saying a bonus goes hand in hand with a job being completed to spec. But if you want to build good long term relationships with your freelancers, you should be willing to go the extra mile and recognize good work.

I have a bunch of writers and web designers who are always happy to hear from me when I need to outsource. I’ve noticed that if you treat a freelancer well, he will often repay you in work that exceeds your expectations and increases its own value in the process. That’s a priceless commodity to have.

If, however, you’re the kind of dickhead who shotguns his email replies with “boss from hell” demands and a general overtone that says fuck you, you work for me, well…good luck getting the most out of your workers. They’re going to be looking for shortcuts whether they mean to or not. The ironic thing is that most of the demanding (and easily agitated) employers are the ones that don’t take enough time to prepare a decent brief. They expect shit delivered to a spec that was only ever properly defined in their own head.

Putting together a good brief for your freelancers is not a ten minute job. I can’t think of one successful project I’ve outsourced that only took me ten minutes to brief. And you know why? Particularly in this business, the art of a good project brief isn’t so much saying what you want done. It’s describing what you don’t want done.

I recently outsourced a Craigs List posting project. If you’ve ever engaged in mass-scale Craigs List advertising, you’ll be aware that it’s the sort of data entry task that needs a few brains behind the wheel. You need to avoid manual deletions, “ghosting” of your ads, and you’ve gotta have a guy running the project who can rewrite without fucking up your message beyond repair.

I must have wrote over 15 seperate briefs, and nearly all of them failed. It was only when I sat down for half a day and wrote out every single fuck-up that I got a little closer to expressing what I really needed. One of the biggest outsourcing mistakes is the same common problem that gets you shitty conversion rates on your landing pages: You assume.

You assume that because you’ve got a colourful image in your head of what you need to obtain from a project, some kid in Asia is going to read your mind and translate it to HTML. You don’t take the time to sit down and translate your thoughts to text. And if you don’t do that, you’re going to receive bad work. It’s not necessarily bad because the writer was bad. It’s bad because you never really laid out what you wanted.

Classic example, one of my friends outsourced 20 product reviews for his SEO affiliate site. What did he get back? 20 extremely negative damning verdicts of why you’d have to be blind, deaf and stupid to buy said products. Honest and genuine as it was, they weren’t gonna do shit for an affiliate’s pay cheque. If he’d bothered to convey what he needed, he wouldn’t have rinsed $200 on 10,000 words of friendly drivel. Instead he blew his gasket over the writer being such a loose cannon liability that he could never work with him again. You think the Average Joe Patel knows to lie between his teeth like the average affiliate?

Whether you’re outsourcing to India or to Indiana, it really shouldn’t make a difference. You should still treat these guys with respect and the time of day that it takes to give them proper direction. Without direction, you’ll be the one to get burnt while they’ll still be getting paid.

The upside, of course, is that if you can get your shit together and outsource well – your business breaks free from the one man mentality. You can achieve so much more and expand in to new niches overnight. It’s worth the pain, but don’t expect your visions to be delivered on a plate. Just as in all walks of affiliate marketing, you’re gonna have to bust your balls ’til they’re blue to get there.

FTC Now Requires “Sponsored Post” Disclosure

News has broken today that the FTC is making a change to the “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” for the first time in almost 30 years.

Here’s what you need to read:

“The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that ‘material connections’ (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers–connections that consumers would not expect–must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other ‘word-of-mouth’ marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.”

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10367464-93.html

Failure to disclose payment terms can now result in an $11,000 fine. A drop in the ocean for many successful affiliates, but the deterrent itself will probably shave off more profits than the fine.

Now while this is obviously relevant to floggers, it applies pretty directly to those of us in the affiliate marketing blogosphere. Personally, I think it’s a welcome change. It was only last week with the re-design of this blog that I added an Important Information page to vent my own frustrations with the blogging for riches business plan.

There are bloggers out there – hot shot super affiliates – who will shotgun their readers with any crap that pays a commission. It only takes one reputation built on sand and naive new marketers will buy in to just about anything. While some financial disclosure isn’t going to stop that, it will hopefully expose a level of doubt in what some of these super affiliates will sell their word for.

As far as flogging goes, I can’t see this change making life any more difficult than it already is. If you’re a flogger, you should already be painting your pages in an endless wall of disclaimers. It’s necessary to cover your back. As far as I can see, most of the high exposure flogs are already small printing in the fact that they’re paid a commission.

The real problem for the FTC is policing these changes. How do you tell the difference between word of mouth friendly praise and a second motive of money changing hands? Sure there are affiliate links being dropped, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these sketchy companies started implementing a new off-site method of tracking. A “we’ll catch your referral on the other side” type mentality. It’s also pretty damn hard to nail a Paypal transaction on a sponsored post. How are they going to bust these private sponsorship agreements?

Good luck to the FTC. You’ve got your work cut out.

Outsourcing: The Art Of Knowing What You’re Shit At

I’ve noticed a large number of blog posts related to work ethic and time management recently. Barman seems to be responsible for the large majority of them with a crazy posting spree on PPC.bz. Ruck chimed in with his own advice on the Convert2Media blog (less forum lurking, more pushing his berries). I’m not going to preach about the importance of setting to-do lists and sticking to them.

The truth is, no matter how many good ideas you have floating around your head, if you don’t have the expertise to bring them to reality – ideas is all they will ever be. One of the biggest stumbling points I’ve encountered is the mindset that I know everything about everything. I used to be, and still can be, a stubborn piece of shit when it comes to outsourcing jobs to be done professionally.

There are still times where I have to convince myself. I’m sitting there thinking hey, you know what, I can strum up a banner in Photoshop. Ain’t no sweat. So I’ll bust out my hand palette of gradients and go wild until I’ve wasted half a day pissing up the wall any hope of a decent clickthrough rate.

If you want to get shit done, and get shit done well, you need to know when to outsource various tasks to people who are better equipped to get them done properly. It comes down to knowing your own strengths and weaknesses. Even then, you still need to gauge the important parts of your business that require your time instead of anybody else’s.

I recently outsourced the redesign of this blog (thanks to Ramona of Dojo-Design for the great work). A couple of friends asked me why I’d decided to outsource my own web design when I come from a working background of several web agencies. True, I could have done the work myself. But it’s not always the best decision to do things yourself.

What you’ll notice about the successful guys in affiliate marketing is that they tend to spend their time at the decision-making business end of their day jobs. Testing new traffic sources and researching media buys…this requires expert knowledge that you can’t outsource without giving up your own school of thought. It’s like a pyramid of growth. If you spend all your time battling over design tweaks or copywriting mistakes – you’re going to find that this is all you succeed in becoming successful at.

We all have to put in our hard graft. I’m still in the process of growing my own business. I work incredibly long hours because it’s necessary to cover all of the ground that needs covering for me to remain successful. But while I haven’t employed anybody yet, I’m always looking to outsource tasks that create what I call “low value reward”.

Affiliates need to think innovation to stay one step ahead of the curve. If you don’t have a pair of eyeballs watching for the next acai berry trend, you’re going to miss it. Shit happens quickly in this industry. Good luck spotting the next gravy train when you’re treating every small task as another notch on your to-do list. Too much reading is a bad thing. Too many hours pissed away typing in to an AIM window WILL lose you money. I think we can all agree on that – but you can’t work like some badger in a fucking hole. Get somebody else to do the tasks that don’t require what got you here.

Outsourcing the day to day basics of your business will go a long way to giving you a more creative freehold over what you’re doing. What have you spent today doing?

Did you spend too many hours trying to find the right words for your latest flog? Maybe you’re an SEO guy with a mountain of creative thought who just spent his afternoon submitting links to PR0 directories. If you look at what you actually do in a day, you could probably find 2 or 3 tasks that somebody else is willing to manage if you taught them how.

The reluctance to outsource, for many new affiliates, stems from spending money. We seem to have a paranoia for investing money in to a campaign that might bomb or never flash a profit.

How many campaigns have you tested that failed because you threw together a sketchy 5 minute landing page and didn’t see the results that you wanted after a day’s traffic? It’s this kind of lazy marketing that costs affiliates so dearly. Not in expenses, but in lost revenue. The moneymaking campaigns that got away. Not because they were doomed to always fail, but because the affiliate was so keen to get those zero click stats ticking over.

If you’d just commit to a job and get it done properly, you’d probably find that the idea was a good one after all. So the next time you think of a great campaign, run over the requirements in your head.

You’re going to advertise on MySpace? You should probably get a banner professionally designed. That’s if you want to know for sure whether there’s money beyond that initial dollop of impressions, right? You’re going to send a shitload of traffic to a flog? There are guys out there who write the damn things for a living. It’s become a micro-profession. They could probably do it better than you, sat there in your tightie whities, larking about on MSN, scratching your balls and pretending to be hard at work for 20 words per hour.

Filtering The Retards From Your Outsourcing Shortlist

Okay, so outsourcing isn’t just the art of knowing what you’re shit at. It’s the art of knowing what half of digital India is shit at too.

The second you offer a whiff of a payment, you’re going to be fighting off messages and Skype calls from every last impoverished kid with a computer in the far east. This is just the way it works. You can get burnt with one bad job and never outsource again, or you can use it to learn and recruit somebody better the next time round.

I’ve done my fair share of outsourcing in the past. Where do you think all this typing anger stems from? The next post will feature some tips I’ve picked up along the way. What to outsource, when to outsource it, and who you definitely don’t want to outsource it to.

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