One thing that came out of my Internet Marketing Survey Results was people at all levels are overwhelmed in one way or another.
Content creation, customer service, traffic generation, technical wizardry… there’s just so much stuff to do to keep your business going that it’s very easy to let things things slip.
Of course I’ve been through similar struggles to many of you, and that’s why the best thing I did in my business this year was to start outsourcing properly — not just hiring people for one-off tasks, but as full time employees who work 100% on MY business.
I’ve just put on my second full-time employee from the Philippines and thought I’d share a few things I’ve learned along the way.
First, if you’re making even a small profit and are not outsourcing you don’t know what you’re missing!
There are a billion things to do in this business and many of them are relatively boring, repetitive tasks that you — the company owner — really shouldn’t be doing.
You should be spending your time on high value activities.
E.g. In my business I focus my time on developing relationships, copywriting, content/curriculum/sales process design, strategic planning, presentation delivery, consulting… and not much else.
(Frankly even that is too much, but I’m working on handing off some of these tasks as well.)
You can hire full-time employees from the Philippines for about $200 – $400 a month — I’m paying $350 for my latest recruit and she has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (more educated than me!) and speaks/writes English like a native.
Why the Philippines?
They have a culture of working hard and being honorable, they are very well educated and most speak decent if not good English, and apparently they don’t have credit cards, so it’s difficult for them to rip you off even if they wanted to.
I’ve hired from oDesk and BestJobs.ph and I MUCH prefer who I found on BJ — they tend to have better skill sets, better experience, and better rates.
(I don’t think you can sign up directly at BestJobs.ph, I got in there through my subscription to ReplaceMyself — make sure you check out the free audio on the homepage because it gives away a lot of great outsourcing info.)
Some of the things I’m outsourcing include:
Content Creation
- Article writing, “spinning” and distribution
- Ebook writing
- Info product creation
Website Traffic Generation
- Article distribution and posting
- Forum posting
- Blog commenting
- Building back links
- Search engine optimization
- Pay per click campaign management
- Video marketing
- Social networking
Website Installation & Maintenance
- Installing WordPress blogs
- Keeping WordPress blogs and associated plugins up to date
- Moderating blog comments
Customer Service
- Monitoring & responding to customer service enquiries via email
Research
- Using Google, Market Samurai and other software programs.
(Some of these are in full-swing and others I’m taking baby steps and slowly handing things off.)
A couple of tips:
1. In most cases you want to hire people based heavily on their English skills. You can teach anyone how to do specific tasks, but teaching English is a LOT harder.
2. Hire slow, fire fast. Contact at least 3 different people before you hire anyone. Pit them against each other with a moderately difficult task and see who does the best job. And don’t be afraid to fire someone quickly if they’re not fitting in.
3. Hire full-time rather than part-time if you can. You want them working only for you and focusing ALL their time on your business. You want everything you teach them benefiting YOU.
4. Don’t expect them to know everything you know. You will have to train them. I’m using a combination of the training materials John gives you as a member of ReplaceMyself and my own stuff.
This is a blessing in disguise because it forces you to systemise, document and streamline your own processes. I bet you’d be surprised how much in your business is done completely haphazardly, I know I was!
First time is a pain but once it’s done, it’s done. You can then get other people up to speed very quickly.
5. I use DeskAway to manage my team. I think it’s free for up to 5 users. I have all my projects and associated training setup in here so getting a new employee up and running involves little more than giving them access to DeskAway and assigning a project to them.
As my recent IM survey showed, it’s very easy to become overwhelmed with all the “stuff” you have to do in your business, so look to outsource sooner rather than later.
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Alrighty Kyle –
Surveys are officially your best friend (and mine!) – THIS blog post is exactly what I want right now … as in PERFECT timing.
I just put a service on my site that is gonna need this ‘sooner rather than later’ so it doesn’t turn into a JOB for moi
I love love it!
SO appreciate you,
Andrea
My pleasure Andrea
I remembered you had asked about outsourcing in another post/comment, so as soon as I had some concrete info to share I put together this little mini report.
Hope you find it helpful — I wish I had known all of this a few years ago!
Hi Kyle, nice post. I’ve just started outsourcing staff, specifically for building links. One is from India, the other from the Philippines. My intention is to see who is more efficient, before deciding on just the one.
Dal.
Hi Kyle – I like the idea of a full time resource because they won’t get distracted doing other projects.
One task that would be cool is setting up testing of funnels, different offers, etc via optimizer and have them monitor/tweak/report the results.
Exactly Will — you can train them to do just about anything you do in your business and then focus your time on your highest value activities. There are SO many possibilities it’s not funny.
Another option to consider if you’re not keen on having to train/manage people is to use a company such as SEOPartnerPro.com who already have trained staff ready to go.
You simply “bolt on” their services to your business and let them take care of everything. Of course, there is a trade off in that you’ll miss out on some of the benefits I talked about above… but for many people it’s a small sacrifice if it means they don’t have to manage anything.
hey Kyle…how did I miss this post? lol
I was looking through all the emails I’ve got from you lately and saw this one was unread! This is exactly the kind of info I’ve been looking for about outsourcing. Cheers and chat soon!
Stuart Stirling
Hi Kyle
I have only been online since the beginning of the year. I know the value of outsourcing in offline businesses so it makes sense to outsource online.
Thanks for the great information.
Sue