Outsourcing Services – Why Not Replace Yourself & Work Less?

Tim & Anthony here,

Welcome!

Have you considered replacing yourself and letting someone else do most of your “mundane” work?

A few days ago we mentioned an outsourcing services solution we are using called ReplaceYourself.

A heap of people emailed in asking questions about it so we wanted to give you a few tips that have helped make outsourcing work well for us.

For those that didn’t get the email with the video we put together about outsourcing, we suggest you WATCH THE VIDEO HERE now.

TRAINING STAFF

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We found it (and still find it) generally best to train up our staff somewhat rather than looking for someone fully trained.

Replace Yourself  has great training resources for developing your own outsourcing services.

For example – one of our writers had no experience writing online articles.

With the writing training provided in “Replace Yourself” she is now one of our best (and most loyal) writers.

Why consider at least part training your outsourcers yourself?

For 2 main reasons;

1. Loyalty – by assisting someone to learn a certain role in your business, they are much more likely to remain a loyal staff member.

2. Cost effectiveness  – someone “new” working for you that has NOT  been exposed to the likes of Rentacoder and  Elance etc etc is starting “with a clean slate”.

Many (certainly not all though)  of the staff available on these and many other outsourcing websites have been subject to some buyers who have no idea of prices and and who  end up paying 5 or 10 times the going rate.

This results in many workers overcharging and trying to manage too many projects at a time. By training up a worker, outside of these websites, this issue can be prevented.

WEEDING OUT THE DUDS WITH A SIMPLE TRIAL!

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The “trial” is a must, and we normally do a “pre-work” minor trial to get rid of the “tire kickers” (those people who say they have experience in a certain thing but don’t).

For example we might require a person to install blogs, post comments, etc (and their resume might say they know how to install plugins on a blog).

We would give them basic instructions to “login to this blog and download this plugin and install it”.

If they couldn’t do it (but indicated it on their resume) we’d take that as a sign NOT to use them.

We virtually 100% of the time interview people over Skype (text chat only) and by asking some “hard” questions we weed out people even further.

A TRIAL EXAMPLE

For example if the outsourcer  says they are an “expert on link building” we would ask for an example site they have previously worked on, ask for keyword(s) they were targeting and paste it into rank tracker in Market Samurai and check the results. If the keywords were on page one (or where they said they were) then good, if not we’d query it.

For writers you can ask for a test article and then check it for unique content, use of correct keywords etc.

By doing this, it really helps you qualify people.

It take a little longer to interview but worth it, because you end up with better people and save time in the long run..

We currently  have ten (10) full time Philippine workers, so yes it can work!

We have certainly had some issues getting things sorted and  cannot say it’s perfect but after the initial period of time getting them trained in exactly what we want done, we can say we are getting good results from them each day.

If you are expecting them to magically understand your business from day 1, then you will will be in for a shock, you do have to put a little work in.

But it’s such a liberating feeling saying “setup a link campaign for xyz now please, here are the keywords, and here are the articles” and off they go and the work get’s done.

We suggest you get yourself a good  project manager as soon as possible to manage your workers.

But if you are just starting out,  you certainly can  get great results by interviewing and running a trial and managing the workers yourself…

For a FREE AUDIO on outsourcing using ReplaceYourself, please VISIT THIS LINK.

Enjoy and hope to hear from you soon.

Cheers,

Anthony & Tim

P.S.

Looking to find out more about ways to Increase Blog Traffic?

About Tim Buchalka

Tim writes a lot about Internet Marketing on this blog. If you have a question ask away and I feel sure you will get a reply. Anything about Internet Marketing in general, but also search engine optimization, web 2.0, google+, twitter, even yucky ol Facebook.