Dave and Jay - Crazy Web Entrepreneurs

A sad fact of life here in North America is that every day, jobs are being shipped overseas where labor is cheap, and unfortunately while it may be bad for our economy, it really does cut your costs significantly.

If you’re actively trying to build an income online, it’s quite easy to end up tied down in the details. It doesn’t matter if you’re already established and doing it full time, or doing it part time - you have to remember that your time is money. If you’re unable to do the work that earns you money because you’re writing an article or sending out link requests, then it may be time to go over to the dark side and hire a freelancer.
Dave and I both use different freelancer sites; I generally use getafreelancer.com as a good source of repetitive labor or writing, but have found it to be sub-par when it comes to coders or designers, while Dave uses rentacoder.com.

Personally, I find the quality of people available for coding work on rentacoder very good, and we routinely post jobs and use the winner for a long time to come without any problems.

Last summer, Dave and I were in the middle of launching our fansite network but we had a problem: we both are sort-of lazy, and we both tend to get bored easily. So, when faced with the prospect of having to write 200 biographies and spend 8 hours on each site working with link metro, it didn’t take me long to suggest outsourcing.

What we discovered was quite surprising. For technical work, it’s not hard to find someone for $50USD to code a CSS website, and for link metro we had people lining up to beg to work all day for just $10. However, the best find was actually in Canada when I discovered a hard-working lady in Quebec who wrote excellent, original 600 word articles for $10 and ebooks for $10/page. While you can certainly find cheaper, when you want quality writing it’s worth it to pay a bit extra.

The best part about it all is you’re not dealing with companies, so in most cases if you give someone a lot of work, the cost can be negotiated.

However, it’s not all a bed of roses; one of the major problems you’ll face in outsourcing overseas is most of the people you talk to can’t speak English very well. This leads to misunderstandings, and often things have to be explained repeatedly and this can cause you to miss some deadlines.

Another problem I noticed was because of the English problem, many people bid on jobs without really knowing what they are bidding on. They simply use a canned message telling you how great they or what their company is, so after thinking about it for awhile I discovered that if you put a line at the bottom of your ad saying “only bids with the word Banana (or any other word you choose) at the beginning will be considered”, you can quickly weed out who actually reads your ad versus who just posted an offer with no idea what for.

Also, both the sites I talked about above have feedback systems, so when considering a bid it’s best to take a look at the work people have done before, and what others had to say about it. It also is highly recommended that you make use of each site’s escrow; it doesn’t cost any money, but you can rest easy knowing you didn’t just send $300 to someone in Austria who may or may not do the work. If someone asks for payment up front… RUN AWAY!!!!

While using freelancers isn’t entirely pain free, after you’ve tried it a few times you’ll begin to make a list of people who you can contact to do work for you in the future. THen, when you need something written or a new site coded, you don’t have to look for someone - instead, you can just send them an email.