As I wrote about in my last post, building niche sites is a numbers game. If you are going to become successful, you should expect to build quite a few sites. In doing so, some will fail, some will succeed, and some will totally kill it!
In fact, what you will probably find is that 80% of your income comes from just 20% of your sites. This is called the Pareto Principle and its common to most any business that you choose to be in. This is the truth for my Adsense portfolio, and it was also the truth with the last company I started. In that business, we didn’t build niche sites; instead, we had customers, and 80% of our revenue came from 20% of our customers.
To find the gold, we had to dig a lot of holes (make a lot of cold calls). I wish I could have known in advance who the big fish were going to be, but the business just didn’t work that way.
Neither does my Adsense business. Instead of making lots of cold calls, I just build lots of sites. Some never make a cent. Others make a killing. The rest are in the middle.
In today’s post, I want to talk to you about outsourcing, because if you don’t learn how to become an outsourcing ninja, how are you going to build all those sites? Unless you are going to give up sleep, you just won’t be able to do it.
What to Outsource
When it comes to delegating (outsourcing), you want to focus on getting someone else to perform that high-labor, low-value tasks. This would include things like:
Installing WordPress
Article Writing
Post publication
Adding site to your ManageWP account
Link building
Graphics creation
On-page SEO
Plugin development
Custom theme development
Video pre-rolls
Voice intros and outros
So much more….
Notice that I didn’t put keyword research on the list? that is because it is a very high value activity and is something that you should do…so long as you have SECockpit, that is!
An Overview of the Process
Outsourcing is not rocket science; however, there are some very specific tricks you need to learn if you are going to achieve ninja status.
In its simplest form, outsourcing consists of these steps:
Decide what to outsource
Find workers
Train workers
Oversee projects and communicate with workers
Pay workers
See…not that hard right? Ok, well…maybe there’s a few pretty important details in there! Lets dive into them, one at a time.
Finding Workers
When I first started out, by far my favorite place to find workers was oDesk. I really like oDesk for a couple of reasons. There are plenty of workers from which to choose, the rating system is pretty decent, and best of all is something called the work diary.
With the work diary, you can actually have the oDesk software take screenshots of your worker’s desktops so that you can check to see if they are actually doing the work you are paying them for! (confession: I have my workers use this, but I never actually check it as I have better things to do with my time)
In addition to oDesk, I’m also a pretty big fan of Fiverr as you can very easily find all sorts of SEO type jobs for just $5! As with anything, you must be very careful about who you are hiring and the best way to do this is to look at their feedback.
For an example of a recent Fiverr gig that I paid $5 for, check out the first 5 seconds of this video. Pretty cool stuff!
Other sites that you might want to use to search for workers are:
VWorker
JobStreet
RemoteStaff
eLance
Guru
Scriptlance
Amazon Mechanical Turk
How to Write a Job Posting
Whenever I’m looking for a worker, I try and be as descriptive in the ad as I can. Below is the job posting for a contract I awarded for a virtual assistant.
What I’ve learned since this first posting is that many of the replies are what I’ll call a template reply. In other words, the applicant is simply cutting and pasting their standard reply into their application.
When I see this, it tells me that they very likely aren’t reading my job posting.
To avoid this, here’s a trick to use: somewhere in the middle of your job description, you want to write a sentence that goes like this, “On the first line of your reply, please write [CODE PHRASE] and nothing else”.
[CODE PHRASE] could be anything you like. It could be “blueberry” or “big truck” or whatever. The point is that you will be able to very quickly filter through the applicants and figure out who took the time to actually read your job posting.
Create a Detailed Job Description
When you attempt to create a job posting on oDesk, you are going to notice that the text field limits how much text you can put in it. If you require more room than that, I suggest that you create a very detailed document in PDF format and then just include it as an attachment to the job description.
Make It Personal
When a VA is coming to work for you, they are not going to be joining a big company, and as such, you should paint a clear picture in your ad what working for you will be like. You will want to touch on things like:
how many hours per week you want them to work
whether they can work on their time zone or yours
what type of boss you are and what they can expect from you
how you want them to communicate with you and how often
how they will be paid and when
Completion Conditions
If your project has any level of complexity to it, you will want to be sure and include some completion condition in your job description. Essentially, completion conditions describe exactly what the worker has to complete before they become eligible for payment. If you clearly define the CC’s, you will have far fewer conflicts further down the road.
Interview Strategies
Here’s what I suggest you do once you have a bunch of applicants…
The Filtering Process
One of the fastest ways to reduce your work during the interview process, is to send all your shortlisted applicants to a questionnaire, which you can easily create as a survey with either surveymonkey.com or Google docs.
In the survey, you should require them to answer the following questions:
Ideally, how many hours would you like to work?
What time zone do you want to work in?
What days are you unavailable to work?
What is the primary reason for applying for this role?
What hourly rate would you expect to be paid?
The Interview
When I’m interviewing applicants, I always follow the process outline below and I do it over a Skype voice call. The reason that I use voice is that I want to know before I hire them how good or bad their english skills are because communicating details with someone who has a poor grasp of english can be very frustrating.
Thank them for applying
Confirm that they understand what I’m willing to pay for the job as described
Ask them what type of work they are doing now (full time, or freelance part time)
Ask them a bit about themselves and where they live/work (I want to know if they have a reliable Internet connection)
Ask them to tell me their understanding of what the job is and how they would go about doing it
Start with a Small Task
If the job in question is a big one, I will always start them off with a small job first, and I will pay them before they finish the small job. How someone continues to work after they have already been paid in full will tell you a great deal about their work ethic. If they continue to work as though they’ve not yet been paid, you are likely onto someone worth hiring.
Things that you should look out for when they are performing the work on this small task are:
How well they follow instructions
Speed
Skill level
Attention to detail
If they do a good job with the interview and any tests I’ve had them do, I hire them.
Training Your Workers
Unless you want to explain the same thing over and over to each new worker that you hire (bad idea), I strongly suggest that you create a library of training material with a heavy emphasis on video-based training. If you don’t want to do video, at a minimum, you should have documentation that contains plenty of screenshots.
It was to satisfy my own need for a complete training library that I originally created Niche Site Mastery.
Once you have your training library in place, bringing new workers up to speed is going to be a LOT easier because you will be able to create the training one time and then have each VA view it over and over. Plus, as you WILL have turnover in your VAs, bringing each new VA up to speed will consume much less of your time.
To store your training content, you have a few options.
If you aren’t using video, then I’d suggest that you use a combination of Evernote and Dropbox. Both tools are cheap as heck and both back all your data up to the cloud so its accesible from anywhere.
If you are going to use video, you could use Youtube so long as you make your videos private. Alternatively, you could, as I did, publish it all to a WordPress blog with a membership site theme (I used ProfitsTheme) and then host all your videos on Amazon’s S3. If you go this latter approach, you will actually hit two birds with one stone – you will serve your own needs for storing your training material, plus you will have created a membership site that you could sell memberships to. Sound familiar?
Mastering Communication & Project Management
When I began outsourcing, I very quickly learned how important communication is when you are dealing with people you don’t ever see.
Set a Communication Schedule
As a final step prior to hiring a worker, you should brief them on your communication expectations. You will want to define things like:
when & how often you expect them to communicate
how you expect them to communicate (skype, chat, email, etc…)
As my portfolio of niche sites has grown, I very quickly realized that the challenge of managing all my sites was going to rapidly get out of hand, and, when that happened, my business would not perform as well as it otherwise could.
How I Solved the Problem with a Task Management Tool
To alleviate that problem, I created a visual task management tool for myself. The idea behind the task management dashboard was to give a place to track the profit and loss of each site, as well as to provide me with a color coded dashboard for any activities that I am personally responsible for.
The whole idea behind a task management tool of this type is to take advantage of the way my brain already works. If something is out of sight, it generally gets forgotten. With a color coded task management tool, I found that this problem was greatly reduced.
Managing Tasks Assigned to my VA
For those of you who’ve known me for a while, you should already be saying, “Hey, wait, what about your VA? How do you handle that?” Excellent question!
As I have mentioned numerous times, I am a HUGE believer in hiring people to do my work for me. If you have read the eMyth, you will already understand that, as the business owner, your primary job is to create systems for other people to follow. The free eBook that you get when you subscribe to my newsletter is an example of one such system.
When I first created a task management tool for my VA, she was thrilled because she said that it made it really easy for her to stay on top of the work that I was assigning her.
Before I created this dashboard, I was continuously emailing her tasks, and as soon as I hit about 5 sites, it became a total nightmare. I had no record of what tasks I’d assigned to her and she had no efficient way of sharing with me which tasks she’d completed and which ones she needed more instruction on. As the above task shows, management tool is just a Google spreadsheet. I was easily able to invite her to have access to it, and now any time I make any changes, Google docs automatically sends her an email to let her know that the spreadsheet has changed.
With the spreadsheet above, tasks assigned to my VA never fall through the cracks, and, if you use more than one VA like I now do, you can just enter their name in a blue cell so they know who the new task should be assigned to.
Here’s How It Works
Down the left are all the tasks associated with the creation of a new niche site. Across the top are columns for each site that I have in my portfolio.
In the very top row is a color code legend that explains what all the colors mean.
New tasks are blue with the respective VAs name in the cell. If a VA has a question, as you can see, they highlight it in red and then put the question into the cell’s comment section. I provide the answers in the same place as they put the question.
How to Become an Outsourcing Master Ninja
As you can see, there are a lot of details involved in effectively integrating outsourcing into your business.
As an alternative to doing this all yourself, there is another option; you could become a Niche Site Mastery Master Ninja member, and in doing so, you would gain instant access to NSM’s VA team, in addition to all the training videos, the discussion forum, and one-on-one coaching with me.
And, best of all, I’ve put all this together for a subscription that is quite a bit less expensive than getting your own VA and then subscribing to all the software tools you will need for link building.
If you want more details, you can get them here.
What Do You Think?
If you’re already outsourcing and you think that I’ve missed anything, I would love to hear what you are up to, so please take a moment to share your thoughts below. As well, if you have a question, please submit it via the comment form down below and I’ll get you an answer.
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