Outsourcing aspects of your Internet Marketing work is always a good idea, particularly if there are too many tasks to do. I’ve always outsourced certain tasks that I feel are tiresome, ranging from administrative work to creating much better graphics than I can manage alone.
When you’re looking to outsource aspects of your business on a short term basis, one good place to find work is using a contracting site. There are a number of well-known ones, such as Freelancer and Upwork. These contractor sites generally work using a simple model which although it can vary slightly between the sites tends to be based around the three main stages. In this article, I’m going to explain how these stages work so you’ll know exactly what to do when you want to use a contractor site to find your next outsourcing worker.
The first stage of the site is to put up a request for you want doing. You need to come up with a short or detailed scenario about the work you want completed. If this involves writing an e-book, your information might include length of the e-book, the topic of the e-book is on, the writing style you want to take, the number of words you want per page and whether you want a native or non-native speaker to work on this. Once you’ve completed this, you put your request live on the site so that the potential outsourcing workers can view it and make a decision if they would like to participate in it.
The second stage of the outsourcing involves finding the worker. You’ve put your bid request up so people are now putting together their offers to work on it. What happens is a lot of potential workers will quote you a fee to completely work for you.
This may vary completely from one worker to another. You may find for a simple project the one person only wants $10 to do it, a second worker may want $50. You need to carefully weigh up given options and you can do that by checking out the experience of the worker. Each work will have a feedback profile detailing what jobs have been done before and what rating they’ve got for it.
You may also wish to ask the potential worker a few questions yourself. Always look at the standard of the English you get back and how long this worker has been active on the site. You can then go ahead and choose the worker you think will deliver the best job for you.
The final stage of the process involves getting the work completed and releasing the payment. Generally, you will pay the site as soon as the job is confirmed. That means they will take the amount of money you’ve quoted and had agreed by your worker directly into escrow.
The money is put aside safely. It’s not in the hands of the worker until they’ve done the work. But the site knows you’re not going to renege on your payment. This is important for the worker as well as they know they’re going to get the money when they’ve completed this.
You then follow the process of the worker doing the job assigned to them. Once you’ve got the results back and happy with them, you agree that the escrowed payment can be released directly to the worker.
If your outsourcing worker never completes the work then eventually you get the money released back to you. This may involve some form of dispute being filed with the outsourcing site. The good thing is these kinds of disputes are fairly rare so generally you have nothing to worry about if you’ve gone through a sensible process and chosen a good worker.
There you have it. That explains how the contracting sites work. You start off by putting together a carefully considered request about what you want doing and you put it out to tender. A number of bids will come in of which you choose one of them to complete the work. Your outsourcing worker works – during this time the money is held in escrow and once they’ve completed it, you release the payment to them.
Now, there’s no reason why you can’t have multiple bids going on at the same time multiple projects being worked on. And indeed the contractor sites will encourage you to do this. By doing so, you can easily outsource a substantial amount of your business.