As you become more successful as an affiliate, you will find that a lot of work comes with maintaining your sites and setting up new ones! Don’t let your own success be your success killer! In this lesson we give you an Introduction to Outsourcing.
What is Outsourcing?
Outsourcing is about you; it’s about hiring other people to replace yourself in your business, giving you more time to focus on maximizing your sales, expanding your business and implementing new ideas, and spending less time worrying about annoying or time-consuming specifics like writing articles, or writing HTML for your sales pages.
It’s about what you don’t know
You don’t need to be an expert at everything, and you shouldn’t need to be! You don’t need to be an expert PHP programmer, a brilliant graphic designer or a social networking guru to become a successful affiliate and there’s no reason for you to need to learn those things in the long-term if you don’t have to (unless those things interest you, of course). You’d be better off hiring someone with the necessary skills who can do those things for you, rather than spending your precious time trying to learn something you don’t need/want. Why should you spend twenty hours trying to learn HTML and PHP and still only end up with a basic understanding of it, when you could hire someone with more than twice the skill and instead spend that twenty hours focusing on optimizing your PPC campaigns instead?
It’s about what you do know
Every affiliate has a list of necessary tasks they need to perform to keep their site(s) going; no matter how far ahead you get, you’re always going to need to create content, perform SEO, link building, social networking, site maintenance; the list doesn’t end. Unfortunately, as you become more successful these tasks will only end up requiring more time so, when it comes down to it, either you can dedicate your time to completing all these tasks, or you can hire other people to do it.
There’s a limited number of hours in a day and you’re better off dedicating your time figuring out how to maximize sales and working on your new ideas, rather than using that time to write SEO-optimized articles or trying to figure out why the CSS on a sales page has broken.
Outsourcing is cheap
Outsourcing can be (very) cheap. This is, perhaps, one of the most important points about outsourcing, and it cannot be emphasized enough. Consider how much your time is worth per hour; what if, instead of you spending one hour writing a blog post, five people could each write a blog post in that hour, for the same cost? That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?
The Philippines is a perfect example of this. For a fulltime employee from the Philippines who can do all your necessary tasks, from link building, to SEO, to social networking you can expect to pay, on average, US$500 per month. Not per fortnight, not per week – that is US$500 per month, for a 40-hours-per-week employee to do pretty much everything you’re doing now. If you’re in a position to need an employee to take over your day-to-day tasks then there’s a good chance you’ll have absolutely no issue covering this cost from your site income.
Outsourcing is not Elance!
This is an important distinction to make; outsourcing and hiring freelancers is not the same thing.
Elance and other freelance hire sites are no good for outsourcing; every job you need done by a freelancer (or outsourcing firm) requires you to go through a whole application process and general rigmarole. Your time isn’t freed at all – it’s simply changed from being taken up by the tasks you need performed, to the task of hiring.
Don’t get us wrong – Elance and other freelance hire sites are great! When you need something done quickly, and you don’t have much time and/or money, these sites are very useful for getting things done. However, for general long-term operation of your business, they’re not so great, so don’t make the mistake of trying to use them in that way.
The other problem with freelance sites is that they’re not there for you, they’re there for them. You can’t train them in specific ways to adapt to your business and thought processes like you can with employees.
Outsourcing is not India!
If you ask an affiliate about outsourcing, many of them think of India. Consequently many affiliates have a misconception that outsourcing means dealing with call centre employees with Indian accents, dealing with communication and productivity problem; in general affiliates just won’t have a good opinion of outsourcing.
However the truth is vastly different. India is most definitely not the only place you can outsource to. In fact, it’s possible to outsource to most places in the world – however you’ll often find you get the best results from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. In fact one of the best countries, if not the best country, for outsourcing is The Philippines.
Outsourcing is not exploitation
Many affiliates who think about outsourcing, and hear about how cheap it can be, often question whether or not it is about taking advantage of someone.
There is no suitable single answer to this; however, one short answer is that the cost-of-living in many Eastern European and Southeast Asian countries is cheaper (a lot cheaper!) than in, for example, The United States; in the Philippines, for example, a pay of $500 per month is considered an above average wage, and is more than enough to provide your employee with the necessary living basics.
No comments:
Post a Comment