Gonna try some outsourcing

[Stallion]

I haven't started outsourcing yet. It's really the only thing that I haven't implemented with my affiliate marketing muse. As you can expect, I put a lot of time into work.

A lot of my work is related to article marketing. You write articles and you submit them to various places. You get traffic and links in return, which lead to sales.

I probably write a full term paper, every single day with articles. Which is a little hard on the head.

So what I'm going to do is try outsourcing this. I'm just going to start out with an initial 5 articles, just to see how it goes. If things go well, I'll just outsource more.

I've been getting a few quotes and I'm seeing $5/article and $7/article. Someone offered me $0.03/word and I want 500 word articles so that's $15 lol.

The guy offering it for $5/article has a good reputation and writing style by his samples. I'm sure before the day is out all the cheapie writers will show up offering them for $2. I probably won't touch that. I need some degree of quality.

[dlw]

LOL stallion,
is this an alternate way of obtaining price quotes.

all the best with the articles.
it is one way to generate traffic... but as you've said it -- Hard on the HEAD!

[Stallion]

Well, I was rereading the 4HWW last night, and I was on the part about outsourcing. I noticed that it gave article writing as something a virtual assistant could do.

Well, I just talked to a virtual assistant from the Philippians that I got from elance.

I asked her about what I was looking for and how many 300 word articles she could write in a 2hr period. She said 3-4.

I probed some more, found out that it takes her 30 minutes with research (which is perfectly fine).

But I want generalized and vague articles. I explained I'd get her a cheat sheet, where she just randomly picks a few points and writes a paragraph for each. Which makes up a 300 word article.

I write a lot of articles about things I don't have the slightest clue about and that makes me money, so that's all I want from her.

I explained to her with my researchless and generalized articles, I can write 12 in a 2hr period. (Yes that 3600 words). I told her as someone outsourced, I'd expect them to write around 8 articles in a 2hr period since there really is no research involved.

She agreed to it. Later in the week I'm going to send her out a little more information, such as the cheat sheet and 200+ example articles I've already written on the vary topic I want her to write about.

We're going to start out with an original 1 week trial of 10hrs. That's 2hrs, Monday-Friday. Cost $5/hr.

It's awesome. When I apply the 80/20. This 2hr block of time, that I'm outsourcing to her is probably a good 80% of what I make.

I give her a one week trial of $50. If she is good, I'll just get her on a permanent basis. Pretty sweet to outsource 80% of my profit making work for $50/week.

[cake]

Beautiful! You gotta love it when you can write about something you haven't a clue about and still make money!!

[Stallion]

The funny thing is that I've tried topics that I'm an expert at and only made average (at best). Than I start yapping about something I have no clue about. Give very generic advice like "cut your losses" and I make more money. The topic is about investing lol.

[Stallion]

Just put my first project up on elance. Even though I have one lined up already to do one thing. I'm looking for cheaper outsourced people to do something else that requires absolutely no intellect (it's just repetitive crap), so I'm hoping I can get it for a cheap $2/hr.

Within 10 mins of putting it up, I had two bids. $4/hr and $7.99/hr. Pffff!

[Stallion]

Alright.

I just sent off my first work to my first outsourced group.

I did the 80-20 rule for all the work I do and I basically summed up that over 80% of my profit comes from about 4hrs of work per day. I just outsourced 2hrs today, for $2.50/hr.

I typically get up at 6am to do my work, just because there is no distractions and I'm more productive. Well, 2hrs in, I'm done for the day. Gonna start sleeping in until 8am.


Also, the outsourcer that was quoting me $5/hr for some work ended up flaking on me. They gave me their email to email the details and they never replied back. I guess that is what I should expect by contacting them independently of elance.

I'll keep everyone updated on how this goes.

[andyYY]

Dude just never fall outside elance or all the VA websites,they will be like ebay,and the negative feedback spectre will terrify them in the future,NEVER stay outside elance,they may take all the bids available and just do the more profitable ones,it's the current problem on indians,they want more and more and more,actually is said that best outsourcing is made in china... (they will brake on of those days)

[FrozenCanuck]

Stallion,

I admire what you've done. First, you've created a method to profit in affiliate marketing and second, you've begun outsourcing.

Can I ask you ... would you mind explaining briefly a few things?

1) Where do you post your articles?
2) Do you mask affiliate links?
3) How many affiliate products do you promote (or have you promoted in total)?
4) Is all of your traffic free?
5) Without outsourcing, how much would you say you were earning per hour by writing and doing all work yourself (personal question, feel free to decline)
6) With outsourcing, how much will your hourly rate rise to? (This is cool math...)

I'm curious because I have done some affiliate marketing of one single affiliate program and it probably brings me about $50 per week of profit, for what was an initial PPC time investment (learning) and now I spend absolutely zero time on it. But I have not been able to replicate this for other affiliate programs. Ok, not entirely true. I finally got a sale on another affiliate program I setup months ago, but was only getting about 5 clicks per week, so after 20 weeks (100 clicks) I made $91 commission with $20 of adwords spending. Profit = $71 for no work.

Stallion - nice job here, and looking forward to learning from you.

[Stallion]

Thanks frozen Canuck. I believe it was you that told me to do the 30 day challenge that really started to get me into this.

1. EzineArticles.com was the main one. It gets the most traffic and has the most power with the search engines. It used to be my main source, but I've branched out a bit adding in some other ones like Article Dashboard, Articlesbase, Buzzle, Amazines, etc.

2. Yeah. I have two reasons why I do it. The first is that it looks better in the status bar, obviously. The second is that I can set up all the masking in a central directory on my domain name. So if I make a hundred pages or whatever, with the same affiliate link on it, if that affiliate site went down or wasn't selling anymore, I'd have to go through a 100 pages and fix them all. Basically all I would have to do is change one file on the server and they're all changed automatically.

3. A lot. Let me think. A lot of them are in the same niche, but a number would be around 30. Most of them have no made any sales and you have to take into consideration, that I started out slow. I just did one at a time, and than I worked up a too a few of them. Than I did an experiment where I tried out a lot of different products to test my sales pages (23 products tried there).

4. Yep. I believe last month I had around 6000 unique hits between two domains I have.

5. It's hard to say. When I started out, I really wanted it to work, so I put a lot of time into it. Long days. I've really cut back, do to 80-20, so I'm only really doing 4hrs a day. That works out to roughly $1000/mth.

The thing about it is that you're not working for money, you're building online realestate. And the more I get up, the more traffic I get and the more sales I make. It's been a growing process. It has sort of stagnated around this time, mainly because it's the summer. The fall will be very interesting.

6. Hard to say. I guess if I sticked with the math, 60-80% per hour more. It really depends on the quality of the outsourcers work.

-----------

That's pretty cool from the adwords. I haven't exactly jumped into that yet, but I probably will have too. Currently making the sales page on my first muse, like a muse that sells a product.

I'll probably have to try it out than.

[FrozenCanuck]

Stallion - can you post your two domain names? I think many of us would like to look at them, or maybe post one of your article links so we can see a sample and learn?

Glad you did the 30 day challenge. It was awesome learning for many of us.

[Stallion]

Outsourcing News:

Well, I've had three days of work done so far and I've just made a request to the outsourcer that we mutually end our contract (which was supposed to be for two weeks).

First Complaint: He did not read my project proposal. I think he just look at the first sentence and that was it.

This lead him to doing the first day wrong. He probably did 20 minutes of work and billed me for 2hrs.

I pointed this out to them, and they made it clear that they didn't want to have to do what I wanted in the contract. They offered a compromise. I was happy to do the compromise.

Before I got back to them, they tried to redo day 1 the way I wanted. It shows initiative, but you just can't redo a day. You have to start a new one, because I can't use the work. Anyway, I get billed another 2hrs for the redo.

Let's goto day 2. I was all good for the compromised plan that we had. He could do just what he did on the first day that took him 20 minutes. I'd just give him more work. But no!!!

I don't know if this is language barrier, or he's fucking with me, but for some reason, he just did the work at random (even though I never used that term ever or implied it) and just did the same amount of work.

After that day is over, I explain to him that I need him to do all the work, not just random bits of it.

Day 3, he does the total work. Yippie! I think we got past the learning curve. Oh look, It took him 5hrs to do the work. Oh and he didn't finish the work.

I get an invoice saying he did 11hrs of work. I know that isn't a big deal, but fuck. I wanted just two hours a day, and it was simple work. I want out now.

Now I have to go change some passwords, just in case he's sour for me making such a request. I just want it to be mutual, so we don't have to shatter each others reputations. Mine is more important because this is my very first project.

[Stallion]

Well, I think we may have reconciled. I think he really got the point of WHAT I WANTED, and the fact that I WASN'T GETTING IT.

Even though he wrote back a compromise in caps, I think we might be able to salvage something here. Since he "gets it".

I hope so because I don't want to go back to a 4hr workday, I was enjoying the 90 minute workday.

--------------

I wrote on my blog about this. I made a few points at the bottom of it, basically stating some rules for the next time I try to get an outsourcer.

Here's the rule that is probably the most important.

Cap the Hours: Basically, limit the amount of time they can work. I should of said that they do 2hrs a day, no more. If they don't finish the work in 2hrs, than they stop and send me a message.

It would of been a more favorable way to rectify the situation before it got out of control with over 5hrs of work.

I know we're talking about very little money here, but I'm on a tight budget and I plan to stay on it.