No better time to outsource

By Fiona Boyd |

Many of our readers and book purchasers are bloggers or niche content site owners and if you’re like many of them, you’re probably struggling under the weight of not enough hours in the day and too much month at the end of the money. It may be opportune to take a good hard look at the world of outsourcing to remedy the situation.

Huge corporates have been following this path for at least the past decade, but in recent times it’s become possible for small and owner-run businesses to take advantage of the incredible wonder that is outsourcing.

Not enough time? Time to outsource

David and I, while we owned and ran our major online venture www.artshub.com.au, had often considered the notion of outsourcing various business functions – but each time we had a go at it the whole thing would end up a dismal failure or was just outrageously expensive.

The first time we had a go was when we ran a forum called ‘Dole for the Arts’ at the State Library of Victoria. We had about 50 attending, three great speakers and 15 mins of terrific questions from the audience. There were plenty of hardworking artists and artsworkers there as well as some serious arts heavyweights.

After the exhilaration of the event, our News Editor, Rita Dimasi, wanted to run the forum as a series of news articles and we shopped around for a transcription service to transcribe the forum recording. 60 minutes of forum ended up costing us AUD$480 transcribed. And it took two weeks to get the transcription, hardly timely service. It also meant our news features ran a fortnight after the actual forum, making us look as a news service, not terribly up-to-date.

Compare that with an experience David had last week, where he put up a job on www.elance.com for a transcriber to do a text of his videoblog – www.nichecontentmillionaire.com/video-post-offline-marketing-for-your-online-business/. A couple of hours later he hired a guy in Wales who within 24 hours had transcribed David’s 14 minute video piece for the princely sum of US$30. You can quibble about the rate, but however you cut it, we got way better value outsourcing this transcription job than we did back in 2003 on the ‘Dole for the Arts’ one.

We’ve recently shifted home/office and our new place has a whizzy security system that needed a visit from our RACV Home Monitoring guy to get us going. Every one you meet has a story to tell, and this guy’s story was that he had an online business idea and had been struggling for 6 months to get a basic website out of a local guy he’d paid $2000 to build his site. A local business, known specifically as a web developer, yet in 6 months they were not able to come up with any vestige of a site despite being paid a hefty deposit for it.

David let this guy in on the secret of www.elance.com and as he said on leaving, he was off to put a job to build his site up and to experiment with what happens when you actually put your job out there to a world of talented individuals, and not just the local guy in the Yellow Pages.

In relation to blogging or creating content, I’ve long thought the most time-consuming element is the actual research bit. If you’re biting off a big topic, your credibility is served by having good quality research and quotes to back up your idea. Tim Ferriss in his book and blog www.fourhourworkweek.com uses a virtual personal assistant for all sorts of personal tasks, including at times, doing research for writing he’s working on. If you want to know more, get his book, it’s a revelation on how to use your time, talent and energy more wisely and with greater financial and lifestyle benefit to you.

And if you’re new to blogging or niche content and want a short cut on how to have gorgeous graphics on your site, we have another story to tell you. In our consulting business over the past 13 years we have spent thousands on graphic design. At one stage we even hired a trainee in-house graphic designer. One thing I’ve come to learn about graphic designers is that you get your best work out of them when they’re working at home anonymously in their jim-jams. For the www.nichecontentmillionaire.com web graphics and book cover graphic we again put the job up on www.elance.com and hired a fantastic guy from China. His work is excellent, and the price we paid was just sensational, but more than that the experience was just so convenient, all done by skype and email.

Another great site to look at for outsourcing of your web graphic needs is run by a friend, Mark Harbottle and is called www.99designs.com.

2009 really is a great year to outsource. We’ve tested the water several times this year and unlike our past forays, all experiences have been great! So if you’re wondering how you can get your business and life back into balance, have a think about what you can outsource and test it out. At worst you’ll get some time back to use as you wish!

Image: Flickr openDemocracy

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