Building Your Own Outsourced Empire
- 40 Comments
- By Zac Johnson on March 8th, 2010
Running a business is like creating an Empire! You may be the king of your castle (company), but you can’t run an empire on your own. Everyone living inside the castle has their own job or requirement to make it stronger, how will you build your castle on your own? The answer is outsourcing!
Outsourcing is good for many reasons, the major ones being that is takes the stress and workload off yourself, and that you can focus on bigger projects that make more money. Outsourcing is available everywhere, and for nearly anything you can think of… but finding quality work and reliable outsourcing solutions is the hardest part.
In most cases the best work will come from personal referrals, but sometimes you are left to fend for yourself. In such times, I’ve come across a few reliable sources that I’ve turned back to time and time again. Below is my list of preferred outsourcing solutions I’ve used for design, writing, advertising and everything in between.
Need a Quick Banner Design?
Got an idea for a new ad campaign, or simply want to a few new banners for your site? Look no further than RightBanners. I’ve used these guys several times and they’ve always over delivered. The best part about their service is their turn around time. You should almost always have your design work within 24 hours (usually within 4 hours). If you aren’t happy with your first draft, let them know and something new will be created for you. Banner rates start at $36 each.
Full Time / Part Time Writers
Another great resource I’ve come across is the ProBlogger Job Listings. For just $50 you’ll receive a 30 day listing. ProBlogger is a massive site in itself, but the amount of writers and readers on the site looking for new work is also tremendous. I’ve done a few listings in the past, and on both I’ve received over 20+ resumes looking for work. As the job lister, you decide on what the job entitles, along with pay.
Outsource Your Advertising
When running a blog or web site, one of the major sources of revenue comes from your on site advertising. Two excellent services for managing your earnings, ad rotations and providing a market place for buying and selling advertising is BuySellAds and AdvertiseSpace. BuySellAds has been around for a while and is made up of over 750 successful bloggers and 1,000 quality advertisers. AdvertiseSpace is a smaller site with the same concept. BuySellAds offers more customization and options, but AdvertiseSpace is still new. Both services are recommended for testing for ad buying and sell. BuySellAds charges a 25% commission on all sales, while AdvertiseSpace ranges from 20-30%.
Full Web Site & Logo Design Creation
Since we covered banner, writing and advertising options, let’s finish with the sites that can put everything together. Two of my favorite sites for blog/site and logo design are 99Designs and LogoMyWay. Again, I’ve personally posted jobs on both sites and very happy with the results. In a recent design posting on99Designs I received just over 150 design submissions, and over 500 design submissions when using LogoMyWay. Design postings on both sites vary, but start in the $200 range.
Finding the Right Image
This one isn’t so much outsourcing, but it sure can save you some time. When creating new landing pages, web sites or even just for a blog post… finding the right image to use is key. One of my favorite royalty free stock photo sites is iStockPhoto. They have thousands of high quality photos to use, and it really only costs a buck or two to get a nice size image. Sure, you can head over to Google Images or Bing and do a photo search… but when you need a nice high quality image, and want to keep yourself copyright safe, look no further than iStockPhoto. (Images used on this post are from iStockPhoto)
My list of recommended outsourcing solutions may be familiar to a few, but hopefully not many. This article was written to inform you of the smaller solutions available that have been working for me and the benefits of outsourcing. For more options and outsourcing tasks, you can always turn to bigger sites like eLance, Guru and Freelancer.
Leave a comment about your experience in outsourcing and if you’ve used any of these services.
- Posted in Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Web Developement
"With great power comes great responsibility".... my Uncle Ben told me that. Haha, just kidding! I'm Zac Johnson and I've been making money online for over 10 years now. In short, I started making money online while I was in high school... but my passion for marketing and making money goes back way earlier than that. I created ZacJohnson.com to help motivate you to start making money online, and live the life the you always dreamed of.
Do you have a recommendation for landing page design?
ReplyI’ve outsourced a ton of stuff in recent weeks and I would highly recommend it. YOu can save yourself so much time by outsourcing tedious tasks allowing you to focus on your most profitable things. And, a lot of outsourcers you work with can easily be coached to do any task you want them to do. A lot of the money you spend will be small compared to the returns you will get when you start outsourcing.
ReplyThanks for the post Zac, i will need to get on with Buysellads. You have some great sources. Cheers
ReplyThe 80/20 rule! Outsourcing your work will free up more time for you to focus on running your online business.
ReplyGreat post Zac. Outsourcing is by far one of the best ways to start making more money online. Especially if you start outsourcing the things you don’t like to do.
ReplyOutsourcing is great because it frees you up to do the things that only you can do. I outsource some of my niche blogs content because I want to focus on promotion.
ReplyQuite a few of these available. I think this will make for a good post next week.
Replywe all need to opt outsourcing to increase our productivity
ReplyOutsourcing, well, should be done with proper cost-profit analysis. It may be cheaper to hire someone and get that done rather than hiring an agency. Or at times if you like the work, do it yourself.
ReplyI’d like to know who you would recommend for campaign optimization and management, specifically for FB, outsources or may be a small team of in house staff, what do you think?
ReplyOutsourcing is the main problem in America, without this, it may turn beneficial to the economy itself. Millions of jobs were loss because of it.
ReplyI do all of my own campaign management.
ReplyHi Zac That’s great…no wonder how great is your logo here in your site. I really love how you designed your logo. I wish I can make like this one. Did you use drawing tablet here? thanks
ReplyYou should’ve collaborated with Joel Comm on this one, lol. He did a post right after you arguing some points against
Replyyour right!Starting a business is like starting a empire.Right on Zac
ReplyMany entrepreneurs starting out don’t realize the huge benefits of outsourcing. Just because they are capable of doing everything themselves, they try to do it all. This is often at the expense of slow progress or inadequate quality. By outsourcing you free up time and you can get things done more effectively. You’d be surprised at how inexpensively you can get things done if you know where to look.
ReplyYour article Zac is great! This is not a smaller solutions but a big help for others who would want to start their own outsourcing business.
Great one!
Phil
ReplyCome on, you are giving away all my secrets.
ReplyI think that this is not the right time for me to outsource since I am not that sucesful yet. Although I have been earning my living I don’t think that it is enough to outsource.
ReplyI haven’t had much luck in the past with outsourcing, you need to watch them like a hawk and have very specific tasks for them to do. But I am ready to try it again. I have a few projects laying around that need Help, Outsourcing here I come.
ReplyI’m a little confused, what exactly is outsourcing?
Reply@:
If you are already earning your living through your business, you are definitely ready to outsource. You just have to thoroughly analyze your business to determine profitable tasks. There is a the 80/20 rule where 80% of your income comes from 20% of your efforts. It is just a matter of pinpointing those tasks and outsourcing them. Then you just have to be disciplined enough to use the freed up time to expand and increase your income.
ReplyOutsourcing is the best thing I’ve done for my business, it costs less and the job is well done!
ReplyThis rule also applies to getting outsourced work and then outsource them to someone else. It’s like double outsourcing. Hahaha.
Zac, please don’t forget to provide some recommendations for the landing pages.
ReplyI’m going to bookmark this post, excellent resource Zac! I have personally used quite a few of the services that you have outlined here, but I haven’t heard of a few and I am the kind of guy that likes to outsource anything that isn’t in my core competency. Thanks for the tips
ReplyI’ve been recommending outsourcing to many of my partners for awhile now. Good to see you think it’s the way to go too.
Till then,
Jean
Replyoutsourcing is alike with crowdsourcing they have the same concept that is to save money and to create quality output
ReplyGreat stuff, I am impressed with the idea of the silly banners for chearp.
ReplyI think outsourcing just a necessary thing, but only at a certain stage of development.
ReplyOutsourcing is great, but I think that it is important to understand the processes that are going on in you business as well as have a project management system in place in order to make sure that your project goes according to plan.
I have had some bad experience with outsourcing. The main thing is not to give up and find someone else.
Reply@: I find that if you go through reliable networks with rating systems you have far less problems with outsourcing. Since they are accountable to the rating system, the workers make sure their clients are satisfied.
ReplyI’ve used Guru and elance and am happy with both! I have also tried Odesk, but its better to fix the job rate than go for an hourly pay there. Prevents dragging out of the job!
ReplyRight on the money Zac. It took me quite a while to learn the outsourcing lesson. Since I’ve outsourced most of my content creation my income has jumped big time.
It has freed me up to focus on the marketing and design aspects of my business.
Thanks
ReplySteve
I use rentacoder and elance extensively. I have found some really good content writers and coders there who get my work done at a better level than I could do by myself. I would highly recommend these 2 sites.
ReplyIt’s pretty simple. If you can’t do the job then find someone to do it for you. There are tons of people online who offer their services such as writing, web designing and other technical stuffs.
Bernice,
ReplyI really like the idea of outsourcing my entire traffic generation aspects, but when getting started I prefer to do all of the actual traffic generation tasks first and then show my future outsourced employees how to effectively do those tasks.
ReplyI’ve outsourced a lot of stuff in recent weeks and I would highly recommend it.
ReplyGreat post. Outsourcing is a great business strategy because of the multitude of benefits that it offers. For one, you are able to receive high quality output at little cost. Also, outsourcing leaves you free to concentrate on your company’s core competencies.
ReplyGreat stuff! I have just started to outsource actually, i hope it all goes well!
ReplyOutsourcing can mean the difference between success and failure. The learning curve is very long when first starting out. You need to capitalize on the wealth of skilled artists, writers and web designers available to cut time and actually save you money in the long run.
Reply