As many will know I tend to try and outsource most of the business and many of the personal tasks I have to do each day. It allows you to build a system that will scale and in a time limited business like consultancy thats the path to real profit.

So I thought I would do a quick post of tips on how to get started in outsourcing your tasks.

The service I tend to prefer is oDesk (No aff link there surprisingly )

The reason I prefer them is that as you build your ‘team’ on the service they give you a team room where you can click to see the work diary of each team member.

The oDesk software also provides you with screenshots at intervals during their day so you can visually see the progress each of your team is making. They even have an iphone app to see that too.

1. Posting an opening
Post a clear and easy to understand description of the tasks involved. Bear in mind that many of these openings will remain open long term so try not to be specific on tasks. For example “PHP coder with experience of PHP, MySQL, xHTML, CSS, Jquery / Javascript, Wordpress and Api’s” is better than “Someone needed for development of a wordpress site”

2. When you get applicants filter down to a few possibles. I use the following criteria: -
English skills of 5 (Very very important)
Feedback score of 4.5-5 (I rely on the feedback quite a bit)

3. Choose providers affiliated with a bigger provider.
I have used independent providers but find them often more hit and miss and unless you can justify employing them full time from the off then they will get dragged off onto other peoples projects. Its also good to have a manager above them who can allocate work to others in their organisation if needed.

4. Don’t interview.
I tend to just narrow down to a few and then hire them explaining that I will give them a small paid task to test if they are what we need, the best result wins. The paid task is important as it measures the quality of their work and it gives you a chance to check communication is good – communication in outsourcing is the secret to success.

5. Set an hourly limit.
I need to make sure I know what my exposure to costs are, sure I can see the progress as we go but I need to be on top of what this is going to cost me (Watch out for anyone billing off odesk hours and ask them to stop)

6. Don’t employ people without a way of paying for their time.
I have 9 people on oDesk now and only one of them is doing work that I cant invoice out again to a client or is for a business I own equity ain and is paying for itself.

7. Use Basecamp to manage your team.
As soon as someone joins my team I set them up a login for our company Basecamp account and assign them tasks via that system rather than oDesks. Basically this means I keep on top of the total project and provides all we need to keep the tasks on time and all the files in one place.

8. Get a feel for what to expect and break things down for them
Its not surprising that people based thousands of miles away get the wrong end of the stick when you dont define what they need to do. Break each task into tiny little tasks and assign them, I like to do a project scope at the start so they get the context of what we are headed towards.

9. If you can try and get to a scale where you have someone managing your team whos communication skills and ability is excellent.
I have most of my team now reporting to one person who acts as a projects manager and understands the projects better even than me, I would like to get everyone reporting to them as soon as possible as there are always a stream of clarification questions to sort each day.

10. Get the iphone app
9am Monday morning…. roll over bleary eyed and reach for the phone…
Check email – NOPE
Check twitter – Maybe
Check the slideshow of work done overnight by the team – YUP

Its a great feeling to see that before you have woken up you already have an invoiceable days work or more done, suddenly the daily treadmill is an optional one!

I have had a lot of people asking me questions about my Adsense flat since I posted the pictures a while back.

It should go on the market at around £90,000 in a few weeks so we are just getting it ready for sale.

New carpets due in, hall to be decorated and some cosmetic work left to do.

Heres a quick video of what it looks like, not much of a place but a nice little flat for someone retiring to the seaside here…

Adsense Flat by SEOidiot from seoidiot on Vimeo.

Just wanted to let everyone know that I will be speaking at SES London this year. I am on a panel entitled ‘Automating Twitter’ with Fantomaster, Pierre, Tracy Falke and Moderated by Cindy Krum.

Looking forward to it!

Like many people I do a lot of research online for fun and profit, things like: -

Finding potential blogs to approach for guest posts
Finding possible targets to approach for link buys
Analysing the link profile of competitors for reports and proposals

That all sounds like a lot of work doesn’t it?
That doesn’t really fit with my plan to move down to a 4 day week does it?

OK so this is the sort of task I would normally outsource to one of my team on oDesk but due to the time it would take and the need to have someone who knows what to do this can get expensive.

Now instead of using a host of toolbars and procedures and training to get the team up to speed on the data gathering side of the task I have swapped out to use the excellent and brilliantly simple Quix by the man with the free but increasingly valuable cartoon, Yoast.

In basic terms Quix is a simple bookmarklet that you drag onto your Firefox toolbar that when clicked allows you to enter simple commands that bring back great results.

With Quix you can do things like: -

Check the whois for the current page
Check Yahoo Site explorer for the links to the current site
Do a simple SEO check across the site

Now currently this is all in procedures and screencasts for each type of task and requires the outsourcer to go get toolbars etc to make things quick.

With Quix I have got the procedures document down to one page for simple research and any new members of the team can get started in minutes rather than hours.

At $2 an hour for this type of research and Quix being free its a great combo.

Watch the video and get started!

An introduction to Quix from Joost de Valk on Vimeo.

I took a lot of flak when I posted the question “Should I go to ThinkVisibility” a few weeks back, most of it good natured banter.

I have bought my ticket….

The truth is I was ALWAYS going and heres why: -

I am not naturally a ‘conference person’
Many people love the conference circuit and love speaking and meeting other conference attendees. Personally I would rather get on with working hard to achieve my goals. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy socialising and meeting new people.

ThinkVis for me is what Search conferences should really be about. Good content partnered with a genuinely inclusive social gathering both during and after the event and an event thats at a size where you can meet most people.

It is almost the antidote to the suit wearing corporate conference…

I wouldn’t miss the opportunity to share some time with people like Al, Dom, Shaun, Jay, Tim, Kieron and Chris.

Great people, great conversation, real value.

So if you have been to a search conference before and felt lost and lonely after paying a huge ticket price why not join me at ThinkVis this year and try the future?

If I was you I would act now as the amazing £99 ticket price ends tomorrow…