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10 tips on using oDesk to outsource your life

SEOidiot — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:35:26 +0000

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

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. Here is an example of a great provider.

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!

Go sign up to oDesk today

Post from: SEOidiot

10 tips on using oDesk to outsource your life

My Adsense Flat

SEOidiot — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 12:50:40 +0000

A few times recently I have mentioned that I am preparing to sell my ‘Adsense Flat’ to friends and people always seem surprisingly interested in what my ‘Adsense Flat’ actually is.

A few years ago it was possible to create a decent amount of money from Google Adsense adverts simply by automating the creation of websites and because it was automated you could work out ways to scale the whole thing.

How it all worked

Register lots of .info domain names

Regfly at the time had their ‘Super Fridays’ where you could buy domains in bulk via their API for just $0.99 a piece – we used to get between 2-500 each time

Shove them all on one or two VPS hosting accounts

They were in fact all served by a single index.php file on the box, we dynamically determined the requested domain and then served the cached content into a set theme

Create a system that goes and gets content from somewhere

It doesn’t matter how we got this content but it was pretty poor spider food at best if I am honest

Get it indexed

All sites in a batch were cross linked and just 1-3 inbound links from elsewhere would be enough to get the sites crawled and the majority indexed

Place Adsense on the sites

The clicks were tracked and any site that we sent enough traffic to got contacted for a direct relationship

Await the site being de-indexed

I used to track ‘burn rate’ as a KPI of how long the domain remained indexed for (My KPI was the time between full crawl and 75% de-index)

Then repeat this again and again using the keywords that worked well

Heres a post from 2007 showing some stats from one batch

Why it stopped working as well

Well Google decided that the lack of value in the sites they were allowing us to make was in fact more harmful than profitable so they embarked on a tirade of banning people for spurious reasons (I eventually reached account number 7 and Google still owe me £8.5k that they will never pay)

How much did people make and what did they use it for?

Here is where I am different, many people made good money. Here is a screenshot of one of my Adsense accounts from the time (NB its actually a scan of a printout I made and kept on my office wall for a while – That account is banned now like so many others….)

As you can see thats $9,000 in 30 days

Most people spent the money on better computers, cars, gadgets and in one memorable case a year long holiday across the globe

I however invested some of mine in a flat in the nearby coastal town of Cleveleys

Here is the listing from www.houseprices.co.uk showing what we paid for the flat (There is no mortgage on that property)

And here is a screenshot of where it is – handy for a paddle in some brown freezing water

Its a one bedroom flat and has a retired lady called Veronica sitting in it as our tennant.

The plan was always to use the capital from the sale of that flat to eventually clear our main house mortgage.

Veronica has taken up an offer now to move into one of the many many houses owned by my mother and father in law so we will be selling it slightly earlier than intended but that all depends on what interest we get in it when it goes on sale.

Here is the place she is moving to – they dont look much these places but its ideal for a retired lady, easy for the shops and always in demand

So thats really the story of my Adsense flat, I do miss the easy money where the script was the money maker.

I have moved to outsourced teams and affiliate nowadays, whilst that doesn’t mean that I need to work much harder it does mean you have to manage much more.

2010 I will be making more time to get back to generating cash away from the client work.

Post from: SEOidiot

My Adsense Flat

Affearners

SEOidiot — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:26:57 +0000

After many months of slow progress on Affearners (My Affiliate forum) I have decided tonight to pull the plug.

Over the past few months the amount of decent posts has dwindled to a few a week and the work involved in moderating the forum and cleaning out the spam has been distracting me from the real task of building my new business

So with sadness I have pulled the site

Post from: SEOidiot

Affearners

Forgotten Blogs

SEOidiot — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 18:45:18 +0000

Just stumbled across (literally) a blog that I recognised…

“Holy cow thats mine!”

Its from back in the day when I was creating lots of blogs for niche affiliate offers

I think going through the contents in moderation may be a bit of a task too far!

Lesson here – keep better records of where you leave your sites

Post from: SEOidiot

Forgotten Blogs

Syndk8 – Bidding on people now?

SEOidiot — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 21:39:09 +0000

Just been pointed out to me that Syndk8 – everyones favourite blackhat SEO forum – and a place I used to spend an awful lot of time and where I still moderate – appear to be bidding on SEO names.

And its not just me, Dave Naylor and Esrun get ads too

But they dont seem to be bidding on people like Earl himself, Perk, Irishwonder, Bompa, Dianne88, TheKaptain, Vsloathe and many of the other high profile members.

I assume that this is another attempt to sell the Autopligg tool (Im not a big fan of that)

If it is its odd they arent after phrases like: -

Link spamming

Odd but made me chuckle – see if you can find anyone else I have missed.

Post from: SEOidiot

Syndk8 – Bidding on people now?

Why you shouldn’t believe what people tell you about their earnings

SEOidiot — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:52:17 +0000

Its a tried and tested rule that Adult traffic is hard to convert. Its true, thats not the issue but many people will try and tell you they are getting earnings from stats that you know cant be true.

So to debunk some of the BS you hear from these people I thought I would run through some real stats for you.

First off a disclaimer:

1. I don’t do Adult as a rule but I have some traffic that seems appropriate so thats where I sell it to.

2. This is traffic that is harder even than normal to convert but the main points still apply.

Here is the expected stats for the Adult site I am sending to (I have blurred the actual sites)

Now you may be shouting at the monitor (Why by the way, I cant hear you) that I should be using the top site as it has the best conversion rate. I feel that the site I am sending to will beat that for the traffic I am sending.

These figures mean that they are getting 1 signup per 756 clicks

Imagine if you had to reach that level on all your affiliate stuff, we would all be begging for scraps on the street by now!

Now I also have the problem of not being able to send the traffic straight there as I have to pre-qualify the visitor slightly.

The visitor to my site has to arrive, click any link (they all go the same place) and then when on the Adult site sign up for me to get paid.

This is how the maths work out for me here: -

I get a 37% click through on my site
I need 756 of THOSE PEOPLE WHO CLICK THROUGH to make a sale

So I get 1 sale for every 2041 visitors to my site!

If I get say $30 for each signup (I do a bit better than that as I get a percentage of recurring bills too)

If I was a BS merchant I could pretend that I was earning $4500 a day from the traffic I have but in reality I am getting far less.

I am not complaining here and this site has enough traffic to make it well worth my while keeping it around but I do like to inject a little reality into things every so often.

Remember the rule, work out your numbers based on the full path of the visitor. Dont just multiply your raw traffic by some industry average and think your the big man.

Post from: SEOidiot

Why you shouldn’t believe what people tell you about their earnings

Cligs – solving Affiliate targetting

SEOidiot — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:03:45 +0000

Li pointed me towards a great new service from Pierre which helps solve what should be (But never is) a simple problem.

Cligs

When you want to drop in an affiliate link somewhere out on the web often you will find that many of the people who are exposed to that link are from a location that the merchant doesnt want traffic from.

You know the kind of thing, you are promoting a UK offer yet if you drop the link in facebook you find a large percentage of the people who click it are US based and so the network tells them they dont qualify for that offer and sends them somewhere pointless instead.

Cligs helps solve that problem by allowing you to still have an innocent shortened URL whilst allowing you to send the traffic to different places depending on where they are located.

So UK people get the UK offer and US people get something equally tasty.

Simple ideas are often the most useful

Post from: SEOidiot

Cligs – solving Affiliate targetting

Guarantee you wont lose money on Affiliate offers

SEOidiot — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:10:14 +0000

I have been playing with a few new networks and some new places to promote affiliate offers of late and something has become painfully clear.

To rely on the stats given by the network is the same as dangling your cash in a shredder and flicking the on / off switch.

Typically the logic goes something like, lets have a look at the EPC for this offer and to start default bids on traffic at about a qtr of that until we get enough data to refine that.

This is the result from a new network I am trying (Not naming which one)

Quality I am sure you will agree. In my defense I was on holiday and didnt stop the test when I should have but it was a brief test at low value.

So in future I am going to use the following method for setting my default bids. (New network only)

Work out what a 2% ctr would provide me and set my bids appropriately. So if I know that the offer I want to test is going to give me $10 per conversion on avg then I will need 500 clicks to get that and 500 clicks cant cost me more than 2cents each, run away run away….

I would therefore conclude that its best not to PPC test this offer but to throw some cheap organic seo traffic at the offer to see what their data integrity looks like instead.

Anything else is burning cash until you know the network better or you get data to support theirs.

Post from: SEOidiot

Guarantee you wont lose money on Affiliate offers

SMF theme to look like Beast

SEOidiot — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:00:06 +0000

I did a little bit of work on my Affiliate tips forum Affearners today to give the theme a bit of work.

I dont know if your like me but I am starting to think that most of the forums I go to all look a little confusing and loud. I have toyed with the idea of taking the whole thing over to a forum like Beast but I am not happy that its good enough from a features perspective yet.

So in the meantime I have stripped out most of the colour and made the whole thing look more minamalist. Let me know what you think.

Next on the agenda we will be adding a way to see the ‘Best of Affearners’ and ill post the code I wrote for that. Then soon after we will be adding some conditional stuff to try to increase signups from guest users.

Post from: SEOidiot

SMF theme to look like Beast

How to stop forum link spam on SMF

SEOidiot — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:41:31 +0000

I have had a few problems with people dropping links in their posts or signatures over at my Affiliate Marketing Forum – Affearners so I decided to check a few of them out.

One really nasty one went to the sort of porn that nobody should be interested in and we also had one that went to a site that tried to install some malware on my computer. So enough is enough, had a chat to a few people to run some ideas around (Thanks to JasonD and Perk in particular) and came up with the following plan: -

All links going off site would be intercepted and run through a jumper page to check the link out first.
Any links that were tagged as approved would then pass on and work as normal.
Any links that hadnt been approved would simply be displayed on a page for people who really wanted to go to them to copy and paste into their browser and leave.

So how to do all this on SMF?

Intercepting the links
SMF uses BBCode to make life easier for people to post links in the forum, this meant that we could utilise their hard work to change all the links and add the following to the front of all links off site -

http://www.affearners.com/forum/outgoing/go.php?link=www.thelinktobechecked.com

Where the link to be checked could then be analysed against the list of pre-approved links.

To do this I changed many instances of the [URL] replacement in subs.php within the sources folder in SMF. Heres what my finished subs.php looks like now: -

Subs

To use this just find and replace all instances of http://www.affearners.com/forum/outgoing/go.php?link= with your own script location

*NB If you mess up your own forum thats your own fault!

So that was making all links off site head off to our checking script.

This script simply checks the links people have posted against an array of approved links and if they are approved redirects back out (302 ) but if they arent shows this page for the user to copy and paste the link themselves: -

And the code that runs that is as follows: -

http://pastie.org/244003

This simply checks against our array (took most of the sites out to make it cleaner to show) and if they match jumps onto the site in question. If not we get the page displayed for unapproved links.

Notice I do some chopping off of the http:// part to check and probably should do some url encoding etc.

Pretty simplistic I know but solves a good deal of the issues. In the future ill DB the approval part of the links and add the ability for anyone logged in as admin to approve a link on page.

If you liked this you might also be interested in making friendly 404’s for SMF or making SMF more SEO friendly.

Next ill show you how to solve the profile spam issues

Post from: SEOidiot

How to stop forum link spam on SMF