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!

Went to see a mate of mine yesterday and was aware of the fact that they didn’t have an easy way to see where a site ranked in Google so thought id post my quick way of keeping track

Result Counter

100 Results

To use these just drag them onto your shortcut bar in FFox
So it looks like the image below…

Then to use – do a Google search and click 100 results followed by the Result counter
You are just a CTRL+F away from finding your position then

I have been doing some work over at my Affiliate Marketing Forum, Affearners. Minor tweaks really but I felt that they could be useful to anyone else with an SMF powered forum.

I would really like to spend some time ripping the whole thing to pieces as its all table driven and the code looks like someone threw it up, but instead of that mammoth task I did the lazy thing and tweaked it to get some benefits.

First off Affearners uses the SEO package created by Earl over at Syndk8 and I inherited that when I bought the forum. In my opinion it does a decent job of sorting the URL’s out but has some issues that perhaps newer packages dont (I dont wanna go through a complete URL migration so sod it it will do).

So first thing to sort is that the post pages dont even have a decent H1 title, so that should be easy to sort…

Open up dispaly.template.php (in your current forums theme folder) and change the following line: -
', $txt[118], ': ', $context['subject'], '  (', $txt[641], ' ', $context['num_views'], ' ', $txt[642], ')

And replace it with the following: -

Thats gotten rid of the crap we didn’t need in there and made the page title a nice H1.

Next the formatting may be a bit crappy for your forum so we may have to alter the CSS to sort that out. Heres what I did, open up style.css (Same folder as display.template above) and add this to the end of the stylesheet: -

That just makes the title big but still fits in nice even if people do long stupid titles (Like I tend to )

Thats it really, simple change really but I feel a lot happier about the what each page is saying about itself.

Carrying on down the idea that its good practice to make those ads stand out as the best option for your visitor to click on I have done many sites where i limit the colour on the page to only being the ad. The links are hidden, the page text is grey and the ads are black and blue, the classic recipe to see your CTR soar!

Heres an example image I just knocked up: -

[photopress:greyscalesite.jpg,full,pp_image]

Update – for Keemo – heres the source code for the above
<code>

<style type=”text/css”>
<!–
body {
color: #999999;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 9px;
background-color: #666666;
}
a:link {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:visited {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:hover {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:active {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
.style1 {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
color: #FFFFFF;
}
.style2 {font-size: 9px}
td {
font-size: 11px;
}
–>
</style>

<table width=”800″ border=”0″ align=”center” cellpadding=”0″ cellspacing=”1″ bgcolor=”#333333″>
<tr>
<td bgcolor=”#FFFFFF”><table width=”100%” border=”0″ align=”center” cellpadding=”6″ cellspacing=”6″>
<tr bgcolor=”#CCCCCC”>
<td height=”80″ colspan=”2″><div align=”right”>
<h1 class=”style1″>Burglar Alarms </h1>
</div></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width=”300″ align=”center” valign=”top”>SHOVE 1 ADSENSE AD HERE</td>
<td width=”458″ height=”774″ valign=”top”>Burglar (or intrusion), fire and safety alarms are found in electronic form today. Sensors are connected to a control unit via either a low-voltage hardwire or narrowband RF signal, which is used to interact with a response device. The most common security sensors indicate the opening of a door or window or detect motion via passive infrared (PIR). In new construction systems are predominately hardwired for economy while in retrofits wireless systems may be more economical and certainly quicker to install. Some systems are dedicated to one mission, others handle fire, intrusion, and safety alarms simultaneously. Sophistication ranges from small, self-contained noisemakers, to complicated, multi-zoned systems with color-coded computer monitor outputs. Many of these concepts also apply to portable alarms for protecting cars, trucks or other vehicles and their contents (i.e., “car alarms”). See also fire alarm control panel for specific fire system issues. Burglar alarms are sometimes referred to as alarm systems, see burglar alarm control panel for a discussion of hard-wired burglar alarm system design.<br>
Burglar (or intrusion), fire and safety alarms are found in electronic form today.
<p>Sensors are connected to a control unit via either a low-voltage hardwire or narrowband RF signal, which is used to interact with a response device. The most common security sensors indicate the opening of a door or window or detect motion via passive infrared (PIR). In new construction systems are predominately hardwired for economy while in retrofits wireless systems may be more economical and certainly quicker to install. Some systems are dedicated to one mission, others handle fire, intrusion, and safety alarms simultaneously. Sophistication ranges from small, self-contained noisemakers, to complicated, multi-zoned systems with color-coded computer monitor outputs. Many of these concepts also apply to portable alarms for protecting cars, trucks or other vehicles and their contents (i.e., “car alarms”). See also fire alarm control panel for specific fire system issues. Burglar alarms are sometimes referred to as alarm systems, see burglar alarm control panel for a discussion of hard-wired burglar alarm system design.</p></td>
</tr>
<tr bgcolor=”#EAEAEA”>
<td height=”40″ colspan=”2″><div align=”right” class=”style2″>Blah Blah</div></td>
</tr>
</table></td>
</tr>
</table>

</code>

Ok so when you build or generate a page for Adsense and only for Adsense whats the aim of the page?

Click ! – Yup thats right you need the visitor to click and fuck off as soon as possible, whilst they are browsing they are eating bandwidth and the risk of them finding something useful to read is increasing.

Whats the best way to make sure that happens whilst remaining legal? What I do is make sure that my links arent easy to spot and i make sure that the ads are the brightest thing on the page.

More about making the ads stand out soon and more about making the page as dull as possible too but today we are just going to make the links dissapear via css.

I dont add navigation links in a list, mine are often just in the middle of the content and look like another paragraph of content. Heres the css I use to make them dissapear: -

<code>
<style type=”text/css”>
<!–
body {
color: #666666;
}
a:link {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:visited {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:hover {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:active {
color: #666666;
text-decoration: none;
}
–>
</style>
</code>

More on why the text isnt black its dark grey another day but all your links have faded into the general content and your click happy visitor will be reading those ads with their finger on the money button