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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 (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!

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Making your Serps more useful in FFox

SEOidiot — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:11:16 +0000

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

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SEO for SMF Forums, Some simple hacks

SEOidiot — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:32:52 +0000

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: -



', $context['subject'], '

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: -


/* seo hacks etc */
#top_subject h1 {

font-size: 16px;

line-height: 18px;

color: #ffffff;}

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.

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Adsense Tips – Greyscale sites convert better

SEOidiot — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 12:04:56 +0000

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
























Burglar Alarms 





SHOVE 1 ADSENSE AD HERE
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.


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.


Blah Blah

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Adsense Tips – CSS links

SEOidiot — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 21:13:27 +0000

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: -

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

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Hard disk test ’surprises’ Google

SEOidiot — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 01:38:22 +0000

Hard disk test ’surprises’ Google

The impact of heavy use and high temperatures on hard disk drive failure may be overstated, says a report by three Google engineers. The report examined 100,000 commercial hard drives, ranging from 80GB to 400GB in capacity, used at Google since 2001. The firm uses “off-the-shelf” drives to store cached web pages and services. “Our data indicate a much weaker correlation between utilisation levels and failures than previous work has suggested,” the authors noted.

A wide variety of manufacturers and models were included in the report, but a breakdown was not provided. Widely-held belief There is a widely held belief that hard disks which are subject to heavy use are more likely to fail than those used intermittently. It was also thought that hard drives preferred cool temperatures to hotter environments. The authors wrote: “We expected to notice a very strong and consistent correlation between high utilisation and higher failure rates. “However our results appear to paint a more complex picture. First, only very young and very old age groups appear to show the expected behaviour.” A hard disk was described as having “failed” if it needed to be replaced. The report was compiled by Eduardo Pinheiro, Wolf-Dietrich Weber and Luiz Andre Barroso, and was presented to a storage conference in California last week. In the report the authors said Google had developed an infrastructure which collected “vital information” about all of the firm’s systems every few minutes. ‘Essentially forever’ The firm then stores that information “essentially forever”. Google employs its own file system to organise the storage of data, using inexpensive commercially available hard drives rather than bespoke systems.

Lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates
Google report

Hard drives less than three years old and used a lot are less likely to fail than similarly aged hard drives that are used infrequently, according to the report. “One possible explanation for this behaviour is the survival of the fittest theory,” said the authors, speculating that drives which failed early on in their lifetime had been removed from the overall sample leaving only the older, more robust units. The report said that there was a clear trend showing “that lower temperatures are associated with higher failure rates”. “Only at very high temperatures is there a slight reversal of this trend.” But hard drives which are three years old and older were more likely to suffer a failure when used in warmer environments. “This is a surprising result, which could indicate that data centre or server designers have more freedom than previously thought when setting operating temperatures for equipment containing disk drives,” said the authors. The report also looked at the impact of scan errors – problems found on the surface of a disc – on hard drive failure. “We find that the group of drives with scan errors are 10 times more likely to fail than the group with no errors,” said the authors. They added: “After the first scan error, drives are 39 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without scan errors.”

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Templates and footprints – a CSS issue

SEOidiot — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 12:05:14 +0000

When creating sites on a large scale you have to be sure that you dont make life easy for anyone looking to track you down or to ban your entire network. So it is important that you dont leave any footprints.

I have talked with people who change their template on each batch of sites they do – to be honest I never did, I simply changed em once in a while.

What really gets me though is when people use a publically available system and dont even bother to change the default templates it comes with. Some people also make a simple error here too, they see the structure of the site in visual terms rather than in coding terms. They simply look at the css and alter it to give the site a different look. Dont get me wrong you can make sites look completely different using just the css but remember one thing.

THE SPIDER SEES THE CODE NOT THE PAGE

So altering the css and leaving the divs and page structure as is means from the spiders point of view its the same as the default page, stupid move eh?

Even when I am doing wordpress templates I change the layout structure from css to tables so suddenly from a search engines point of view its not a simple wordpress blog its a normal yet unique website.

Think people think!

Edit: THIS IMAGE IS OF ESRUN – HE MADE ME POST IT IN PLACE OF HOMER

[photopress:Photo_74.jpg,thumb,pp_image]

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Apple sending cease and desist for doing nothing

SEOidiot — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 18:16:17 +0000

Apple Windows Mobile iPhone Theme, originally uploaded by TheAgencyBlog.com.

Apple are reportedly sending cease and desist letters out to bloggers who post this photo. Its a picture of a windows mobile skin someone created to look like the new iPhone.

I can understand if they want to stop the skin maker but anyone who even talks about it? Isnt this the same company who did the 1984 style adverts in the eighties? Now they are acting like the oppressive state.

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CSS is for styling not for layout

SEOidiot — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 21:42:52 +0000

I know there are many people who will laugh or take the piss out of me here but im old and stuck in my ways. I am now convinced that I really do not like CSS for layout in pages, dont get me wrong I use it all the time for styling the text and the links and even for background images etc but as a replacement for tables in laying out a page CSS blows in my opinion.

Everytime I use it i find myself lost in a pointless battle between negative divs and IE compatability, well sorry sod it I am gonna keep using tables for layout until the compromises go away…

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Tips for the person starting out on adsense publishing

SEOidiot — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 21:41:26 +0000

don’t….

OK well if you must..

There isn’t an easy way to make money with Adsense, in many ways it can be as hard and as frustrating as any other money making procedure
Content generation isn’t the hard part at all. To be honest as long as its unique most content will do for starters. TRY to provide some value to the visitor as you will last longer and you will therefore make more
Good page titles mean good ad targeting
don’t bother with section targeting – its bollocks
Make sure your internal link structure is very very clear, you want to get crawled and indexed as quick as possible
Build in batches and if your brave interlink between sites in the same batch (Never cross link between batches)
Don’t flood your sites with links, the engines will index based on very few well placed links, if you can use your own network to get the bots in rather than having to go and ‘get’ links elsewhere
If you have to go and get links make sure that you do it ethically and provide value for the link they give, 100,000 yes I agrees is not smart in my opinion
Don’t over optimise the sites, be loose and natural
Don’t do anything that can get you banned
Remember you should have done this 18 months ago
Learn PHP at least
Never use someone else’s template
Css might make a site look different but from a spiders viewpoint its the same code
Get the cheque it feels better..
Never believe what people tell you they earn – if they tell you then its a lie (Reduce by 80% minimum)
Clean your keyword lists religiously – you don’t want bad words in there
Strip out the words where you are wasting your time and where you wouldn’t provide value to the advertiser (There is NO point at all creating pages for terms like ‘bad debt’ or ‘Viagra’ your just wasting everyones time
Make sure you can control your adverts remotely so you can: -

Turn them off when you need to
Monitor and control who clicks and when
Ban people or ip’s that may be trouble
Swap them out where it makes sense or if you get banned
Get good stats
You know which advertisers you are sending clicks to (You never know how useful that could be)

Don’t rely on the money from Google
Don’t do anything that would piss off the normal user (The boy scouts on the other hand will always get pissed whatever you do so meh)
Turn off the advertise on this site link
Play with ad formats and placement to get the best CTR
Don’t try to game Google
Never use an off the shelf content gen
Watch what you use and what it does
Make sure you know how you got indexed and formulate a plan to repeat what worked

I hope thats useful, some may argue with parts but its a good grounding i think.

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