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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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.

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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…

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For anyone who used to make mass content sites and knows a lot about the issues involved in that task the rising profile of Demand Studios is an interesting one.

So is this business model a mountain too high for everyone else to climb? Endulge me here in my normal thought process…

Here is a few articles to get you started: -

http://thenetsetter.com/blog/business-models/quality-vs-quantity-approaches-to-web-publishing/

Here the creator of the Envato network discusses the plans of Demand Studios to scale up their content manufacturing

http://www.demandstudios.com/publishers/content/

And on their own site they talk about their workflow of: -

Pass search predictions to their algo
Run that through their ad revenue algo
Output a title
Have an outsourced army of content creators produce content to suit
Profit

Now sitting abusing the non-free wifi at my local soft play centre with Laura (I wasn’t paying the price they wanted so….) I cant help but start to work my way through the mechanics of this business model…

Article cost $15 (thats pretty high imo)
Copy Editor $1 per article (are you joking?)
Site overhead $1 per article (estimate)

So each article has to get a return of $18 to be in profit…
Hmmmmm

Now comes the fun part
If we assume a return of: -
17p per click
CTR of 2%
We need 5500 people to visit that article to get a return
Assuming they have a safety buffer of 1 in 3 articles that doesn’t pay back
We need 7500 people ish really to be safe

And we assume that they want a payback in 6 months max they need 42 visitors a day to that one article

Well thats possible with decent domains to start with and if that title choosing algo is reliable

Bear in mind that if it is the return per click will be far higher that my low assumption.

Interesting stuff….

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Think Visibility was a fantastic experience last September and the same team have announced the next date.

Its March 13th 2010 and so I now have to make my mind up whether to attend again..

So shall I?

Comment abuse welcome…
I already know the opinions of certain people

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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.

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I just wanted to say thanks, thanks to all the people who provided the quotes you now see on the sidebar of this blog.

For years I have worked with the name SEOidiot and part of that is down to my general opinion that I am in fact an idiot…

When you ask people like DaveN, Jason, Joost, Rob, Ralph, Julie etc to give a quote you never expect them to say quite what they did.

I need to start showing that confidence in what I write here too

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Well its that time of year again where we all plan what we are going to tackle this coming 12 months…. sigh…

For this blog however we are going to see a change in the content.

Most of my personal ramblings will head off onto Posterous
This blog will be far more focussed on the following subjects: -

Practical SEO
Guides, tips, advice

Experiments
Some fun, some serious

And above all…

The business of making your living online

Automation
Outsourcing
How to’s

Anyway.. Thats the road we are headed on this year

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As the bright light of a new decade streams through the bedroom window to suddenly focus what now appears to be an acute case of hangover I wanted to post this advice.

Normally at this time of year the net is suddenly filled with predictions posts and tweets (I even considered making a Twitter web app where you could add filter words to remove any tweet that contained “prediction”)

Rather than make any pointless predictions myself I would rather just share some commitments and plans for the coming year. This is a task that I would normally do at this time of year anyway.

2009 Goals

1. Move to entirely self employed (Done – March 09)
2. Diversify income as the first stage in long term plan (Done)
3. Start a new business with a friend (Done – Kerboo)

And my 2010 Goals are

1. Sell my Adsense flat to nearly clear my main mortgage (1st / 2nd Qtr)
2. Get Kerboo to 500 customers
3. Make 80% of my income location independent

And the sub projects for this year are all around the theme of

AUTOMATION

AUTOMATION

AUTOMATION

We have a 3 week trip to California planned in for August this year to look for somewhere we can relocate to (Planning for 2012 ish)

Heres the incentive for that…

Have a great 2010, make sure you have a plan and that you ACTION it

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Spent the last weekend at the fantastic Thinkvisibility conference. It was great to catch up with a few people and great to meet some more new friends.

As a conference I think @thehodge has got it just about right, its a great mix of the social and the useful. Not too big an event and enough time and opportunity to meet nearly everyone.

Some people I met: -

Yoast
Name checked me as the guy who drew his avatar for him, resulting in everyone turning round and looking at me even though I was hungover enough to chuck my guts up at any second.

Photo from Caius

Great presentation as ever though and id like to thank Yoast for the cufflinks he brought me.

Jay Butler
Great to catch up, now permanently fixed as my Rum and Wasabi partner

Judith Lewis
Great to catch up with Judith and she delivered a very polished presentation as ever.

AlCarlton
Creator of the awesome Conference Calendar as well as a bunch of other sites. I like Al, he fits with my long history of having and being friends with people who enjoy an ‘adventure’

Chris Garrett
Finally got to chat

Bony Toad
Stephen is a great chap, always has been. He actually made me snort when, sat next to me, he posted this twitpic

Kieron Donoghue
Great to meet at last, keep up the good work with Share my playlists and keep on nagging me to stop tweeting whilst we drink.

Tim Nash – A great session on profiling (Which I am doing a separate post on Tim and thats why I havent written this bit until now sigh )
Hobo Seo – great to chat Shaun
Mr Scott Jones and Ian – probably as drunk as I was
Anthony from Bronco
And Lindop – as ever good to see you mate

Everyone else I have forgotten as im an Idiot

And of course Dom and Mrs Dom (soon enough) for putting on a great conference.

How Gumtree spam nearly made me a TV star

A Year in Adsense Stats - Some statistics from one batch

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