Your First Outsource Job - Getting Started

If you’ve been thinking about outsourcing, my suggestion to you is JUST DO IT.

So in three easy steps, we’re going to get you off your duff, and outsourcing. This project should cost under $30, and will deliver 20 articles about the subject of your choice.

Step 1, the basics of where to go and what to say.

Take some trivial job. I like to start my students with something easy like creating 10 articles about a subject they are interested in.

I then encourage them to head over to Scriptlance or GetAFreelancer, and create a simple job description. It should go something like this:

Title: Need 10 Articles Written

1. Articles in number - 10
2. Words - minimum 400-600
3. Original - no copy/paste work
4. Quality good, but grammatically perfect and readable
5. Deadline - 3-4 days

Subject and additional information will be delivered to selected freelancer

There are some standard statements I like to put at the end of creative writing tasks. These are:

• Payment with Paypal or (Scriptlance/Getafreelancer) escrow only
• Please give me a deadline you can hold or I WILL cancel the product
• I work with (MSN/Yahoo/Gmail) and expect that you can as well
• Do not plagiarize - results will be tested with Copyscape
• All spam messages will be reported
• Do not post if you can not do it for the price

You should get plenty of interest, and the fees should be under $20.00. Under $10.00 would not be unlikely.One of the reasons I’m suggesting Scriptlance and GetAFreelancer instead of eLance or NeedAnArticle is because of  the very low cost of this project. eLance has a $50 minimum; let’s avoid that while we’re still warming up.

At both Scriptlance and GetAFreelancer, you’ll be required to setup an account. Don’t worry about being a “Gold” buyer or anything like that to start with. Once you’ve setup the account, and put in some basic information, you can “fund” the account. For starters, I’d put $40 in the account, transferred from Paypal.  Later when you’ve selected your freelancer, you can ‘escrow’ the money, earmarking it for the freelancer you’re working with, to be delivered when you’re satisfied with their work. Also, once we’ve selected the freelancer, we can go into some basic details such as keyword frequency and location, title requirements, delivery, and more.

It’s worth mentioning that for larger projects, such as 100 articles, I would typically have the articles delivered 10 at a time, and pay as you go. This will ensure you don’t get 50 crap articles dropped in your lap at the end. If there are any issues you can catch them early.  With just 20 articles, it’s probably not worth the effort.

For this job, I’d make the duration, short, no more than two days. You should be able to get all the interest you need by then. They’ll know what is expected of them, and should be able to bid accurately. Some people have a lot of issues with what day you present jobs, and at what time. I don’t really care for something this size.

If you’ve followed these steps, you are well on your way to becoming an outsourcing expert. Really!

NEXT: Selecting your Freelancer, and getting them started