Finding Cheap Skilled Helpers by Andrew Hansen

Carrying on with our discussion about using the skills of other people to grow your business.

Firstly here’s an important part of this process that I forgot to mention last time.

As an individual, you have certain skills and abilities. You also have certain things that you suck at, you will always suck at them and even if you try it will take you a long time to learn them, and there’s nothing wrong with that!

Part of running a good online business as any business is finding the things that you are most skilled at and focusing on those things, then designating the tasks that you aren’t as good at, to people who are better at them! The result is a much higher quality output.

Moving on…

First, here’s the basic outline of the flow of events in case anyone isn’t familiar with it:

- You create an account at one of the main freelance services  RentACoder.com is a good place to start) and you post a request for bids on your project.

- As bids start to come in you select from them a freelancer who best suits the needs of your project.

- You communicate through the freelance site back and forth with the freelancer until the project is completed to your satisfaction after which time the remainder of a payment balance is forwarded to the freelancer signifying the completion of their work.

Here’s some tips on going about finding the best kind of people for a great price, whatever kind of work you’re looking for.

Consider the location. Don’t get me wrong, freelancers from developed countries are great but depending on the kind of work you need done, you’re often likely to get great offers from people in developing countries too.

I’ve had high quality work done by writers from the Philippines and Romania, coders from Russia, Egypt and India and so forth.

Like I mentioned earlier, you can get people from these countries who can do great work and are willing to do it for A LOT less than people from America, Australia or the UK.

Of course you can always use the sites feedback system to see whether the freelancer in question is of good quality and you can also test them with smaller but similar projects prior to hiring them for your main desired job. Doing this does as close as possible guarantee that you’ll get a high quality result.

Next tip, and this is a bit sly but it’s the truth: You want to assess the freelancers circumstances as well as their skill in the desired task.

You’ll come across young freelancers who accept projects in their university holidays and so forth—big no no! They’re always in between tasks, always have interruptions, you’ll rarely get your project done on time. My point being that you should have a look at the coders circumstances if you can, check out their profile, even don’t be afraid to ask them questions about their work on RentACoder etc.

Here’s the bit that sounds a bit harsh: Ideally you want to get people whose circumstances make them desperate to complete their work and get their money. It sounds harsh but for getting work completed on time, people with mortgages, kids to feed, debts to pay etc are the ones most likely to get their work completed on time.

Next tip: You can literally get ANYTHING done by freelancers…

A lot of people get stuck online because they get to a point where they don’t know how to complete a certain task—the thing is you don’t have to waste time deliberating over how to do it—you can have someone do it for you!

Once you get good at describing projects and negotiating for good prices you will be able to get any task done quickly and easily.

My last and best tip for using freelance sites is this—and it’s a bit controversial too…

The best thing you can do particularly when you find people who are good to work with is try to get some information by which you can contact them outside of RentACoder.

RentACoder in particular doesn’t like you getting the freelancers contact information because obviously they’d prefer you to keep buying projects from them from within RentACoder so you pay their fees and commissions. They’ll even sometimes close projects when you ask for instant messaging addresses within the conversation of the project.

What you can do is try to e-mail them personally to ask for their MSN, Yahoo, or Skype ID so you can talk to them.

The reason this is so good is because once you can contact them privately you have the potential to be able to negotiate ongoing work (instead of one off projects every now and then).

I have found a couple of our now full-time employees this way. They started out doing one-off projects, I got chatting with them in instant messengers and organized for them to do ongoing weekly work for a nominal fee—powerful stuff!

Well that should do it for today. I hope my tips have opened your eyes to the power of outsourcing and how you can find quality help in the pursuit to build a successful online business.

Check out just who Andrew Hansen is.

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