13 Outsourcing Sources For Affiliate Marketers

Affiliate marketing is more than just finding a great product and driving leads to it. If you have been making money online for a while now, you know that you’ll have to do a lot of little things to keep making money online. That’s why a lot of top affiliate marketers outsource their non-core activities. If you don’t know coding, outsource it. If you don’t know web design, out source it. If you don’t want to deal with the social media (which I recommend you do), you should outsource that as well.

Thankfully, there are many places that you can go to to find highly qualified outsourcing partners. You can find works in Asia, Europe, and even Africa on these sites. If you are looking to get more done in less time, you won’t go wrong with outsourcing.

Here is a list of outsourcing sites for affiliate tasks:

• Rent a Coder: RAC is a great place to find coders, writers, and everything in between. Anything that you want to do is covered here. There are hundreds of categories to choose from, and these guys take care of you. You won’t be robbed on this site.
• oDesk: oDesk is another one of those top outsourcing sites that is designed to gain you access to the global markets. They too provide you with tools to manage your projects more effectively.
• Guru.com: Guru.com is a great site to reach out to startups and smaller companies and get more sophisticated projects done. I have seen highly complicated projects posted there (e.g. Web 2.0 start-ups).
• LimeExchange: LimeExchange another decent site to hire freelancers from around the world.
• Elance: Elance is not only a great place to find work but also those who provide services.
• LivePerson: LivePerson a great place to outsource programming. If you are looking for coders, this is a decent place to look.
• PartnerUp: PartnerUp is a great place to find partners and service providers.
• Affordable Progammers: AP is another great way to reach out to cheap programmers.
• Virtual Employee: Virtual Employee helps you find virtual assistants and all kinds of help.
• Freelancer China: looking for Chinese employees? Freelancer China is the way to go.
• TheFreeLanceNation: TheFreeLanceNation is another place to look for programmers and elancers.
• HireMyMom: HMM is a great place to find professional moms.
• iFreeLance: if you are out of luck so far, you cna give iFreeLance another try.

There are many other places to look for freelancers, but I would stick with these as most top service providers are available on these sites. At the end of the day you want to spend more time doing work and less time window shopping.

Your take: which one is your favorite outsourcing service?

Things To Look Out For In Your Outsourcing Partners

Outsourcing is one of the hottest topics in the affiliate marketing these days. Good old affiliates would spend hours in front of computer trying to make a decent living, but most successful affiliate marketers outsource their non-core processes to India or China these days and spend their time strategizing and working on their core capabilities.

Outsourcing is a complex process that should not be taken lightly. It’s more than hiring the first person you can find online and you should prepare for the unexpected and hedge your risks. Here are a few tips on how to go about outsourcing a process to an outsourcing partner:

• Do not outsource mission critical and core processes: if you are very good at a process, you should not outsource it. Your core capabilities are what help you get a leg up on your competitors. If you outsource your core mission critical processes, you will leave yourself open to too much risk, which is not recommended.
• Know your outsourcing partner: do the proper due diligence before getting into a relationship with an outsourcing partner. Take a look at their past clients’ experiences with them. Try to figure out if they stick to their deadlines and finish things up in timely fashion. Take a look at client complaints to find out the weak areas in your partner.
• Don’t fall for too good to be true trap: if something is too good too be true, it probably is. If someone is offering to work for you for $2 an hour, you should be concerned. Also, if someone offers to complete a project for you for only $20 when others are offering to get it done on average for $1000, then there may be a problem.
• Agree on the communication details beforehand: being in constant communication with your outsourcing partner is a must. You should talk to potential partners about ways to stay in touch via phone calls, email, chat, and weekly reports. You can also use collaboration software packages such as Groove to keep things on track.
• Take it one step at a time: do not throw too much at your outsourcing partner. Take it one step at a time. In addition, make sure you ask them about whether they will provide you with a project manager. If not, you will have to manage the project yourself (get Microsoft Project).
• Understand the challenges: understanding the potential challenges ahead can help you set your expectation level. You should find out if there are any language barriers between your team and the outsourcing partners’ team. You should do your best to clarify your requirements for the outsourcing partner (using diagrams and visual aids). Expect misunderstandings and work hard to resolve them.
• Don’t put your eggs in one basket: working with multiple outsourcing teams will help you face the most difficult challenges more easily. If you put all your eggs in one basket and work with only one outsourcing team, you may find yourself in a spot of hurt if that team disappears or does not perform as you expect them to. I always try to go with two or more teams for each of my project to make sure something’s getting done even if one of the teams is under-performing. There will be more red tape, but you can hedge your risks by asking multiple teams to take on your projects.

Outsourcing sounds easy on the paper, but it is a difficult process (especially if you go international). You should do your due diligence before jumping into outsourcing waters. That way you can hedge your risks and get things done more quickly. Stay tuned for my take on outsourcing do’s and don’ts in the upcoming days.

P.S. how’s been your experience with web-sites such as rentacoder or Guru.com?

Why Outsourcing Matters?

I had a post about outsourcing a few days ago, and how it can move you from being an ordianry affiliate making decent money to extraordinary masteraffiliate making possibly millions. The fact is as an affiliate marketer you only have 24 hours to accomplish so much. Even if you are very good at multitasking, you can’t beat a work of a team day in and day out. And even if you somehow manage to produce out-of-this-world results with your affiliate efforts, you are going to burn out very soon.

Outsourcing levels the playing field in the affiliate marketing industry. You can hire people for as low as $8 to accomplish work that others charge more than $25 to $50 hours for. So you can essentially compete with more established companies by using a team of outsourcing partners. Outsourcing your non-core competency can help you achieve possibly 10 times more than you can by yourself, so I definitely recommend you take advantage of the following services:

• Rentacoder.com
• Guru.com
• elance.com
• oDesk.com

There are many pitfalls for people who begin the outsourcing process (I will go over them in future posts), but you should not let simple issues to keep you away from the ultimate goal: dominating your niche. Good luck!