Over the last few months I've become a big proponent of sourcing projects on ELance and Guru. I've gotten some really high quality work done for an affordable cost. Say what you will say about outsourcing, it's allowing me to do work that I wouldn't be otherwise able to afford and I'm helping to provide a decent living for someone somewhere else in the world. Here are a few things that I've have outsourced: -Article submission (we write the articles, our provider submits them manually to directories) -Directory submission -Link Exchange (provider works with link exchange services to manually request link exchanges) I'm wondering if there might be some other marketing things that people have done that could be outsourced? Thoughts?
Do you go through a local company or someone who is somewhere else in the country or elsewhere in the world?
I always choose a firm that 1.) Specializes in the subject matter (Because it is actually Contacts and experience you are paying for, not just a ghostriter to write the Press Releases) 2.) Is located in that country The second one is important as any decent PR firm will handle press enquiries and if their phone number is in a different country, a lot of press will just move on to something else
I out source all my development Rent a Coder All my content/articles Elance and Constant Content Design - Logos and Templates.... this is a hard one but I use contests on sites like Design Contests and Sitepoint Forums I also outsource hire help, just misc support help on rentacoder as well. As for PR, I do this myself with PRNewsWire and PR Web. I love to hear the places everyone elses uses for out sourcing... I have found Elance and Guru to be more expensive the Rentacoder.
For me Scriptlance has worked quite convincingly ..if you can prune the bids correctly... SL is a lot cheaper than others... i tried out Elance - but for the same cost i had five done in SL instead... Most of search/ dataentry / articles/ content is outsourced.... -------------------- I am in no way affiliated with Scriptlance other than being a webmaster who gets work done through them... just in case you were wondering if this is a spam -------------------------------
I have found scriptlance to be full of writers with bad english and I also had problem with stolen content with a bunch of writers there. I guess you get what you pay for on all these sites!
the problem with the bigger sites are the costs associated with posting a project/ bidding a project / category listing ... When you pay you are paying for the cost the programmer paid to bid on the project and admin costs... One more thing to note is elance sports companies( rather than individuals) which bid on your projects which comes with the extra baggage of the administrative/sales/mkt dudes in the company... when i compare to individual freelancers it is without this extra baggage and you pay for just the work you want to get done... If you are looking for bigger projects in excess of a 1000$ yep you need elance etc... but for anything less i opt the rent a coder Scriptlance and some of the smaller sites...
Wow, these are some great replies. It's cool to come across some new sites that I haven't heard of before. Sometimes we post projects on Guru and ELance and don't get a lot of bids so now I have some additional options. I'm wondering what other marketing-related projects people might outsource. I'm looking to grow traffic to our site and think that I can probably get more bang for the buck by farming out some guerilla marketing type projects (e.g., submitting to directories, link exchanges, etc.) than by spending it on advertising. Any other ideas for creative ways to employ outsourcing partners in the interest of bringing more people to a site?
The new evolving trends ( may be just new to me though...) Contests in popular websites... ( win - win)...awareness... there are folks who can negotiate on behalf of you.. forum signature leasing ... ( active posters in good forums) forum posters specifically posting to promote your product... ( free giveaways that are useful... this involves nifty scripts or ebooks to folks who purchase a complementary product ... ( concept+ creation+promotion can be outsourced) The best way i figure ... is start a blog and find a real controversial topic to talk about... it brings in traffic for months... Ebay is interestingly working for some keywords but it depends on your site... I will leave it for others to suggest a few as well...