Welcome back!
Over the past couple lessons you’ve discovered how to free up a lot of your time by hiring competent and reliable outsourcers (freelancers) to do your low-revenue tasks. Last time you found out how to do your due diligence so that you can create a “short list” of potential freelancers. Now it’s time to start hiring. Read on…
Choosing and Hiring a Freelancer
You probably have a dollar figure in mind when you’re searching for a freelancer. However, don’t choose your freelancers based solely on price. That’s because some cheap freelancers are cheap for a reason. For example, they might over-schedule projects, which results in them habitually missing deadlines. In other cases, they might be cheap because they return sub-par work.
In other words, sometimes you get what you pay for.
Now, even good freelancers might not be the best fit for you. In other words, a freelancer who does GREAT work for someone else may not do good work for you. This isn’t intentional. Rather, the two of you may have troubles communicating. For example, you may have a hard time explaining to a freelancer what you’d like your web design to look like.
As such, the key to hiring a freelancer is to start with small projects. You don’t want to unload a huge project on a freelancer and/or spend a lot of money only to find that the two of you don’t work well together (or at the freelancer isn’t as professional as you originally thought). So instead, hire multiple freelancers to do small tasks first… and then choose to continue working with the freelancers who do the best work for you.
For example:
- If you’re hiring a ghostwriter, then hire him or her to create a few articles of a short 2500 word report before you hire this person for something larger or more important.
- Hire a web designer to design a graphic or even a mini-site before entrusting him or her with your money site.
- Here are some other tips to help ensure you have a good outsourcing experience:
- Create and sign agreements. Your freelancer may have his or her own agreements that detail important items like when payments are due, how they’re to be paid, etc. If not, you and your freelancer should create an agreement together that lists things like delivery deadlines and payment dates. Then be sure to sign and date the agreement to make it official.
- Detail your expectations. While an agreement as mentioned above is a contractual obligation, there are other things that are important but they won’t appear in a contract. For example, perhaps you’d like your freelancer to update you every 48 hours. If so, you need to make that expectation clear.
- Offer a detailed brief. Finally, your freelancer isn’t a mind reader. That’s why you need to explain clearly and in as much detail as possible what you want the final results to look like. For example, if you’re hiring a designer than you need to talk about colors, navigation menu, logo concepts, overall “feel” of the site, etc. You may even show designs of other websites to help your designer see what type of feel you’d like your site to have.
Here’s the bottom line…
It does take time to find, hire and train a good freelancer. But if you invest this time upfront, you’ll enjoy time and money savings in the long run. So go ahead and boost your productivity by outsourcing some of your tasks!