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Hi,
As an affiliate I work with my business partner long hours on our websites.
However, we’d like to start new projects and were wondering how the busines model of other affiliates worked and how you go about hiring staff and where they work from etc.
I have no idea on a good business model for this kind of business so any advice would be greatly appreciated?
The questions below give an idea of the kind of information Im looking for.
How many sites do you have?
If you hire staff:
Do you do so locally or remotely worldwide?
Do they work in a local office?
Do they work from home?If a mix, what jobs do you get done by a local person and which jobs by people around the world?
What tasks do you get specific employess to carryout? SEO, link building, content, project management etc etc
Any tips for hiring staff from around the world for specific tasks?
Any recommendations?
Anyone looking for a job ?
My advice is to out source to COMPETANT people wherever that may be. Hiring local people who ARENT competant will make you tear your hair out and waste tons of time and money.
Very good questions, I wish I had the answers.
Personally I outsource some stuff on GetAfreelancer, mostly when it comes to graphics.. not ready for employees yet since it’s such a burden. I think it’s better making less money solo, than more money with employees. Unless it’s significantly more money. Handling the administration side of employees seems troublesome.
I don’t employ people, I contract them longterm.
They work out of their homes, wherever they happen to live.
I don’t use services like getafreelancer anymore because I have been burned very badly.
We have physical meetings at least twice a year – you need to get to know your guys personally.
It is difficult to manage such a setup, and the more people the more difficult it is.
Finding the right ones can be even harder – but I have been pretty lucky in finding skilled, loyal and resourceful people I enjoy working with.
I’ve experimented with this MANY times. I still have someone do a little graphic design for me since he is amazing, and works cheap, but for the most part I’ve learned that I might as well figure it all out myself and get it done right.
Every time I think I’ve found somebody that can take care of a campaign for me, or build a website that I want to do, but don’t have time for, it turns out that it comes nothing close to what I had in mind.
In a way, it has been a good thing though, I now know how to do a lot of things that would cost me a lot of money to be done by someone else.
I’m not saying it can’t be done, I really wish I had people that could do things the right way, but it’s a rarity to say the least. It probably doesn’t help that I’m a complete control freak over the day to day operations of my business
Josh
Dominique;161867 wrote:I don’t employ people, I contract them longterm.They work out of their homes, wherever they happen to live.
I don’t use services like getafreelancer anymore because I have been burned very badly.
We have physical meetings at least twice a year – you need to get to know your guys personally.
It is difficult to manage such a setup, and the more people the more difficult it is.
Finding the right ones can be even harder – but I have been pretty lucky in finding skilled, loyal and resourceful people I enjoy working with.
I can say Dom’s team are a great bunch and we had a good meal with them all in Vegas.
Dom, meeting up with your team is an excuse to go to Vegas! :tongue:
I too have learned to steer clear of GetAFreelancer.com and the likes the hard way. And as Dom has already pointed out, managing a team of employees who all work from home can be a logistical freaking nightmare.
I’ve outsourced seo, link building, copywriting, etc previously, and have some pretty good contacts if you need them.
Ohh, an in case anyone didn’t realise, that was a while before joining 365 :wink-wink
@joshmvf 161869 wrote:
Every time I think I’ve found somebody that can take care of a campaign for me, or build a website that I want to do, but don’t have time for, it turns out that it comes nothing close to what I had in mind.
People don’t come ready-made to fit your operation, each needs training in how to best handle our specific type of work. I find for the most part I have at least a 6 month training period with close monitoring of all work.
When you hit 5 people, you need to start using a project management program, which lets you assign and store tasks to specific people, they pick it up, do their work and upload it again. They also keep the hour count there.
The number of people we have varies, but 15 is pretty much the minimum number. If you just have one or two, it’s easy to keep track of everything.
Dom, meeting up with your team is an excuse to go to Vegas!
Thanks, we had a great time. You missed our spring meetings, we had a bunch more people this time, and fall looks like we’ll get close to gathering everyone. It’s a logistic nightmare to get them all together in one spot at the same time.
There are really a lot of very talented and motivated people who love the opportunity to work from home, it’s a matter of finding them and training them to do well in this specific type of work. I try to stick with people who play online or are hobby webmasters. I have had several start part time while going to school to perfect skills, and then joining full time. Works for me.
The website is fine for some outsourcing, mostly graphics, which is technical. Pinky has hundreds of positive feedback, for example.
I’ve also found an incredible writer there, which was a gem.. downside is that he found a full time job and stopped writing for me :Cry: Awesome 2k words reviews + pictures for 30$ each. No offense to Renee and the other people that sell their writing services here, but they charge the highest amount possible since they know that their content will generate money. To people you outsource, an article is an article, whether it’s about poker or bathtubs, so the prices are much lower. Same for link building, graphics, templates.. I just shot myself in the foot pretty bad by revealing the secrets
All in all, if you’re bright about it you can save time and money there. You do have to be careful however.
Contract work is the best way i believe. You can find some extremely competent people at competitive rates – as shown by many examples above. Its then easy to establish a relationship and hire people only when required – the very nature of our work requires this. The beauty of working online and modern communiaction means it doesnt matter where you employ people, so long as theyre good. Good luck!
@Dominique 161904 wrote:
People don’t come ready-made to fit your operation, each needs training in how to best handle our specific type of work. I find for the most part I have at least a 6 month training period with close monitoring of all work.
This is a very good point. For your 6 month training period do you sit with them personally or do you do the ‘close monitoring’ remotely? If you do it remotely how do you do it? Is it just a matter of getting them to do XYZ Task and then you checking through it and giving feedback?
@Dominique 161904 wrote:
When you hit 5 people, you need to start using a project management program, which lets you assign and store tasks to specific people, they pick it up, do their work and upload it again. They also keep the hour count there.
This is interesting, do you recommend any particular ‘project management program’?
I have one full time employee that works here at my office -she manages 6 contract employees that live in different parts of the world.We split the tasks in design ,linkbuilding ,SEO Writing and have two guys who updates our websites ,login to get new banners etc. We have some good people that freelance too if you need some contacts.
@Casinogod 161963 wrote:
This is a very good point. For your 6 month training period do you sit with them personally or do you do the ‘close monitoring’ remotely? If you do it remotely how do you do it? Is it just a matter of getting them to do XYZ Task and then you checking through it and giving feedback?
It’s on messenger mostly, and of course double checking everything. I don’t generally have the skill they have, I just know how I want it applied to what I create. I hope that makes sense.
This is interesting, do you recommend any particular ‘project management program’?
I tried a few and settled for Achievo. Works like a charm and is easy to handle, and people can get in and out quickly and there is no learning curve for them. Also keeps your ideas for new projects organized, and you can prioritize better.
Thanks for all the useful replies so far!
Casinobonusguy
I have one full time employee that works here at my office -she manages 6 contract employees that live in different parts of the world.We split the tasks in design ,linkbuilding ,SEO Writing and have two guys who updates our websites ,login to get new banners etc. We have some good people that freelance too if you need some contacts.
Where did you locate the 6 contract employees, how easy/long was training them, how many employess did you have to go through to find reliable workers?
How do you manage there tasks?
Plus any further insights into how your business model orks would be appreciated.
Thanks!
The most important question to me is how you handle payments. Outsourcing on internet is sort of easy as you have a price for your project and then you pay the person once it’s done.
When you work with people on a regular basis though, how do you guys pay them? By that I don’t mean “how” but based on what – project? hours? set salary per week?
Since you can’t monitor people that aren’t at the office as closely, paying per hour makes me somewhat wary.
