Today I have another stellar guest post by Todd Dunnigam from Roaming Royalty. Todd is a BandWPThemes member and today he sent me an email stating that he did some outsourcing to tweak the theme. Friggin awesome I thought. So he sent over this step-by-step process for using oDesk to outsource some of your web and WordPress work.
How would you like an assistant, or even a team of assistants that do amazing work for you at a low price and only when you need it?
Do what all the Fortune 500 companies have been doing for years, outsource it. There are web designers, graphics people, tech nerds and every other kind of skilled person just waiting to work for you. Sounds great, and (in theory) it’s as easy as going to a website and sending out an e-mail with your job listing, you can go back to making music while some of this other tedious stuff gets done by someone else.
OK how easy is it really?
That’s what I set out to discover when I wanted to change up my WordPress site (built on BandWPThemes). I know a little html, a little css, I think the term is, I know enough to be dangerous, and the changes I wanted to make were beyond me. I’d read about outsourcing and fortunately I had a friend who was doing it so he was able to help me through the process. He recommended odesk.com ’cause he had tried some others and liked them best, and through odesk.com he had assembled a team of people from all over the world that he was really happy with.
step 1: sign up and post your job
Sign up is pretty easy, you have to fill out the usual information and you need to put a credit card on file which will be used to pay the people you hire. Next you’ll be asked if you’d like to post a job which takes you to a basic text editor where you describe the job you have.
Once the job is listed, people will start applying for your job. I put out an ad asking for a simple WordPress update and within about 8 hours I had 30 people apply for the job. Applicants came from all over the world. Some were part of big companies and some were independent contractors and they ranged in price from $3.33 per hour to over $30 per hour. I looked at some of the candidates and I was ready for the next step, but I hit a snag.
Odesk charges 2 small amounts to your credit card which you then find on your statement and you then go back to the website and plug in those amounts to verify your card. This is pretty common practice but the process took 3 days. When you’re used to things happening instantaneously, 3 days seemed insufferably slow.
Step 2: interview and hire someone
Out of the roughly 50 answers I got back I chose to interview 4 people. Odesk does a cool thing by matching keywords in your post to keywords in an applicants listing so you get a compatibility rating. Here’s a quick example listing:
I chose the 4 applicants based on 4 different criteria.
- the lowest price
- one recommended by my friend
- one guy who was fairly new to the site and had almost no jobs, I figured he’d be hungry to do a good job
- one who was pretty expensive but had lot’s of jobs and impeccable feedback
A quick note to potential job seekers on these sites: Look at Irnya’s headline in the pic above, that got my attention ’cause it stood out from all the other headlines, her pic didn’t hurt either.
Step 3: Put your new employee to work
So I hired my 3rd option, the guy with no track record or jobs, he was also cheap at $5.00 an hour. Imran Ali Shah contacted me and we exchanged a couple of e-mails. I did my best to explain to him what I was after, and included many links to other sites that had examples of what I wanted. I also asked him about the time frame and he said he could have it done over a weekend.
So when the weekend came around I went to our site and saw a couple of changes and I was pretty excited, Imran Ali Shah, was on the job! By the time the weekend was over, he had started to make a couple of the changes we had talked about and then seemed to abandon the project. I hit him up to see how it was going and I received a bill, granted it was only for $5.00 and some legit changes had been made but not even close to what I was thinking was going to happen.
Strike one. Lesson learned. The cheapest guy probably isn’t the best.
Step 4: Hire someone else.
So I went back and this time I hired Iryna, pictured in the ad above, she was more expensive but her feedback was stellar. Iryna contacted me within minutes of hiring her and after we had a couple of details worked out she said she would start in 30 minutes. My plans for that day were taking the kids to the waterpark so I wasn’t going to be near a computer all day, but I sent her the same instructions I had sent the previous applicant and told her to go for it. For the rest of the day I occasionally picked up my phone and e-mailed answers to any questions Iryna had, but within a few hours I had the changes I wanted made to my website for less than $40.
Step 5: Enjoy your life
I can’t tell you how happy I was spending a day in the sun with the kids vs. pouring over a css manual trying figure out WTF is wrong with my site. 40 bucks? Totally worth it. So all in all it wasn’t perfectly smooth, but now that I have Iryna I can go back to her whenever, she’s part of my team. Also, good people tend to know other good people so when I asked Iryna if she did graphic design, she said ‘no’ but she knew another person who also turned out to be fabulous. So go write a song, or do some surfing or spend some quality time with the family and leave the work to someone else.
Check out Todd’s site, RoamingRoyalty.com. Join his email list and download some of his tracks. Just don’t outsource the listening part.
