Outsourcing – use of online services like Fiverr and Legiit

One of the promises of most “make money online” promotions is the dream of passive income. We all would like that income stream that takes up little to none of our precious time. Maybe it is to supplement our paycheck, and we have little time to give, or maybe it is our dream to spend as little time working for money as possible, so we can follow a passion. The only way this is going to happen is if you get someone else to do some work for you. A great way to do this is by outsourcing some tasks to ‘gig’ providers like Fiverr and Legiit.

First – the positive points. Both fiverr.com and legiit.com have a huge number of services you can purchase. It is hard to imagine that you can’t find some help for your enterprise by going to those sites. Note – there are others too, these are just the two I use most often. What do you need to get your online business up and running. Web site? Lots of gigs for setting up a web site. You need content for your blog? Writers abound. You want a Facebook ad or a video to promote on Youtube? Believe me, there is no shortage of creatives waiting for your order.

Price is another positive – most of these gigs can be found at a variety of price points, some very affordable. In fact, $5-$10 is very common for some tasks. More involved gigs, such as designing and setting up hosting of a complex WordPress website, will of course cost more, but even then, the cost will likely be less than you might expect.

One last big plus – speed. Many of the providers do similar projects over and over, so they are very proficient. Whereas it might take you many hours to put together a project, time you don’t have to spare, often these providers will deliver in a day or two. And when the item is delivered, you often have a chance to provide feedback and get tweaks done to the project.

Let’s stop and think on this for a second. You have a couple days off because of the holidays, or a long weekend. In your mind you have been wanting to start up a dropshipping store. Now, you could spend your time off learning about web design, Shopify, and Amazon. I’ve done it the hard way – even with reasonably good technical skills, you are looking at a serious investment. Or, you go on fiverr.com, find a gig to set up a dropshipping store, pay the fee, and rejoin your family. In a day or two you get an email with the subject line “Great news: Your order is ready. You check it out, maybe go back and forth with a few suggested changes by email, and your store is ready. That’s it – you are now running an online business.

So what’s the ‘but’? Remember that episode of How I Met Your Mother where Ted found a woman who seemed great, but everyone hated her? It turned out that she talked WAY too much. They all had to admit that there was something annoying about each of them, and they called it their “but”, as in “she’s really nice, but….” So what is the ‘but?’

Not every provider you get will be of the same quality. Really, really pay attention to reviews, especially the negative ones. And if you get a delivery you aren’t satisfied with, kick it back for revisions, or even refuse to accept it.

Now, I am Canadian, and one of the stereotypes of us northerners is that we are polite. It can be difficult to be blunt. Let me tell you though, when you get really substandard work, it gets a lot easier.

On two different occasions I have hired someone to ghost write an e-book for me. While I would like to write a book myself, and have learned that I would like to share, writing a book is a long process. So I thought I would jumpstart the process – get a good first draft, then edit until it sounded like me, until it was written in my voice. The first book I was going to do was going to be on, big surprise, making money online.

So I found an author that was not the cheapest, nor the most expensive on an online service. I corresponded back and forth about what I was hoping for, and what my expectations were. The delivery time was a few weeks, which made sense for a 30,000-40,000 word e-book. As the delivery day approached, I was asked if the delivery day could be extended by a week so they could deliver the quality product I was expecting. Sure, I said.

Then i got the product. It was unreadable. Oh, it contained some good content. In fact, some really good individual sections, at least in terms of the information contained. But the writing was so awkward, and hard to read. I mean really bad.

So I did some digging. It occurred to me that some of the sentences could be fixed by switching words for synonyms, in most cases moving to simpler words. So I switched up a sentence, fixing it so it read well, and copied it into Google.

Boom. I found the source. All the author did was copy articles from various web sites, and keep switching out keywords until it would pass a plagiarism scanner. The end product though, was unusable. Here is one example. When discussing the ‘debt snowball technique’ to pay down debts fast, here is a paragraph I was sent:

As an initial step, you will wish to list the debts you owe from smallest to largest. Toss all of the excess funds of yours is probably the smallest harmony, while doing the minimum payments on all the larger loans of yours. As soon as the smallest balance is paid off, begin placing that additional cash to the following smallest debt until you spend that a single from, etc.

Now, I don’t know about you, but this is awkward. What on earth does “is probably the smallest harmony” mean? With a little time on google, I found the original source:

As a first step, you’ll want to list all of the debts you owe from smallest to largest. Throw all of your excess funds at the smallest balance, while making the minimum payments on all your larger loans. Once the smallest balance is paid off, start putting that extra money toward the next smallest debt until you pay that one off, and so on. (credit to the original source – thesimpledollar.com)

Now, copying whole paragraphs, and doing so badly, is unforgivable. But it was even worse. The entire book was nothing but a collection of entire articles patched together this way. I’m not saying everything we write has to be 100% original – even Shakespeare used existing stories. but to copy entire articles, severely degrade the writing, and then try to pass it off as original work – that is beyond what I expected. For Pete’s sake – it could have got me sued if I had used it!

Fortunately, most of the gigs I have hired out have come back exactly as described, some where even better than expected. My point is, review your delivery ASAP, and if it is unacceptable, say so. Give the creator a chance to tweak, if that is all it needs, but do not accept bad, or even misleading, work.

If you are careful with your suppliers, and make sure to scrutinize their results, outsourcing can be a great way to accellerate your progress, and spend your valuable time more wisely.

If you are looking to check out Fiverr.com, I do have an affiliate link. Click HERE to save 20% on your first order. And yes, it benefits me to. Would you want to listen to someone who wasn’t doing what he was encouraging?