As you become more successful as an affiliate, you will find that a lot of work comes with maintaining your sites and setting up new ones! Don’t let your own success be your success killer! In this lesson we give you an Introduction to Outsourcing.

So what's this outsourcing all about?

Outsourcing is the process of hiring other people to get things done, and there are two reasons that you might want to do this:

1. ​​To get others to do things that you could do yourself, but simply don’t have time for. This is usually the case if your business is taking off, or you just have too many things on your to-do list, and you can only fit the highest-priority ones into your day. If you don’t want other areas to slip because you don’t have time, outsourcing is your answer.
2. To get something done that you don’t know how to do. No one can do everything themselves. I’d be impressed to the point of suspicious if you were the kind of online superstar who could write website code, design graphics, create articles, and research everything you could need to know, from content to market trends and effective strategies, all by yourself. Any project benefits from a variety of people working together, each focused on their own specialty, to create something of more value than any one person could create alone. For this reason, you might outsource tasks that you feel are over your head to someone who knows exactly what to do.

How can outsourcing benefit me?

Obviously the main benefit of outsourcing is that you free up a lot of your own time to focus on your top priorities, but let’s discuss some of the other benefits outsourcing can have for you.

Location-based risks are lowered
When you pay someone from elsewhere in the world to do work for you, it lowers the risks to your company if the people from one location can’t work for any reason. Many factors can cause this problem, from small instances like public holidays or snow days, right through to natural disasters taking an area out for a significant period of time. If the people working for you are spread out, there’s always going to be someone to keep things going, even if you’re in a bit of a pickle where you are.

You can scale your business faster
If you need someone with specialist knowledge that no one in your area has, then you can find someone online who’s got what you’re looking for without having to leave your computer. This makes it so much faster to scale your business, since you can get what you need straight away, without having to hunt around for someone who might be available locally.

You can hire the best, not just whoever's around
On a similar note, even if someone in your area has the skills you require, they might not be the best for your company. With outsourcing, you can hire the best out there for what you need, rather than having to take what’s available nearby regardless of quality.

It's financially flexible so you can find affordable options for any stage of success
Finally, the one we’ve all been waiting for: outsourcing can be super cheap. I would urge you to always make sure of quality before hiring someone to do a job purely because they charge so little. Sometimes cheap equals low quality, but if you know where to look you can get high quality that’s affordable. 

One example of this is that the cost of living is different from country to country. If you hire from a country where $100 will go a lot further than where you are, you can get the same skill level as someone local, for much less.

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That way you’re also giving them as much money as they’d normally make for those skills, so you’re saving money without ripping anyone off.

The other way that outsourcing works for you financially is that you don’t have to pay anyone a full-time salary unless you can afford it. You're more likely to start out by getting the odd job done via freelancing when you can afford to, and only moving on to hiring full-time employees when your success has grown enough for the time/money factor of it to be working in your favour.

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Hiring freelancers for the odd job as you need to also means that if you have a slow period where there’s less going on, you don’t have to pay someone you can’t afford. 

Where can I get started?

A couple of popular options for finding people online include Upwork and Fiverr. 

For smaller jobs, Fiverr has a variety of people with all kinds of skills. You can hire someone for $5 per job, with the occasional add-on. This is great for writers, voice artists, graphic designers... Even programming and tech work.

Upwork is a similar deal though on a larger scale. You can make very specific job listings, then those with the skills to match your requirements will bid on the job and you can select someone from there.

Where to now?

Take a look into Upwork and Fiverr to get an idea for yourself whether or not they have people with the skills you need, and how much it will cost to get certain jobs done. You may discover there’s a lot of potential to save yourself some time and effort, while still being affordable.