THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING Startup growth is proportional to talent. Get more of it faster and for less with the complete guide to outsourcing. By Liam Martin Co-founder of Time Doctor and Staff.com
Table of Contents Introduction... 2 What Is Outsourcing?... 3 Why Should You Outsource?... 3 How To Use This Guide... 4 Becoming More Productive... 6 Double YOUR Own Productivity... 6 Setup Rituals... 6 Effective Planning... 7 Determine Goals... 8 Set Milestones... 8 Get Into A Flow State Focus... 9 Type Of Tasks You Should Outsource... 11 How To Source Talent... 12 Craigslist... 12 Elance and odesk... 13 Mechanical Turk... 14 Fiverr... 15 Staff.com... 15 Define Your Needs And Refine Your Search Location... 16 The Process... 17 The Job Description... 18 The Interview Process... 19 3 Qualities To Look For... 19 Stages Of The Interview Process... 20 Interview Questions... 21 Trial Stage... 23 Communicating With Remote Employees... 24 Create A Wiki... 24 Sending Effective Emails... 25 Leveraging Project Management Tools... 25
Have Chat Rooms... 28 Process Design... 29 How To Build Your Process... 29 Refining Your Process... 31 How Virtual Training Is Different... 31 Building Redundant Processes... 33 The 4 Main Types of Redundant Processes... 33 SEO... 33 Content Creation... 34 Social Media... 34 Development... 35 Effective Forum Posting... 35 Generating Leads Through Twitter... 36 YouTube Lead Generation And Optimization... 38 Check That Work Is Done... 38 Building A Process Databank... 39 Conclusion... 40 About Liam Martin... 41
Introduction In late 2009, a future 3 time bestselling author, Tim Ferriss released a book called The Four Hour Work Week. It was the one of the first concerted efforts to bring high level business process automation (BPA) and outsourcing down to a smaller scale for everyday businesses and individual consultants. This book has been both the best and worst thing to happen to remote work and has been in part the bane of my existence when interacting with customers at Staff.com. His book started a trend that many companies, consultants, small business founders and lifestyle entrepreneurs have been trying to implement since. This has produced the unfortunate result of a significant large amount of customers 'trying out' outsourcing without having any serious background on the sourcing process, remote interviewing, remote team management and operational procedures needed to become successful with remote employees. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 2
This guides goal is to shine a light on that process and show you how and where to find the right resources you'll need to properly start outsourcing within your organization and stop bothering me with questions all the time :) What Is Outsourcing? Outsourcing in business is essentially finding a third-party to handle some of the workload or complete specific tasks. Outsourcing is often used by consultants, small business and even entrepreneurs as a way to handle more business and deliver on work that requires skills outside those of the core organization. It can be change on a project by project basis or from industry to industry. This Smart Guide will take your through the process of making sure that you and your business are ready to either outsource different components of your regular operations, or setup an outsourcing framework to enable you to handle a bigger work load. Either way, the result is an increase in efficiency and growth for your bottom line if handled properly. Why Should You Outsource? There are many benefits to outsourcing, some of which I've already briefly mentioned. While you may not completely reduce your work week down to 4 hours, you will find gains in: Your business growth (profits) THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 3
Cost and efficiency savings Reduced overhead Greater staffing flexibility Your personal and business organization Outsourcing will also enable you to focus on your core activities. How To Use This Guide This Smart Guide is meant as a starting point for you and your business to use as a baseline framework. It's the framework I've used to build numerous businesses and how my current business, Staff.com, uses to train our clients on how to optimize outsourcing within their companies. Depending on your product/service and industry you will need to add to this guide and can take personalized notes along the way. It can and should serve both outsourcing newcomers and veterans as a great reference guide and as you work through the process time and time again. The first section, Becoming More Productive, will focus on an often ignored aspect of outsourcing: your current productivity and organization levels. Just as larger companies organize and streamline their activities and business processes before automating and outsourcing, you too have to better define different areas of your business and personal outputs. This will save you time, money, sanity and much more further into the process. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 4
The next section, How To Source Talent, will introduce you to the newest and most trustworthy platforms that have been developed and used by millions of businesses since Tim Ferriss first wrote his book. I'll show you how to define your company needs, how to craft a compelling job description to attract world-class talent and what the overall (recommended) process should be when looking to hire. The third section, The Interview Process, will dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of how to run effective interviews. Since you'll most likely be interviewing someone over the phone or through a video service, I'll point out what qualities you should be looking for, what questions to ask, and how to setup a trial phase to make sure both parties are satisfied before anything becomes permanent (if this is what you're looking for. The same process can apply to temporary freelancers). The fourth section, Communicating With Remote Employees, will walk you through tools and processes to ensure that your remote workers deliver high quality work and that you both remain connected. Communication is often the biggest difference in performance and final output. The fifth section is dedicated to Process Design. This will help walk you through the theory of how to design, build, and implement effective business processes to help make your business more effective. The last section, Building Redundant Processes, will focus on actually applying the theory from the last section to help you create processes that will streamline your operations and make automation of simple or repetitive tasks possible. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 5
Becoming More Productive If you aren't more productive, you can't make anyone else more productive. There isn't any point trying to systematize anything at this point as it wouldn't even be effective at this point. Double YOUR Own Productivity There are 3 specific things you need to do in order at (at a minimum) double your productivity. These are: 1. Ritualization 2. Planning 3. Flow State Focus We're going to go through each of these individually. Setup Rituals A ritual is something that is so pervasive in our lives that we just do it without thinking about it. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 6
You need to setup your own morning ritual in order to be most productive. Now getting started will be the hardest thing, but once you get going, it'll develop into a habit and become natural to you. Some of the best ways to make sure your set for a morning ritual are: - Eating a good breakfast. - Listing tasks you want to get done on paper or in a time management software. - Figure out your 1 kick ass objective for the day and make sure you start with that. - Don't check your email right away - it's highly disruptive to any kind of productivity. Effective Planning You need to not only plan your day, your week, your month, but the next 3 months. This will help you determine not only if you're hitting your big goals, but also how effective you are at doing so. I use 3 tools to help frame my planning. 1. A time management software like Time Doctor. 2. A digital calendar like Google Calendar or ical. 3. A quarterly white board (see below) THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 7
Place your major milestones for the next quarter on it and put it in a very visible place. These 3 tools will make sure you never miss any deadlines again and help you visualize what you need to get done. Determine Goals Write out your biggest goals for the next 4 months. It doesn't matter how crazy they are - you just need to take a few minutes and write it all down. Set Milestones Now that you have a few goals set you need to attach and break them down into a series of milestones. 1. Outline Outsourcing Guide (7 Days) THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 8
2. Fill out Guide sections (30 Days) 3. Ask for input from reference customers (7 Days) 4. Make appropriate edits (7 Days) 5. Prep marketing materials (7 Days) 6. Launch Guide (1 Day) By holding yourself accountable to smaller milestones of an overall objective, you'll be able to accomplish more little things and feel motivated and productive to keep going. Pro Tip: To really be productive you need to figure out how much time you think you'll need, then cut it down by 25% Action: Be sure to set milestones and allot a specific amount of time for completing each one. Add these milestones to your calendar. Get Into A Flow State Focus This might sound really complicated, but it isn't. It's really astounding to think about the number of people who think they're really productive but have no idea how much time they spend doing what. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 9
Flow State Focus is a term coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and suggests that people are happiest and therefore at their most productive, when they are in a flow uninterrupted concentration and absorption. While everyone's a bit different I can achieve a better flow state of focus by doing the following things: Separate my work space from my social space - this could be anything from closing your door, or having a random spot on the couch where you only do work at. Having tools like Time Doctor that keep you focused on what you are doing or that literally block you from going to other sites like Facebook. Methodology is also critical to getting things done effectively. Come up with a plan ahead of time about exactly how you re going to tackle completing a task. Write it down. This may sound a little redundant, but it'll enable you to visualize yourself doing the task and make sure you have everything necessary ahead of time to complete it. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 10
Details - a simple note about a meeting shouldn't just be the person's name in the appropriate time slot on your calendar. Something like: "Meeting with David over Skype at 10 am to discuss time management. His Skype name is 1234." Action: Try to achieve flow state focus while reading this guide Be in a comfortable environment, have everything you need in order to work and then get to work. Type Of Tasks You Should Outsource The types of tasks you should consider outsourcing include the following: Repetitive tasks: Data entry is a good example of a highly repetitive task. While you may use your in-house staff for this, it may be a better idea to outsource this and employ the in-house staff for more useful work. Specialized tasks: IT support can be the right example of this type of task. While you may need IT support for your network, you may not need to appoint a full-time employee for this purpose. In such a situation, a contractor may be ideal for this specialized work. Expert tasks: Financial analyst is a good example of a position requiring a high level of expertise, but that you can still easily outsource. It may be difficult for a small business to pay for highly-skilled executives. However, you can appoint a financial analyst on a contractual basis at a much lower cost. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 11
How To Source Talent Outsourcing can get you some very productive employees as a very competitive rate, but it does require a bit of work and structure in order to be able to find the right person for your company. This section will cover 4 main points of finding an offshore employee: The pitfalls of an outsource employee search (and how to avoid them) Where to find the most qualified people for your needs How to write an effective job description How to filter candidates Craigslist Craigslist can be a pretty cheap alternative to some other solutions out there, but you'll often have to spend lots of time filtering through profiles and setting up tests in order to validate the individual and their actual knowledge. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 12
What's more Craigslist is often a haven for headhunters and staffing agencies, meaning that they'll post under a name and circle the work around to a few different people, paying them a dime on the dollar you re paying to a single "supposed" person. While you can find good people here, it's often time consuming. Elance and odesk Elance, Odesk and other sites like these ones are great for specific project(s) like having a website built or video editing. You can expect to pay higher hourly rates due to the fact that it's short term, freelance type work. Typically, you'll also find lots of companies and firms that have built themselves a reputation and a presence on these sites. They'll be bidding to do the work instead of a THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 13
single freelancer - again because it is project based and lots of web design agencies can do the work pretty quickly. Mechanical Turk Mechanical Turk is really great for very small tasks (typically something less than 5 mins) and you can get data back quickly. If you have a survey for example, you can generate hundreds of responses within the hours for pennies each. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 14
Fiverr Fiverr is the world's biggest online marketplace for services starting at $5. This is another great place for small tasks. Staff.com THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 15
Staff.com is for full-time, long term employees. You can actually find significantly less expensive talent then on freelance type sites like Elance or Odesk, as well as having the advantage of working with a single qualified employee for a more long term contract. You will however have to make at least a one month commitment when hiring a worker on the platform. Define Your Needs And Refine Your Search Location There are 3 major international countries you should be searching for high quality talent in - and each one has different major areas of expertise (so depending on your industry there may be one of these 3 you'll really want to focus on. This isn't to say that the ideal candiate isn't available from another area, but you'll just have better chances and well research work to do). So take the time to define you exact project needs here and then figure out which of the three locations below is the best for you. These locations are: The Philippines - They have great talent pools for SEO experts, PPC experts, HR, Virtual Assistants, customer service agents. They will require a little bit of development to a degree, but compared to the prices you'd pay here it's worth it. Most individuals in the Philippines have impeccable English as they've been taught it from a young age. India - Is a great place to find SEO experts, software development application development. They can also handle PPC and customer service but may require a bit THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 16
more personal development than talent from the Philippines depending on your needs. Eastern Europe - This area is the most expensive option out of these three areas, but they by far have the best developers at the best price for the talent. The Process Now we'll get into the actual process of getting that candidate. On elance or odesk you re going to have to create a profile in order to register your company. Then you're going to want to upload your project description to the site and wait for bids. For Mechanical Turk, things happen pretty fast. You need to sign up, define the task and then submit it to the network where multiple people will all "complete" the task. With Staff.com you're going to want to register, put up a job description and then seek to interview actual staff either by searching for them or with the help of a Staff.com customer service representative. Action: Choose who you want to work with and take action Choose which type of outsourcing you're looking to have done and then register with your according platform. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 17
The Job Description The Job Description is less about helping you find the people you want and more about filtering out the people you don't want. On sites like elance and staff.com the people you want will find you. So let's start with some key points about Job Descriptions: Long and highly specific descriptions don't work as well as you'd expect when outsourcing talent - especially in the Philippines. They won't even apply if there is even a single item them feel they don't meet (e.g. 4 years of ruby development when a perfect qualified candidate only has 3). Don't be vague - things like "passionate about success", "able to work well with others". Only put down actionable items. Keep it clear and concise - 3 points is perfect to get people in and you can filter them later. Lack of contact information and payment scale - lot of firms will leave out payment scale hoping to win over candidates during the interview process, but you'll end up wasting everyone's time and becoming frustrated. If you can only afford 48K per year, says so. Use the code word trick - I've done this several times to really help filter out potential candidates and quickly identify the concise attentive ones. Somewhere in the middle of the job description, tell them to reply with an email that has your code word in the subject line. This way you can go into your email client and set up a filter to only look at new emails containing your keyword in the subject line. Action: Follow the tips above to put together a job spec that is to the point but allows for a wide range of applicants to apply. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 18
The Interview Process In this section, I'm going to take you through the actual interview process and what to look for in all the candidates that you got from the last section. Since there's a good chance all your interviews will be happening over the phone or via video chats, I'll also show you how to identify the right characteristics you want to hire for as well as what some good questions to ask your interviewees are. 3 Qualities To Look For The 3 main qualities you want to quickly identify in the ideal candidate are: Action Taken, Reliability and Skill Level. *These are in order of importance* Action Taken - this can be discerned in the initial testing period. I'd rather have someone give me an example of how they screwed up rather than have done nothing waiting for directions. So give people liberty to take action, even if the end result isn't quite what you expected because with outsourced labour, you'll both be working on different schedules and you don't want them waiting for you to come online to fix a little problem or give more direction. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 19
Reliability - Monitor your new employees during their test period. Again, tools like Time Doctor or Basecamp can indicate how much of the workload is being accomplished. Skill Level - this can be determined pretty quickly during the initial interview. Test the candidate with some early tasks in different areas. Stages Of The Interview Process There are 3 main phases of an interview process. Initial Testing - This is the fastest way to filter out candidates. Give them an initial test to complete and you can immediately see who is serious about getting the job. It should be an hour long and you should make sure they have a 48 hour window to complete it (to compensate for time change). The most important thing to look for is clarification questions. This might seem like a conflit with the Action Taken quality from the last task, but sometimes the action to be taken is to ask questions. Here is an example test I'd give to a graphics designer. (I call it the gif test!) Hi, I've included a PSD image and I'd like you to make the following changes. - Change the colour of the image to red - Turn the image into a.png - Send it back in 48 hours. If you have any questions or need clarifications MAKE SURE TO EMAIL ME. If you don't understand anything about this task you need to clarify them with me before starting the test. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 20
Excited to see how you do! Liam So, seems like a pretty simple test. However, (and this is the point of the test) I don't send the candidate a PSD, I send them a GIF. This is done purposely because a successful candidate would: ask for a.psd file of the image as it would be very hard to run the exercise with the.gif format. they would ask for a clarification on the "red" or would present me with a few different options. A great candidate would email me back, ask for clarifications and would be able to complete this test in under 5 minutes. A candidate who doesn't do this would take the rest of the day to either make changes to a.gif (which isn't editable) or create a completely new image, both would take much longer than 5 minutes. Pro Tip: You need people to tell you when you're wrong The point of the test is to see if candidates will ask questions and will correct you when you're wrong Action: Come up with a test Come up with a test of your own for your specific position. Make the test very simple and have your candidates try it. If it's longer than an hour, pay them for their time. Interview Questions Interview Stage - After you've gotten candidates past their initial testing stage we now need to interview those candidates. This can be done through a platform or through THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 21
skype. If you're just interested in completing a small task or project then this stage isn't necessarily needed but if you're looking for a longer term hire it's critical. You're looking for a few critical things. - Do they have their own computer, stable internet? - Do you hear background noise in the call? If so they might be working out of an internet cafe which usually won't work. - Are they confident in their answers? Can they speak english properly (critical if you're having them write content or interacting with customers). Possible questions to ask: Can you tell me about your work experience? How do you think (x) could help you with the position we're offering? How do you deal with working independently? Can you give me an example of when you had to make a decision independent of management and how it turned out? Can you give me some examples of how you took action on something? How did it turn out? Do you have experience working in virtual teams? How do you like working virtually vs working in an office? Telling people they're wrong if you believe they are is really important to us. Can you give me an example of when you told your boss/manager they were wrong? How did that work out? Can you tell me three things you'd think you can make better at (company/website). THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 22
Action: Do at least three interviews Make sure you do at least 3 interviews with 3 candidates you really like. Ideally they should all be fantastic candidates on paper. This will usually change after the interview. Trial Stage Trial Stage - By this point you should have tested candidates, interviewed them and have 2-3 candidates that you think might be a good fit. You might even have 1 candidate that you think is a winner and you want to hire that person right away, fight that urge. Testing and an initial interview usually only accounts for 10% of the candidates overall fit for that position, that's why I suggest you try what I call 'real world interviewing'. You're going to take this person (I always suggest you try two or more) out for a day of work. Track them using some kind of tracking software and give them the same tasks. The results almost always surprise you. I'll see some candidates that are quite quiet during an interview that work incredibly well and candidates who seem to have all the right answers during an interview work out horribly during this process. Once they've gone through the day look at both candidates and make your decision. Action: Try a real world interview with two or more candidates Make sure you get at least one day on a trial with candidates. Make sure you also pay them for their time. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 23
Communicating With Remote Employees This is actually the hardest part of the outsourcing process - establishing a clear and concise communication system between you and your staff. Create A Wiki Some kind of a process database is critical to communicating with remote employees. Make sure you have a central place where you place all of your operational procedures (we'll be getting into how to that later on). At Staff.com, we built our own wiki. You can go that route or you can just start with simple Google Documents that can be shared in the cloud. Action: Figure out how you're going to communicate procedures to your team Wiki, Google Docs, Dropbox, Box.net, take a look at them all! THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 24
Sending Effective Emails For outsourcing to be effective as it can be, a clear and concise email communication between both parties needs to be established. And chances are if it isn't going so well thus far - it's probably your fault. When you're worker is 5,000 miles away - you need to be able to quickly communicate exactly what you need done in simple and concise terms. When you're writing out emails keep these points in mind: Complete instructions and all tools, passwords, access required. Explain it to them like they are a 4 year old - not to demean them, but to make sure things are understood. Procedures and proper process is crucial. If anything is going to duplicated later or done on a regular basis, you need to systematize it (more on this soon). Reinforce specific deliverables and completion dates. Leveraging Project Management Tools A project management tool of some kind is necessary with outsourced workers in order to keep all resources, task lists and progress centralized. Here are a few of the tops one to consider: THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 25
Basecamp -> The classic team task/project management tool. Asana -> A simple new comer to the space that's definitely turning heads and helping teams execute. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 26
Flow -> A great way to keep everyone on the same page and you're project moving forward. Google Drive -> Kinda of a hybrid cross between Dropbox and a basic project management tool, Google Drive basically pulls in all the Google Docs tools and keeps everything up-to-date in the cloud. The collaborative aspect comes in when multiple people view the same document. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 27
Have Chat Rooms Tools like Skype or HipChat can provide chat logs within specific groups or "rooms" in which you can include specific people. This way other team members can always come back in a read text logs and keep on top of what happened in other working groups or time zones. Action: Set up a company chat room Have a company chat room set up for all your employees. If you have a larger team, set up division chat rooms as well so you can monitor the chatter across teams. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 28
Process Design Process design is all about having the critical elements and resources in place to help your outsourced labour preform at the same level you want them to. While there is a bit of training involved with any job, it's much hard to manage the quality and flow from abroad. Unlike traditional jobs the material must be available in a consistent and clear format to ensure that no matter who is doing the job - or from where - they are achieving similar results. If you improve the process of who you do anything - you're improving your company. How To Build Your Process There are 4 rules to building your own processes: THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 29
Discover - this is when you try to understand the history of the existing process. Ask why is it being done this way? Design - this is where you're going to build a new procedure from the things you've learned. You'll want to do this in 3 phases: always do the process first yourself, the second time think about systematizing, and finally systematize it. Deploy - take your process to your employees and team mates and find out what's working and what isn't. Debug - keep fixing all the problems within your new process until everything is resolved and running smooth. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 30
Action: Try this on one process today Go ahead and write up a process guide, send that guide to your employees, ask them what needs to be changed and go through the top three D's till you get it right. Refining Your Process Once you've setup all your procedures you're going to want to setup some organic training process. Organic means that you don't just institute them, but that they come about and from your staff. All our procedures are treated like laws that have to be followed, but if you think you have a better one, we'll review it as a team and add it in. We even offer bonuses to all employees who spend the time creating a great process that gets added to our daily operations. How Virtual Training Is Different The number 1 problem that I encounter when I consult for big firms that outsource work is that they think everyone else is the problem but them. You are the problem... Let that sink in for a minute. If you're staff are failing you and you've done everything else in this guide up until now, the way you're communicating processes to your staff is the problem. You're the problem and you need to change in order to make your staff more successful. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 31
Remember that training somebody in person is very different from training somebody 10,000 miles away. It requires a different management philosophy and when you end up running into problems (and you will), step back and instead of blaming the employee, ask yourself how you could better communicate what you want done to your team. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 32
Building Redundant Processes In the last section, we covered some of the core theory of Process Design. This final section will be dedicated to actually implementing the theory and making sure your new employees are able to follow the redundant processes created. The 4 Main Types of Redundant Processes Redundant processes are things you should be doing all the time and in the same format in order to keep things moving smoothly. There are 4 main types or categories of redundant processes that we use: SEO Forum back-linking - this is a very simple task involving a comment, a specific keyword and a link to a specific page. Guest Blog Post Outreach - compile as much information about as many bloggers in your industry and then reach out to them yourself. A backlink from a very respectable blog is huge. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 33
Blog commenting - you need to have your face and brand out there in comments on other blog posts. While it won't give you as much SEO juice as other strategies, it's still very worthwhile. Keyword specific ranking - We have a specific primary and secondary keyword or keyword phrase for each page and work hard to make sure we rank for those specific keywords. Content Creation Guest blog posts - most authors need content for their blog, as long as it's solid content. So spend the time and reach out to them. Forum communication - you'll want to have someone that speaks the language and is part of the industry niche that can represent you very well in your own support forums and build effective FAQs. Newsletter and email creation - you'll want to keep in touch with your clients and one of the best ways of doing so is through personalized emails and a weekly or bi-weekly newsletter that gives them value. Don't just write something for the sake of talking about yourself - give them a reason to keep following you. Social Media Twitter - We directly respond to people who are tweeting about keywords we're interested in. Show them you're listening and offer to help. Facebook fans - write interesting posts, engage with them, make it cool for them to be a part of your experience. You should also do research on other (related) industry THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 34
fan pages and try to do a cross collaboration. As an example, we were able to do this for less than 1000 dollars a month from a labour perspective. Q&A sites - Sites like Branch or Quora are great because if you can have the best answers to important questions it's huge promotion for your brand. YouTube - create short videos and enable comments. You re guaranteed to get lots of questions and you want to make sure that you address them. Development Bug hunting - Typically you don't need to go far in order to find something you could improve - your clients are also key aspects for feedback. New features - from time to time it's important to push new features to keep your team engaged and clients happy. Code efficiency - the shorter your application code is, the more efficient it will be. Effective Forum Posting Forum posting helps to both bring clients to our website and will help with our website s search engine optimization creating backlinks to our main site. Step 1: Go to Google and search for your chosen keywords. Step 2: In the search results, look for forums in which you can write a comment relating to your chosen keyword. You may need to register a new account if you haven't already done so. Step 3: Comment on the chosen forum with a meaningful response. You can include a signature with a link back to your site (if the forum allows). Repeat this same process for THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 35
any other related forums in the search results. Do this on a daily or weekly basis to continue to build more backlinks. Generating Leads Through Twitter Lead generation is the MOST important task in our business. Think of leads as oxygen, we need it to survive! Twitter is a microblogging site which is a great place to find leads, visit the following link for a general overview. Step 1: Either open a new twitter account or check the note section below to see if you have been assigned a twitter account to manage. Step 2: Go to search.twitter.com and search for the keywords that are of interest to you (in this example we're interested in the keyword Tutor). Step 3: Those tweets that are relevant to the product or service we are selling should be first added to our twitter followers and secondly should be responded to as an @reply. See the video and the notes below for example @replies. Step 4: Respond to each twitter account individually with a unique response; see notes below for appropriate responses. Step 5: Go to friendorfollow.com each week, delete those twitter accounts who have not added us to their list of followers. If a customer responds through a PM or an @reply: Restate your desire to help them and answer their questions, always place the url in your reply or PM so that the customer can visit the site. If you encounter questions that are posed more than three times, please add them below so that we can improve this guide. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 36
Pro Tip: Make sure your responses are natural and directly address the tweet, you do not want to spam accounts as this may get the account banned. Sample Responses: (remember each response has to be below 140 characters) - I m a tutor and I can help you with your problem, just visit http://vtamethod.com and you can sign up for a free trial. - I can solve your problem, visit http://yoursite.com and sign up for a free tutoring trial - sucks, if you want, sign up at http://yoursite.com and I ll give you a free tutoring session - I believe I can help you with, visit my site http://yoursite.com and I ll give you a free tutoring session - We have two phd tutors from mcgill who can help you with, just visit http://yoursite.com and you can get a free trial - I Can help you with your tutoring problem, go to http://yoursite.com mention me and you ll get a one hour free trial - If you re serious about getting some tutoring help go to http://yoursite.com and sign up for a free trial, no strings - Ok, I m a tutor and I think you need my help, go to http://yoursite.com and sign up for a totally free trial THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 37
YouTube Lead Generation And Optimization YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. Billions of people view YouTube videos ever year and it is a central component of a well-rounded traffic generation technique for any online campaign. Today you will be learning the fundamental components of how to optimize a video so that it is ranks on YouTube. Step 1: Log in to your YouTube account and/or create a YouTube account (check the notes below to find out if you have a login). Step 2: Search for the seed keywords that have been assigned to you by your project manager and/or are in the notes section below and expand on those keywords in the YouTube keyword suggestion tool. Step 3: Either create according YouTube videos or check the text guide below for links to videos that you can already use. Step 4: Collect the descriptions and tags for the top videos that come up for the keyword you're trying to optimize for. Step 5: Provide the URL's of the videos you have uploaded in your daily accountability report and the keyword you've optimized each video for. Check That Work Is Done Now that you've seen some examples of redundant processes you need to make sure they're getting done. Again, a tool like Time Doctor will help you make sure things are getting done on a daily basis. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 38
You should also setup weekly report. Quarterly reports then become more of an outlook report - this is what we accomplished this quarter, what do we need to accomplish next quarter and how do we position ourselves for that? Building A Process Databank To keep everyone on the same page and your processes in plain sight, use a project management tool like: Basecamp - add all of your processes as project and list each step as a task. Your employees can then leave comments and check off their products. Dropbox - this tool could also work if you have clear and concise processes outlined in document format that you want to share with your entire team. Google Drive - similar to Dropbox, you can start off with the free version and keep all your processes in there. Your Own Wiki - Most of the time you can get by on the tools above but if you're team is over 10 people it's probably time to build your own wiki. See a previous section on how we've set up ours. THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 39
Conclusion Congrats on completing this Smart Guide! Go back and review certain sections that don't make sense and if you have any questions you can set up a personal call with me through Clarity (all of my consultations go towards charity). THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 40
About Liam Martin Liam is co-founder and director of marketing at Staff.com. Liam has been a consultant for many online businesses concentrating on process design and scaling companies through outsourcing. He is also the co-founder of Time Doctor, a time monitoring and productivity monitoring software designed for tracking hours and productivity of remote teams. Social Links: Facebook Linkedin Twitter Google+ THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO OUTSOURCING TIME DOCTOR 41