Product Creation Progress! 3rd Update Saturday

OK have done some product creation. I know have my outline sorted.

Basically the title of each section in my book. It strikes me that you could now actually outsource the rest of the project i.e. the writing. Though, if it something that you have a great passion for, it would be quicker to write it yourself!

I have calculated that, at five minutes per section, this is going to take me 7 hours to complete. By the way, if you are intrigued to learn more about the product creation technique that I am using, then check out the 24 Hour E-Book Writing System that I am using.

So, 7 hours to go, not including tidying up. I wonder if I can get this written this weekend. It will be interesting to see. I still aim to complete a 5 day email course for my niche blog, and hopefully some new articles.

We will see. I want more of a rest day tomorrow so today could be the huge effort. Its only 3.30pm so I have plenty of time left. Time to get some munch and refuel my body and mind.

Terrible Outsourcing Experience Delivers At Last!

Despite setting a deadline of a week for each set of articles which was more than sufficient time, my outsourcing experience this time round has not been so great.

With the first two suppliers, the writers ignored half of my criteria despite my specific say-so and emphasis that they must be adhered to the letter. Instead of canning the project though, I was willing to extend the deadline, so long as the criteria were met. I was happy enough with the general quality of the articles to give these writers another chance to deliver on the project.

The third writer produced the best articles but had some severe internet access troubles and was the last to deliver.

Whilst I had some bad experiences, ultimately I got what I wanted. Here is some advice when outsourcing work on such sites as rentacoder and elance:

• Never pay out until you are 100% satisfied with the completed work. No matter how long the deadlines are extended and how frustrating it gets, never cut your losses and accept lesser work - always insist on 100% satisfaction or don't pay a penny.

• State explicitly what you need in the original tender and state that this must be met. Do not leave any room for ambiguity, be as specific as you can.

• Be willing to accommodate the writer's circumstances. For instance, if there is an emergency in his/her life, kindly extend the deadline. We are all human.

• If the work submitted is not as requested, be polite but demonstrate how this is the case, extend the deadline, and insist on a resubmission.

• Always communicate via the website as all communications are put on official record and cannot later be denied by either party.

• Don't be fooled by ratings of 9.9. Make sure to check the comments as well as the ratings. If you still have some doubts, try a smaller project first. For instance, I have 3 small projects and may well choose the best person to do a larger project on later.

I hope you find the above advice useful. Now, to post my articles and create the hook text at the bottom. Please leave any comments on the above!

BUM Marketing Outsourcing Update

An update - 3 projects nearly completed from rentacoder. Unfortunately, 2 of the 3 projects have come back not up to the required standard. I requested a specific keyword density and format of the articles yet this has been ignored!

Well, I don't hand over money until the job is done, but it is very annoying, and these people seemingly have very high ratings! Methinks that people are stroking each others' egos on these sites and giving each other high ratings.

Anyway, I'll let you know what happens.

My other projects which I have been neglecting lately are an Adwords project (that I will hopefully get under way today) and also a Clickbank project, which is to write my own ebook, but on what I do not know.......

Keyword Crazy!

My ad on rentacoder for freelance article writing is going well and I will choose one of more writers soon. In the meantime, I have drawn up a long list of several tens of keywords to be used.

The key to getting good results from outsourcing is to be very specific up front about what you want. That way, there are no nasty surprises or arbitrations further down the line. This is probably the most key thing.

You also usually indicate a rough price range i.e. you enter your offer into one of the many price ranges but this is merely a guide and not even necessary and does not play much of a part at all.

Probably tomorrow I will accept one or more bids and wait for the articles to be written.

Now, I just need to make better use of my free time. given that I won't have to write any more articles for a short while. I think I will consider Adwords as I have read Day Job Killer and gotten many ideas from it.

Bid Request Posted on Rentacoder

So today I posted a bid request on Rentacoder. This week has been terrible for me in terms of article writing - think I have only written one or two - but at least I have put this work out to tender. My new plan is not to write the bum articles, so next I will concentrate on making a Clickbank product which is something that I don't think you can really outsource, because it has to be above a certain high quality standard.

Now, to wait for the bids to roll in.......

Zen and the Art of Outsourcing Article Writing

Not much progress made recently. The weekend was out, as I met with a friend of mine who will be leaving these shores shortly. Although I didn't plan it, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to hang, even though I knew it would hit my articles progress.

Monday was a continuation - all play and no work, same goes for today (Wednesday) though Tuesday was pretty good.

I'm seriously beginning to doubt some of the Wordtracker keywords. Some of the so called gold are such narrow terms that nothing can be written on them!

So back to outsourcing - it has been said that a single bum marketing article will yield one sale per month. So let's assume $30 per article per month. Then, in order to make $30 per day, I would need 30 articles. And in order to reach $150 per day, I would need 5 times that, or 150 articles written.

If we assume an outsourcing cost of $5 per article, then 150 articles will cost a grand total of $750 (about £380).

Now, if these articles yield $150 per day then we break even in about five days! Of course, it will take time for indexing in the search engines so this is a little simplistic but outsourcing does seem to make a lot of sense.

There are a lot of crap writers out there but I am hoping to choose a few writers and get them to write, say, 20 articles each. Then the best writer will get the contract for the remaining articles.

I think I'll still write the author bios though as this is the major selling pitch that I need to retain control of.

Have you had any experience of oursourcing? I'd love to hear from you so please leave your comments and share with all of us.