Outcourcing

Outsourcing can make life a lot easier!
You can hire people from around the world a small fraction of what someone in the US would want for the same work!
What can I outsource," and "Where do I find people to outsource things to?"

What can I outsource:
- Customer Support
- Website Design
- Graphics Design
- Writing Ad Copy
- Getting Link Partners
- Writing Content
- writing ebooks
- Research
- Programming websites
- Programming software
- ANYTHING and EVERYTHING else you can think of!!!

Only do what you HAVE to do to be successful. I've found that the fewer things I do in my business, the more successful it has become!
Where can I find people to outsource things to?

There are a few companies I would like to mention here.
1st) RentACoder.com - this is a site where you can post a project, and people from around the world will bid on it. Usually a great place to find programmers and graphics designers.

2nd) Guru.com - Great for finding more upper level (and more expensive) programmers as well as writers.
You can visit www.guru.com to find the company's agreements, paying procedures, and finder's fee amounts. The home page of Guru lists categories of freelancers available. You will want to head directly to the "Writing/Editing/Translation" category list on Guru. Currently, there's a fee structure at Guru that varies depending on what type of subscription freelancers or service companies have purchased. Some freelancers can list basic skills and respond to some ads for free. Paid members and companies will have higher profiles and be able to bid more frequently. To post a "ghostwriter wanted" ad is free. You will still have the power to peruse the entire catalog and invite certain service providers to bid on your project. The finder's fees range from 5 to 10 percent, and the finder's fees are pulled from the buyer and/or the seller at Guru.
Guru is a larger site that has won some awards and has a catalog of hundreds of thousands of service providers in their database. Like with Elance, only a fraction of the service providers are ghostwriters looking for ebook work though. But a fraction of almost 500,000 is a good number.
Because of the buyers market, your odds are pretty good for finding someone quickly on the Internet. Postings for "ghostwriter wanted" are a factor of ten fewer than the number of authors that may bid on the job. This is regardless of monthly fees and percentages charged to the writers on the sites. Sometimes there's also a fee-per-bid charge for service providers. Since many ghostwriters who will be responding to your ad are already out of pocket monetarily, they're eager for your project. And, they are serious about their business.
The information available about each service provider, i.e. ghostwriter, can be compared to information available on vendors on the popular eBay
auction site. Histories and rankings on the large sites are readily available for each writer or company you are thinking of hiring. You can see if other clients have been satisfied with a writer's work, and see how many ebooks a ghostwriter has written through the use of the freelancer bank. These indicators can be very helpful when it comes time to make a selection.

3rd) Workaholics4hire.com - this company is great place to find people to do support, linking campaigns and more. They charge you an hourly rate.

4th) AgentsOfValue.com
- if you want to hire someone long term - then this is the place to go. We've got quite a few full- time employees from AgentsofValue.com. How it works is you will hire someone from their company (in the Philippines) for usually around $2- $5 an hour. You train them how to do what it is you'd like them to do, then they work for you 40 hours a week!

5th) Elance .com
From the home page, scroll down to the menu along the bottom of the page, and click on "Marketplace." From the marketplace page, look to the left hand side of the screen, and from that menu, click on "Writing & Translation." If the site organization has changed slightly since this writing, just use common sense and navigate around until you find the ebook projects database. Basically, you are looking for the area where you can advertise that you want to outsource an ebook to a ghostwriter. Click around until you get there. To make things easier on future visits, when you find ebook outsourcing services, add that URL to your Internet browser's favorites list.
Tip: Writers are referred to as "service providers" on Elance. This phrase is not to be confused with an Internet service provider (ISP) or the service of the Elance web site itself. On Guru, writers are referred to as "registered professionals."

In Elance's writing marketplace, browse through others' ads to see how they are finding ghostwriters, and roughly what the projects are paying. With a quick browse you can see how ads are written and which ghostwriters have responded, and additional details about the advertisers and the ghostwriter responder.
Placing ads is free as of this writing. The ghostwriters are the ones who pay to review the ads. Isn't that nice? You will need to "subscribe" however, and get some of your information into the database in order to advertise. This is only fair so that responders know what they are responding to and so that there is trust that payment will be made when the job is completed.

I recommend that you subscribe right away, so that the processing can take place while you're getting your other pre-work done (selecting a topic for your ebook and creating your ad for posting).
Once you place an ad, writers will begin to post online bids for your project. They may offer to write your ebook for less money than the maximum pay you stated in your ad, or they may offer to write the ebook more quickly than you've stated you require. Basically, they start a friendly competition (usually friendly) to get your business. Lots of them will be appealing. That's because it's a buyers market - good news for you.
Each responder will provide some background information along with their offer. There will be navigable links you can click on to review their history with Elance, their portfolio, and ratings given by some of their clients. Unsubscribed web surfers will not have access to all the detail that you do on the ghostwriters. Likewise, casual surfers will not have access to all of your ad's details either. From the bids you get, you read up on the materials available and make a selection.

Once you've awarded the project to a writer, you'll work up an agreement between you and the writer, and arrange payment through Elance. There are agreement templates you can use on the site, and there are recommended methods of paying also. You may want to browse through some of this information early on regarding scheduling and payment, even before you place your ad, to make sure you understand the "fine print." There's nothing terrible there that I know of, but read it all anyway because it's the smart thing to do.
Payment can be made before the writing starts, after the writing is completed, or half before and half after the writing is completed. When you do pay, a percentage will be taken by Elance. This fee is currently less than 10 percent and is considered a finder's fee. Basically, you won't pay anything to your ghostwriter or to the databank service until you have actually selected a writer.

will recognize it.

3rd - just do it. Remember from before my motto "Ready, Fire, Aim." Get the product idea, create it and get it out there as fast as possible. Money follows speed, and if you don't go fast you will loose out.
Another reason to go fast is because what if your product is a flop? Another important lesson is to fail fast. I've known one person who's been trying to sell the same ebook for the 5 years I've known him with no success.
Remember "Dead ducks don't quack!" If you have a dead duck - move on to something new -  FAST!

4th - people pay different prices for the same content delivered in different ways.
What I mean is that you can sell an ebook for $27. Now, if you take that same content, record it into a "book on CD" - you can sell that same content (in a different format) for a lot more - usually $97 or more.
Now, let's say you want to go to the next level... what if you took the audio, and the text, and combined them into a video. You could make a camtasia video that shows the bullet points from the book as the audio reads through them.
Or create an outline from the text, and record yourself teaching the ideas...
There are a million ways to switch forms of content - but just remember that people pay more for audio then they do text... and more for video then they do audio.
Ok - now that is out of the way - let's get to work.

1st - Software Creation - Creating software is one of the easiest ways to create a product fast. You can create something for almost any niche.

2nd - Public Domain - These are "works" where the copyrights has expired. You are able to take these and repackage them and sell them as your own products!

3rd - Interviews - interview an expert in ANY field and sell the recordings and/or the transcripts. This is the best way to become an expert in any field - just interview the experts and people will see you as one of them.

4th - Seminar Videos - put on your own seminar, record it with a video camera and sell the footage.

5th - Re-niche content - if your selling a product (or bought rights to a product) - you can re-niche it for a different audience. Example would be if you sell a book about speed reading, re-niche it to "speed reading for students."

6th - Book on CD - record yourself reading your book and sell it on cd.

7th - Resource CD - compile a list of resources for a specific niche, and sell the directory.

8th - Recycle content - take products or content you've created in the past and re- use it.

9th - Camtasia Video - this is one of the most powerful tools online marketers have. Create screen capture videos of anything you can do on your computer. Demos of software - PowerPoint slides, how to... anything computer related.

10th - Idea collection - Combine a list of ideas and sell those. People sell list of ideas on how to make money quickly, how to clean your carpets, how to take care of lawns, etc...

11th - Others experts give content - get others to submit articles, or audios, or videos, and compile them into a product.  I did this with one of my wrestling products.  I had people submit their best stories, pictures and poems and compiled them into a product.

12th - Podcasts - like an online radio show that you can download. Have paid podcasts - or record a bunch, then take the recordings and put them onto CD's.

13th - Membership sites - have residual income when people pay you over and over again for access to your membership site. You can provide content in your membership sites - or create software programs that people have to pay monthly to use.

14th - Teleseminars - just record yourself interviewing someone or teaching on a subject that you know a lot about.

15th - Ghostwriters - hire someone to write a book on a the subject that you want to sell.

16th - Free coaching calls - do free coaching calls for your members, track their progress, then compile the recordings into a product.

17th - Plan roundtables - get a group of experts together and have them discuss the subject - record the full thing and you've got an instant product!

18th - Private Label - similar to public domain, but usually created with the intent to sell without a copyright. A million ways to use private label stuff. Most people fail at this because they try to sell the content "as is." Be sure to make it your own and you'll have a ton of success with these.

19th - Case studies - People teaching the course compiled hundreds of casestudies for the subject we were learning about, and then explained how they all worked.