Freelancers provide a massive ROI
When you’re first starting to grow your website, you usually have to do everything yourself: the website setup, the content creation, the graphic designs, the social media channels, even the more difficult tasks like coding and programming.
When I first started out as a blogger, I couldn’t afford freelancers to help me with my site. In fact, I was barely making enough from my website to buy a McDonald’s hamburger once a month! I was too overwhelmed managing every part of the site myself, creating a bottleneck in revenue and productivity. I couldn’t really afford to hire anyone to help me, and frankly — I just had no idea what I was doing. The result? After 4.5 years, I was still only attracting around 1,000 page views a month with no signs of improving.
I was ready to quit — it was all so much work, and I wasn’t really seeing any success despite years of trying.
I decided to give it one more go. In one last push of commitment, I decided to hire some freelancers to help me run the site.
One year later, I was averaging about 200,000 monthly page views, I had gained 30,000+ new email subscribers, and was earning a full-time income. I was able to quit my job and work entirely for myself as a publisher and content creator.
Here, you’ll learn how to find top-level freelancers, delegate the right types of work, and be a far more effective publisher so that you can earn more revenue for you and your family.
Where to Find Inexpensive, Top-Level Freelancers
I’ve been a publisher for over ten years, and I’ve hired dozens of freelancers to help me with countless tasks:
The truth? Not all of them were winners. I thought I was getting a good deal, but some freelancers didn’t know how to do the work or didn’t send me what I asked for, resulting in days of back-and-forth emails trying to complete something that should’ve taken an hour.
But overall, I had great experiences with most of them. For $50 or $100 dollars, a high-level expert could complete a task in a few hours that would’ve taken me two weeks. This not only saved me a massive headache (something I had all too often trying to do everything myself), but I could focus far more time back into doing what I did best: creating great content.
I’ve hired freelancers from everywhere, from big-name commercial sites like Upwork and Freelancer to word-of-mouth referrals from friends and colleagues, paying them $20 dollars to design PDF’s or thousands of dollars to run my advertising campaigns.
My favorite site so far has been Fiverr.com, a relatively inexpensive pool of expert freelancers in nearly every field. If I can’t find what I need there, my backup options are Upwork or Freelancer. Wherever you hire your freelancers from, I’d recommend they have a high proficiency speaking your primary language and plenty of positive reviews to prove they’re a quality candidate.
What Types of Work Should You Delegate to Freelancers?
I went to a popular marketing conference a while back, and the host — a man who had made millions of dollars through Facebook Ad campaigns — revealed he had never created a Facebook ad before. He joked that he had no idea how to use the system, and had no plans to learn. His team did all the technical work, while he focused on creating great sales pitches and compelling products.
The more you can delegate difficult tasks to experts, the more time you’ll have to run your business.
When it comes to determining what work to give to freelancers, a good rule of thumb is to give them work that you:
- Don’t know how to do
- Do know how to do, but would take you a long time to finish
Time is the name of the game here. The more time you have to focus on the specific tasks that truly make you money, the more revenue you’ll earn. I realized spending $100 for a freelancer to finish a task in two hours that would take me five days had a massive ROI for my business (not to mention my mental health).
For me, this included lots of graphic design. Take a look at this screen shot from another big list of freelancers I hired, and you can see the trend of work I outsourced: creating logos, designing graphics, and building PDFs/powerpoint presentations:
Another great task you can give freelancers is market research. As I mentioned in my recent post about how to use podcasting to grow your site’s revenue, I hired freelancers to research the top 50 podcasts in my field and gather all the important data and contact information for these podcast hosts. Instead of spending a week trying to sort through the hundreds of thousands of podcasts in my niche, my freelancer found me 50 great podcasts to target. It only took me a week or two to secure podcast interviews with about 15 of them, resulting in an enormous increase in my website traffic. For $50 dollars!
Finally, you can see how I outsourced my video editing and video content strategies. I’m a writer at heart — that’s where my true content creation skills lie. I’ve never outsourced my writing content, because my audiences know and love my specific voice. But I knew that video content was massively important; it was the direction my market was heading in. So I’d record my videos on my smartphone or camera, and send all the footage to expert video editors that made my videos beautiful in a matter of hours. That would’ve taken me weeks.
Writing content might not be your strong suit. But content experts can help you create enormous amounts of SEO-optimized, persuasive, interesting content on topics that align with your brand and site. Companies like Handsoff Publishing or Niche Website Builders offer packages for publishers that include tens of thousands of words of content, ensuring you’re getting high-quality and relevant content for your site while you can work on owning and managing other important tasks.
When it comes to delegating work, ask yourself: which tasks give you the biggest headache? Can someone else do it? Even if it’s not 100% as good as you might be able to do, the time saved usually proves to be far more worth your money; the more you can focus on what you do best, the more revenue and influence your site will build. As CEO and founder Jessica Jackley explained in her TedTalk: “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”
In Conclusion
It may feel strange having strangers help you with your website, one of your most personal and prized possessions. You may not even have a lot of extra money to spend on delegating work to others.
But imagine how much more work you could do on your site if you had someone helping you. Envision how much more content you could create, and having someone else do work while you take time off and focus solely on the parts of your website you truly love (that earn you more revenue).
In almost every case, the ROI of hiring freelancers is far more than what you pay them. Spending even $50 dollars could go a really long way to help you earn more revenue from your content and products.
Hiring freelancers doesn’t have to cost you a fortune, and they’re ready and willing to help at a moment’s notice when you use popular commercial sites. If you want to grow your website, have others help you so you can transform from a content creator to a true business owner.
