There are so many aspects to making money online that it becomes impossible to master them all.
SEO, copywriting, blogging, PPC, email marketing, sales, branding. There’s several entities that make up a business that you cannot do alone.
At some point you’ll realize that you need to hire a freelancer to do some of the work for you, and even that’s a job within itself.
I freelance and hire freelancers all the time and know it’s not as simple as posting a job to grab yourself awesome employees.
Spend money to make money
When you post your first job ad on Upwork, Freelancer or any other online job site, within a few hours you’ll usually receive 20-30 applicants applying if you’re looking for a freelance in almost any field.
You’ll see people charging from $3ph all the way to up to $50-$80ph. If you’re inexperienced in hiring, chances are you’re going to use the freelancer who’s offering the cheapest rate, or the one who seems most ‘cost effective’.
Freelancers are not vetted before they join freelance sites and just because they tell you they’ve written for certain blogs or created such and such website, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true.
The ones who charge the lowest rates often lie about their experience and the jobs they’ve worked to win your business.
If someone tells you that they’ve written for the Huffington Post but only charge $1 per 100 words, most likely they are lying.
Pay a premium for work done on ‘money points’
A money point is any aspect of a business that makes you money. These are landing pages that generates leads, sales pages, an email that contains a call-to-action and anything that is pivotal to your sales funnel.
For example, if you need to hire someone to write a landing page where you’re going to send $1,000 worth of paid traffic, you’d want to make sure that page is well written and converts.
There’s a greater likelihood of that happening by hiring a more experienced writer who charges $30ph than one who offers just $4-8ph.
Hire cheaper freelancers for simple tasks
Now let’s say you need someone to embed some code on your website so you can show visitors a timed pop-up banner. It’s a simple task and only requires a little bit of communication to tell the freelancer.
It’s simple, easy to understand and can be outscored for as little as $5 or $100 and the result will be the same.
The simpler the task the less you should pay. Budget rate freelancers are often from non-English speaking countries such as India or Pakistan, where $5 goes a lot further. Giving these freelancers simple tasks is fine because they are easier to understand and there is little chance of miss-communication.
If you need to hire a freelancer for a more complicated task (website-rebuild), a landing page that needs to answer a prospect’s question or anything else that requires a lot of communication between you and the freelancer, hiring non-native freelancers will usually be troublesome as it’s very hard to get your message across via messaging or Skype call.
I’ve experienced several times where non-native freelancers told me they understood everything I’ve told them, and return work that doesn’t meet any of my criteria.
The secret to hiring the best freelancers at cheap rates
There’s a little secret in the freelance world that if you’re a great freelancer, when you start up on any website to build up your reviews, you offer your work for free or minuscule rates that it may as well be free.
For example, I have a friend who charges $55 per hour for all writing work but when he joined Upwork for the first time, he was offering work for as little as $3 per hour.
Why? Because he wanted to build up his profile with 5* reviews as fast as possible. He knew that undercharging was the way to do this. Freelancers (the good ones) are doing this all the time so within a few weeks they can go ahead and charge a higher fee for their work after having several 5* reviews on their profile.
You have to do a little more work finding these freelancers and perhaps post the same job 2-3 times over the course of a few weeks to find them as they are rare to catch.
I’ll often give new freelancers a try who have no reviews if they can show me proof of work elsewhere as I know they just want a 5* review and the work will be awesome.
Summary
Don’t be scared to spend money on hiring freelancers. Consider it an investment for your business that will most likely repay itself in no time. Have you hired freelancers before, what was your experience?