www.getwsodo.

com
www.getwsodo.com

ADVANCED OUTSOURCING
STRATEGIES

BONUSES
TRANSCRIPTION
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

T RA NSCRIPT ION www.getwsodo.com

www.getwsodo.com
Bonuses Advanced Outsourcing Strategies

SPEAKERS: BD - Brian Dean

BH - Bryan Harris

BD: Hey, what’s up everybody? It’s Brian Dean, founder of Backlinko and creator of SEO THAT WORKS. I’m
very excited today to have Bryan Harris from Videofruit with us. Bryan Harris works with guys like Gary
Vaynerchuk, Noah Kagan, the people at KISSmetrics, HubSpot. His credibility can’t be questioned honestly.
He basically went from starting his business to turning it into a six-figure business in under a year. Like
any entrepreneur, he couldn’t do that all himself and he couldn’t work with all these big brands, plus run a
blog, plus do [inaudible] coaching. There’s no way he could do this all himself.

I’ve come to get to know Bryan over the last couple of months. It’s been a real pleasure for many reasons
and one of them is his knowledge of outsourcing and delegation, something I’m honestly not that good and
something I could work on. So this is one of the most highest-demand topics that people had in terms of
what they wanted to see in SEO THAT WORKS, and Bryan has a ton of experience with outsourcing. He
does a great job with it and he has a ton of experience to share with us today. So Bryan thanks for coming
to SEO THAT WORKS.

BH: Yeah, thanks for having me on Brian.

BD: Sure. So the first thing I wanted to ask is basically for people that have either never outsourced parts of
their business before or people like me who have outsourced part of it and had mixed success. Sometimes
it goes great, sometimes it doesn’t go well. Would you recommend in terms of a step-by-step – where should
someone start with the outsourcing process?

BH: The first step I would give is to keep it extremely small and keep your expectations really, really, really
low. I think a lot of people have the assumption you can go hire somebody for $3/hour, and hand them your
entire business and they’ll run it.

2
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

What I’ve found with me and I’ve only been outsourcing for about 2 ½ years, but what I’ve found is the
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
problem 99.9% of the time – if you run into problems – isn’t the person, it was you.

Either it was you hiring poorly because you hired too quick and you hired the cheapest person on oDesk,
you didn’t give – usually it’s the second one though – usually it’s your instructions suck. You didn’t give a
good enough instruction to the person in order for them to properly execute the job. In your mind, you did.
You know SEO, so if you go tell somebody, “Go research 100 different keyword variations for the word ‘guest
posting’ and give me a report that has these three columns,” you would expect somebody that has SEO in
their skillset to be able to go do that. But the problem is people don’t know SEO like you know SEO. If I ask
somebody to go write a blog post outline for me based on these three things, they’re going to send me
something, but based on that instruction alone it’s not going to meet near what I expect.

Two things I’ve discovered is one, being very diligent in hiring and two, being super clear. We can dive into
strategies on how to be both of these. These are kind of higher-level, but two, be super clear on your
instructions you’re giving and maybe a third thing is keep your task in the beginning really, really, really
small.

BD: Can you give us an example of a type of small task you’d start someone off with?

BH: Yes. I’m actually doing this right now with your Skyscraper Method. That’s something I want to do
retroactively to some posts and do going forward to select posts. I have a guy that’s helping me do that. So
I wanted to put together a list – my step one final deliverable was an Excel spreadsheet of 100 sites that had
backlinked to articles that were related to the article I was writing, so basically the Skyscraper Formula. But
I didn’t want to spend the time to go out and find the root articles and then do all the reverse analysis and
then do the most time-consuming part, which was finding the email addresses associated with them.
Because exporting the sites, you can do that with Open Site Explorer pretty quick. Honestly, that didn’t take
a lot of time, but then researching and finding the right email addresses can take a lot of time because
there’s no one go-to method.

The task that most people would’ve come up with that would be posting to oDesk and describing everything.
“I want an Excel spreadsheet of 100 domains that are related to this topic and the email addresses
associated with them.” You’re setting yourself up for disaster with that. The way I broke it down was I told

3
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

them the final deliverable of what I wanted, but then I broke it down, I said, “Let’s just start with five.” I even
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
gave them the root article. My article was on building an email list, but I went and found an article that had
been backlinked to – I think it was a conversion Excel article. It had been backlinked to 26 times.

So I said, “All right, here’s the root article. It has 26 backlinks. Here’s how to get those 26 links.” So we just
walked through the process all on Skype, screen shared so he could see me doing it. We’re recording the
call too, so I can upload that later for instruction. Then I said, “All right, here’s your root article, this is how I
found it. Here are the 26 articles that link to that root article and here’s how you export those. Then what
you need to do is find the email addresses for the author or if it’s a guest post, find the email address for the
site owner so we can email them.” I gave him five or six different strategies. I gave him articles because the
email part can be tricky. There’s a lot of different things sometimes that you have to do. Sometimes it’s easy
as guessing firstname@domainname.com. Sometimes you have to do other stuff, so I gave him five
different articles and some of them I’d written about researching email addresses.

I said, “I want you to spend two hours, that’s your time limit. You have a two hour time limit and I want you
to give me back these five sites, one root name, five of the 26 articles with email addresses. See if you can
do that and if you can do that to a reasonable success, then I’ll allow you to do the next 100.” With him I
incremented it, so once he did the first five, he did the next 21 to finish up that one article.

Then I had him go and research – I wanted to get a list of 200 root links pointing because I figured there’d
be some overlap and some that weren’t relevant. So I had him then research enough articles to give me 26
or to give me 200 total linking articles. So that was a step. Then we broke it down to find the email addresses
associated with it. That’s done and then the next step, I broke it down even further. “I want you to draft up
one outreach email.”

So I gave him access to another Gmail account that had my Gmail account associated with it, so he couldn’t
get into my inbox and he drafted up one email. I proofed that email. He drafted up five more emails. I proofed
those to make sure they were good and then today, he’s drafting up all 100 of them. He won’t send them
because I want final eyes on it, but it saves me the step of having to write all those freaking emails. So all I
have to do is log into that email account and they’re sending from Bryan@Videofruit just inside of another
Gmail account and I can just go through and hit send, send, send, send, send, send, send.

4
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

That’s the first time I’m doing it. We’ve recorded all the video of me showing him how to do it. He’s actually
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
writing a Google document with screenshots that I’ll probably want to be a guest post on my site teaching
people how to outsource this. Next time I do it, I can just tell him, “Here’s the article, here’s the keyword. Give
me 100 email addresses,” and he can do all of it then. But I’ve tested him through every step of the process,
held his hand, excruciating amount of detail and Skype calls and back and forth. But now once he’s trained
on that, he’s written a document I had videoed. The next guy that comes along, if he winds up bailing out
on me, I can just hand him that and do half of the work and have him up to speed.

That’s kind of an example of breaking it down very, very small and then expanding it, if he shows
competence in speed and quality of work and then giving him the bigger task.

BD: Okay. Well, Bryan, even if we ended the call right now, you’ve already provided enough value, honestly.
That was insane because, I think, for many people watching this, SEO THAT WORKS students and
graduates along with me, it’s totally different than how we view outsourcing. I think the 4-hour work week
set up some maybe unrealistic expectations about what outsourcing is that you can just, like you said, hire
somebody at

$3/hour and be like, “Run my business. I’ll be at the beach, let me know if anything goes wrong.”

Like you said, there’s actually a lot of work in outsourcing. I remember Noah Kagan that we both know from
AppSumo, he had a great sales letter for his hiring course and it was basically something like, “I’m so busy,
I need to hire someone and now I need to spend time hiring someone too.” I think that’s the idea that most
people have. It’s like, “If I had all this time, I wouldn’t need to hire anybody.” But there’s no shortcut.

The idea is that Bryan has had so much success with outsourcings because he put up all his up front time
to hold this person’s hand and most importantly develop systems like a real business and then he can pass
it off to the next guy when this freelancer who never really gets sick or the dog dies or all the other stuff
that happens to freelancers all the time. They have the worst luck.

BH: But you can take a shortcut. The shortcut is pay more money.

BD: You think so. So you can do that.

5
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

BH: If somebody can hire you, if somebody paid you $2,000/hour, you would do the Skyscraper Method for
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
them and they don’t have to tell you anything. They just say, “Do the Skyscraper Method” and you do it. At
some point, like if you pay a $40/hour worker, somebody that’s skilled and is used to doing this stuff, you
don’t really have to – all you have to do is say, “Hey Bryan or SEO dude that knows what they’re doing, go
read this article and point them to the…” The Skyscraper post is an instruction manual on how to do the
Skyscraper Method. So if you want somebody to do that method for you, send them the article, pay them
$40/hour and give them the article you want to drive traffic to. You’re going to have to hold hands a lot less.

The problem is either you have to have time or money. If you have neither, you’re screwed. If you just have
time, then you can spend less, but you’re going to probably have to probably go through a few more people
and you’re going to have to be way more intentional. But I’ve found there’s a skill in hiring people and
training them. If you pay a bunch of money right out of the gate, that’s kind of, to me, a bad method because
it doesn’t develop the skill of you having to break things down in excruciating details. I think that’s a really
good skill to have, of being able to know: all right this is the big task, but here are the 30 sub-tasks, let me
start with one of those. Find somebody, vet them, and let them try that.

That kind of goes into the second point, which is hiring. That can be part of your hiring process. I just
happened to know the guy I outsourced this to. He was somebody I met actually through AppSumo. There’s
a guy that lives in the states here and had done some work recently for me on some completely unrelated
stuff, so I just hit him up and he was interested. But if you were outsourcing this task and you needed
somebody fresh, you could put a task on Elance that says “I need you to find 20 backlinks for me and find
the email addresses.”

But as part of the vetting process, you want them to give a bid just like normal, but anybody that gives a bid,
go ahead and reply to them and say, “Hey, as a test project, what I want you to do is here’s the root domain,
I want you to find five linking sites to it and five email addresses and here’s a little bit of instruction.” Don’t
go into a crazy amount of detail there. Then see if that can do that small thing. It’s free. Some people will
say they’re not going to do free work. That’s fine. You don’t want them anyway because they’re not eager
enough. You want somebody that’s really eager.

I do this – anybody I hire from scratch now, they always do some level of free work for me first. Not because

6
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

I’m cheap. I totally want to pay them and I want to pay them well, but if they’re not willing to spend an hour
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
basically filling out a job application, which is what that is – it’s just a little mini-interview of seeing their
actual work – that’s a great way to vet people.

Give them a little small thing, ask them to do it for free, ignore anybody that says that’s stupid and then
judge the quality and speed of work of anybody that applied for that, and their results. Just see who was
most accurate in their email submissions, or whatever the task is that you’re trying to sub out.

BD: Okay. Good stuff man. I think this goes against how most people do it. That’s probably why most people
struggle with outsourcing. I used to follow that. I’ve been better lately. I’m not where you’re at, and I want to
be. But I used to be like, yeah, post a job, hire someone, give them a full task, either it’ll be great or it’ll be
awful. It’s usually [inaudible] between and if it was awful I had to post the job again and it was eventually
like I’ll just do this myself.

But I think that you can find more information with one test than you could talking to someone two hours
on Skype. It’s like a talk, “Oh, you got a basketball? Okay, so tell me how do you dribble? What’s your
rebounding strategy? Boxing out, what do you do?” First you just hand him the basketball and be like “Go.”
Yeah, let’s play. Like if you’re a scalp for baseball or basketball, just watch a guy play right. That’s the number
one thing.

So with this, you’re not asking them to work for free because you’re not using their work. You’re giving all
the same tasks; it’s going to overlap. You’re not giving them an hour so then you can get work for free. It’s
really the only way to test. So that’s really good. Where do you go? Do you tend to go to sites like Elance,
oDesk, or do you have some other resources that you find people to help you?

BH: It depends on the task. Like if you’re doing design work, one of the strategies I like to do is go to Swiftly.
You can go to Dribbble or Swiftly. Swiftly is usually – it’s actually owned by 99 Designs, but you can get little
$19 design projects done. So I’ve gone there and found three or four different designers that I work with now
by posting – like I need an e-book cover made. Here’s the basic spec, here’s a few comps. That’s another
part of – especially in design work, is give them something that kind of looks like something you want. If
you want an e-book cover design, find two or three e-book covers and say “These are three examples I like.
Here’s what I don’t like about this. Here’s what I like about this and here’s maybe a general guideline of what

7
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

I want. Here’s three examples.” Then they can do something.

www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
But for 19 bucks, you can find somebody that does a decent job, then you have their email address and you
can just contact them directly to get them to do bigger work for you. I’m working on kind of a new project
of doing some industry explainer videos, like trying to explain larger concepts that I don’t feel like have
been taught well by doing these cool videos. So I’m trying to find an illustrator right now. I’ve never hired
an actual illustrator before, so I’m doing Swiftly and I’m doing Dribbble. So the second task on Dribbble is –
Dribbble, you can just go look at people’s work. It’s basically like Facebook for design. People just post
projects they’re working on on Dribble. It’s invitation only, so it’s really curated very well.

If I was wanting stickman illustration, you just type in ‘stickman’ into Dribbble and you get 500 people that
have drawn stickmen, you find the one that is kind of like the design you have in your head, and then tweet
at the guy. I think Dribbble has a higher feature built in, but I’ll usually go to their personal site, find their
email address and email them and say, “Hey, I’m Bryan. I’m looking for something like this, are you
interested?” Then you can start a conversation with them and get a quote from them. So Dribbble and
Swiftly for design.

BD: Before you go on, can I just ask you how Swiftly works? Is it similar to Elance, but it’s a flat fee or you
have people bid and you choose someone, but they can only bid $19?

BH: Yeah, it’s really, really easy. $19 for everything. You post a task and then it goes into a pool. You don’t
really see any of this back end stuff, and then a designer picks it up, submits their work and if you approve
it, they get paid the 19, if you don’t they revise it. If they get to a point where they just don’t want to do it, they
put it back in the pool and someone else picks it up and does it.

BD: Wow! So there’s no looking at bids. You just put it in and they’re just…

BH: No, and it’s one hour. As soon as somebody picks it up, they have an hour to finish it and you’re done.

BD: You’re kidding me. So you’re telling me that right now, you can get an e-book cover – you put it out there
and how long does it take for that person to grab it and then start?

BH: Like an e-book cover, it’d be really quick. Sometimes I’ve given more complex tasks and they’re like this

8
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

is too big for Swiftly. Like one time I wanted an order page design and it had – like, I wanted one that looked
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
like Neil Patel’s page. So I just said, “Hey, I want this kind of page, but kind of tweaked for me.” They were
like “Hey, that’s a lot of work.” So I just said, “All right, give me the header,” and they did that [crosstalk]. “Give
me the bottom part,” and they did that part for 19 and then the [crosstalk].

BD: You had the same person do it, or is it just one person grabs it?

BH: I used the same person for that. After the project you say, “Hey, I would like to contact you directly for
stuff, can you give me your email?” A lot of times what they’ll do is send you to their 99 Design profile which
gives you the ability to contact them directly via email or whatever. Pretty much every designer has come
from Swiftly/99 Designs, or Dribbble by seeing their work.

I’ve done Dribbble for app development. Right now, I’m working on a little app for Videofruit and I kind of
had some rough ideas of what I wanted, but when I try to mock it up and [inaudible] it’ll look terrible. So I
went to Dribbble, and did a search for some keywords associated with the general thing I was designing,
found a few people that really get a [inaudible] design and either you can go two routes. One, that just gives
you the idea for design so you can do it, or you can just contact that person and say, “Hey, you’re design’s
incredible. If I pay you $500 will you design this whole app for me?” They’re like, “Yeah, sure,” and I’ve had
stuff done that way too.

BD: Wow, that’s [inaudible]. It’s almost like a trial task, but you’re paying them. You’re getting something you
want out of it. Then you can just – like I’ve found like for graphic stuff – that’s been a huge thorn in my side
for over the last two years since I started Backlinko, designers are always hard and I found out the test
project is so huge, so huge now because what can someone say about their design ability. Some people say
I have a Masters of Fine Art or whatever and I’m like, “I don’t care.” Can you design this infographic or not.
Lately I’ve been doing that.

I’ve been kind of using smaller projects as almost like a [inaudible] and now I have three designers, which
is like blowing my mind. They’re all excellent, they’re all punctual and it didn’t happen that way. Usually I’d
hire someone, pay upfront like an idiot and only for poorer work. So that’s good. What other resources
would you recommend, not just for design work, but for finding help in general?

9
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

BH: On the design thing before we move on from that, the thing on Dribbble is their test. You can do tests
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
with them to test communications skills and promptness, but I found Neil Patel’s infographic designer on
Dribbble by just scrolling through and I was like “Hey,” I noticed the design immediately. I was like that’s
that chick that Neil uses. So I contacted her and talked to her. I haven’t hired her for anything yet because
she’s kind of expensive. But you can go use Neil’s and you know she’s good because you’ve seen Neil’s work.

As far as other resources, I used to use TaskRabbit a lot for stuff that was kind of immediate. With overseas
stuff, usually there’s a 24-48 hour delay just communication wise. TaskRabbit just changed up their site,
which is really weird currently. You can usually find people for 10-20 bucks an hour on TaskRabbit. Like if
I need something researched really quick, you go post a task there, they bid on it, you hire them. I think
they’re still tweaking that, so hopefully they’ll come back and be more useful.

BD: Yeah, I used to like TaskRabbit too. I have a success with them because TaskRabbit’s like – the type of
person on there is totally different than at Elance. That’s someone who actually like in real life show up for
something. Like if you have a party and you need someone to serve drinks and that person actually went
to that event and served drinks and did a good job and left on time, or sometimes they stayed extra to clean
up and stuff, that’s the type of person you want to work with. On Elance, it’s so easy to flake out and so many
people flake out. I found at TaskRabbit – was like, first of all, Americans, who I prefer to work with and
they’re also people who are like – they have more integrity, I feel like than on the other freelancer sites. But
then, all of a sudden I put a job and actually it cancelled because they changed their system and now I can’t
make heads or tails of how to use it.

BH: Yeah, I don’t know what they’re thinking. It’s completely unusable now. I guess another one is
onlinejobs.ph. I found that’s good for finding researchers. I found a couple of really good assistants on there.
More technical work, I haven’t had a lot of luck, like programmers and designers, and that kind of thing, like
video editors – usually like C-minus quality, but researchers, assistants kind of people, you can find them.
I got an assistant right now, I pay $3 an hour and she’s incredible.

She’s really prompt, does really good stuff.

BD: A lot of this is because you’re doing what you had described earlier with that guy, right.

10
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

BH: Yeah, so this one girl I have, the thing I wanted her initially for – I had a bunch of miscellaneous task
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
that she could do for me that I was doing. The thing I hired her for initially was to help me run my coaching
program. Basically all that was was log into Gumroad, which charges, log into my calendar and go to this
spreadsheet and make sure the spreadsheet is updated, keep a ledger on each person with a link to the
Wistia video. Just make it like – all I want to do is come to this spreadsheet and be able to see everything:
when they’re next appointment is, the record of every call, a link to the notes about the call. All that stuff
and just update it daily so it never gets behind.

The first thing I hired her for was “I just want you to make a spreadsheet of all my customers and the date
they bought.” So she did that, and I was like, “All right, now let’s add this ledger thing,” which links to another
tab in Google docs, which has a list of every time their payment processed, every call that’s been made and
a link to the notes. Then she made that part for one person. Then once she got that right, I said, “All right.
Do that for all other 20 people.”

It just gradually grew and now she does a bunch of stuff, but start with the one thing, like a one-30 minute
task, and then make it an hour task, then make it a two-hour task. The management process of that is really
important too and this is where I think the tech part of things is way behind. I haven’t found a good program
specifically designed to manage five or six different people at a time. So I use Trello to kind of do that and
have a system that I like, but I wish there was some software that really made the management of all these
different – because some are one-time tasks, some are recurring tasks. That can kind of get a little jumbled
up. Being able to track all this is very important too, or else you’ll get in way over your head and not even
know what’s going on, not be able to double check back behind them to make sure they’re doing what you’re
telling them to do and you get yourself in trouble if you’re not really paying close attention in the beginning.

BD: Okay, so those are all the places you go to find people you described.

BH: Elance and oDesk obviously. Like I’ll go [crosstalk] programming work mainly. Onlinejobs.ph for
research, assistant type of work, and Dribbble for…

BD: You had mentioned one other time, this Wordpress specific service. It’s not so much outsourcing, but
you really spoke highly of it. What is it called?

11
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

BH: WP Curve. I guess technically, they are outsourced, but you don’t ever have to hire anybody. I think they
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
actually outsource people in the Philippines. I’m not sure how they [inaudible] fulfillment, but you pay $69
a month. If you’re listening to this and you haven’t bought, go buy immediately because they will raise their
price eventually. There’s no way they’re going to keep charging $69. But you’re grandfathered in if you get
it. But for $69 a month, they’ll make unlimited small changes to your website for you.

A lot of people get caught up in ‘what is a small change’? They’ve actually – I’m working on a program right
now and they basically built it. They did an API integration for me and did the basic code and I took the
code, which was kind of the hard part of the work and now I’m getting a designer to design it up and I’m
getting another programmer to make it a little prettier and make it where people can install it as a plug-in,
but they did the core of it. I said, “Hey, I want you to attach Wistia to my email program and also to my
Wordpress site and use these three API integrations. They built that, which I was shocked they did. I just
send it to them just to see if they would say yes and they did it.

But I went from paying $200-$300 a month for a bunch of small changes – from like a good coder that
charged reasonable rates. He was good; he wasn’t ripping me off at all. But it went from doing $200-$300 a
month for “Do this $20 job, or this $10 job, or this $50 job,” and I pay them $69 for two times the work because
I know they’re cheap, so I give them way more stuff.

BD: I got to try that because my guy who’s very expensive, but he’s like amazing, I just have him do
everything because I know it’s in good hands. But it’s also – he works a lot, tons of hours because of all those
little things and I just trust him. I wish that there was somebody else that I can delegate smaller stuff to
them and then he does more of the bigger stuff. So that’s really helpful.

BH: He’d probably like that, not to have to go in and do this stupid stuff. Those kind of guys don’t like doing
mundane tasks and WP Curve will totally do that stuff.

BD: All right, I’m going to talk to him about it because he’s almost like a partner, this guy. He’s so, so helpful.
One of the few people that I’ve found that was great, and we’ve been working together for over a year. So
you touched on the vetting process. Is that really all you do, you put a job out, you get the candidates, what
else do you look at besides a test task. Who do you even contact for that test task? I know you don’t go to
everybody. What do you use to vet people?

12
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

BH: I’ll do a couple of things. When I write the actual job description, I’ll have at least one or two things inside
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
of that job description that are kind weird, not dumb, but they have to do when they’re submitting their post.
So I’ll usually write the whole post and usually in the first line, I’ll say, “Reply to this with a subject line of
‘x,y, z’”, and if people don’t pay enough attention to that in the job posting when they should be hyper aware,
they’re going to miss all kind of details later. So that’s one thing I do, and then at the end of the post, I’ll say
“To apply for this job...” and then I’ll list out three or four things, which is: include a sample, which I don’t
usually pay that much attention to. But I’ll say like “Include it as a PDF attachment to this posting and not a
Word doc or a link to a Google doc or any of his other dumb stuff.” So it’s really easy for me.

I’ll usually send them to – depending on what I’m outsourcing, I’ll usually send them to a good Google form.
So the action item for them is click this link, go to this form, fill out this form and that form will have this
type of information, which is attach a doc, do this quick little task for me. Actually, on a lot of my more
complex stuff like writers and stuff like that, I’ll not give them a free task right out of the gate. I’ll ask them
to do a couple of things, like do a little bit of research, attach this as a PDF, like that kind of stuff. Then
anybody that applies and successfully does everything that I asked them to do, then I’ll reply to them with
the test project. Then it’s just a matter of – usually by that time – I did this recently on ProBloggers. This is
another one, ProBloggers Job Board. I think it’s jobs.problogger.net for writers. That’s the best place to go
that I’ve found.

BD: Really? Better than a regular freelance site, sites like Elance?

BH: Yeah, oh yeah. Because you have to pay about 50 bucks for a listing there so it keeps [crosstalk] weeded
out. Like with them, they’ll all fill out a form and then anybody that does that, they’ll submit a sample article
back to me. I don’t make them 1500 word articles, but it’ll be maybe a section of an article I want you to
describe in painstaking details to make sure you can have the skillset to be able to do that.

Then it’s just – usually from a Pro Blogger’s ad, I’ll get 50 or 60 people that fill out the form. By the time I
weed them out, I’ll have 15 or 20 that actually did what I asked them to do. Then of that 15 or 20, I’ll get maybe
5-8 that actually will submit a test project back to me. Then it’s a matter of just looking over those 5-8
articles and seeing which one’s the best.

Sometimes I’ll even hire two or three of them and say, “All right, I want to pay you $50, or $75 or $100 and I

13
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

want you to write this 1,000 word article for me.” I’ll get all of them to write it.
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
Sometimes you’ll find two or three good writers at a time.

Sometimes you’ll get one back that’s good and the other two are just kind of off. I don’t want to spend a ton
of time critiquing you in the very beginning.

Ideally for me, the ideal person to hire is somebody that we sync up so much that I don’t have to hold your
hand a ton. The less hand holding, the better. To some degree, you’re always going to have to do that. So if
you can find of those eight people that submitted a sample, which one is really eager, which one’s priced
well, which one does quality work, and which one kind of gets you in what you want more than the others.
Then you just hire them and use them. So it’s kind of a three-tiered process: do the job ad, ask for the form
with a couple of little weird things, give them a test project, and then finally pick the people that you like
the most.

BD: So you don’t spend a ton of time looking at their feedback and how long they’ve been on the site and
their portfolio?

BH: Not really because I found that stuff really isn’t, especially on Elance and oDesk, that stuff doesn’t really
matter at all.

BD: It doesn’t correlate with what they’re going to deliver right? It should.

BH: If they’ll spend the time to do all that – because the thing is, especially on writers and designers, my
quality level and standards are infinitely higher than 99% of other blogs out there. Some [crosstalk] might
have hired him and gave him a five star, well that doesn’t mean anything to me because I would’ve never
read that article ever.

BD: Right. Good point. That’s a really good point. If you have good standards, you need like a ten-star guy to
really [crosstalk].

BH: It’s kind of a ‘show, don’t tell model’, so I don’t really care what you tell me, just show me what you can
do, and the other stuff, I really could care less about.

14
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

BD: That’s really good. Honestly, I thought this would go like an hour, but you just dropped like insane
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
amounts of stuff that I’m going to actually use for my business. It’s really helpful. There was one thing that
you didn’t mention that I know you use and I’ve started to play with it, which is called SweetProcess, maybe
you can talk a little bit about that.

BH: I’m doing this with the Skyscraper Technique. Part of our process of going through this for the first of
time in tons of details is documenting it as we go. You can do that in a Google doc, you can do it in an
Evernote file. What I’ve found, if you are going to outsource this, if you’re going to do this more than two or
three times, it’s probably a good task to outsource most likely, unless it’s just your core competency. My
main blog post, I probably will never outsource because it’s one thing that I do really well, and it would be
really hard to find someone to do it – and I’d have to pay them a lot. So SweetProcess, something like the
Skyscraper Method, I could care less about doing that manually. I really want to pay somebody $75 or $100
an article just to go do that for me and me not spend the time on it. As we’re doing this, we’re making a
process that we can hand to a fifth grader that doesn’t know anything about SEO and they can do it. That’s
kind of how you need to think about your training as well like could you hire your eight-year old nephew to
do this for you.

BD: But that’s not for everyone, right. You’re talking literally…

BH: It depends on the task, but most of the time, yeah, you need to be able to break it down to that detail. It
forces you to have to be a better teacher.

BD: Right. [crosstalk] explain to me like I’m five.

BH: Yeah, but could an eight-year old go find me 200 links? Yeah, why not. If you gave them the proper
filtering criteria, yeah, they could. I’ve started cooking a lot lately. High-end cooking is a different level, but
basic cooking, you just freaking follow instructions. If you want to cook fish on the grill, I didn’t know how
to do that five weeks ago. I’d never done it, but I just opened up Wikihow and followed the instructions and
I’m like, “Well, that was really easy.” I don’t think there’s no such thing as a bad cook, there’s just bad
instruction followers and bad instruction givers. If you can follow instructions, you can create instructions.

So circling back around to SweetProcess. To me it’s the best system I’ve found for actually documenting

15
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

processes because it does it in a really nice checklist fashion. You can embed video and pictures into it
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
and it makes it really easy to structure and to follow because if you have a Google doc with all of these
instructions, you either have to spend a bunch of time formatting it, or you wind up with a bunch of crap on
a paper that’s hard to follow. That’s the whole purpose of doing it is to make it really easy for somebody to
follow. Because usually the better you can describe it, the cheaper you can get it done for.

BD: Okay. That’s good. That’s like a tweet, well, it’s a course, so you can’t tweet it out. That is really well said.

BH: So SweetProcess just does a great job of making the formatting really easy and you can just send a link
to them and you can get notifications of when they’ve done it. So if it’s like a recurring, weekly task – if one
of my tasks to this guy is “I want you to do a one [inaudible] Skyscraper a week and I want you to rotate
through this spreadsheet of articles.” So I list out 20 articles, so over the next 20 weeks, you have your tasks,
but I want to know that he’s doing it, then I’ll get a ping every Monday that says, “Hey, he finished this task.”
I wish it would go more in depth for some of the management side and I think they have that direction but
it does some basic management of tasks already. So it kind of helps you in making sure the tasks are
actually finishing.

A couple of more things before I forget. I have a – this is something I do because I was so poor at outsourcing
in the beginning. I actually have a short code that I don’t mind sharing with you if you want, but I have \task
and anytime I want to write an email to somebody to create a new task, I just open up my email program
and hit \task and these parameters pop up. This is kind of the couple of things that are there. One is a
summary. So it’s a summary.

BD: I have no idea what you’re talking about right now. What’s a short code? I’m not going to look very
technologically savvy right now but you lost me at short code. It’s like a text expander thing?

BH: Text expander basically. There’s some things you need to do every time you outsource something, in
my mind, to make sure you’re telling them everything you need to do. One of them is a summary of the
task. Give me the short version of what you want. The second thing is give me the detailed version of what
you want, so break it down. If it’s super long, give a link to the SweetProcess document. Don’t write a 3,000
word email. The third thing is a deadline. Make sure you give them a deadline of when you want it done by.
One way to do that, especially when you’re working with people overseas or not in your own time zone, is

16
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

tell them you want this done eight hours from the time they received it. If you tell them a time of day, it gets
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
confusing with time zones. That’s a real little nuance that makes a massive difference in communication.

BD: Well, why does that help so much, giving them the deadline of a time from when they read it?

BH: Let’s say right now it’s 11 a.m. and I want this done by the close of business. If I just tell them I want this
done by close of business, it’s like whose close of business and then what was your time zone so I can look
at the conversion. But if you just say I want this done six hours from now, then that’s their task. Another
thing is the deliverable. Make sure you tell them the thing you want very clearly. So for the Skyscraper
thing, “I want 100 drafts in my secondary Gmail account within eight hours.” That’s the task. That’s very
clear. There’s a bunch of other crap you need to do and you can check the checklist for that, check the
SweetProcess document, but the deliverable is 100 drafts in my Gmail account. That’s the deliverable.

BD: Those last two things you mentioned, people don’t do. I think most will give the summary. Obviously,
you have to give them something and then the long one, I think that also people probably don’t make it so
detailed that an eight-year old fifth grader could do it. That’s another thing because it just takes a lot more
work to do that. It’s a lot easier to just do the deliverable. But also I like the time limit, the way you did it and
I also like the deliverable, so everyone’s on the same page about what’s the end result of this work.

BH: The last one is something we kind of already talked about, but I have it called check-back here, like how
long – this is real important the first time or the first couple of times you’re doing a task or if it’s a one all
task that’s going to take – if you’re doing ten hours of research, I don’t want to hear from you at the end of
ten hours, I want to hear from you after like two hours with a sample of what you’re doing to make sure
you’re not going off on some crazy tangent. It was well-intentioned. So I put a check-back and I specifically
have it written out, “I would like you to check back with me after completing the first ‘x’ hours. I’ll verify that
you’re doing it correctly and then give you a go-ahead on doing the rest of it.”

So, a summary, details, a hard deadline of when you want the entire task finished, the deliverable of exactly
what you want them to send you. Do you want a Google doc, do you want to whatever the thing is, the time
it should take – I guess that’s the same thing. Total number of hours is really what that is. If the deadline is
three days from now, how many working hours do you want them to spend on this because they have other
stuff going on, so I want you to spend four hours total on this task, but you have three days to do it. So you

17
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

[crosstalk] however you want. www.getwsodo.com

www.getwsodo.com
BD: So like a deadline versus the time that it will take to complete.

BH: Exactly. So on the Skyscraper, it could easily be a three-day project that he kind of did all this other stuff
on. But we had a strict time limit. I want you to spend four total hours on this project. That may or may not
be reasonable. I don’t really know because I’ve never done it, so check back with me after two and then we
kind of broke this up into small pieces so I could see how long it’s taking him. But on the next time I give it
to him, I won’t go into all of that detail. I’m just going to say, “Hey, you have four hours, here’s the article,
here’s your [inaudible] keywords, you have four hours to complete it. Check back with me after an hour to
make sure we’re on the same page, and that the final deliverable’s 100 drafts to my Gmail folder.”

I have that as a text expander thing, so anytime I go to do a task, I hit \task and all of those things pops up.
That forces me to give good instructions. I found that if all of those things are filled out, people don’t have
questions, they get it. You’re going to get [crosstalk] that way.

BD: I love that. It doesn’t matter what it is. You’re asking someone to split the item or to find email addresses,
it’s fixed. That’s really the things you have to hit when you actually hire do the person. Do you have
anything else before we go?

BH: I think that’s it.

BD: That was good. I’m glad you threw that in at the end. I think it’s a good way to sum up what you should
be doing, because if you can’t fill in that stuff that means your system isn’t clear enough for someone else.
That’s another mistake people make with outsourcing, wanting somebody [inaudible] in the beginning is
leave decision-making up to the person you’re outsourcing.

Unless you’re hiring someone who knows more about that than you do, you don’t want to do that. By having
this super clear criteria for every task that you send someone, it forces you, not them to step up and to be
really specific about what you’re looking for. A lot of times you’ll find, as I did when I started doing this sort
of thing, struggling with filling that stuff out. That was like gaps in my thinking and I was like, ‘Wait a second
if I can’t figure this out, exactly what I want, how is this random guy going to do it that doesn’t even know
my business at all.” So that’s helpful.

18
BONUSES TRANSCRIPTION ADVANCED OUTSOURCING STRATEGIES

BH: One last tip would be force yourself to as much as humanly possible – don’t outsource something that
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
you haven’t done before, especially in the beginning. Don’t go tell somebody to go do the Skyscraper if
you’ve never done any part of that process at all because your instruction is going to be terrible. There’s
some level of you – it’s kind of like the E-Myth Revisited, that book, like you’re the CEO, but you’re also the
floor sweeper too. You’ve swept the floors, you can write the guideline on sweeping a floor to get somebody
else to do it. If you haven’t, the trial and error is a lot harder if you haven’t done the task.

Just force yourself to do the Skyscraper for 20 people, one time, and then you can give a lot better
instruction on it. That would be one last [tip]. Especially in the beginning, if you’re just starting out, don’t
outsource stuff you haven’t done. Not that you have to design infographics, because you probably suck at
designing infographics, but maybe find Neil Patel’s instructions on how to outsource infographics and use
that as your basis, not your own thinking, because your own thinking’s probably really bad on stuff you
haven’t done yourself. There’s so many how-to articles out there. You can use those as your instructions a
lot of time. Feed off of other people’s stuff and try to do whatever it is yourself before outsourcing it, if at all
possible.

BD: It’s really good stuff. Bryan, thanks so much for stopping by SEO THAT WORKS and dropping some
outsourcing knowledge. For those of you out there who want to learn more about Bryan, which is probably
100% of the people watching this video because Bryan brought his A-game today, head over to
Videofruit.com, which is Bryan’s awesome internet marketing blog. Definitely in my shortlist of top five
internet marketing blogs online and if you want to skip some of this stuff as sort of a shortcut in terms of
hiring, Bryan has a program called The Vault and basically The Vault is his [inaudible] of things online that
he likes and also outsourcers that he’s worked with. So if you don’t want to do the whole vetting process,
but you’re ready to give people specific instructions, The Vault is great because then you can just go to the
people that he’s already vetted and tested in real life and you can email them and send them tasks. It’s been
very helpful for me and I’ve only signed up about two weeks ago.

So Bryan, that’s it. Thanks a lot for coming on.

BH: Thanks for having me.

BD: Cheers.

19