The Primary 3 Ways to Begin Outsourcing

By Bryan Haines, About.com Guide

Outsourcing has revolutionized the way business is done. No longer do business owners need to over invest in talent, office space and Human Resource managers. When you have a task that needs to be done, simply hire it out and move on to the next project.

With the growth of the industry, we have witnessed a diversification of the way tasks can be outsourced. Here are the three most common:

1. Outsourcing Portal

Here’s how outsourcing portals work: Place your project requirements and receive detailed bids on projects from a pool of talent. The bidders maintain a full online profile complete with feedback and ratings from previous clients. The portal acts as a go-between, ensuring tasks are completed and payments are made as contracted.

Popular example: Elance.com
Read interview with Elance CEO

2. Crowdsourcing

Here’s how crowdsourcing works: List your detailed requirements and have a pool of people compete, doing the work and pay the best result. This is very different from using an outsourcing portal. In this example, a number of people (or companies) actually complete the work but only one gets paid. While simple creative tasks can yield good results, complex tasks obviously will not offer the same quality because no one is ensured of even getting paid.


Popular example: SquadHelp.com

I recently completed a review of this service. Read the full SquadHelp.com review.

3. Economy Outsourcing

Here’s how economy outsourcing works: You can search a set of predefined tasks with predefined pricing. For example, for $5 you can find people who will:

• send 5 tweets to my 52,000!!! FOLLOWERS on Twitter about you or your company for $5
• write your 10-15 page User Guide for $5
• do a "movie trailer" style voice-over for your website/podcast/business, etc... for $5

My experience with these services is that they do get accomplished. If you have a complaint, you can claim your amount paid back. One of the complaints I’ve heard for the marketing tasks (promotion of a link in Twitter or Facebook) is that virtually all of the new traffic and fans are from India. Not that this is bad, unless India isn’t your target market.


Popular examples: Fiverr and UpHype.

Learn how to start outsourcing. Read the full interview with Elance CEO about how to outsource.