#33 How to Automate Your Staffing

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Welcome aboard for podcast #33! This is the final installment in our series on business automation and we are talking to you today all about how to automate your staffing. Here are some of the things you will learn;

Sites you can use to get expert help
What types of jobs you can post on these sites

What have Andrew and Heather learnt during the week? Andrew has been digging into local pages and listings – big if you are a bricks and mortar business. Everyone has an online footprint whether you like it or not. Even if you don’t have a website, people will often write reviews about your business on directory sites. It is important that you check online and find out what people are saying about your business and to check that directory information is up to date. In the case of a client Andrew was searching for, a competitor had filled out his details and included his own website! If you are a bricks and mortar business, make sure you search for yourself on Google to check! If you are a home-based business, you can also create your own listings.

Heather has a reminder about PDF documents and how to use them as marketing tools. You can try your best to put blocks on eBooks so that they can’t be passed on, but it is easy enough for people to pass on PDFs. So, seeing as it will probably happen anyway, include a call to action in the footer of the pages of your book. This way you may be able to capture those who receive your book for free if they sign up via links in your book.

What can you outsource?

IT and programming. We often use programming people from India as they tend to be pretty good. We have also found that for app development, there are many good people in Russia and the Baltic countries.
Sales and marketing.
Copywriting.
Admin and clerical duties.
Design and multi-media.
Writing, translation and transcription.
Personal Assistants.

Sites we like to use;

Elance – you can get most of the things here we have talked about above. Set up a free account and include your banking details. Search for the job you need doing e.g. ‘WordPress assistance’. This will give you a list of people whose bio matches and you can look through and check their portfolios. Alternatively, you can post a job to the general community. Be very specific so that you get more useful responses (you will get some that think they can do what you are asking but really can’t). When choosing a candidate, you can see information about them such as their ratings and how many hours they have logged on Elance. Also look at their portfolio, you can even contact some reviewers to reference check.Another feature we love about this site is that there is built in protection for both the employer and employee. This means that you fund an account for the job and only release the funds when you are happy with what is being done. As an employee, you can see that money is sitting there and the employer cannot take them back once they are there. If either party does not deliver what they are meant to, a dispute can be lodged with Elance.
ODesk – similar to Elance
Guru – similar to Elance
Rent a Coder – coding work
99 Designs – great for graphical work. This site is different as you just describe what you need then people bid on your job.
Fiverr – you can get nearly anything for $5. There are some excellent people on this site but be warned that there are also some who are very average. Check the reviews!

Bear in mind when you are hiring that you definitely do need to have a strategic aspect to what you do. A web designer is usually just that; a designer. If you are operating a business website you really need to ensure that it is set up from a marketing perspective as well and has all the parts in place that will help you with marketing.

Fiverr Gig of the Week: We are starting a new quest to look at what fiverr gigs are available that you can use to spice up your website etc. This week we got a video done for our podcast site – check it out!

Listener question from last week; Why didn’t you talk about MYOB or QuickBooks in the financial episode?
We wanted to make sure that we discussed tools that people may not have heard of as most have heard of both of those. The tools we talked about are great for entrepreneurs, although if you already use MYOB or QuickBooks those are great too, so if they work for you, keep using them!

Stay tuned next week for when we will be interviewing one of the online experts who contribute to our Online Footprint Magazine!