Outsourcing Check out any active Internet marketing forum and it is very likely that you will find a at least one discussion on time and time management, with contributors agreeing that there are never enough hours in the day to get everything done. Advice on how to get more done in a day will usually focus either on how to improve your time management skills, or how to leverage your time by finding other people to do your work for you. One way to leverage your time is to build a network marketing or affiliate downline in the hope that your downline will include enough active marketers to generate a healthy residual income for you. Another way to leverage your time is to outsource as much of your work as possible to freelance experts who you can track down on outsourcing websites such as elance.com, rentacoder.com, odesk.com or guru.com. Using one of these outsourcing services can be a great way to save yourself time and get your big projects completed quickly and cheaply with little effort on your part. However, you do need to take some precautions before you hire someone to do any work for you. Here are some of the points you should consider before signing a contract. 1. When you advertise your job, layout your requirements as clearly and precisely as possible. Give exact directions and clearly state the time limit, but don't set unrealistic targets. 2. As people respond with bids for your job be sure to check their profile. People who have not bothered to post information about themselves are clearly not taking their freelance role very seriously. Have they posted a biography? Is there a photograph? Do they look and sound professional? 3. Check how many jobs they have completed and the kind of feedback they have received for their previous work. You'll be able to do this via the feedback service available on sites such as elance.com or rentacoder.com. Filter out anybody who has too little experience or who has attracted negative feedback. 3. Ask those freelancers who got through your initial filtering process to provide you with a sample of their work. It is better if you set them a task to complete as this will provide you with a second level of filtering. For example, if you are looking for a competent copywriter, you could ask the candidates to provide you with a 200 word review of a product in your niche market. Those who do not respond in a timely manner should be eliminated without any further consideration. 4. The work which those who comply with your request send to you will give you a good indication of the quality of their work, and it will show you how well they followed your directions. Again, if you have requested a piece of written work, check it carefully for the quality of the English and consider whether it reads like an original piece of writing or whether it has been pasted together from other articles, or has been generated using article writing software. 5. So far I have not mentioned price as a factor in choosing the best candidate. It is a mistake to begin by looking at how much freelancers are charging for their work. Simply going with the lowest bid will not get you satisfactory results in most cases. Price should only be a factor once you have filtered the applications according to the criteria listed in the previous points. 6. It is quite possible that your strongest candidate will be somebody who lives on the other side of the world. This should not present you with any big problems provided you make allowances for possible time lags for freelancers who live in time zones that are several hours ahead or behind your own. Once you have found someone who produces good quality work according to your directions and in a timely manner for a reasonable fee, treat that person like gold dust because you will have found your outsourcing go-to person who can turn your Internet projects into realities much more quickly than you could do so yourself, and who could therefore prove to be one of your biggest moneyspinners over time.