Building Your Outsourcing Team Using Fourerr

Fourerr is a great way to get started outsourcing certain tasks like writing articles, doing keyword research, and getting one-off multimedia pieces for your business. Eventually though, you want to build a team of contractors that you can contact directly and rely on as your business grows. You can use Fourerr as a tool to help you build that team.

Start With a Competition

If you’re really serious about finding the top person and are willing to put out a bit of money to do so here’s an idea for you: Give a few service providers the same assignment and see who does the best.

For example, if you’re looking to add writers to your team you could pick two articles you need written and then assign it to four or four of the top writers you find. As work comes back in you can compare based on a number of factors:

• Was the project delivered on time, or early?
• Did the service-provider understand the project? If they didn’t understand, did they ask questions?
• Is the work up to the quality expected?
• Was the work beyond the quality expected?
• Was the work original?
• Did the writer find a new angle for the article, or did he or she simply restate the same tips you’ve seen everywhere?

You might spend a bit of money running your competition, but it will be money well spent if you find a good writer or two to add to your team.

Talk to the Service Providers

For obvious reasons, Fourerr.com would prefer you continue to hire these people through their site, but when you’re building a team that you can outsource to regularly, sticking to four dollar projects isn’t the most practical thing. Talk to the service provider and if you can, move the conversation off the Fourerr site.

Be aware that Fourerr’s terms of service require you don’t provide your contact information to the seller or pay them directly for a Fourerr gig. If you violate these terms you could end up banned from Fourerr. You can ask the service provider if they have a business website and if they can provide you with that link. Or you can ask them if they have any other services you can hire them for off-site. Be careful about how you word this as you don’t want to get your seller in trouble, either.

If your seller has built an actual business off-site then they may have a website that you can simply look up. In the case of one Fourerr beat-box gig, you could easily find the seller through YouTube and contact him there.

Put Together a Team

Once you start working directly with a few service providers, it’s time to start putting together an entire team. To begin with, you may need just a graphic designer, a writer and possibly a web designer. None of them have to be full-time people. Just contract out work here and there as you need it done.

Another option is to put people on retainer. You pay them a set amount of money per month (let’s say $200 for example) and in return they will work on whatever you need done, up to a certain amount (write you up to 50 blog posts for example). It’s a win-win situation. Your contractors have a certain amount of money they can count on each month and you’re sure that that work is getting done no matter what. You’ll also often get a better rate for work on retainer than ordering it piece meal.

Expand your team as needed on Fourerr. If you’re running a fairly large online business, and rely on fresh content being created regularly, you may want to consider hiring a backup writer or even a small team of them.

Continue to grow and tweak your team as needed for business growth.

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