Remote workers, there are several advantages to having them help you with tasks and projects as a business owner or individual.
You can hire people at competitive rates and have them do work for you that previously most had to get a full-time employee from their locale to do.
So, there are a lot of good things when it comes to hiring freelance workers online.
And in this post I will show you some of the disadvantages of hiring a freelancer just so you know some of the things you can keep doing to get more out of every Shilling / minute you spend on projects / tasks you outsource.
Disadvantages of hiring freelancers online
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- Need direction at the beginning which you might not want to or be able to offer because of time constraints or lack of skill / experience in a particular field.
- May need a lot of back and forth on certain types of projects and even then they might not be completed / finished on time.
- Being in different time zones can sometimes lead to lag in communication which may be frustrating to you especially if you need a task to handles quickly but outsource it when the freelancer is almost going to bed.
- Sometimes a freelancer might disappear on you when you need them only to reappear later – when you have probably spent a lot of time agonizing about what is happening to them – which may be infuriating especially if their return also comes with excuses that just don’t make sense.
- You may find someone that is not dealing with you in good faith. For example, you can hire someone to write a blog post for you and end up being sent someone else’s work only to realize later when you have paid them. So, there are scammers out there (on both ends of course).
- It is hard to retain the good ones sometimes. You may work with someone on a few projects and then they will just go AWOL, not because they don’t enjoy freelancing (working with you) but because they were just doing it to make some extra money (and once they do, to shift their focus to other things in their lives) or because they find other ways to sustain themselves and stop accepting freelance work (e.g. when they start their own SaaS business / startup).
- Sometimes work you outsource will not be delivered on time even when you give the freelancer you hire plenty of time to finish their assignment. This can piss a lot of people.
What you can do to start getting a good return on the money and time you spend on freelancers
To turn most of the disadvantages I have listed above into things that can affect your relationship with the freelancers you hire positively, you can do some of the things here:
Have detailed briefs and instructions. For every online job you outsource make sure to create a detailed outline about what it is you need help with. Like most, freelancers you meet online, will not have the ability to read your mind even if they are really skilled at their field. You will have to tell them what you want in a way that they understand.
Do your best to make clarity your ally. Make sure that your instructions are simple and easy to understand. And instead of outsourcing work in bulk the first time, you might take things a bit slowly but outsourcing one or two tasks first to gauge if the freelancers you hire fully understand your instructions.
And from your interaction with a freelancer the first or second time you hire them, you can take lessons from the whole experience and use those lessons to make your briefs and instructions even better.
Spend time training them. Spend time showing the freelancers you hire how you want your stuff done. As a freelance writer myself I have seen clients approach this differently. Some will post 2 to 3 short videos on YouTube where they have recorded themselves talking about how they want their articles / blog posts to be written and formatted.
Others will usually link to some external resources to help a freelance writer understand how they want their articles to be written. Find an approach that works for you and employ it when you hire new people to help you out on your projects.
I do really like both of these approaches – using videos and linking to examples of similar work on other websites. Note also that, like some freelance clients, you can also resort to video calls to show the freelancers you hire all the things you think they should know in order to be able to create work that meets your expectations.
Find good freelancers and pay them well. This is another simple way to get more out of skilled freelancers. Don’t hold back when they deliver food work to you. Understand your numbers and then just meet good work with good pay.
Be generous. Be appreciative of good work and let the people you hire know that you understand how hard they are working to make your business grow and becomes even more profitable.
Give people you hire enough time to do their work. The best way to know how long it is going to take a freelancer to finish a task you outsource to them is:
- to ask them how long they generally take to complete work like the one you want them to do for you
- to think about how long it would take you to complete a similar assignment
- to read a bit about what it is you want to outsource. And to learn from the encounters of others who have gone before you
- to plan your projects ahead so that you won’t be in a mad rush to get stuff done and returned to you quickly
How to hire freelancers on Niabusiness Classifieds
Once you know what you want to outsource, you can go to Niabusiness Classifieds and check the ad listings in the various categories to find people you can hire.
On Niabusiness, you can hire people to:
- write content for you
- install and manage a WordPress site or WooCommerce online shop
- create and manage paid ads for you
- do audio transcription work
- product and edit videos
- do graphic, web and logo design work
- do sales and marketing for you
- manage your social media marketing
- build links for you, do outreach and SEO work
- fix your blog / website or migrate it to another web hosting company
- help you with email marketing tasks
- offer virtual assistant services
- develop an app / software / extension or write custom code
- do translation work
- help you with your ebook and online course
Just check the ad listings in one of the categories and click on the ad listings you like.
Reply to the ads and wait for the freelancers you contact to message you back.
From there you can give them more details about what you need help with, take a look at their samples, agree on a budget and a deadline and then outsource work to them.
Remember also that you can place your own ad listing on Niabusiness for free with details about what you need help with.