Small businesses all around the world are increasingly turning towards freelancers for some tasks. When they don’t have enough money (can’t afford someone full-time) but want something done, they are not letting the money issue becoming a hindrance to them achieving their goals.
And though outsourcing tasks to online freelancers isn’t big with small business owners in Kenya, I share some reasons why someone would want to consider hiring out work to contractors. Further down, I share some of the things business owners everywhere in Kenya can easily outsource to freelancers.
Benefits of hiring online freelancers as a small business owner
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You don’t need to have someone full-time before you are able to start getting the benefit of their skill. If you need someone to integrate a payment gateway to your website and connect it to your in-store POS system you don’t need to get an employee with a degree or diploma in IT if you can’t afford it.
You can just get a freelancer for a few hours / days to help you set up everything at a cost that is affordable to you. If you need help with your bookkeeping, you can also still get help from freelancers if you are still in a position where you can’t hire someone full time for the role.
Another benefit is that if you are running a small operation and you don’t want it to be bloated (and suffer bureaucracy), if you are after running something lean, you can always just keep staff for the most essential roles and hire out everything else to competent freelancers online..
If you are a one or two person business or a one person business, you probably won’t need to have someone on staff for everything. You can just keep your number small and turn to freelancers whenever you want help with something your in-house team lack expertise in.
Another benefit to hiring freelancers is that you can quickly assemble a team to help you demand whenever there is a spike in customer numbers.
For example, when you experience a surge in traffic (owing to mentions in the media / or ads that are doing well), instead of placing job adverts and interviewing people for positions before they can become employees (and start work), you can just to freelancers to help you fulfill orders, manage customer requests, deal with support issues and the like. And when the spike dies down, you can simply scale down, have fewer people.
Things you can outsource to freelancers online as a business owner
Here are some of the things freelancers in Kenya can help you with.
Setting up a website and blog. If you need to take your business online, you can hire someone on Niabusiness.com or any other freelance marketplace to help you create a site. They can help you get a domain name / hosting (which you will pay for) and then get to work – adding SSL certificates, installing a content management system like WordPress, uploading files, adding plugins / themes / templates / extensions, adding pages and posts.
Adding features to your site / quick fixes. Freelancers can also help you fix problems that might occur when you are trying to make changes on your site. You an also hire them to introduce new features to your site using custom code or plugins.
Setting up an online shop. If you want a place of your own where you can sell your own products or services, you can hire freelancers to help you set up an online shop using WooCommerce, OpenCart, Shopify, ZenCart, Prestashop, Magento or another shopping cart software.
They can then add your products / services, add buy buttons, add cart / checkout pages, integrate payment gateway available to small business owners in Kenya such as Kopo Kopo Lipa na M-PESA, Pesapal, iPay, Jambopay, PayPal, Flutterwave and DPO Group.
They can also add email marketing providers to help you build a list and message your customers, add affiliate programs to your store and help you increase conversions on the most frequented pages on your shop.
Running ads online. Small businesses all around the world are increasingly turning to online advertising to increase sales / generate more leads. But sometimes you will find that the small and micro businesses really don’t have the time to manage their own ads on platforms such as Google Ads and Facebook Advertising.
So, they hire out ad management to freelancers they find online. These freelancers can start and run campaigns for them at reasonable fees.
Content writing. Business owners can hire freelancers to create content for their offline promotions (flyers and brochures for example). They can also get help with content for their own websites and blogs. If they are after more organic search traffic from search engines like Google, they can hire freelance writers to create detailed sales pages, detailed product description pages, detailed documentation pages and detailed blog posts.
They can also get getting mentions on other sites by hiring writers to help them with their guest posting / link building outreach campaigns.
Design. Small businesses can also hire freelancers to help them with their design needs. For example, freelancers can help a business owner get well designed business cards, logos, packaging material, web pages, invoices, banners, ads, mobile apps and more.
Live chat support. If you need help interacting with your customers but can’t (because of other engagements) you can hire someone to talk to the prospects and customers that come to you. You can get someone to help you during business hours or someone to help you respond to customer queries / support issues after business hours.
Browse ad listings on Niabusiness
Now, to get the people that can help you in the areas I have listed above, go to Niabusiness Classifieds page and browse the ads listed in the various categories.
If you need help with SEO (search engine optimization), check the Outreach and Link Building category.
If you need someone to help you grow sales online (via chat, phone or email) check the sales and marketing category.
If you need help with administrative tasks, check the Virtual Assistants category.
If you need help with accounting, taxes and bookkeeping, check the KRA / taxes and the bookkeeping categories.
If you want to upgrade your sole proprietorship of partnership into a limited company in Kenya, check the Incorporations category.
If you need help with app, software or web development, check the Coding / Programming category.
If you need help with online ads, check the Ad Management category.
Other things freelancers can help you with include, audio transcription, video production, legal consultation, registering trademarks & patents, social media marketing, ebooks & publishing and online courses.
So, if you are ready to outsource, just go to the relevant category to find a few people you can email and see if you can work together
Place an ad for a freelance job on Niabusiness
If you don’t find what you are looking for, you can place your own ad on Niabusiness for free.
Just go into the specifics of what you need once you enter a title for your ad.
Once you submit your ad, it will be approved and the freelancers interested in working with you will reach out to you.