Running an Affiliate Niche Site? Read This Before Hiring a Freelance Contractor

When your affiliate site takes off, and you start making some real money, you'll run into a problem: you can't do every single thing yourself.

Not anymore.

As your business grows, you'll start to realize that you've got way too much on your plate.

This goes double if you have a day job, too.

At this point, it's time to start thinking about hiring freelance contractors and delegating certain tasks.

Generally speaking, you want to delegate your weaknesses.

Affiliate marketers come from many different professional backgrounds. Maybe you're a salesman, or a marketing director.

Or, maybe you're one of those people who definitely isn't all that great at sales, but you're an experienced professional web developer.

Whether it's content and copy, visual branding, or code, there's bound to be at least one aspect of running an affiliate site that you'd be smart to outsource to a pro.

In a recent blog post, affiliate marketing guru Charles Ngo talks about best practices for delegating tasks to freelancers.

If you want to focus on your strengths, maximize profits, and crush your way to the top, you need to become a master delegator.

However, depending on your experience, you may have a nasty taste in your mouth when it comes to delegation. Maybe you tried it and found yourself even less productive.

If this was your experience, you probably encountered one of two problems:

1. You hired the wrong person. It happens. Stop whining about it.
2. Your delegating skills are worse than Bill Lumbergh’s. This is the more likely cause of the problem. When there’s a problem, there’s great power in accepting responsibility.

In this post, I’m going to break down the Ngo method of delegation.

STEP #1: Resolve To Delegate 99% of the Tasks On Your Plate

You might be freaking amazing at writing sales pages but suck at editing podcasts.

You might have a sixth sense, except instead of seeing dead people, you know how to optimize the heck out of a landing page…Then if you’re awful at navigating the world of Facebook retargeting, you can outsource it.

STEP #2: Use 360 Delegation Skills 

The point of delegation is to accomplish tasks as effectively and efficiently as possible. There will be times when YOU are the bottleneck. When you are the only one who can do the task at it’s supposed to be done.

When that happens, your team should be able to assign a task back to you in order to keep the process moving.

Good and Bad Examples

What does all this look like practically?

Bad example: You send an email to John saying, “Can you please do some research on which of our Facebook ads are performing best?”

This is incredibly vague and will result in hours of back and forth as John tries to figure out exactly what you want, what numbers are important to you, why you need this data, and how you want it presented.

Good example: You send an email to John saying, “I want to find out which Facebook ads are performing best so that we can stop our poor campaigns and double down on the high-performing ones. I want to know:

• The product we’re advertising
• The CTR
• The impressions
• The conversion rate
• The amount spent
• The relevancy score
• The revenue generated by each ad
• A recommendation from you on whether we should continue this ad.

A Few Other Tips on Delegating Effectively

In addition to these two primary principles, there are a few other key ingredients.

Establish clear communication protocols.

In order for things to get done, everyone needs to know exactly what they’re supposed to do, when it needs to be done, and the steps required.

Without these things in place, things will become confused and tasks will be unnecessarily duplicated. My team and I use Wrike to ensure that everyone always stays on the same page.

Have a specified system for finishing tasks.

As you implement this system, tasks will move along in stages, from idea to in-progress to in-review to finished.

You need to be able to clearly move tasks along these stages so that each person knows where a task stands and who’s responsible for moving it to the next task.

Again, we use Wrike to do this, but Trello also is a solid option.

Realize that employees get better over time. 

Expect them to suck in the beginning, but trust that they’ll improve with experience.

There's definitely a learning curve to hiring and managing remote contractors, but over time, bringing in some extra help will become the best move you could make to grow your online business.

You can find more great advice for managing remote contractors effectively in the full article, over at Charles Ngo's blog.