Hiring Writers the Right Way

This is a guest post from my good friend John who runs a site dedicated to motocross gear. It’s about his recent attempts to hire freelance writers.

As an internet marketer, one of the most important parts of growing your business is hiring out work. For affiliates, the most common task that is outsourced is writing. This was something that was very easy for me to take on, since I am a very lazy person by default. When I was focusing on OnlinePoker.org as part of poker affiliate business, hiring writers was as easy as heading over to PAL and finding a writer on the forum. Through my contacts I could ask around and find a great writer to help me with different projects. But as I worked to jump into other industries, it became harder and harder to find good writers that wouldn’t flake on me.

A friend of mine said I should try out the jobs.problogger.net job board, and he said that he had posted jobs with great success. To make a long story short, I soon had an inbox full of resumes and I was overwhelmed. I spent hours sifting through them, and I spent days trying to communicate with the prospects. In the end, I had about three that I thought would work out. They all flaked on me within a week.

What Went Wrong?

The truth is you can’t help it if someone decides to quit. We work on the internet via email and IM, and people vanishing is nothing new. The best thing you can do is not waste hours and days of your time hunting these writers down. Here are a few tips I’ve found help with the writer screening process.

#1 Include as much information in your job posting as you can. This will save you a ton of time later. Be sure to include pay, subject matter, expected time frame, word counts, payment options, and anything else you can think that someone may ask you in a follow up email.

#2 Have them follow specific instructions when submitting their resume. In a recent job post I did, I asked them to place a specific phrase in the email subject. I also asked them to answer a few questions that would help me determine if they knew anything at all about the topic.

#3 Use an email filter to only pull the emails that contain the proper subject line. Discard all the rest. If they didn’t take the time to read your listing thoroughly, chances are they are going to burn you later. Also, at this point anyone who screwed up the questions is out as well. No sense in wasting time on writers who aren’t knowledgeable on your topic. Obviously you will want to discard any with typos, poor grammar, and spelling mistakes. No excuses for that.

Conclusion

With these simple steps you should be left with a handful of qualified leads to then interview further. I’ve found it best to just go ahead and send them a few topics to get started on and see which ones come through. Just be sure not to send 20 topics to someone. They could take forever and have those topics tied up while they string you along with their excuses. Good luck!

New Venture: BoardShorts.com

The online gaming industry has taken quite a few hard hits since Black Friday. So, I think now’s a good time to start looking to diversify. I probably should have done it sooner but it’s hard to walk away from an industry that I have spent more than 5 years working in.

I’ve been doing a lot of keyword research looking for another industry to devote my time. I looked for an industry where items could be purchased online and if it needed to be shipped, it could very easily. I also wanted it to be something that I was familiar with myself.

So, that’s how I ended up buying Boardshorts.com.

I don’t know how interesting the boardshorts market is, but I know that I wear O’Neill boardshorts so at least I am a comsumer. Also, the action sports market is always growing and boardshorts are sold for both men and women. According to a boardshorts wikipedia article, they are even a popular choice for MMA fighters.

The business model for the site hasn’t been determined yet. I could try selling boardshorts myself, which would mean keeping an inventory, shipping..etc. I think that it would be a nice change to have my own customers and be able to control my company more than I can as an affiliate. Obviously, the downsides are that it can be very time consuming and I’d need a lot of upfront capital.

A good option would be for me to be an affiliate for sites selling boardshorts. I live in California so with the new sales tax laws I wouldn’t be able to promote Zappos which would be my first choice. Although after doing some research, I could sell them through PacSun and a couple other clothing sites that offer affiliate programs.

I could also do a combination of those and team up with a larger online retailer and sell their inventory through my site. This could be a good option depending on the deal I could get.

There are many things to decide on the site and as you can see there isn’t much content on the site right now. The Boardshorts logo has been created and a couple articles about the different surf brands that sell boardshorts. I have a temporary design up but know that I need to decide how I’m going to monetize before I create a permanent design. At this point, I’m still working on my gaming sites but I allocate a couple of hours every week on the site to begin to diversify.