If you’re in the business of selling digital products such as books, videos or even apps, then you know just how hard it is to create all these products yourself.
Is it possible?
You bet. As long as you don’t mind growing your business at a snail’s pace. If watching your competitors overtake you and swipe your market share doesn’t bother you, then you can try to do everything yourself.
However, here’s a better idea: hire professional freelancers to help you out. These freelancers can create products for you, create content, and even help you market your business. Best of all, freelancers can often do this work better and more quickly than you can.
But there’s a catch
A good freelancer can help you grow your business while a bad freelancer can waste your time, waste your money and cause you a lot of headaches. That simple fact often turns business owners off from hiring freelancers.
But don’t let it stop you, because you’re about to discover how to find and H.I.R.E. an awesome freelancer by following these simple steps:
Hunt Far and Wide
Investigate Candidates
Recruit the Best Candidates
Encourage Your Freelancer
Let’s take a closer look at each of these steps
Step 1: Hunt Far and Wide
The first step in finding a great freelancer is to hunt in multiple places. In other words, cast a wide net to find as many potential freelancers as possible. This includes:
- Searching Google.
- Asking your colleagues for recommendations.
- Asking on business-related forums and Facebook groups.
- Mentioning your need for a freelancer to your contacts (email list, blog, social media, etc).
- Posting a project on freelance sites such as elance.com and upwork.com.
- Looking locally, such as posting a want-ad on CraigsList.org or even in the local newspaper.
For this step, just create as big of a list of potential candidates as possible. You’ll whittle down that list in the next step
Step 2: Investigate Candidates
For this step, you’re going to whittle down your big list of potential freelancers to create a small list of the best-qualified candidates. In other words, you’ll do your due diligence. This includes taking the following steps
- Checking the freelancer’s portfolio to assess the quality of their work.
- Asking for and following up on references.
- Checking the person’s ratings and feedback on freelancing sites (where applicable).
- Using Google to research the freelancer.
Once you’ve investigated each candidate thoroughly, then you’ll also want to check out their prices. You may find their prices online, or in some cases you may need to fill out a form about your project in order to get a quote.
Just be sure not to make any decisions based on price alone, as sometimes the ‘cheap’ freelancer can cost you a lot of money in the long run. In other words, you often get exactly what you pay for.
Now that you have a short list of the best potential freelancers for your project, move onto the next step
Step 3: Recruit the Best Candidates
With luck, you have more than one good freelancer on your short list. Now what you want to do is hire the top candidates for a small job.
Here’s the thing
Just because a freelancer totally rocks when working with others doesn’t mean this freelancer will work out well for you. Your colleagues may have had great experiences with this person, but perhaps the two of you won’t communicate well. Maybe you’ll have a personality clash. Perhaps you’ll just have fundamental disagreements about how to perform the work.
These are things you won’t really know until you work with the person. If you jump right in with a new freelancer on a big project, you may end up wasting time and money on someone who isn’t really going to work out that well for your needs.
The solution? Hire your freelancer for a smaller job first. For example:
ï If you need to hire someone to write a 80,000 word book, hire them to write a 10,000 word report first.
ï If you want someone to do a 20-module video training series, hire them to do one module.
Once you see how well you work with your top candidates and the quality of the work they provide, then you can hire on the best freelancer to do your big job.
At this point, it’s a good idea to sign an agreement with your freelancer. This agreement will cover the scope of the work, delivery deadlines, payment information and other relevant details.
You’ll also want to sit down and chat about expectations with your freelancer. Your freelancer isn’t a mind-reader, so let him or her know what you expect.
For example, if you expect your freelancer to update you on the project every three days, let them know about these expectations.
Final step
Step 4: Encourage Your Freelancer
At this point you’ll have a really awesome freelancer working for you. Now your job is to encourage this freelancer and provide a good working environment. In turn, you’ll get high-quality work and a good working relationship.
Here are tips for creating a great work environment
- Provide thorough briefs. The more details you can provide to your freelancer about your project, the more likely it is that you’ll get great results. So be thorough and exact about what you want on a project.
- Respect your freelancer’s process. In other words, don’t micromanage your freelancer. He or she is an independent contractor, not an employee. If he or she produces great results, then don’t interfere with your freelancer’s process for getting those results.
- Offer kind words. Obviously, your freelancer took the job because he wants the money. However, you can motivate your freelancer by offering kind words. If your freelancer does a great job, let him know. There’s never any reason to hold back on offering praise for a job well done.
- Give unexpected bonuses. If your freelancer does an exceptionally good job or comes in ahead of deadline, you might offer a bonus. This could come in the form of an extra cash bonus, or you might show your appreciation by giving your freelancer a gift certificate to a favorite restaurant.
Now let’s wrap things up
Conclusion
So there you have it that’s how you find and H.I.R.E. a great freelancer. This is so important, because finding a great freelancer is one of the keys to growing your business. This is especially true if you’re building a digital-product business, where you sell products such as ebooks, software, apps, videos and so on. A freelancer can create these products for you, which frees up your time to work on your marketing plan.
But heads up
Even a really awesome freelancer can’t save your business if your product ideas aren’t rocking anyone’s world. That’s why you need to find out how to create products that people really want to buy. And the best place to do that is right here: www.productprofitsclub.com. Be sure to check out that link now while you can still get in the backdoor for free!
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