The West promoted this evil “outsourcing” concept in the Arab world in order to keep Arabs from learning new skills. They want Arabs to pay others for things that Arabs could do themselves. This way Arabs wouldn’t learn any new skills to compete with other economies. MUAHAHAHA!

Yes, I’m an economist and I know about comparative advantage vs. absolute advantage, but this is also a part of the elaborate Western conspiracy. Damn those scheming cowards!

The above is what’s been reported to me as said by some Arab economist in Dubai.

Do you think what he said is beyond ridiculous and outright insane? Wait until you hear what I have to say about the subject!

First of all, I should make it clear that I don’t have a company of a few hundred or even dozen employees. I work alone. And from my lone-wolf perspective I write this post.

I’ve read a few books that sang the praises of outsourcing. And there was a time when I tried to outsource a lot of my tasks. The truth is: I ended up wasting a lot of my time and money because I didn’t know about the practical drawbacks of outsourcing. Even though the books I read were indeed written by Western authors, I don’t think these drawbacks or downsides have anything to do with a Western conspiracy. These are just practical obstacles to outsourcing that are often overlooked.

Quality

The benefit of outsourcing is easy to understand. You specialize in what you’re good at and delegate what you’re not so good at to someone else. This way, you produce more and at a higher quality. How nice! Except in reality, it doesn’t quite work like this.

When you hire someone to perform certain tasks for you, they’re interested in one thing: delivering the minimum requirements, sweeping things under the rug, and moving on to the next task/client. This will be especially true for someone who tries to outsource on the cheap. The outsourced work you usually end up receiving is crap that barely fits into your project, if at all.

Of course, this is not always true. Some times you might get lucky and find a starting up, cheap provider that does quality work. But even without luck, there are ways to avoid receiving crap outsourced work. Two words: Pay. Up.

Pay with Your Time

Many people think that when you outsource something, you no longer have to worry about the method with which your tasks are being done.  But that’s not entirely true. To make sure that the tasks you delegate are completed in the manner you envisage, you have to do one of two things:

One thing you can do is supply extensive documentation and descriptions of the desired deliverables; leave no room for assumptions. The second thing is micromanage the process. That is, supervise at every step of the way. Ask for regular updates and snapshots of the completed work. Give instructions and feedback along the way. Of course, you can also utilize a combination of these two methods.

But the problem remains the same, you haven’t really completely freed yourself. You still had to dedicate a big portion of your time to the outsourced tasks, even though they are outsourced!

Pay with Your Money

But are there providers out there that are smart, creative, and have high standards of work ethics that they don’t require supervision or extensive instructions? Well, of course. But no one is gonna give you their hearts and souls on the cheap. Good people are expensive.

So, you could outsource tasks with minimum description, provide no supervision and still get above expected results. But that’s only if you outsource to really smart people that dedicate themselves to your stuff. And in many such cases, it’s not financially feasible to outsource.

When it is Easy to Outsource

I still outsource some tasks. In fact, I’m waiting on deliverables as I write this.  But I’ve learned to only outsource repetitive, data-collection or data-entry types of tasks that don’t require a lot of creativity and that are easy to describe.

Outsourcing could also work for high level tasks such as content writing if you don’t care about the quality, i.e. you’re just looking to fill out a website or template with a bunch of text. But if you want writing (or any work) that is of high quality, full of insights, expertise, and intelligence, you’ll have to either do it yourself, or pay up!

I personally wrote the content for WPMP. It took me about 4 days. And to setup the website, I took another 4 days. So, let’s say the entire website took about 2 weeks to set up. I didn’t outsource anything.

BGFK on the other hand is bigger. It has more than 30,000 words of content. I outsourced the content writing to someone on Elance. The content cost me $1,000. The idea behind BGFK was to promote games for kids from Amazon.com. So, I personally built a system to facilitate this. Building this system took about two weeks.

Based on the sizes of these investments, I was expecting BGFK to do much better than WPMP.

Both sites have been live for more than a month and the results are in. BGFK is just dead. It’s not getting any Google love and it’s got no other source of traffic. WPMP on the other hand has already made $60 in sales! And here’s the lesson…

The Lesson

Niche affiliate sites are usually created to cater to pre-selected search engine keyword(s).

In the case of WPMP that keyword/keyphrase is “WordPress Membership Plugin”. For BGFK that keyword/keyphrase is “kids games” or “games for kids”.

According to Google Keyword Tool, WPMP’s keyphrase gets fewer than 1,000 searches a month. BGFK’s keyphrases get nearly half a million searches a month! Huge difference!

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I actually didn’t know these facts going in…Wait, that’s not the lesson…

Google is smart enough to know “games for kids” and “kids games” are the same. BGFK won’t rank for one keyword and not the other. If it’s gonna rank, it’s gonna rank for both. And these two are VERY competitive.

When I did my keyword research, I was just looking into the phrase “games for kids” and I ignored “kids games”, which is actually more common! Had I done my analysis using both phrases, my results would have been different.

The lesson learned here for me is this.

Use the right keyword tools

Do more diligent keyword research. Don’t only use Google Keyword Tool. Mix it up. Verify your results using other tools such as Keyword Tracker.

Keyphrase variations

When you do keyword research, don’t pick an awkward variation of the keyword. Pick the natural one. “kids games” is better than “games for kids”.

It doesn’t matter if the exact phrase “games for kids” shows lower competition than “kids games”. Google realizes that both are the same.

Very Small Niches Can Be Profitable

Also, just because the main keyword for a niche gets fewer than 1,000 searches a month, that doesn’t make the niche unfeasible. By covering the niche with rich and useful content, like I did with WPMP, you can probably capture more visitors through longtail keywords.

In fact, the $60 I made through WPMP came and I still haven’t even ranked on the first page for the main keyword, “wordpress membership plugin”.

Bigger Niches Require More Resources

If I wanna leverage what I have at BGFK, I would need to invest even more at it. Create more content for each sub-topic. Do more aggressive SEO and link building, and so on. That would require more money than I had initially planned. Usually, a bigger investment is required for a more popular/bigger niche.

But also keep in mind that just because a niche isn’t popular that doesn’t mean it’s not competitive. There maybe a few players in a certain niche, but they may all be very enthusiastic about what they do.