oDesk Tutorial - Finding a worker on oDesk

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's video, I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Lalitha, who asked me about one of my favorite services to use, oDesk. So she is an online marketer, she does a lot of article submissions and has an ebook and other programs that she wants to promote. She does a lot of social media marketing and she's wondering if somebody could help her on oDesk to reduce do some of those admin tasks for her. So she's wondering what category she should post a job under and any other thoughts I might have to help her out. So Lalitha, I would suggest posting under the administrative support category. There's tons of people who can help you with that kind of stuff. That's bread and butter ODesk, really easy to find somebody to help you out. You don't have to worry about hiring somebody full-time. They could do it for part-time hours. They're used to that. They're set up. They're there to support people who want to do online marketing. So it's a great fit for the type of tasks that you have, as long as you can really be clear about what it is that you need and give them a little bit of training on how to log into your accounts and all that. In terms of posting a job, I would suggest again put it under the admin support category. In my job postings, I always try to ask a question that they have to include with their profile. So I might write a really long paragraph and then if you have some social media accounts, you might ask them to say something like post how many Twitter followers I have or how many Facebook likes I have so that you make sure when they give you their submission, they've actually read your entire job application. So make sure you do that. The next thing I usually do is I hire people on a trial basis. So I can set up a trial job, give them a simple task, see if they do it, see if it's accurate, see if it's easy working with them, and then from there make a decision as to who to hire. And then even after I make that hiring decision, I'll usually hire more than one person and just cut back the number of hours. So you can say I need somebody for 5 hours a week, or even less if you need that, and hire a couple people, and the cream will rise to the top. You'll find that you know, one or two people are really, really, really good and the others might fall off a little bit. So it helps you work with a couple people to make sure you're getting the right person. But I'm a big fan of oDesk. I've hired a number of people through it and it's been a huge boost for my business. It lets me focus on the bigger picture stuff for my company and can outsource the other stuff to people who want to do it and who are good at it and probably better than me at it as well. So I hope that helps. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below and I'd also love to hear feedback if you want to leave a comment underneath the video. And stay tuned for the next episode.