Last time I talked about the importance of having a team and how it can really explode your business growth and profits. Today I want to talk a little about how to actually put a team together, just the mechanics of it. In the next post I’m going to talk about leadership skills-yes, you need that too to have a successful affiliate business!
Putting together a team is no easy task, and there’s not simple formula you can follow to find good people. Nevertheless, I can tell you a few things that I’ve learned along the way from my personal experiences.
I know you might be thinking:
- Who needs a team when I can do everything myself, I don’t trust anyone to make my sites or write my content. They’ll just rip me off and become my competition. Screw that I’m doing this myself!
- I don’t want a team, I want all the profit to myself!
- I tried finding a writer/web designer on elance and rentacoder and things didn’t work out, I didn’t get what I wanted so I stopped doing that. If you want to get things done, you’ve got to do them yourself!
- For what I need to do, I can do it faster and/or better than anyone else, so there’s no point in hiring someone to do it for me.
With that mindset you’ve got yourself a full time job. Let me ask you, is that why you got into affiliate marketing, so you could have another freakin’ full time job?!?
Realize this, if you build a team PROPERLY, they will do a better job than you, they will be loyal (won’t run off and copy your ideas) , and you’ll end up making way more money… so don’t give me this I want all the profit bs.
With a good team in place the speed at which you can move and get a profitable campaign going is amazing! You’ll be able to tackle projects that you’ve never thought of tackling before, like building that huge content site that you KNOW is going to be super profitable a year down the road. You’ll be able to produce higher quality affiliate sites faster than your competition.
Now at the very least you want a web designer to design your sites, unless you’re a professional web designer and love doing that, and you want a writer that will write your content and copy.
How did I find my web designer, Tom, who’s a seasoned pro who works with MAJOR Silicon Valley companies, AND an expert at SEO & social media? I’d love to tell you I interviewed 100 applicants, but the truth is that people who are that good are not out looking for jobs, they have so much work they have to turn a lot of it down.
Tom was a client of mine, I did a one hour adwords consultation with him. During that phone consultation he showed me one of his sites and I was blown away, when I found out he made the site I asked him if he could make a site like that for me. Anyhow, I contacted him a month later and ask him to make me a content site for the niche I was in. He did a phenomenal job and did it fast!
I asked him if he could continue to work with me, he was hesitant, he had a lot on his plate. So I offered him 15% of the profits for all the sites he made for me. The rest was history.
You want to find people that are really talented & if they have experience in internet marketing, that’s a huge bonus.
Here’s some tips to finding good people for your team:
- Go to elance, or rentacoder (or whatever outsourcing site your prefer), and hire 2-3 people, who have the best ratings, to do the SAME job. Compare the results and pick the winner. This is how I found Alin, an excellent and highly reliable web designer from Romania.
- Keep an eye out at conferences and at forums for people that are talented writers & web designers that are doing freelance work. Conferences are great places to meet these people, if they’re at an affiliate or internet marketing conference then these are the type of people you want on your team.
- Here’s a bombshell: User crowdsourcing to find a talented web designer! What in the world is crowdsourcing? Crowdsourcing is where you setup a contest for your web design project, let dozens (100’s sometimes) web designers submit their designs. You pick and only pay the winner!
Here’s how I used crowdsourcing to get a logo design for this blog:
http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/contest/1406
I setup a content for $300 through sitepoint.com for the designer who could come up with the best logo for this blog, as you can see I got over a dozen entries. We’re now working with the winning web designer to make more logos for us. Thanks to the power of crowdsourcing we’ve found our logo guy! 
Next time I’ll talk about how to have a team that’s loyal and motivated to help you grow your business. So stay tuned!
