Delivery and Schedule issues with outsourcing

Starting to get Frustrated

Starting to get Frustrated

I am currently working on a brand new project.  I have approached this new project in a completely different way than I would normally do.  I have a plan, schedule, and budget.  The schedule necessitates that I can`t do all of the work myself, which is fine because I made a budget for that.

So some of my content has been outsourced, and it is going great.

My site design template was outsourced, well kind of, I simply went over to templatemonster and picked one that I thought would work well.

My first landing page was outsourced, now I don`t really think that it is the greatest, but that is more my fault with direction than that of the designer, and the price was very ~affordable~.

However I needed to get my Wordpress theme developed to match the template that I picked out.  So I headed over to DP and made a post.  I got a few great offers, too good to be true actually, so I dumped them.  I got some over the top and dumped them too.  Then I picked one that seemed great.  The guy wrote with decent English and wrote respectfully, and the price was mid-range.

However, I would not be writing this post if all went well.  This was supposed to be a job that took no more than a week, it has been more like three, and the guy doesn`t seem to be that interested in getting back to me in a timely manner.  I am starting to think that he has gotten his 50% upfront so now he doesn`t care.  I pay my bills but I am seriously thinking that I need to have a discount on part of the service that I am receiving.

What have you done when your out sourcing project has gone wrong? When the person on the other end of the inter-web does`t give to shits that you have a schedule to meet and knows that they will never meet you face-to-face?

Sales Letters Suck

I am not a fan of writing sales letters. However it is not something that I am willing to out-source when I am in the testing phase. There shouldn’t be a need for me to shell out mid-$XXX for a decent sales letter when I am not even sure that there is a market for my idea. So that is why I am stuck doing it myself, and it is not easy. I can write about a lot of stuff and simply ramble on, however to write a good sales letter there is a form that should be followed, and at the end I should be able to convince myself to shell out the dough for my letter.

All of that moaning aside, I have almost finished my first. There is some tweaking, design stuff, etc but the content, flow etc is there and done. I am going to spend a couple of hours this weekend finishing it up and putting it live. From there I am going to start research for an AdWords campaign and then get that started for one week on Monday. I still have to get my newsletter software finished and tweaked so that while I am testing I am building a potential list.

If you are wondering how I am planning on doing a reasonable test without a product, I am going to have the same set-up and when they fillin a bit of information to take them to the paynow page, I am going to have a blank page that describes that the check-out is closed temporarily and if they want to hear back via email when it is online they are to confirm there address.

If I they get reasonable conversions I will move onto the product generation phase. Then really start the marketing ?

But, before I can get there, I still ahve to finish that damn Sales Letter.