A couple of years ago I hired some Filipino workers. I learned quite a bit from that, so I decided to write this to help anyone who may be considering this but isn’t sure what is involved. I am passing along my experience which, for the most part, was good.
I was creating some affiliate websites and had a lot of repetitive work to do. Create the site, write articles to put on the site, create videos from the articles, syndicate the videos. All stuff that, once you get it set up, is fairly routine in nature (except the actual writing of the articles, of course).
I didn’t really want to have to do all this stuff, and since I had about 30 sites to set up (5 videos each) it was really not feasible to do it myself.
I also had a membership site which used PHP. I wanted to keep changing it and adding new material, but didn’t want to learn PHP.
So I outsourced all the work to people in the Philippines. At the peak I had 4 people working for me full time plus 2 article writers who worked on a piece rate. My biggest challenge was getting enough work to them to keep them busy. It really put my organizational skills to the test. Actually, what I should have done is hire one more person to coordinate everything. I didn’t use any type of project management solution, such as Base Camp, but it may have made things easier as well.
My weekly bill for the 4 full time people was $250. The website person was the most expensive. I paid him $100 per week. The other 3 earned $50 per week each. And they were happy to earn that much. One of them actually started at $30/week, and was ecstatic when I raised him to $50. He would gladly have continued at $30, but I felt guilty.
This went on for about a year. I learned a few things during that time which I will pass along to anyone who is thinking of going this route.
I used a site called onlinejobs.ph to find the employees. I actually joined about 5 years ago through John Jonas. At the time he said that that was the only way individuals could access that site. I don’t know if that is the case or not, but Craigslist has a Philippines site, so you could use that, as well. The thing I like about onlinejobs.ph is that they have a standardized system for the people applying for the jobs to tell you what skills they have. They have a huge list of skills and the people rate themselves from no experience to excellent. Obviously this is not unbiased, but it is a good starting point. You can just search on the skills you need and get a list of people who think they have those skills. Or you can post a request for people with certain skills.
The Skills I Needed
In order to do the work, I needed the following skills:
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- Article writers: I had about 150 articles to write, so I needed someone who could do a decent job quickly. I actually hired 2 people to do this. I went through about 5 applicants before I found these 2. They didn’t do any keyword research. I gave them a list of the topics for the articles and a couple main keywords and they wrote the articles from that information.
- Voice over: After the articles were finished I wanted to create slideshow videos to syndicate. So I needed someone to record them. Voice over pros tend to be quite expensive, especially if you have 150 articles to read. When I put in my request for this I told them to send me an MP3 of them reading something. I probably should have given them a text so they would all be the same, but I didn’t. I probably listened to at least 50 samples, looking for the quality of the recording, the quality of their voice, their reading ability and their accent. I finally found 2 men who were very good, with no discernible accent. I hired one of them. The women tended to have very quiet voices and more of an accent.
- Slide creator: When I received the articles, I divided them into 4 or 5 parts. Each part would be one slide. I then found someone to create the slides. This was fairly easy because it was just a matter of finding someone with open office that could insert the images and enter text. I gave him the images and text for each slide.
- Video creator: This was also a fairly menial job. After I got the slides and the voice over, I uploaded them to Traffic Geyser and had the person use TG’s Video Creator software to do the videos. The most challenging part of this job was to sync the audio with the video. Basically, the person had to listen to the mp3 and look at the article that was divided into pieces. He just marked out how, long each audio piece was and made the slide last that long in the video creator. Not too tough to do.
- Video syndicator: I had one of the above 2 people set up the syndication. I had to write up the video description and give them all the information to enter into Traffic Geyser, but they did save me some time by setting the actual syndication up. If you use Traffic Geyser, it is actually much more streamlined now as far as the info they require than it was at that time, so it is much easier to set the templates up. That was actually the most annoying part of the whole process.
- Website person: I actually hired this person separately, and don’t remember where. He was very good and only charged $100 per week. I had a hard time keeping him busy, though, but still got a good deal for the price.
Takeaways
I learned quite a bit during this little adventure.
I think the biggest thing to keep in mind is that you are paying pennies to hire these people, so don’t be afraid to try out quite a few before settling on the ones you want. Also, there are a lot of times you will question, based on how much they accomplished in a day, whether they actually worked a full 8 hours. If the person is doing a good job you shouldn’t let this bother you, since you are paying so little anyway. Just remember to keep everything in perspective.
Except for the article writers, I always paid them with a site called xoom.com, not paypal. They are familiar with that site and no one there (except the article writers) had a paypal account. The only problem with xoom.com is that there is a $50 minimum payment. So, for the one that I was paying $30/week I had to pay every other week. It is also kind of expensive. I think I paid about $5 to send a $50 payment.
Pay in arrears, not in advance. That is something I was told, and always did it that way. I never had a problem with anyone being upset about being paid at the end of the week.
The electricity and internet service there tends to get spotty, and they have those pesky typhoons and resulting floods. So missed days were not an unusual occurrence. My people would just make up the time on the weekends, but again you have to remember that you are not paying them that much to begin with, so a missed day here and there is not a real big deal. It is probably a good idea to specify someone with a high-speed internet connection. I did not, so a lot of time was wasted by slow connections.
One thing that I thought was an advantage is that their time is 12 hours later than Eastern time, so when they were working Mon thru Fri days it was actually Sun thru Thurs night where I am. That means I could get their stuff ready during the day, send it to them around 5 pm and they would have it back to me in the morning. The drawback is that they, for the most part, aren’t available during the day for emergency situations. Just one thing to keep in mind.
Never hire someone without getting some type of sample from them. I probably don’t have to say this, but will anyway.
Hiring people to write articles is tough. I hired 2 article writers, who did a fairly good job (considering I only paid them $3 for a 500 word article). The articles were not prize winning, but were sufficient for what I wanted to do. It is very difficult to get article writers from the Philippines whose work doesn’t sound “foreign”, so I wouldn’t really recommend this unless you really needed a lot of original articles, as I did, and the quality doesn’t have to be that great.
If you do hire article writers, get Copyscape and check at least a few. I had one person who wrote some really great articles, but I found that they were all copied word for word. Not a good situation.
One thing you should know is that they have a tradition that, after each year of service, they are paid an additional month as a bonus. I don’t remember what they call this, and don’t know if they would be insulted or upset if they didn’t receive it, but it is something to be aware of.
One odd thing that happened to me…Right after Christmas I was trying to get some work done on a sales letter and my web guy just disappeared for about 2 weeks. Very frustrating. Then, when he came back, there was something different. His time sheets were in a new format, which I found a bit strange. Then, about 2 months later, I found out that the original guy had actually quit work and his girlfriend was filling in and pretending to be him. Her work was very good, so it worked out ok, but this highlights one potential problem in that you really don’t know who it is you are hiring and paying.
I think that is about it. I actually had a good experience with my Filipino employees. They are intelligent, speak fluent English, and try very hard to please you. All of the ones I hired were also honest. The web guy could have done real damage to my site if he wanted because he had all the passwords, but he didn’t. I would never give them access to my paypal account, but would have no problem giving out WP admin and FTP passwords. Some people do give paypal access to Filipino employees, but I would not do it.
So, this should definitely be something to consider if you have a large amount of routine work to do and don’t mind hiring someone that you only communicate with through email. I hope this information is helpful. Again, it is just my personal experience, but it should give you an idea of what to consider and what to expect.
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