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What should or shouldn't a newbie outsource? (16)

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Are there any guidelines a newbie AM should follow about what they should or shouldn't outsource?

I have talked with Vortex about this through PM and she gave me some great insights (thanks you rock!). I want to ask the same question here and see more peoples thoughts on this.

Before I got in the AM game I was selling stuff on eBay so I never had to deal with the technical side of things. Just buy low and sell high baby!!! lol.

Truthfully... all I really know is some basic HTML, and CSS. Focusing on mobile pops and redirects. I can make super basic changes if needed. Adplexity is my spy tool of choice and can rip landers all day like a freakin BOSS but the only thing that is bothering me is all the extra coding such as javascript, jquery and such.

Now I have searched and found some threads related to javascript, like replacing broken codes, exchange links. My issue is looking out for the malicious codes that people can put into the pages. I have no idea what so ever about finding that.

Coding and creating landers is 1 aspect that I really seem to dislike. I haven't launched a campaign yet because I'm sitting here scratching my head trying to figure this out (I'm an "analytical" type person which leads to procrastination sometimes) I'm thinking about outsourcing landers and having a coder clean up landers for me. I'm new so not sure if outsourcing this early would be the best direction right now (experience, and budget wise)

Thoughts or advice?

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This is it man, as a newbie, you shouldn't be outsourcing anything else. Coding landers can be a bitch, just as looking for the code injects. But everything else is something you can learn pretty fast, not that you couldn't learn how to code landers, but that would take a longer time indeed. On top of that, you need to master all the other steps of AM, so you'd actually be able to hire more man power in order to scale.

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Any idea of what it's going to cost monthly to hire someone for landing pages and where to find them?

Since outsourcing this part. I can do the spying and ripping the landers. I'll just have the freelancer fixing them up and making design changes.

I've heard of upwork but saw that reviews for this type of work over there is so-so.

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Upwork is a hit or mix, I've been using them for translations since the oDesk times thou and have had great success with the platform. Upwork, fiverr or whatever other platform you use - all of them are just platforms, the result depends on what people you decide to hire.

In case you want to get only a bunch of LPs done, you can also use a service like the one by Attila : bannerslanders.com

But for the long term, I would suggest finding someone either in eastern europe (russia, ukraine and countries like that) or asia ... India, phillipines ... lots of people there are willing to take simple coding/design jobs on a part time/freelancer base and they are still very cheap.

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For translations www.transey.com
For banners, and landing pages www.bannerslanders.com

You can say I'm biased, but ask any serious affiliate and let them tell you - the price/quality/time delivery you get enjoys 0 competition.

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If you have zero technical skills I would look into hiring a part time web developer from the PH.

You can get one for $200-$300 a month and would save you the headache of learning HTML / CSS / JS.

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I found someone who will be cleaning landers and such for me. Cost about $10 per lander as we are working on a per project basis. Eventually I will hire someone on full time like matuloo and bbrock2 recommended.

iAmAttila I would like to work with you no doubt, but I asked your team how much it would cost just to clean a lander I already had ripped and was quoted $40 per lander. That's the same price as starting from scratch custom made landers you provide. I don't see how that is cost effective tbh. I will eventually get something done from your team when I have a custom lander I need done.

This was the roadblock that was in my way of launching campaigns but now I have no excuses. I will be starting a follow-along shortly. Thanks everyone for your time.

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I'm at the same point as you - as in - i've been ripping LP's and I am in the process of hiring someone to clean them because I don't know how (to clean them myself) yet.

Can I ask a favour - what are you asking them to clean? Im trying to find out how to instruct them - however outsourcing anything is tough when you have not done it before.

Here's what I have so far:

1. Replace their tracking or aff. links with my own
2. Remove scripts that redirect my traffic to their affiliate links (is this what they call 'backdooring?')
3. Change images so they point to images in my own folders, rather than theirs

Anything I'm missing?

Of course I'll be improving on the page and testing new stuff out once I've figured out exactly what 'cleaning up' really involves.

Thanks!

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First of all, if you are really just starting out and you know the basics of HTML / CSS / JS I would just recommend you to do it yourself.

Learn the basics, ins and outs and after you can outsource it.

I'm just in the process of outsourcing some of the coding stuff, but it's pain in the ass to find the right person. Some don't follow the tasks even they have checklists and checks them off, others disappear right after they are confronted with job details, others never start working. Believe me, it will be "fun" and you will be losing great amount of time in the start just with managing people and your actual focus of getting things done will be lost. At least this is my experience. But at one point you will have to do it anyway, if you want to let grow your business without you.

There is a lot more stuff then these 3 steps, here are some more ideas:

• Replace javascript libraries with their CDN versions
• Minify CSS/JS
• Remove static generated data from javascript (times, dates, tokens etc.)
• Remove malicious scripts
• Resize & Compress images
• etc.

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Thanks @erikgyepes - thats very helpful!

I've been working with freelancers for years (for my SEO business) and I know how much of mistake it is to outsource things before you at least have a basic understanding of how to do it. As you said, it leads to shitty work and people taking advantage of you.

I'm finding it hard to find information on cleaning up ripped landers, and hence, that's the only reason I'm going down this route. Coding is not my strong point, so i'm now spending long days on Codecademy trying to get myself up to speed on the basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript. Ive put it off for too long.

I appreciate your list however, thanks! (although the 'etc' tells me I need to keep digging!)

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On the part of landers, I can suggest Adsbridge tracking software. We are a tracker as well as an LP builder. You can self-host, build your own on our editor, or use one of our pre-made templates. All Landing Pages created within our platform are hoted by us. PM if you have any questions.
-Alex

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When you are starting out, it is good to at least know how to do the basics of each task. Without this, you can run into a lot of difficulties later on.

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Sure I can give you my input on how I handled this hopefully it will help ya out.

From my experience (prior to getting into AM) and what has been echoed in this thread. You must at least know the basics of what you want to outsource otherwise you won't know if the coder you are trying to hire actually knows what he is doing. What I did was spend about a week all day learning HTML and CSS from codecademy and w3schools. I still more than likely can't put a website together but I now know what I'm looking at and can make changes to the layout. Then when I found out that I need to learn some JavaScript I went right back and did those lessons. In my opinion you don't need to become an expert at coding. You just need to learn the basics of how everything works so you'll know what you are looking at.

I then just started ripping a bunch of landers and just started practicing cleaning them. I started to see the common redirects codes and such that they have. There is 1 lander I know for sure was 100% backdoored. I cleaned it up with the help of someone else that was cool enough to help me out. I use this lander as a test for a coder. I tell them:

1. I need this lander cleaned from all redirect codes
2. Any malicious or suspicious codes that are in the HTML or JavaScript that are NOT needed for the page to function properly need to be removed.
3. Replace all outgoing links with something like yahoo, or google so I can replace them later with my own links.
4. This lander is going to be for mobile devices so please make sure that its optimized to do so.

So the reason why you need to know the basics is because if you outsource this and the coder comes back and says "All done the page is fine" you will have no clue if he is telling the truth. In my case I sent the lander to the coder and he did exactly that. He removed the script that blocks desktop users from viewing the page, and replaced the outgoing links with yahoo, but left the backdoor still there. I asked him why it was still there and he responded back that he sent me the wrong finished files. He sent me the clean version but if I hadn't known anything I would of just assumed it was good. It very well could of been an honest mistake on his part.

Sent him a few more landers to clean. He organized and optimized the codes that I original found was a mess and got rid of some redirects and scripts that I wouldn't have caught, but he again left some unwanted scripts in a couple landers. I asked him again why he left them there and that if we are to continue doing biz that he needs to make sure everything is 100% clean as I can't keep checking for mistakes as this is what I'm hiring him for. Got back with me immediately with the updated files.

That was 2 mistakes I wouldn't of caught if I didn't know what I was looking at. Now everything is ok and and the latest pages have been coming back looking good and don' think we will run into anymore problems.

AM may be different than what most coders are used to so you may have to correct them the first few times so they know what it is exactly they should be doing.

Just my 2 cents. Hopefully something in there made sense and is helpful.

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You certainly need to have a decent idea how to do the task yourself, or have a very clear documentation that the coder/designer/whatever can follow.

Specifically for landing pages, if you work regularly with that coder, you can spend a few hours with them to explain what you need, and then they should be able to get it right without your help. One approach I am trying out now is to say "page should look like it already does, then have these X scripts in, from our collection. Everything else gets taken out."

Think of the first few pages as training for them. And if they do it wrong too often, it could also be that you cannot train them well enough.

If you don't mind me asking, where is the person you mentioned that forgot to clean up everything based? And where are you from? Work ethics are very different throughout the world, at least in my experience.

One of my ex-employees used to fall asleep at his PC because he had like 4 jobs. He didn't tell me, he only told another employee, which then told me after I had fired the first guy. I thought he was joking when he told me he fell asleep at his PC. It never crossed my mind that someone could be serious about that. Nobody from Europe would do that anyway...

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I believe this coder is capable of handling the job now after catching his first initial mistakes. I will of course be double checking for a little while to make sure there are no scripts that I know shouldn't be there. He took a few landers that looked like it was all encoded in BASE64 (I couldn't really make sense of it as I never seen anything like it) and he re coded it into regular HTML format and creates a separate CSS files if the original lander didn't have it to make things more organized.

That's similar to what I tell the coder. What I did and it seemed to work is tell them I want the page to look the same but just take out all the extra scripts that aren't necessary for the page to run properly.

I initially thought he was from Thailand but he is in Bangladesh. I'm in the United States. He understands English well, and response times are pretty quick which I found surprising actually.

So question for you manu_adefy
What country have you gotten the best results when outsourcing coding? What are the biggest red flags do you see when hiring a coder that tells you it won't work out?

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I never had success with Asia when it comes to coding

Over the years (not just AM related), I've seen coders from India, Bangladesh, Philippines and all were sub-par. The only coder in these countries that was very good was one that was already working for an affiliate and wanted to get a 2nd job. I had to say no, it didn't seem fair to any of the parties involved for him to work for 2 competitors.

I've had better results in Romania (home country though), and from what others have shared with me, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, etc. are also all decent options. Basically everything that is Eastern Europe/ex-communist countries.

Big red flags for me are actually more related to his work style than knowledge. I have enough of a technical background that I can judge their skills quickly. What matters is how they integrate in the workflow. I dislike it when I give a task and the person says anything remotely to "not his job". For example if you tell a coder to also find a picture for the lander, while it is true that it's not a coding job, it's the more efficient way of having that task done.

The biggest red flag is if after 1-2 weeks of working together, I spend more time explaining a task than it would take me to implement it myself. I don't care if it takes him 2x what it takes me, if I have to spend 0 time on it. You want to hire to save yourself time, so as soon as the employee doesn't do that, it's a red flag.

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