
Ask HN: Best Outsourcing Practices - chewxy
Hey HN,<p>Recently I did an audit of my activities and I found myself doing too much trivial work. I want to outsource it, but my past experience hasn&#x27;t been too great.<p>Anyone can provide tips? Also, is it possible to hire someone on a retainer basis - with little jobs along the way? My past experiences with outsourcing my work has been Freelancer.com and they were either very literal&#x2F;to-the-letter or flaky as heck
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lee101
In trying to get more people involved in my crypto currency prediction and
stats system [https://bitbank.nz](https://bitbank.nz) on the marketing side I
created a referral program which helped my normal customers be a bit more
sharing but pro marketers eg ones on freelancer want more stability than that
and a more well defined task than being an affiliate, which is fair enough,
they work for money and Im happy to take on the risk of my site not converting
people to customers.

It's hard however to invest in people upfront when they don't know where to
start

It's good to outsource if there's a literal to the letter description or if
it's something outside your forte, design and marketing I in my case,

I have had a good experience running design contests on 99 designs or using
their small design touch-up service. I ran a contest to get a logo designed
for a game I made which paid off
([http://wordsmashing.com](http://wordsmashing.com)) it requires active
management otherwise the designs drift toward something unwanted, id say run a
blind contest too because designers copy each other and end up with less
variety otherwise.

I'd feel bad not paying proper rates but if it's something on the verge of
automation you could try mechanical Turk.

Let me know what you find! the type of sporadic tasks I would have are things
requiring non trivial domain knowledge and self direction, things like article
marketing or link building which can be hard to find someone trustworthy and
self directed on a party time basis

