A couple of months ago I found a writer that should write my first ebook. It didn’t turn out quite right and I am som experiences richer.
So I am on it again.
During my new round of hiring I have been in contact with several writers I found on bestjobs.ph. Many of them (up to 50%) are only doing freelance work and are not available for full time work. This means that I am finding it harder to find qualified people who are actually willing to work for you full time. Have anyone else seen this trend.
Unfortunely you cannot register yourself on bestjobs.ph if you live outside the Philippines (so it helps if you can get someone in the Philippines to create the account for you 
).
I have also heard of people talk of Craigslist (the Manilla flavor ) but I haven’t had any success with this. Does anyone have other ideas to where you could find qualified fulltime workers in the Philippines?
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Hi,
I have some programmers. It have not had any programmers, how was able to work only on my project. Not optimal, but they do work hard.
/daniel
Daniel you rule Philippine outsourcing
I am beginning to thing that you have more Philippines employed than John Jonas!
Hi Rasmus,
Great job on the blog here. Found you through John Jonas’ blog while “fishing” around.
Regarding a writer in the Philippines I have been struggling with this for the past 6 months.
Presently I have 2 web guys and a VA in the Philippines. I have hired and terminated 8 writers to date. More than half have been terminated for plagerism even though I told them up front that they were expected to provide original material. The others were let go because they either failed to meet repeated deadlines or just disappeared in the middle of the project and never returned.
One of the things I do now is ask them to submit an example of their writing and then I take a paragraph or two and plug it into Google and do a search. It amazes me what you can find with Google.
My web guys and my VA are great though. I don’t know how I ever got by without the VA. She is great and does everything.
For now I am putting the writer position on the back burner to concentrate on a few other projects and will try again after the new year.
Good luck with your search and let us know how you make out.
Best Regards
Bob
Hi Bob
I am also on my second writer, being screwed over by the first. This second one has some great articles, but I am unsure if she can do an entire ebook.
I have had my web guy do all the research for the ebook (plus I have bought an existing book on the subject). This way the writer should really just focus on writing and this will hopefully make the task a bit easier. But I have yet to show a result with this method
Good luck with your projects!
Hi
I read your blog with great joy.
But I was wondering how I would go about finding a programmer for freelance tasks on my Magento Online Shop?
I’ve tried bestjobs.ph, but it seems it’s not very user friendly. Do I absolutely have to create an add looking for a programmer? Seems weird that I’m not able to simply browse through programmers looking for jobs?
Thanks in advance
Hi
No you cannot create an add since you live outside the Philippines (and you are not allowed either, so if you get a username for the site, you should never post an add).
You can browse CVs online but can only see the contact details if you are logged in (and this is the tricky part as you cannot register yourself outside the Philippines).
have you considered breaking a job down into sub chapters and trying multiple writers. This way even if they screw up and cant write a whole book you will end up with a complete project and a few good writers.
Maybe try 10-20 writers up front – but rewriting from pre-done research. Also make them join copyscape as a requirement of employment. That will solve the plagiarism problem.
@Gareth: Hmm that might be something to do the next time.
Hi Rasmus,
Just finished reading Tim’s book (twice!) and I’m fortunate that I can already describe myself as an expert with a deep but narrow niche (which no-one seems to have filled after much searching). So thoughts are turning to a “How-to” ebook and outsourcing. Any thoughts on ebook versus DVD set versus downloadabl;e videos? Secondly, any thoughts around how do you go about outsourcing the writing of a skills-based ebook? That is to say, it feels like I have to write bucketloads (a book?) about my skill in order to provide enough materials for the VA to go about his/her task. Keep up the great work!
@Tom
Regarding your niche. This is great IF THERE IS A MARKET! Do people search for products/knowledge in this niche? Does the people searching have any money to spend? (heard about an information product helping starving actors find work, unfortunately the starving actor couldn’t afford the info product). use googles keyword tool to see how many actually searches for this.
Regarding the writing, you could always try to outsource the writing of a single chapter and see if the quality was good enough for you. You could also write a quick draft version yourself and have an outsourced writer do a complete rewrite based on your writings.
Regarding ebook vs. dvd vs video online. I would almost never select dvd. Although you can have someone write them, package and send them to your customers, it is too much overhead (in time and money). I have created an ebook, but considering doing some video in another niche. The reason for this is that then you can do a membership site that could give you a monthly reoccuring income (vs getting just paid once for an ebook). The perceived value of video is also somewhat higher.
If you went with the online video route you could also have an outsourced person transcript the whole video and turn that into an ebook.
Hope you got some ideas you can work with