What a week!

Ever since I started working online, I’ve always tried to be cautious when selecting people to work with for online projects, mainly because of the high rate of disappearing acts that so easily happens online. So I guess I shouldn’t be totally shocked when a few of the workers I’ve hired to outsource some of my more mundane work have decided to magically disappear upon deadline.

What I am surprised at, though, is that FOUR out of FOUR outsourcers decided to take off at once! Holy hell! Not only is the work I was supposed to have completed by the end of October totally pushed till December (if doing it on my own), but now I’m out a ton of money. I’ve filed a Paypal dispute with one of the outsourcers and hopefully I’ll see a small portion of that $200 payment back someday (but I’m not holding my breath). One of the writers refunded me earlier today with a note of apology, saying that he felt bad but he couldn’t complete the project on time.

As for the other two outsourcers, I’m giving one woman the benefit of the doubt because she is admittedly swamped with work. The other guy I’ve worked with successfully before, and I hate to think he just poofed and vanished because he was one of the best people I’ve used ever. (Not to mention it was a $300 project that I had him running with!)

So lesson learned: don’t outsource all of your work all at once. I totally jumped the gun and figured I’d lessen my workload by 70% this month. Bad idea! I should have outsourced one thing at a time.

Another craptastic work event happening this week is the “breaking” of my mailing list script. I’ve used the same script to host all of my mailing lists for YEARS, without ever running into a problem. All of a sudden, the entire thing decides to go haywire and now I can’t get any emails out to any of my lists. I had a promo email to send out that would have easily netted me $500 this month, that I’ve had to kiss goodbye. I’ve been chatting with the script developer for the past three days, but so far it’s not looking good. I’m hoping to get this script working again and then quickly switch to AWeber’s service. Hopefully most of my 6000 subscribers will follow me over there.

This week, I don’t plan on getting a whole bunch of work done, but I do want to fix my mailing list script issue, get my lists switched over to AWeber, and then get some of my outsourcers working or at least getting refunded. Wish me luck on that.

Update:

Outsourcer #3 (the woman) has contacted me (after IMing her a few times) saying that things are still going as planned.  I’m not totally convinced, but slightly reassured just by hearing from her.

Outsourcer #1: (the one I’ve filed a Paypal dispute against) still no word, but someone else has contacted me privately about his whereabouts, and I think we will be trying to get something from him together. I’d be happy to just get the project going, but I’m doubting it.