Today, I sat down to complete one portion of a large task for a client.
And this is a large task that currently requires a lot of copy and pasting information that I’ve already generated from the first few steps of the On-Page Optimization process.
In short, I not only do not want to do this long tedious task, but I’d much rather be working on systems that will continue to scale as I attract and onboard new clients needing similar services.
The project scope for this client is to essentially generate traffic to his website using relevant keywords for their products.
This requires performing tasks for all four pillars of SEO including.
- Technical SEO
- On-Page Optimization
- Off-Site Optimization
- Content
I’ve already performed the initial technical audit of the client’s website and even though there are quite a bit of nuanced technical tasks that need to be performed, this can wait until the On-Page Optimizations are complete.
Since the client already has a website that functions decently, the On-Page Optimizations are currently the low-hanging fruit to start getting quick wins.
Why Hire A Data Entry Specialist?
This appears to be a very simple task of simply copying & pasting data from Chat GPT to a spreadsheet.
I believe I should be able to hire an overseas contractor that’s able to quickly do this task much faster than I can.
And, to have this type of contract on call will be extremely helpful in freeing up my time so that I can spend my time working on building the systems for my company to continue scaling at faster and faster rates.
Furthermore, I’ll be able to not only have contractors do work for clients, I can also have them apply these systems to my own website so that I can start attracting more high quality clients through Search Engine Optimization.
I posted the job on the open market and within about five minutes, I already had 24 proposals!
I’m not looking to spend too much time going through all of the proposals.
I’m sure there are MANY qualified individuals who can do this task, quickly.
I sorted the proposals, starting with the lowest hourly rate, and clicked on the applicant who had the highest success rate.
Then I read his cover letter, and to my pleasant surprise, even though he is located in Pakistan, his cover letter was well articulated in English and responded specifically (and eloquently) to the details of the job.
Within 10 minutes, I hired him and sent him the details of the job.
What Could Go Wrong?
For $3 per hour, this task should take around five hours to complete.
This applicant claims to be a computer science graduate with over three years of experience in data entry.
I’m not too sure what could go wrong.
He claims he can do this task in less than five hours.
I’m having him start with one line of the spreadsheet, and if he completes this one line successfully, then I’ll have him complete the remaining 100+ lines of data entry.
BUT.
If for some reason he is unable to do this job properly, which I can not understand how anyone with any level of competence can fail, I currently have 56 other applicants I can quickly hire and quickly fire until I find someone who can reliably do this simple task.
What Did Go Wrong & How I Fixed It?
For some reason, I shared a link from ChatGPT to the contractor and ChatGPT had completely different information than what I was seeing.
I took a screenshot and had the contractor screenshot what we were seeing and sure enough, somehow ChatGPT has essentially the correct structure of information, but the sentences were almost completely different.
The fix.
I copied and pasted the info from ChatGPT into a Google Doc and now the contractor had access to the correct information.
The contractor then asked me a weird question and plugged in the wrong information on the first line I was testing him on.
I pointed this out.
He realized his mistake.
Made another correction.
Then he accidentally overwrote one block of data and didn’t update two blocks.
I pointed this out.
He realized his mistake and claimed he was going too fast.
He corrected his mistake.
And now I have him completing the entire task.
To prevent contractor from accidentally overwriting data blocks, I froze the blocks using a feature called Protect Ragne in Google Sheets.
Overall Experience With New Hire?
I’m glad I took the time to go through the task, in detail, until the contractor was doing exactly what I was asking for.
At this point, he’s been working for about 30 minutes, I’m spot-checking his work, and it looks like he’s doing exactly what I’m asking him to do.
Overall, it was a fantastic experience and I’m slowly shedding my fear of delegating tasks.
Moving forward, I’ll continue to work on delegating every task for any SEO project, that way I can focus on fine tuning systems that scale the company, while also focusing on sales and marketing to attract more large scale clients to continue increasing the rate of spreading access to cannabis and accurate information about cannabis.
