oDesk has been around for a few years now, and I’ve used it a few times, hired a few people, but since moving to Thailand a couple of years ago, my staff costs here are so low I never need to outsource, I was in an outsourced country!

But, today with our current major project we need a pretty good flash developer, and we only need someone for about a week, so there’s no point recruiting someone, or even bothering trying to find someone in Thailand, I’ve just posted a new job on oDesk in about 10 minutes.

So easy to do I love it. And the really good thing about oDesk from a buyers point of view is that we have full insight into what they are doing and if they are really doing work – the oDesk system takes screenshots like every 15 seconds so we know if they are actually there doing work or are slacking off doing other stuff…

All round oDesk is a great place to outsource to, it’s just so easy, fast and worry free.

OK, before I start this rant, I warn you that I see something that I think is bad, I can be a real asshole, mostly because I think whatever it is I’m ranting about needs a serious reality check and while everyone around is saying good things and being supportive, I feel there needs to be someone dishing out the reality of the situation, and I’m prepared to be that person. Not out of hate, but to really give whoever a reality check in the hope that they see the error of their ways, and either change profession, or step up their game a whole heap (go back to school).

Today’s ‘why the fuck would anyone buy this’ rant, is about http://www.bidcheap2u.com/

It’s for sale over at sitepoint, http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/36780 with a BIN of $6,000… and starting bid of $2,500…

It pulls 500 page views a month – 60 uniques – which is about right for search engine bot traffic, not people… Mostly what’s being sold is the code, he custom wrote it, and honestly so what?

There’s heaps of ebay – auction style scripts around that do all that his would do – and probably more, and not to mention, since he’s the only developer and he’s selling the site with code as a once off thing, if there’s bugs, errors, issues, and anything else, then you can’t get support, you don’t have updates, you will have to hire a developer to decipher his code, and then work out the issue.

This site is a liability, not an investment.

He should be selling the code to other developers with resell rights, or an exclusive sale, not a site on sitepoint. Or he should be selling a hosted solution and a singular marketplace, a single auction site with your own code is just pointless, it’s like buying a Russian custom built one of a kind car which you will need to manually comply to drive in your own country, and then find a Russian mechanic who can fix it when there’s issues.

Actually, I might start valuing things for sale on sitepoint and wherever else I see them, because as a designer, developer, investor, business owner, and whatever else I am / have been, I think I have a good grasp on the value of a site for sale. I’ve built them, sold them, bought them, invested in them and disowned them.

My plan this year is to do away with clients totally by the end of the year. Be 100% self reliant income wise.

How am I going to achieve this? The same way anyone else can. By investing my time and energies into my own business ventures, building web based applications based on subscription models and by investing my excess revenue into offline businesses.

I have a whole bunch of targets I need to meet financially, but with the right planning and by putting the right steps in place I should be able to get there.

The same goes for anyone, and anything. Work out what you want to do with your X (X being your website, business, blog, life, whatever). And then sit down and research ways to achieve this.

For example if your goal is to make money from your blog, you really need to work out how that’s going to happen, why would people read your blog, what hooks are in place to get people to register to your mailing list or subscribe to your RSS feed, what value are you delivering to the end reader that they can’t get somewhere else?

In my opinion for a blog it really comes down to content and hooks, if your content delivers value people will read and search engines will index, if your hooks are of value people will take the bait and refer other people to it as well.

If the goal is to build traffic to the site to sell ads or something, then work on small targets, 100 a day, 200 a day, 500 a day, 1,000 a day etc. But don’t just set random targets without ways to achieve them, for every target put in place a set of actions that will make that target achievable.

It’s easy to say I want 5k visits a day and you’ll get that from writing good content. Well you might but you probably won’t, it’s better to say I’ll get 500 a day from writing good content, and search optimising my site, networking with others in my industry, buying ads on related sites and building some link bait.

And then go from there; work on sustaining that traffic and then growing on it to reach that 5k, it’s the same old story on the internet, once the traffic is there the ad revenue will follow.

For me in my position I’m working on building web applications that generate revenue, I’ll be building them with my team of developers in between client projects, and once they are ready for the public we’ll start small with some basic marketing, and no fees for usage, grow the user base, and start working on ways to monetise once the application has a healthy number of active users.

Until there’s a good amount of users on the system, just like high traffic numbers to a site, there’s no point of trying to monetise, you’ll make shit all and you’ll only drive people away.