When you find an freelancer on Elance or GetaFreelancer etc. in many cases they may be foreign and although they often speak reasonably good English, it can be difficult to explain the work you would like carried out.
By far the best way to train them is to make a video with Jing or Camtasia and upload it to the Web for them to watch and learn as if they were stood behind you while you showed them.
Jing is free for videos up to 5 minutes long which should be fine to demonstrate most jobs and you can upload 2 GB of video to Screencast.com with their free account.
Video Transcription
One of the best ways to show your freelance workers what you want them to do, rather than just emailing them a description. Which can sometimes be pretty hard, and if they’re foreign workers, sometimes it can be lost in translation.
The best way to do it is to use some screen capture software. We’ve got one called Jing. It’s from TextSmith. And it’s actually free. You can record videos up to 5 minutes long. If you want to record videos that are longer than that, which, generally you won’t find you’ll need to. They do have professional version for just $14.95.
You simply do whatever you’re doing on the screen, whether that’s organizing an Excel sheet, some other job you want doing. Submissions to a website, to directories, perhaps. You can just carry it out on your screen and Jing will record the actions on your screen very much like I’m doing now.
For example, we’ve made several videos to teach our outsourced workers how to do submissions to directories. How to add articles to blogs. How to do article rewrites. All kinds of different things. keywords. Research. You name it. We’ve given them a private area on our website where they can log in, watch the videos, and then go away and do the job.
You’ll also need a Screencast.com account. They’re free as well. You can get 2GB of storage and 2GB of monthly bandwidth. You can sign up just there, and once you’ve finished doing your screen capture, you’ll have an option to upload straight to Screencast.com. And then you just send that URL to your outsource workers. They can log in and take a look at your video.
So it’s a very good way to demonstrate things that are hard to explain in an email. Once you’ve made your video once, if you change your outsource worker over, you can send your worker over to it rather than having to retrain them again or resend them the description. So I highly recommend that you use Jing and Screencast.com to teach your people.
Thanks for watching!
