One of the most challenging aspects of outsourcing a project as part of your website marketing strategy is choosing which contractor should do the work.

Simply looking at the bid price alone is obviously a mistake. There’s the old adage “you get what you pay for”. So, to just opt for the lowest price contractor without considering any other aspects is probably a mistake. However, to automatically choose the highest-price contractor is likely a mistake too.

No, you need to adopt a more systematic approach to evaluating bidders to work on your project.

If you use a popular freelance contracting venue like elance to find contractors, they make it easy for you to review bidders’ portfolio of past work, their review rating and customer feedback from past projects, as well as the bid price and comments the bidder can make specifically to “sell” you on their specific quality-to-price ratio.

The first step is to take this information and break it down into individual elements, and assign an “importance” rating to it (on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1=not very important to you, and 10=absolutely critical to you).

For instance:

Portfolio:

- Has done similar work in the past (Importance:
- Quality of past work (Importance: 10)
- Creativity versus “boring” (Importance: 5)
- How impressed were you? (Importance:

Feedback:

- Intensity of positive feedback (Importance: 6)
- Frequency of negative comments (Importance: 9)

Project Specifics:
- Price (Importance: 5)
- Understanding of project (Importance: 7)
- Eagerness for project (Importance: 9)

The second step is to go through each one of these and rate each bidder on a scale of 1 to 10 on how well they deliver each element.

The third and final step is to multiply the importance factor by the rating for each bidder, and add up the scores. This will give you an easy and entirely quantitative way to compare the value that each bidder provides to you. This will help you to narrow down the choices to one or two contractors and makes it much easier to select a winner.

I recommend using a spreadsheet such as Excel to do this. Put the different elements in columns across the top, and the different bidders in rows down the left side. Once you have your template set up, it takes only seconds to evaluate a dozen or more competing bidders and choose the one(s) most likely to produce the results you’re looking for.

Evaluating and selecting bidders for your website marketing project is not very complicated if you follow a systematic approach.

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Jason Jantzi has used outsourcing to drive his Internet marketing for years. Download his free Hiring Out 101 outsourcing guide and learn how to use this powerful website marketing strategy to help your business succeed.