Useful Sites for Outsourcers

You are an outsourcer, your boss wants you to setup a Facebook Fan Page, Social Media Accounts, or “something” online, but hasn’t given you any names yet to work with, except maybe the company name. They haven’t realized that you will need first names, last names, dates of births, addresses, etc. Head over to FakeNameGenerator.com – choose the country that your boss is from, to get some real-sounding names, just to setup the profile page (unless they have given you details to work with). This will save the guess work (if you’re an outsourcer, you know what I mean, when they say.. “I don’t care”, but you have no idea what type of names sound “normal” to that country. Choose the Gender, Name Set, and Country and let this tool do its magic. This is just for the profile – the name can be changed down the track when the boss gives you the correct details – but it shouldn’t be a reason to stop work. Timezones differences can mean a difference of 2 days trying to sort out a name that can be changed later.

This site gives you all the information you need, a real-sounding street address, a valid phone number, everything that you can use for a profile setup (obviously you will change it to real details later when you can get a hold of your boss, but this site is truly magic, I have used it many times to setup clients profiles. Write down all the details in notepad (although you won’t need the Credit Card, UPS or email address).

Another awesome useful site is FaceYourManga.com which allows you to create a cool Avatar image for your fake profile. This is especially useful since a lot of people use avatar’s that look like them anyway, and will be perfect to use while you are doing your social media related work, so that you can get everything looking natural and professional looking, until you are provided with a photo (which is generally months after you need it).

This one should be obvious, but I was super-surprised to find out that some of my outsourcers were still using Yahoo and Hotmail.. bleh! And had never created a Gmail account before. Gmail accounts are the way to go. Setup a new Gmail account for each of your clients, and have that gmail account download all the crap from Article Directories, Social Bookmarking sites, etc. Then use Gmail’s filters to automatically label each one and “archive automatically”. http://www.gmail.com – note, that some countries force you to use a phone number – well, ask your client for the phone number. And make sure to give them access (usernames/passwords) to the gmail account as soon as you have created it.

The forums at digital point are a great way to get some cheap graphics if you need to create something really fast. You can hold a contest – $10, $20, $50, or more.. for logo creation, landing pages, avatars, whatever you like. You may need this in future, and you cannot ‘post’ to the contests until you have at least 25 posts. So signup today and start helping out the community with your knowledge, then once you have 25 posts, you can create graphic contests to get sites done much cheaper and faster. Direct link to Contests forum. Thanks to Maria Gudelis for this tip – it’s been a time & budget saver for me on 3 occassions so far!