| Thursday, July 26, 2007 |
| Outsourcing life |
A couple days ago, I heard a brief story on public radio's "Marketplace" about a new book, The Four Hour Workweek. Based on the four-minute piece, the author's thesis is that you're a big ol' sucker if you're working more than the titular four hours, and you can accomplish this by outsourcing everything to India. I'm not kidding! They can even apologize to your spouse if you've been fighting, according to this excerpt from the book. Maybe I could pay somebody in India $5/hour to write blog entries for me. ("I need 500 words on what I thought about 'The Simpsons Movie,' stat!")
Anyway, my thoughts drifted back to the "Marketplace" story today because I'm doing something super-tedious: setting up an Amazon.com Associates store for one of my clients. It involves looking up the ISBN numbers for around 100 books. Couldn't someone in India be doing this for me instead?
I thought I'd look up the company mentioned in the book excerpt, Brickwork India. I Googled them and found their web site. Instead of finding info about how I can get my very own personal ISBN-searching assistant, I saw this error message:
Server Default page If you see this page it means:
1. hosting for this domain is not configured
or
2. there's no such domain registered in Plesk
OK, that's a bad sign. If the company can't keep its web site up, I'm not sure I trust them to work on deadline for me. Then there's this blog entry, written by a would-be Brickwork customer who complains, "[M]y experience with them has been nothing short of laughable... I tried to try their services out with a personal assistant, and all I got was a complete runaround."
The Four Hour Workweek allegedly contains info on how you can earn big bucks by operating "a hands-off business that generates $80K per month with no management." I might have to flip through the book at my local Barnes & Noble to see what sort of business that might be. My current business generates a lot, lot less than that, and requires a lot of pesky work!
Ironically, one of the "hands-off businesses" that often gets mentioned in get rich quick books & articles is affiliate programs, such as Amazon.com Associates stores. I would love to know what the average affiliate actually earns; I'm guessing it's pennies, not thousands of dollars, per month. I was unable to get any realistic figures, since Googling "affiliate programs income" and similar phrases mainly gets you tons of hits on shady web sites. Personally, I have been running an Amazon.com Associates store on my lineups page for several years. That page gets literally thousands of hits a day, and I earn roughly $200 a month from it. That's not bad, but it's hardly my ticket to a life of leisure, either. I can't be sure, of course, but my guess is that I'm in the top 5% of associates in terms of income earned.
The truth is, I am something of a control freak and I can't imagine delegating anything, so it's doubtful that I would be a good candidate for outsourcing my life. If anyone has read the book or is making $80K a month through a "hands-off business," I urge you to post a comment here and share your opinions/secrets of wealth. |
posted by 125records @ 2:22 PM  |
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| 2 Comments: |
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If there were an easy, simple route to wealth, everyone would do it - and since wealth is, in fact, a relative rather than an absolute quality, it wouldn't make a damned bit of difference.
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It might help to read the book before you critique the merit of its arguments.
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Name: Sue
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If there were an easy, simple route to wealth, everyone would do it - and since wealth is, in fact, a relative rather than an absolute quality, it wouldn't make a damned bit of difference.