Some Great Outsourcing Tips:

1. Plan out your outsourcing business objective, whether to cut costs, increase revenue or gain an edge over the competition.
2. Identify all your non-core functions and other functions that need specialised delivery model and thus need to be outsourced.
3. Scourge for the ideal location (India) to outsource your business project taking into consideration various factors like costs, customers, transportation, workforce, skills, monetary and non-monetary incentives and so on.
4. After you have decided the activity and the location to outsource, fix a definite schedule and deadline to finish the outsourcing work. This is imperative as early outsourcing can lead to early results.
5. Search for multiple service providers to outsource your work to before deciding on any one of them.A good idea is outsourcing small projects to more than one vendor initially to be doubly safe or if you can't decide on only one service provider. Remember the vendor offering the least or the highest cost may not necessarily be the most ideal one too.
6. Before the actual outsourcing work begins do get all the outsourcing agreements scanned and whetted by your legal team to identify and fix any discrepancy in the outsourcing agreement you enter into with the service provider.

Read the articles on the vendor’s website. You can get a good idea of writing quality - substance, style and flow from the site. Ask the vendor to give you references of other customers who have used their services. Get feedback from them about the process, the reliability, the quality and commitment to deadlines that the vendor assures. You can also check out the websites of clients for whom the vendor has specifically created content. Remember that many clients provide their own content while developing websites. Don’t get carried away by the content on all the sites you see on the vendor’s portfolio.

Try to evaluate the diversity of the team. What areas of writing can they deliver? Some Indian outsourcing companies may only have a few writers able to write in a narrow band of topics, styles and substance. This may be fine. It depends on your needs. Check on costs too. But don’t get stuck on getting the “lowest price”. Rather, look for a vendor that provides complete solutions, gives you suggestions and adds value to the content development process. What is the track record of the vendor? How long have they been in business? What is their experience in providing content? What is the depth of their knowledge on the topics you would like them to write about?

There is no hard-and-fast way to select the right vendor for you. Finally, you have to take the plunge and try them out. We recommend getting to know a vendor by starting with a pilot project.

Can the vendor actually deliver on the promises?

Many time outsourcing service providers promise the sky in terms of the number of services offered and their past experience and expertise but deliver practically nothing, resulting in time cost overruns. To avoid such scenarios it is best to verify all the vendor claims directly and from the service provider's other and previous clients.

Check out the infrastructure

Ensure that the outsourcing vendor has the requisite infrastructure including high speed internet connection, telephone links, power back-up (especially if located in a remote location), computers with required hardware and licensed software and so on. These factors are important because they can either add to the speed of the projects undertaken or act as bottlenecks in the project completion if not adequate.

Security is Paramount:

When dealing with sensitive information and especially when the information is outsourced to a third party it is essential that your data is well protected through security personnel, video cameras, firewalls, VPN's, data backup, confidentiality agreements and so on.