For a couple months now I’ve seen it coming: the need to hire someone to take over some of what I’m doing, so that I can do more. I think the one thing that shocks most people who’ve never run their own business is that you don’t get paid for all the time you work. What do I mean?

Think about working in a corporate environment (I started my business life as a Corporate SEO). If someone calls to talk about a contract, you send it to your sales team. If you need copies made, you can drop them off with the Admin Assistant. When you receive an invoice, you forward it over to Accounting. If your computer goes down, you call IT and go out for coffee. And, at many companies these days, your pay is direct-deposited so you don’t even have to go to the bank.

All of those services fly out the window when you go out on your own. You are your own IT, Admin, Accounting, HR and Management teams. All of that in addition to the fact that you need to get your work done every day. But you can’t exactly send a client an invoice with “5 hours - Fixed my computer” on it, can you? And that is why people who have only worked for companies are shocked to find out I may only do 20 hours of “work” per week. Except that those 20 hours of work took 40 hours of supporting effort. Even getting paid requires me to drive to the bank to deposit checks a couple times a week.

So, a few months ago when I stood with a total of 9 clients and could see my work-hours quickly outgrowing my ability to be more efficient, I began to work on the next challenge: what do I hire out? Assuming I could only afford one employee at the current volume, do I hire an Admin Assistant to take calls, make copies, and help organize meetings? Should I hire a sales person to manage my current contracts and help me find new ones? Should I attempt to find another SEO/PPC expert to take on client work (and if so, how can I be sure I can trust them to uphold the level of quality I demand for my clients?)? Or should I bring on an intern and hope that the amount of smaller-tasks I can hand off to them will outweigh the training time?

I am notoriously demanding when it comes to resumes. I often say that the minute I find the first typo I toss the resume, which is not far from the truth. I expect that one-page of writing shouldn’t be difficult to produce, and that you should have it so polished by the time you’re ready to send it out that I won’t find a thing wrong with it (from a technical perspective anyway). When I receive a five-page resume, or one written in the third person (another story for another time) I have to wonder what some people are thinking. So what’s the best way to get a job with Untouchable Marketing? Don’t send a resume.

As it turns out, the old adages about networking are correct, and knowing people is often greater than knowing anything else. I am going to try out an intern-esque position on a contract basis for the next 15 weeks or so to see if the outsourcing of tasks outweighs the training time. The candidate is actually family of a good friend/business partner who’s situation is well-suited to working from home. He’s qualified and never had to submit a resume.

How will I judge the outcome as a success? Like everything I else I look at numbers. I will feel the experiment is worthwhile if the dollars I pay are returned 2x in either hard dollars, or client approval (as measured by frequency of emails and number of referrals). If the experiment doesn’t meet this goal, then at least I was able to help out a friend and find out that I need to look for a partner or an assistant next.

I was doing some searches for a problem I’m having with Firefox 3 randomly logging me out of AdWords when I came across this article.

From the article:

Stevens bought the drive-by-download.info domain, set up a server to display a “Thank you for your visit” message and to log the requests. No PCs were harmed in this experiment, he emphasizes. Then he started the Google Adwords campaign, using combinations of the words “drive-by download” along with the ad. His ad was viewed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times, for a click-through rate of about 0.16%. The experiment cost him $23, or 6 cents per click/potentially infected machine.

What some people don’t understand about the AdWords system is that the primary traffic sources are not (as was the case in the late 90’s, early 00’s) banner advertising seen by an equal cross-section of tech-enabled humanity. The giveaway to the “success” of this experiment is revealed in two facts from the above paragraph: “combinations of the words ‘drive-by download’” and “6 cents per click.”

Because of the way AdWords works, his ad would only have been seen by those searching for “drive by download” or those reading content about “drive by downloads” (or, more recently, content related to those topics). Given that the only people searching for or reading about that type of activity are those who are already somewhat informed, or are becoming more informed, I would guess that had an actual virus or other malware been installed, there would be very limited damage overall.

And factoring in the 0.16% CTR, and low CPC, I’d say his ad was more than likely running alongside tech articles on the content network, where it would primarily be seen only by tech-savvy users on both sides of the fence.

Certainly, in my younger days when I was first exploring the world of hacking, if I saw someone advertising the download of this type of software, I would take them up on it just to capture their methods and code. Most of the “advanced users” I knew back then not only sat behind fortresses of firewalls and virus checkers, but many of us also browsed via ‘bottles’ where viruses could be trapped. Of the 409 clicks achieved by the experimenter, I’m guessing only a handful of those would have resulted in successful infections, and only a subset of those would have real results.

These type of misunderstandings are what lead to so many small business owners opening their wallets to AdWords and getting taken to the bank. I can’t count the number of times I have tried to dissuade people from adding keywords like “weather” to the keyword list for their golf club, dating, or business portal site in order to get more eyeballs.

The world of online marketing requires more lateral-thinking than any other advertising medium ever invented. If you don’t have the time (or the ability) to answer “Why?” 100 times a day, then you should seek assistance with your Web Marketing efforts.