Re-selling Services..

I have noticed a lot of questions about ethical and
unethical popping up lately...

This is definitely not unethical... The person is willing
to work for "$10" an article. So you are simply getting
them more business. The business you are getting for
them is willing to pay "$15" dollars an hour. You make
money, the article writer makes money, the customer
gets an article at the price he is willing to pay.

Louis, there's a lot of this going on "out there."

This is directly related to how a person makes a lot more money outsourcing than they do by doing all the work themselves.

Creative work is contracted and delivered this way quite a bit. And yes, you absolutely can mark the product up as your market will sustain. I would say it's "just business." Whether you do the work yourself or contract it out doesn't really matter. The key is, did the job get done and was the client charged a fair price for the end-product?

Bailey

Thanks Benjamin,

I love the way you sum that up. And it's true.. if everyone's happy how could it be unethical.

Louis

Louis,

It's also called "management", apart from the obvious marketing edge you will have over the resources you hire.

Hope that made sense.

Hey Louis,

I do this type of stuff a lot, and it's no different than want virtually all offline businesses do. Being the middle man, as I call it, rocks as long as you know what you're doing.

Getting your first client for a new service can be perhaps the hardest part, but after that first one, it gets much easier.

As far as ethics go, I don't see why that'd be an issue as long as you don't show off work that can't be done by the guy you're outsourcing too (don't show off $5,000 sales copy and have a guy do something not even close to the example you show). Do you think it's unethical to shop at Target or Walmart? They're basically the middle men of almost all their products.

Do you think it's ethical to go get a haircut or a massage? I bet the owner is making a huge cut of that profit, while the actual worker is only getting a fraction of that.

But I would caution against getting paid $20 and outsourcing it for $14 -- that just doesn't make sense to me. If you outsource an article for $14, get $50 to $250 for it (yes, I know you're use to low prices here, but that's not the case everywhere). If you want to sell $20 articles, I'd outsource it for at most $5 as long as the quality was good (which you can easily find quality writers for).

Or you can do the same with a variety of other services and outsource for a fraction of the cost. $1,000 to $15,000 clients can easily be outsourced for $50 to $500 if you know what you're doing.

Sometimes you can even take an existing service, add some more easy features or value to it and charge several times the price.

There's a lot of money to be made there once you get into it.

Brian