How and what to look for when shopping for contractors to outsource your online and marketing strategies?

If you are the founder/CEO/head honcho at a young start up, the only person who should be selling your product is you. At this early stage in your company's development, you are the only person with the passion, vision, and knowledge to successfully sell your product. So, if you are lacking the technical skills to sell online, that means sitting down with every piece of educational material that you can get your hands on and teaching yourself. Then, once you've generated some sales, and accumulated some knowledge about the online marketing process, you will be in the position to hire some folks to solve the specific needs of your business that you've identified.

Moving now to your specific questions, the best way that I've found to outsource marketing activities is to develop a good working relationship with a few freelancers that you can find on sites like fiverr.com. I recommend giving them a few smaller tasks, and letting them prove that they can deliver quality results on a timely basis. Only then would I escalate the relationship and give them more responsibility.

For part two, ideally the management of the firm has a comprehensive vision for how all of its marketing activities will work together to promote their brand. Only then will it be possible to farm out the various sections (online, print, TV, etc) to independent parties. I've found that it is possible to have different groups work on different aspects of marketing, as long as the management has provided them with a strong strategic vision and checks in often to ensure that everyone is on the right track.

Finally, the number of people/skill sets to look for depends entirely on the needs and the size of the firm. If you're a two man shop trying to get a Google Adwords campaign going, you should be figuring that out in-house. If you've got twenty people and you're trying to ramp up your print media efforts, then it's time to find a graphic designer.

Bringing this all together, in the early stages of a company, the founder/CEO/head honcho should be putting together their advertising campaign because they understand their product and they, most likely, don't have the budget to pay for a team of professionals. After some sales come in the door and there is money to spend, then it is time to start expanding your marketing team with freelancers who can focus on delivering value according to the strategy laid out by management. Finally, once they've really established themselves, they can look to bring their marketing activities in-house and continue to expand their marketing capacity.

Update: the Starting a Business track featured before a section on HTML, programming and PHP respectively; now they are gone.

So really, if someone is in a business with a core talent totally unrelated to tech, programming and website building, how on earth she is supposed to find the talent to help her set up her online presence?

Outsourcing marketing and outsourcing the development of a website are two very different animals, as I'm sure you know. If I know that my web platform is going to be the way that I deliver my value proposition to clients, I will never outsource it. It is far too important for me to leave in the hands of people who I am not directly managing. So, the two ways to build this site become hiring a few developers or bringing on a technical co-founder. Both ways have their trade-offs, developers cost more but you don't have to give up equity to bring them onboard. The strategy to undertake would depend entirely on the specific business case and the resources available to company, but I will again reiterate that the website should be built in house.

Now, there are a few ways to go about finding tech talent to help you build that website. I always turn to my friends first to see if any of them, or a friend of theirs, have the skills that I need. It might not seem like any of them will have a connection, but you'd be surprised about who knows who. However, if they don't know anybody, you can always post a job ad in your local area, on LinkedIn, Angel.co, Treehouse, or something that is more suited to your local environment. This will hopefully supply you with a broad range of applicants to choose from and then you can filter through the talent to find someone who aligns with your vision. If you can't find someone through these channels then you're going to have to sit down and learn how to make your entrepreneurial idea a reality by learning how to code yourself. In my mind, that is the best way to achieve success because it ensures that you are building the product that you have envisioned.