Image by caprisco@morguefile.com

The biggest investment in outsourcing is not the money you spend.

At least, not in my experience.

The biggest investment is training.

Training is insanely expensive because you need to invest your own time. You have to train people to do things and do it the way you want things done.

There are plenty of ways to train someone. I use videos sometimes but whenever possible, I defer to step-by-step illustrated, written guides. I love them because:

• It’s much easier to edit when we need to update something than a video.
• Anyone can update text/screenshots. This is great when you let your VA update your documentation.
• File sizes are small and relatively portable/shareable.

The only down side to written and illustrated (for me, it has to be illustrated to give the full context and clarity) documentation, it can be a little time consuming. The written part is easy. It’s the part about taking individual screen shots, then having to locate for them to insert into the document.

On an average documentation, I usually have about 25, steps. For larger documents, it can grow to 60-80 steps. It’s tedious.

Then, I found Screen Steps. When I found them, they were transitioning over, from desktop software to a hosted pay-as-you-go software. I didn’t want to pay a monthly fee and still don’t.

So, when I got a copy of its little sister Clarify with my MacHeist bundle, I switched over and been using it since.

I absolutely love it! So much, that I’ve actually created a ton more documentation ever since because it makes the whole process of illustrated documentation a million times faster.

Also, sharing is never an issue because you can simply save your created document in Dropbox. This is so much easier than having to maintain yet another website. Oh yes, I went there once.

The only down side compared to the more complete, Screen Steps version is, others cannot update my document. Clarify creates a file that is in proprietary format. You can output to PDF for sharing. You can even copy and paste the entire thing in Rich Text Format. Or Output everything to Email and DropBox or Evernote.

Even so, this is not a deal breaker. A Clarify license is only $30. I’d be happy to purchase an additional license  (owned by our company) for a VA to use, than to pay another monthly fee.

Having to create a lot of User Guides that are included with our PLR Plugins, Clarify has been heaven sent. An extremely valuable tool that I highly recommend.