As your business grows it can be increasingly difficult to manage all your marketing activities yourself so outsourcing becomes an important consideration.

But it's all too easy to get it horribly wrong.

I've seen business owners waste fortunes and just as importantly waste a ton of time handing over the reins of key elements of their marketing to people who promised amazing results but failed to deliver.

I've had outsourcing problems myself. I hired someone on oDesk to build a wordpress plugin for me but it cost over twice as much as estimated and never really worked properly.

The biggest problem that most people have with outsourcing is that they farm out activities that they don't really understand. 

If you don't understand something and you give it to others to do instead then it can be very difficult to know who the right people are to select.

What criteria do you use? How do you know they'll do a good job?

Very difficult if you don't know what a good job looks like.

You have to rely on their own claims, or reviews they've got from others (take it from me: you can't rely on the star system on oDesk).

On the other hand, if you make sure you understand something before outsourcing it then you can ask the right questions of potential suppliers. You'll be able to tell whether they know what they're talking about and whether they'll be able to do exactly what you're looking for.

So even if long term you don't plan to do all your marketing yourself you should definitely make sure you understand how it should be done so that you can get the right people to do it.