Outsourcing isn't too hard. Just remember that you are still hiring someone, so you should take the time to actually interview a number of candidates and find a good fit. I recommend oDesk, but have had decent experiences with eLance as well. Many offers on these sites will come from outsourcing companies in India, the Philippines, and China. I'm sure that some of these companies do good work, and they do offer the advantage of having people in-house with many skill sets; however, I try to hire people who are independent consultants because I prefer to develop a personal relationship with the contractor.
I recommend interviewing over AIM or Google Chat and having candidates answer some questions or send you written work to help evaluate how well they know English. For example, I interviewed 8-10 people before I found my current assistant. I had them each write an example document, and I also told each of them what kind of affiliate links are appropriate for Freebie Finder (one of my websites - http://absurdlycool.com), then had them each pick the best affiliate link from an example set of links. This tested their comprehension and ability to learn from example, and I found it to be a revealing metric. I narrowed my candidates down from about 10 to a couple of candidates then chose my current assistant, who lives in the Philippines and speaks English very well. She has done excellent work and I gave her a raise at Christmas from about $3 to $4 per hour (25% raise over her bid hourly rate), and I am going to be giving her another raise soon. I've had outsourcers disappear on me more than once in the past, so I try hard to treat them well and to have backup plans. For the current assistant, I took the time to write detailed and reusable google docs about her responsibilities, so that the next training should hopefully be easier. But so far she's been great! (I am conflicted about globalization and outsourcing, but I think that if I pay more than someone bids, and treat them well, I can't really be causing harm.)
A few other thoughts:
* You usually get what you pay for, but I've gotten good assistant work for $4 an hour and a pretty solid web design for $75 total. It can be hit or miss, but once you form relationships they can be very valuable. You can probably get good copy editing and preliminary research for $7-$10 an hour. For more skilled labor, you will likely need to pay more, or do a more extensive interview search.
* Be clear about what you need and spend the time to train contractors.
* Get them to recite back to you what they will do in order to check their understanding. It can be hard to get people to admit that they don't understand you, so tease it out, at least until you get to know them.
You should post a couple of job positions on odesk and interview and give it a try! Let us know how it goes!