Are sites like this the future of outsourcing?

Following from the amazing response to my last post I thought I would show you an Free/Cheap alternative to outsourcing some repetitive tasks.

There are 2 tools that I have been testing for the past few weeks that are providing me with great initial results. The thing I really like about them is that they both allow you to start with a free account and “work your passage” what I mean by that is that in return for you providing them with resources the allow you to use the system. One distributes your articles to hundreds of quality article directories which have lots of back links pointing at them. The other distributes your bookmarks to 17 bookmarking sites without you lifting a finger.

Let me explain more.

The first tool is EzArticleLink.

EzArticleLink is a unique article distribution service. There are 2 parts to it , firstly you add an article directory to the back end of some of your sites, for this I use old sites that are of little use to me. EAL will post articles from other members to these sites (you can monetize these). In return for doing this you can then submit articles for your main sites which are then posted to other peoples directories.

Additionally for every article you post you get 100 additional anchor text links if you are a paid member.

You need to add spun articles but the service has it’s own in-house article spinners who do an excellent job.

Free members get 100-200 distributions per article and paid members (currently $29) get 200-300.

One side effect I’ve noticed is that the sites I’ve added the directories to are starting to perform slightly better. Most probably due to the back link that EzArticleLinks provide to ensure that Google indexes the directories regularly. I’ve added 20 directories which gives me unlimited article distribution for my other sites so If I can earn $1 a month from each of these directories I will have covered my monthly fee

In summary:

Read More about EzArticleLink…

The next tool I like is SocialAdr.

SocialAdr also has a free and paid business model. The service provides back links to your site from social bookmarking sites. Free members earn credits by setting up accounts (Takes about 1 hour) and then logging in everyday and pressing a button which adds bookmarks to the sites for free members. It takes less than 5 minutes per day to do this.

If you are like me and are basically lazy and don’t want to press any buttons then the paid service is for you. You just need to set up the bookmarks you want distributed and then sit back and all the work is done for you. The sum total of your work is opening the email that tells you what has been distributed.

Read more about SocialAdr

To have outsourcers do this work for you would cost a lot more than these services charge. The results I am starting to see means that these are no brainers. You can use them for free until they pay for themselves then upgrade to paid status.

The outsourcing experiment I am currently running originally started out as a test of how effective back linking is. After 6 weeks I am finally getting a grasp on some of the intricacies involved in back linking.

First I suppose I had better let you know what my views on back linking were before I started.  I believed that all the talk about the power of back links was over rated and just something that SEO guys kept on promoting as they know normal people like us just can’t be bothered to do on a regular basis. I can pretty much generate all the traffic I want by choosing the right keywords , the right Domain,good on site SEO and writing the right sort of articles, so I have never really bothered with it.

So has my view changed in the last 6 weeks??  No not much.

I will admit that there is a place for “good quality” back links for long term results and I will admit that ” poor quality” back links will give you a boost in the short term.

So let’s look at types of back links and see if they have any long term value because long term is where you’ll make your money. It’s great having a site making $5 a day for a month because you got some back links to it but what you should want is a site that makes $5 every day for the next few years.

Back Link Packets.

I am sure most of you know what I am referring to here. Monthly lists of High PR sites that allow “do follow” links. They do work short term, every site I promoted with them had a big jump in rankings to start with. Often from the 200′s to the top 20 or 30. With these you could probably get a site into the top 10 of Google for most easy  difficulty search terms. But you can also probably do that with a few good articles.

Long term they don’t have much of a future and may even eventually damage your sites ranking. Google is not stupid they know what’s going on with these and they can instantly devalue the links. Many of the site owners aren’t stupid either and can quickly make your links worthless. Nor are the software developers stupid, want to bet the next version of the software they release uses “No follow”

The number of sites I look at that have posted links based on these packets but have no good on site seo is amazing I would say that 70%-80% aren’t optimized. By spending 10 miuntes optimizing the sites they would probably rank higer than they do with bad optimization and loads of back links.. Remember The O in SEO means OPTIMIZATION!!! If that’s not a clue nothing is!!

I do use these at the moment but am planning on cutting back and concentrating more permanent methods of getting back links.

Link Directories:

The less said the better about these. In the main low quality links and you have no control over what other sites are linking from the same site. Do you really want a link from a site with 80% porn and meds links? Avoid like the plague!

Social networking/Social book marking sites:

Generally good quality links and can give extra juice by using the link wheel method. They not only generate links but traffic as well and can be integrated into an article marketing strategy. Unfortunately getting Links is not easy and takes time and effort, not a bad thing because it keeps a lot of the spammers away.However there are ways of automating it and still getting good quality long lasting links. More of that another time after I’ve shared my methods with the WordPress Goldmine members.

BTW in case you are wondering if the methods I teach in WordPress Goldmine work, here is part of an email I received today.  The funny thing is , I’ve not done any SEO work on that site as of yet!!

For starters congratulations on some outstanding SEO work. That is actually the reason for my email. I am a hard working entrepreneur who is having the hardest time getting my website on the 1st page of Goggle.

I was sadly burned 3 times by SEO companies, and I just feel so close in giving up. But then I came across you and your site and if I am not mistaken, you are ranked so well on Google yet your site is new, and doesn’t seem to have an overload of back links and you are in a pretty competitive niche.

So to summarize do you need hundreds of back links? It depends on the competition, your keywords and the Domain name. There is no straight answer, but before you set out to get hundreds of low quality back links first ensure that all your on site SEO is set up properly on a page by page basis. Once you have that sorted , you’ll find where you rank, then you can plan your back linking strategy.

The Outsourcing Project has been running a month and it’s now time to get rid of the providers who haven’t performed well and who aren’t pulling their weight. This can be difficult for some people to do but if you want to earn money then you have to get an efficient team in place.

My criteria for keeping people on is that their rate is reasonable and that they complete the tasks allotted within a reasonable time. People do have problems so as long as they tell me that work will be late I am prepared to overlook it a few times.

I have found that the best way of getting a good team together is to run the same ad every week and make sure people know you are adding to an existing team. This helps gives you credibility as who wants to work for someone who hires and fires people every week. They Also know that you are a serious buyer.

Each week I hire two or three people and if they are good I will keep them on, either way I always give them a few tasks to ensure that they are reliable.

My ultimate aim is to break the big team I have into smaller teams with reliable workers in each that I can specific assign projects to. I’ll try to explain that a bit better. Everyone I hire joins my main team. Here I assign them work for various existing sites. Back linking, article writing , creating graphics, article submission etc. They generally work on existing sites.

Once they have proved to me they are reliable for a month or so I’ll move them into a new team which will work on new and important projects. These teams are much smaller and have 1 or 2 people with specific skills. By doing this I can create teams with specific roles and control the costs better.

Better cost control means more profit.

Using the method above I know I  can create a small  reliable site building team with all the necessary skills to create and promote new blogs for around $64

Site Building $12
Content creation 5 articles $8
Initial Back linking 150 links $ 27
Article For Submission 15 articles $ $17

Once you start to get this level of cost control you can really start to use outsourcing to it’s Full potential. For example I ultimately want to have 3 or 4 specialist teams in place That can build and promotes sites.  Then all I need to do is to research and monetize the sites and ensure that they have they are profitable

Time for another update in the outsourcing experiment. I’ve decided to keep the exercise going for another month as there are some interesting results coming in and it will take a few weeks to properly work out what they mean.

There has been one development that has made the experiment so far very worth while. I’ve had to go through my server and create a list of all my sites and then see how they are performing. I am not the most organized person in the world and some sites that don’t perform well in the first few weeks tend to get abandoned or fall through the cracks.

Because I need to go and prepare work for the 11 people I am now employing I have to get a system in place. So I’ve needed to create a spread sheet of all my sites, list the keywords they are targetting and see how they are ranking. I now use this to decide which sites to work on next

During this process I’ve found several sites I’ve not looked at for a long time and noticed that they are by some miracle ranking just outside the top 10 a quick push and they should be top 5 within a few weeks. With luck I’ll get a few number ones.

Additionally i’ve found several of my articles at ezine articles are ranking very highly for competitive keywords. Once again a quick push in the form of backlinks and they should rank at the top. This is one of the excellent things about ezine articles, I’ve got lots of PR 6 articles that just need 20 or 30 good quality links and they will sit at #1 driving traffic to my site.

i’ve noticed that the more jobs I post the better the quality of provider I am getting, I assume it’s becise i know what to ask and I know how to test them with small jobs to start with. The Article writers I hired last week have proved to be excellent so far.

I’ll get together some stats next week and see if i can quantify how thigs are going although it’s still to early to tell what effect all the back links will have as they can take upto 8 weeks to take effect.

Finally If you missed the last post. WordPress Goldmine 2.0 is being released next week. I am switching to a subscription based model to allow me to add some cool features and courses I’ve wanted to include. This is your last chance to get in for a one time only payment. (you’ll also get to see the videos I’ve created for the outcoursing step by step course I am running at the moment)

The outsourcing experiment is well under way and the workers have been paid for the first week. Everything went well and all the work was done as requested obviously some workers are quicker than others. After 2 or 3 weeks I’ll end some of the assignments and keep the people who are doing the best work.

The costs for the first week were $156 and for that I had 72 hours work done for me. In those 72 hours there were 20 articles posted to 25 sites each giving 500 back links. There were 3 links for 4 different sites posted to 150 high PR sites. So a total of 1800 links. 2300 potential backlinks for $156 is not a bad deal especially when 500 or them are articles which could generate lots more links for many years to come.

It’s a bit too early to tell how the links will impact on the sites but initial results are quite encouraging. With just an extra 4 high pr links showing up for one site the pages the links went to had risen by up to 300 places in Google. Getting into the top twenty of Google is relatively easy. The difficulty comes moving into the top ten and up to position 1.

One interesting thing I’ve managed to do for a site that was already #1 was to get positions 2 3 and 4. Position 2 is now a second page on the site and position 3 and 4 are 2 or my articles from ezine articles. Just a few links to an article can have a very positive result.

Financially, which is what really matters, it is too early to tell if the links are having a genuinely positive effect. My Adsense earnings is up by about 20% over last month so that’s good. I’ve also made some sales from sites that haven’t made sales for a few months. All of this could be coincidence. Time will tell

Overall I am happy so far, so much so that I now have 10 people working for me. I took on 4 article writers today. They are all native English speakers and the rates range from $1.67 and hour to $4.44 an hour. I’ve asked for a minimum of 3 250 word articles an hour and created a video to show them how to do it. I’ve also given them a copy of the article I wrote about how to write an article in under 10 minutes.

The reason the rates are so low is that you’ll often find new providers on Odesk are happy to work cheaply so they can build up feedback and experience. That then allows them to charge more later on. I am more than happy to increase rates and give bonuses when work is completed well.

I’ve given all 4 new employees 2 keywords today and asked for at least 6 articles. If everything is Ok and they get accepted by the article directories I use I’ll give them 10 hours work next week. Finally I’ll choose the best ones and give them more hours.

As I’ve said in the past articles, break your outsourcing down into small manageable chunks. The last thing you want to do is to have to pay someone for 40 hours if their standard of work isn’t good. Start small and increase the hours once they prove they can work accurately and to a deadline.