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.

Outsourcing Experiment Part II

It’s been a few days since I updated you on the outsourcing experiment. During that time the learning curve has been steep but I’ve learned a lot. Here are 3 tips that i learned.

1 . I mentioned in the original post that the first thing I learned was to break the tasks down in to small simple tasks , i.e don’t advertise for someone to submit articles and backlinks. Instead advertise for someone to post backlinks and someone to post articles. Since then i’ve learned more.

2 . Rather than hire 1 person to do 40 hours work it is far better to hire 2 3 or 4 people to do 10 or 20 hours each. You then have the option of increasing the hours of the good workers and reducing the hours of the ones that are so good.

3 . The next tips is to advertise for people who have done the work in the past, so if you are using backlink packages from of of the well know suppliers then say in your ad that preference will be given to people who have done this work before. You don’t want to pay to train someone if you can avoid it.

Feel free to haggle with providers but the rates that seem to be standard so far are

Back linking $1.50 to $2.00 per hour
Article submission $2 -$3 per hour.

I have had several bids of below $1 and a low bid of $0.67 but I declined these

By far the best person I have employed is costing me $2.94 to post articles but she does almost twice as much as the other person doing the same task.

Both the article posters have shown initiative, some of the article sites I asked them to post to were having problems so they submitted new sites , in fact both of them provided me with lists of sites they had submitted to before.

I am about to take on 2 more people today which will bring my “workforce” upto 5 people giving me 80 hours of work a week for less than $150. I only need 5 of the 25 sites they are woking on to make 1 extra sale to justify the cost.

Stay tuned to see what happens next.

Finally If you are building your twitter followers then check out Twitter Organizer. This is a brand new site which will add followers and delete people that don’t follow you back while you sleep. It takes 30 seconds to set up and then runs automatically. The sales page isn’t the best in the world but watch the video and you’ll see the power of it.

Do you want to change you life?  Do You want to Work where you want when you want? Do you want to become a full time Internet Entrepreneur?

If You answered yes to one of those questions then isn’t it’s time you did something about it?

It’s June 1st today so why not dedicate the next month to laying the foundation of a long term business.

I am not suggesting that at the end of the month that you’ll be able to retire but I am saying that you’ll have a usable system in place that you can build on. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is an Internet marketing career. I’ve been doing IM for over 4 years now it’s only in the past 9 months that I’ve finally got myself organised so that I can work a few hours a week if I wish and still maintain my income.

If you are willing to sacrifice 30 hours this month and $30 then you can succeed.

The first stop you should make is ezinearticles.com. Ezinearticles is a great place to research business models.  There are loads of categories here find one that appeals to you. Once you click on a sub-niche you’ll see a link to the top Authors in each niche. Follow this link and you’ll get a list of the Top Authors in that niche. Now all you need to do is to click on some of their articles and look at where their resource links go.

This way you’ll get to see the business model they are using, and believe me if they have bothered to write lots of articles it is working. Follow the process to the end and see all the tricks and tactics they use

It’s now down to you to replicate the business model.

Even creating your own product can cost less than $30.  The graphics on my Twitter Tips and Tricks Site cost me  $17, the domain cost me $9. I wrote the book in less than a day. Although I am giving away the product at the moment I could start to charge for it or even sell it as a complete business package via a site like sitepoint or digitalpoint.  Check out the graphics at www.twittertipsandtricks.com

Go On do it now!!  Build For Your Future

If you go into any Internet marketing related forum you will read loads of posts about how best to promote your sites and what SEO you should be doing.  Now this may suprise you but 90% of what you read is pure and simply rubbish. People read something in one forum and post it in another without ever testing it out themselves.  This is why you should stop what you are doing right now and conduct your own Website Promotion Exercise.

So what is a website promotion exercise? Simply put it’s selecting a keyword phrase which doesn’t have many competing pages and using as many methods as you can think of to get pages ranking for that phrase.

So For example say we took the Phrase “Website Promotion Exercise” and decided to see if we could get it ranking there are several things you could do.

1. Place a post on some blogs with differing Page ranks and see which ranks higher the highest Page ranked site or the most relevant site. 

2. Use clipmarks and twitter and see which brings the best results.

3. Add a squidoo lens and a Hubpage 

4. Use services like Zimbo, Gather and Wetpaint and see which one outranks the others.

I could go on but I am sure you get the idea. Only when you’ve run tests like this will you know exactly what works and what doesn’t. I would recommend repeating the tests every 6 months or so as google tends to favor certain sites for a while and then move on to others. 

To  make it more fun you could challange a friend or group of friends to a competition and see who gets ranked highest.  Give it a go today it will really pay off the next time you build a site.