How I do outsourcing so far

I get this question asked a lot so I figured I would cover it in a blog post. Outsourcing never seemed like a big deal to me, at some point I had a full time job so it simply made sense for me to pay someone to do part of my work since I barely had a few hours a day to work on my IM business. I first started with someone writing articles for backlinks and kept writing all the content for my website (since I want it to be really good for my viewers). Eventually I decided to pay my outsourcers more and I ended up finding writers that were better that could write almost perfect website quality content so I would just edit it a bit (make sure the info is good, add images, add internal links to my other relevant posts, make sure the keywords I want are mentioned a few times) before posting it on my website and then it was good.

how to outsource a writterI mentioned it briefly in our new forums so I’ll simply repeat the initial part of what I do first here. I have always only used Odesk to find my contractors by the way but theirs alternatives. It’s not like I tried many, Odesk was just the first one I used and I always found someone to hire that met what I was looking for at the time.

How I hire someone to write articles for me

I usually give a test job and ask for 2-4 articles of 300 words and ask for English speakers. I try to provide a one sentence per keyword explaining how they should cover the topic and also that they should try to mention the keyword a few times in the article (1-3 times) as they find it can naturally fit (readability > optimizing it for SEO). I used to offer about $0.5 per 100 words but now I offer $1-1.5 per 100 words to get great writers (surprised some work at this price really, especially American/Canadian writers which is all I get now since their English is great). Anyway, I ask for samples and then I recruit 3-4 people. Once I get all their articles, I pay them all and I ask the best candidate if he is interested in more work (I always had one stand out from the rest by a lot so far, in the 4-5 times I had to do this when I lost a writer or wanted a second one).
I then ask if I can pay him by paypal and his email address so I can contact him directly and settle on a price to write articles for me on a part time basis for the upcoming weeks/months. Most people usually have paypal, especially once you start getting people from North America. Also, I use the articles from those that did not make the cut for backlinks by submitting them to article directories or/and web 2.0s like hubpage or free blogs.

Also, I usually give clear instructions to them and ask them to feel free to ask my questions if they need clarification, which they sometimes do especially at the beginning. Once you have someone properly trained to do what you want them to do it’s great. Over time I usually pay them more or give them a bonus here and there, that’s just how I am and I like working with the same person for a a long time.

Here’s a sample of one I sent a few months ago after I got his email address. Obviously this should not be copied 100%, but you can have a good idea of what I ask for. I usually am flexible on the number of words they can write for me going from 300 to 600 (sometimes up to 1000 if I feel it’s a big topic)

Sample:

Hi, it’s Alex from ODesk. Here’s the next 5 articles I would like. I usually send payment up to 1-2 days tops after receiving them so don’t worry I won’t be late, I’ll be sending it to your paypal ([email protected]).

Anyway, for these articles you can be flexible on the number of words. Ideally I would like ~500-600 words for them to cover the topic well but I understand that some subjects can be hard to write for so as low as 300 words is fine. However, if theirs a lot of information that you can find you can cover on a topic going up to 600 words would be great.

When possible I would like you to mention the keyword/subject name of the article when it fits in the article. No need to go overboard with this, 2-3 times is fine, more is better if it still reads well but no need to force it. As an example, on the first article on good treatment for x and best treatment for x I would like you to mention both of those words 1-3 times. Oh and, these articles are mostly to present information not sell products (unless I mention to you something about this…) so the truth is what I would like. If theirs no “best treatment for x” that seems to stand out while writing your article you don’t need to lie and make one up, you could just say something along the lines of “finding the best x is hard because their is a lot of controversy but my suggestion for the best treatment might be X” (just an example).

Anyway, let me know if you have any questions or if you have trouble writing on a specific topic.

5 articles:

topic 1 (make sure to also mention x if you can)

topic 2

3-4-5

Thanks,
Alex

Getting someone to spin articles for you.

Ok, this one is much harder. For a long time I did it all manually using TBS because I felt like I could do a better job than anyone since I know the niche well and can do a bit of sentence/group of word spinning than someone hired to spin for me would probably not feel comfortable doing. Also, I usually spin almost every word and was able to do entire 300-400 word articles in 15 minutes. Anyway, over time it became important to free up more of my time and I was able to find people to do this for me at around $1.5-2.5 per article. The process is basically the same as the previous one but it’s MUCH harder to find someone that can do the job properly. When you ask for someone for this job ideally you should of course mention experience with article spinning and possibly also that they understand how the best spinner works. Many of them do since it’s such a widely used tool and that helps a lot. Here’s a sample of what I sent people when I first tested them out to spin articles for me.

Sample:

Hi, I’ll try out this article for you to spin with TBS. I understand that you will most likely use “replace everyone’s favorites” and other such features that quickly inserts spins but make sure it’s readable! I would like the article to be around 50% uniqueness as shown at the top near the number of words.

I would like the final article to be given to me with all the {word1|word2} spins in them. I think it’s best that you check out 1-2 spun articles and make sure they look readable!

I added “keyword” in some areas where I will later replace with a link to my website but I left it as keyword for the article so you don’t have to waste time spinning those words 🙂

-Insert your base article here-

Alex

It’s way harder to find someone that will actually give you readable articles when spun, so you might have to put more effort into it. I also manually still do the titles and resource boxes (for UAW and article directories when using AMR).

Right now I want to outsource even more of my backlink building process so I’m testing the SEOnuking service here for $200/month since he seems to do a lot of what I currently do with my websites. He uses SEnuke and article networks. Oh ya, I bet you guys all got spammed about the launch of SEnukeX this week huh? Many of you actually emailed if I was going to use it and the answer is yes but he will… I’m not going to pay another $120+/month :P. Also, I had the previous version of SEnuke and I never felt SEnuke was worth the price. However, this guy builds a long term blog network around your websites (something which definitely does help) and he also submits spun articles to the same article directories that I already use so I felt that if it works I can probably stop paying for some networks in the future. It’s been two weeks and not too sure on how effective it is for now but if people are interested I might update this thread in a few weeks with the results.

Anyway, that’s about it for outsourcing. Right now I’m still working on my new websites and new niches, I’m hoping my experiment with the SEonuking service will be effective since that’s all the backlinks I’ve been doing in the past few weeks. Eventually I’ll probably hire 2 people or so on a part time basis to help me out even more, Fingerman currently has an employee coming to our house 30 hours a week to work for him. Sure, he pays the guy $10/hour but he pretty much does not have to work at all, his online time is spent writing content for his new health blog or new posts in forums.