It is a proven fact that outsourcing different jobs makes financial sense in the brick-and-mortar world, but when is it time to hire out work in the ecommerce world? Too many small business owners cripple themselves. They fall into a work at home small business opportunity mindset and limit their opportunities for success.
The fact is, many small businesses increase their profits dramatically by outsourcing different aspects of their business.
Search Engine Optimizing
SEO is the number one outsource, but it has become a foggy area full of confliction and lies. There is very little reason why a business needs to pay a few thousand dollars to optimize their web sites. In fact, most SEO optimization is just recoding a page, something that any amateur programmer can do for a few hundred dollars.
Content Management Systems like Drupal and Wordpress can be easily manipulated by amateurs, and are already optimized.
Writing
Writing is the next job to be outsourced. Web writers are not the ‘trying to break into the industry’ armatures they were a few years ago. In fact, many pro writers are leaving the magazine and journalism worlds to step into.
A freelance writer can be hired for anywhere from $.01 – $1.00 a word. It all depend on the quality of content. Is it possible to have 100% unique content? Yes.
A niche writer who belongs to associations, has insider information, and regularly updates their contact information can write news, and reviews that are unique. This content can bring more traffic than 100 ‘evergreen’ or ‘rehashed’ articles.
A good writer can also write 10 articles on the same topic without ever triggering Google’s duplicate content filter. This is what you are paying for.
Link Building
One of the hardest and most time consuming practices on the net is link building. Bloggers have it a little easier. They can pay to submit to 700 or 1000 directories at a single shot for $.13 – $.20 each, with a success rate of about 60% acceptance.
Web sites and ecommerce sites need to build links the old fashioned way, by submitting to blogs and forums. However, there are people who can generate hundreds of links for $.10 – $5.00 each. These people are members of dozens of forum, manage dozens of blogs, and have multiple lenses at myspace, facebook, bebo, and other sites.
These people move through their sites, building links to their client’s sites. One of the benefits is having them link to ‘inside’ pages of the site – something Google values more than a link to the home page.
A good link generator can build 200 links a week, each one a valid link – no sig lines, no directory lists, and no link farms.
Forum Management
Ecommerce businesses are starting to realize the value of a forum. Google is too, giving higher ranking to forums than to websites that have paid $20 000 to optimize. Forums are the new ‘boom’ for small ecommerce businesses.
Forum posters charge $.10 – $1.00 per post, and a good forum manager will cost about $100 a week. But, this money is well spent. A good forum manager can host contests which can build 1000 inbound links within an hour. They keep the threads going, add important information, and pre-sell customers. It is like hiring a link generator, sales rep, and writer, all in one.
Conclusion
Each of these freelance support professionals does charge money, something very valuable in the first few months of an ecommerce business’s life, but they can save something more valuable – your time.
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¬ carl
#990 November 13th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Recently I launched my own website. Naively I just assumed you put your site on the web and away you go. I knew nothing about SEO but I soon learned, it was a case of having to. The first month I had no idea really what I was supposed to be doing in getting my site noticed by the search engines. When the penny finally dropped and I came to realize about keywords and especially anchor text key words in blogs and replying to blogs, also I found one of the most important tools is original content on your site, it came quite easily in boosting my page position. Having said that, been stuck in front of a pc 24/7 and this is what it takes, is hard work. When I say original content, I don’t refer to writing about something that nobody else has, as this would be extremely difficult unless you have a new product that only you know about, I mean writing it in your own words. I have spent hours rewriting articles for my site and to publish them later on, which brings me to another point. If you have written anything new regardless of the word count, always publish it to your site first and then wait for the search engines to crawl it. Only then go ahead and publish it to the numerous article and blog sites available. This at times seems like you are waiting around forever but it will pay in the long run and while you are waiting write another. You don’t require a degree in English and to the professional writers who do write for a living in may appear sloppy but you are not aiming the content at them. As long as it is readable and makes sense to the public who are interested in your product then great, plus get your key words that are relevant to your site part of the article. When I started out my site appeared on page 27 of Google and this was out of 60 million results that Google pulled up. Within 10 weeks which does seem lengthy but it soon passes I am now on page 1. My other key words pulled up over 240 million results and I am currently on page 2 for this. I have had no training in SEO and I have not paid for a single thing in terms of links or help from any SEO companies. It is boring and tedious but you just have to stick at it, day in and day out. At first the rewards come slow and there are times when you actually think you aren’t making any ground but after 3-4 weeks I did start to notice my position gradually improving and this then gives you the boost to continue. It’s not rocket science but you do have to be dedicated and to have vast amounts of patience to accomplish your goal. You only get out what you put in and this is just the way of the world.