Outsourcing – How You Can Easily Get It Wrong

Outsourcing is an essential part of any marketer’s business. It is approaching impossible to manage every single task yourself and be successful. That is a lesson I am slowly learning – in the beginning I tried to do every little thing myself, but frankly there aren’t enough hours in the day. However this cautionary tale shows that outsourcing is not something to be taken lightly, and here’s why you must choose your outsourced workers wisely….and keep a check on their activities.

I’m getting more and more requests for link exchanges, this is where someone asks you to put a link to their web site on your own site and vice versa. Without going into long details about it, getting other sites to link to yours is great for getting high rankings with the search engines. Google ranks web sites from 0 to 10, which is their measure of how important a web site is, with 10 being the highest. Anything above what is referrred to as a Google PR (Page Rank) of 3 is pretty good. This site has a PR of 1 🙁 which isn’t bad considering. I’ll get it higher soon 🙂

Anyway, this morning I had this nice email waiting for me:

(I’ve removed all information that could identify the site because that would be hugely unfair to what is a superb web site)

All very nice – very professional and friendly written email. I checked out the site, it does indeed have a Google PR of 5 which is pretty high – nice professional quality web site. So I inserted their link in my “Recommended Web Sites” section and sent a polite email back to them to let them know.

This was the reply I got back:

Thanks for the link But you can add my link under of some of you post in your blog. please Tell me when my link is live in some of your post please

That’s exactly how it came – apart from the email graphic I inserted myself. So this has obviously been written by someone completely different. Right away there’s 3 things which have annoyed me:

1. No greeting – hugely unprofessional. I neither expect nor want to be addressed as “Dear Sir” but it’s not unreasonable to expect a “Hi Robert” or even a simple “Hi” is it? Right away that shows me the sender of that email doesn’t care about me
2. Poor English, really poor English. I’m not someone who expects the world to learn English to communicate with me – after all I speak 3 languages reasonably fluently and can get by in another 3….and I’m living in a non-English speaking country. But someone is paying good money to this person, if I was paying for that standard of English I would be furious. My Turkish is far far better than this person’s English but……I wouldn’t dream of offering my services as an outsourced worker who can communicate in Turkish – I would see that as cheating my paying customer
3. The writer appears to be asking me to put further links in to unspecified and unquantified blog posts. The norm is to put the links into a “recommended web sites” type of section, not blog posts. I have never come across links in blog posts written by the blog owner that are there for the purposes of exchanging links, seems a crazy thing to do. So the writer doesn’t know how the process of link exchanges works

I’ve now decided on the basis of the above communication that this link exchange is more trouble than it’s worth. In my 25 years of business experience one lesson I’ve learned is that if there are problems at the start of a business relationship they NEVER EVER get better. Strangely enough when I’ve had a bad feeling about a business relationship it’s always been proven correct. But maybe that’s ‘The Law of Attraction’ working against me….

Rightly or wrongly, I’m now thinking of all the things that can go wrong. Maybe this person won’t put up my link, or the link will be wrong, or I’ll have to send several emails to chase them up, maybe they’ll take the link down after a few days (after all who has the time to check every day if their reciprocal links are still there?), maybe there’s even a clever scam in there that I haven’t worked out? In short, I can’t be bothered….I don’t need the hassle.

So I send back a brief but polite reply:

If I’ve understood you correctly, you’re asking me on behalf of your client to add your link to various unspecified blog posts? Apart from your request being quite vague I’m not prepared to do that – the usual protocol is to add the link to the links section as I have done. This seems to be good enough for everyone else so I am mystified by your request. I have now removed your link from my site, but thanks anyway for your interest. Robert Black

Confirming everything I’ve written above, this is what comes back:

Why? Not erase my link please Add only my link under of some of your post ( in the bottom of the post) no problem

The English has got worse, his first word “why” tells me this person has neither read nor understood my email. I’m not going to send a reply.

So, when you’re outsourcing bear these things in mind:

1. Never assume that once you have passed on instructions to your outsourced worker that you can forget about it – you need to check that they are actually doing what you are paying them to do
2. Always leave them with a FULL set of written instructions so they know exactly what to do. It may well be that the owner of the web site DOES want links contained in blog posts. Unusual, but hey, every day’s a new day in the world of internet marketing. But….if that’s the case they should have left the outsourced worker with an email template written in correct English asking for that
3. Always remember that the person acting on your behalf is representing YOUR business, so make sure that their English communication skills are up to scratch. No one minds an occasional typo, or the odd grammatical error but come on….
4. Ask yourself whether the cheapest option is the best option – is it worth saving a few dollars on outsourcing to get the cheapest option or would you get better value by paying a little more?

Here endeth today’s lesson.