Forum Moderators: martinibuster
First of all, most of the "bidders" are not workers themselves but an organizations which pay less to worker (I believe 2 times less at least).
Second thing I've opened several projects on sites like guru, elance, etc and the bidders are clearly mind broken and have only basic english skills while I'am asking for the one with excellent english communication skills.
I'am offering $350-$400 for a month of dedicated work(based on 40 hours week)
Funny thing is that in india $200 is a good salary and $300 is an EXCELLENT salary, but I still have no luck in finding even a moderate worker for my project.
Any suggestions?
People with computer skills and fluency in English are not going to work for that. And they are not going to give you 40 hours a week unsupervised no matter how much you pay them.
So lets say the national average is 250/mo salary. Fine well the average job is banana picking so unless you want bananas picked you are going to have to pay more.
I have heard of link farms in this country but they don't generally hire out, they are busy promoting their own sites. They set up an office that looks rather like an internet cafe, and kids come in after school and go out link hunting. They get like 1 dollar for a one way link and .50 for a reciprocal. Once they have their lunch money or their tuition or whatever they're after they move along and someone else takes over.
Hmmm... I'm getting an idea...
I'am too from the country with $200 wages. The problem here that unlike India, English is not widely used here at all.
..raised the wage to $400 and will raise by 50 every 2 weeks until pick someone. :)
I'am offering $350-$400 for a month of dedicated work(based on 40 hours week)
You get what you pay, and the cheap guy always pay twice.¦
Just did this same scenario and it got me into nothing but troubles.
Bottom line is if you pay very little, or pay people who do not have a full understanding of the business, you are relying on novices to help you with the number one aspect of your site - ranks.
With Link building being an very important seo activity, one wrong move and your site stands to loose everything.
Don't think that $400 being a very good salary in India, you will get good job done. Someone will agree to work for you but finally you will see that you have put yourself in a mess after that.
The average cost per month ranges from USD $600 and up as being from this filed I know it.
Also the cost will highly depend on how many links you will want to secure per month.
Fundamental problem with your approach is looking for guys in elance and such places. Guys who start their career through elance are the ones who don't have good local clients and/or would be happy to work anonymously, meaning trouble. Don't go after guys who come after you. Do your research, find a company with a website with their address and phone no. on it. Look for their client list and results, interview them over phone/messenger to confirm they know what they claim to know. Pay generously. $400/pm is not a BIG carrot to dangle in front of a person with experience in the field. Mind you, good ones who come to SEO have IT/design background and IT industry pays generously for good talent in India.
Added: You can't compare the money you give to an individual with the national average or even industry average salary. The difference is security. Person working on a regular job is happy with lesser salary with other benefits, provident funds, prospects of gaining tangible experience that he/she can put on CV, and the support from peer group. But with a job, that he/she is not certain about running for even one more year, being paid from some faceless entity, they will feel insecure.
I'm assuming you're speaking strictly of link developers in this regard. I've worked with plenty of quality people from elance... but I would also never dream of hiring a link developer on elance.
As far as the link developers not providing results - what type of training are you providing them with? Most link builders I've heard about being utilized don't perform near as well as my own link dev team - but they are in house and got a lot of training. You can't exspect them to be an expert (especially for 400 a month - even in third world countries) ... Anyone already "highly trained" in link development tactics is managing link developers, not working as one (IMHO).
>>>get what you pay for
There are two types of link developers - drones and marketers. The first is cheap, the second is effective - most people with a home/small business need to find (or create with training) a cross between.
this is a quite common strategy, and applies to just every industry inc. offline.
Could you please at least reveal the country name?
Thanks.
learned again and again the hard way.
The real trick is seperating the chancers from the talented and good.
do smart monkeys exists? I doubt so.
linbuilding = monkey work.
see the conflict here?
Try finding them monkeys somewhere in the jungle. ;)
You do have to take care of your linkmonkeys if you are ever going to make headway. LM's need to be fed. I have about 25 of them and we feed six meals per day. LM's don't require as much pay as people who speak and write perfect English, or as much as php/mySQL programmer with 3 to 4 years of experience, but you do have to pay them decent money.
Linking is hard work, and it is very taxing on the mind. Linkers need regular breaks and they need reasonable expectations. Some people want a lot of links and then complain that their linker got them crap links, others want only top-quality links and then complain their linkers got too few links. How many links can you get in an hour? Can you get more than your linker? Yeah, okay, Superman, whatever. Linking is damn hard work. Why is it you wanted to hire it out?
After you've fed your monkey, and you've set reasonable expectations, and agreed to pay him fairly, you need to monitor his work. You should review at least 50 samples of his work each week, and you must offer feedback on those linking actions so that your linkmonkey will be able to improve, and learn what you like and don't like.
To enhance performance of your linkmonkeys, pay them on a scale according to their perceived quality of links. We pay linkers by the square of their performance level, with 100% being perfect performance and 0% being no performance. This square-root-of-one curve makes it so that linkers that are really good get great pay and those that can't link, get so little pay that they move along.
Appreciate your linkers and have contests with prizes between them. A cash prize for best linker of the month can do wonders.
If you don't have your own linkmonkey that knows what you want and how you want it done, then you have to depend on the help of a used link monkey. The problem with used link monkeys is that they may have been link monkeys for a dozen different monkey drivers and they know how to link, but what they know is not what you know and not what you want. It s a seriously difficult problem to fix a link monkey gone bad, one that has already picked up bad habits. So, beware of link monkeys that have been compromised and keep them in good company when you do find a good one.
Other points:
How do you pay your link developers? Just a flat rate no matter how many links they get?
What happens with links deleted after linking in first time?
How do you control the anchors?
Do they have access to your linking pages in your own domain?
I have had a team of in-house monkeys, and it did work well, the only problem, it became very time consuming and my time is better spent on our bigger projects.
When stumbling on the freelance sites, I was hounded with offers ranking from $350-600 a month. The truth is, their English is terrible, and I doubt they are meticulous about quality, the way I am.
I live in a semi first world country, and I have been able to hire at the above rate in my home country.
One thing you must take into consideration is as link building continues, you will get spreadsheets of sites that you can get your links on per industry.
Therefore, we could have link finders and link submitters?
Hmmm, I should get 20 of these guys, train them well and outsource :)
In an ideal world we could all outsource to India, and the job would get done? However, as I have discovered, you get one bad linker, and your site ends up on FFA pages with 2000+ links.
If you want quality/quantiy and results , it must be done in-house.
at the end there are a lot of plain stupid ones, I even think a basic IQ test should be performed first, since for many studying little program like Arelis is already a hard work and very painful to their minds and take weeks.
And it does not matter how nuch you'll pay them...
at the end there are a lot of plain stupid ones, I even think a basic IQ test should be performed first
You are 100% right. Of my 5, I had one that was clueless, he really could not master links. I just kept him with the other guys because I felt sorry for him.
Maybe we should start a thread:
"IQ test for your prospective link builders"
It is downright humiliation and trivializing the guys and the profession.
True, thats why we are joking about it here :)
When I hire them, their title is "link engineer".
