Semi-Outsourcing Link Development

[TimmyMagic]

Hi,

I am thinking of hiring someone on a part time basis to do link development. This person is a family member and while they have no SEO experience, they know the web, and have an interest in the subject of the site. He's also a student and is looking for some extra cash (aren't all students!).

I am prepared to give them training and provide them with a checklist of criteria for potential link partners. I'm just kind of stumped on how to work out payment. I'd prefer to pay on results or solid leads, but am unsure of quite how this would work out. Has anyone here had experience with this? Any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Tim

[cnvi]

Pay by the hour not by the link. If you pay by the link you are going to get poor results and junk links. My company employs people who do this work for us and we pay them by the hour which produces the best results (while making them abide by a specific set of expectation so they dont waste time). For example, we tell them they should be able to get out at least 20 relevant quality link requests in an hour.

Make sure you give your worker a detailed list of criteria and make sure they use link request forms anytime they encounter them. Do not send email unless that is the only form of contact the website offers. Keep link requests extremely short, personalized, and sincere. Only a few sentences in a link request correspondence are necessary.

Make sure your worker is not requesting replies back to a free email addy. His email should be [e-mail].

[TimmyMagic]

Thanks. As I said, this person is a family member (cousin) and is someone I can trust. I am not comfortable outsourcing SEO entirely, particularly to people I don't know. Maybe an hourly rate is best, but I'd really like to hear from more people first. Thanks again.

[martinibuster]

You can pay by email sent. Don't put a PageRank minimum on the sites whose owners are emailed. All links are good except perhaps the gray bars and white bars are debatable. Give other preconditions of the kind of site you want them to contact.

[joost]

I completely agree with cnvi. Also: provide your cousin with standard letters written by you that he can/must personalize for every link request email he sends. And install Roboform on his computer to speed up the process of filling in forms (but don't forget to change the input for the forms every now and then).

[Shimrit]

I also agree with cnvi. Pay by the hour (because link building is annoying and time consuming) but put some quantity guidelines in place (because link building is annoying and time consuming and most people will be looking for diversions). Make them reasonable, though. Everyone needs a break every once in a while :)

[TimmyMagic]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

[BradleyT]

A co-worker used to work at a company that had 25 people doing link building to their site. They paid based on PR.

It worked well - they have over 300,000 inbound links and completely dominate the serps.