Today has been a bad week. I’ve been tired and generally unmotivated to get much work done on my sites. I’ve also been disappointed by some of the work I have outsourced.

The two rewrites I outsourced for cheap for a potential sniper-like site were the classic example of “you get what you pay for”. It was mostly just a test run, but it sure would have been nice had they worked out. I know that some people have had success finding cheap articles writers, or maybe their requirements are low, but I have not been that lucky. I think I must finally accept that to get decent quality content I will need to pay more than I care to, but it is certainly better than wasting your time and money on junk.

The other task I outsourced that didn’t quite meet my expectations was a web 2.0 account creation, posting, and cross-linking package. An article around my keywords was suppose to be written and then rewritten 18 times and submitted to 18 sites (like weebly, vox, hubpages, etc) with a link back to my niche site and another link or two back to the other web 2.0 sites created. Almost all of the sites publish their own RSS feeds and those feeds were then submitted to 50+ RSS aggregators.

Sounded great, but I should have asked more about the process before ordering. Now that I have the report and checked the sites, it looks like the articles were spun and the wording in many sections is poor. Also, the names for the sites (which often end up as a subdomain name like “myniche.wordpress.com”) aren’t what I would have chosen and I worry they sound a bit spammy. I hate crappy quality content/sites, especially for this niche, so now I will have to go in and rewrite the articles and do some damage control.

This seems to be my experience with outsourcing, and maybe it is because I am picky, but I end up doing more work to try and get the outsourced product/service to the level I require. That or I just chalk it up as a monetary loss and toss the work. Going forward I need to be very selective with what I outsource, who I outsource to, and make sure everything goes through me before being published. Tight quality control needed – lesson learned (again).

Well, I’m off to tweak those articles and see if I can get my sniper-like site up. I have the theme loaded, but I need the content. My niche site #6 which had gotten up to position #11 in Google for my KW is now back down to #16. I guess in just wants to bump around on page 2 for awhile which is not exactly helping with my motivation problem!

Related posts:

1. Niche Site Building – Progress Update
2. Unique Content Creation – The Uphill Battle
3. Niche Site Update – Finally Indexed