This could end up being a little rant so I apologise upfront. We have been outsourcing work for the last 5 years. In this time we have learnt by experience all of the tricks and warnings that go with the territory. Not all of our experiences are bad but two in the last month have highlighted a new trend and one I feel I need to share with you.

Lets say you outsource work to a writer called Joe. Now Joe is a great writer, he produces copy on time and with the minimum of fuss. So you send him some more, that works well too. Then you start to depend on Joe to deliver quality content all the time. Suddenly a month or so down the line, a problem. The content he delivers no longer flows, it is full of errors and have to be resent for correction. It starts to mess with your time and causes issues.

So what has happened?

Well in our two cases, the outsourcer, Joe, has outsourced the work himself. Now I don’t have an issue with this if the outsourcer knows his stuff. But they tend not to and work on a price alone basis. This is a recipe for disaster and has caused me no end of issues in the last couple of weeks as they will not have the same experiences or standards as I do.

So a warning!

If a relationship with an outsourcer suddenly goes south. It could be because they are subbing out the work you are subbing to them!

What do to?

Well, you have a couple of options. You can ask them directly if they are subbing out the work. If they deny it - my gut would say bin them off as they are clearly lying to you. If they confirm they are subbing the work out (Kudos to them for being honest first off!), you can either share your experiences with them and give them boundaries which you feel comfortable with, and see how it goes. Or state that you are subbing to them and to no one else and if they can’t do the work then you will find someone else.

Summary

If you have a relationship with an outsourcer or freelancer and it goes bad, look to see if it is due to them subbing out your work. Ask yourself if the relationship is salvageable and that if you give them working guidelines, they can continue, or if not find someone else and save yourself the time and effort.

One thing every small business and most llarge ones too, shoulod be doing is writing and submitting classifieds ads.

Not to get direct traffic mind, but to get search engine position. For the longer tail keywords writing a classified ad placement could get you a page one listing within a few days, then you can test to see whether that keyword is worthwhile chasing directly. That said, you could then have the potential of attracting multiple page one listings.

How cool is that? Why settle for one page one listing when you could, have two or three.

While Craigslist is on everyone’s lips, there are other site available that can get you good rankings for your products or services.

Try

Gumtree

Vivastreet

Both a free and rank well for some of the local search and longer term search terms. Why struggle to get your own site listed for multiple search terms when you can leverage some of the bigger, more powerful classified ads sites to do the hard work for you.

Why not share your results with us? Drop us a comment below with your experiences….

The Zulu Principle is the name of a book by Jim Slater based upon an insight he had when his wife was reading. As he tells the story, his wife was reading a four page article on Zulus in Reader’s Digest magazine.

He thought that if she had gone to the library and borrowed as many books on Zulus as she could find, she would have become one of the leading experts in her city on the subject.

He then expanded that thought so that if she had flown to South Africa and lived in a Zulu kraal for a couple of months and studied all the literature at a South African university she would have gone on to become one of the great experts of her country, and possibly the world on that subject.

So what do Zulus have to do with you?

To really maximise the effectiveness of your web marketing, why not apply the zulu principle to your niche. Find one thing in your niche and research the life out of it. Within a very short period of time you will have more knowledge than most people and this will allow you to “charge” for that knowledge, be it in consultancy fees or create a product and sell it.

The beauty is for you, that people are lazy so you get a win-win.

One, most people won’t make the effort to do the research and become that expert

Two, most people will want that expertise and will pay for it!

So within a short period of focused time and effort, you can become a leading authority on something that you can use to help market your current business or to even create a completely new business out of!

Using Wordpress to run affiliate sites is becoming increasingly popular as more and more of use it as it is an easy way to run and manage a range of Affiliate sites.

But having the system in place to add content to is one thing. Adding content is quite another.
Here are few ideas and plugins to allow you to add automatically add content to a wordpress blog.

Please note: none of these methods should be used as they are or standalone. You will need to have original content on your site for it to be successful but there are lots of tools to add in secondary content to “beef” up your website…

ImportCSV
Well I had to start with my own plugin. This allows you to add an affiliate datafeed by converting them into blog posts.

Automatic Blog
This plugin allows you to feed your blog with content from one of the many article directory sites. Should be used as a way of having “guest” articles for your site.

Yahoo Answers Wordpress Plugin
Does what it says on the tin. Allows you through an API code to pull in Yahoo Questions and Answers and drops them into your blog. Turns the questions into a post, and the answers as comments.

Yahoo Shortcuts
This plugin enriches your current content by feeding in other related content from the various yahoo services available. There are some really nice additions in here to help create a very vibrant looking site.

Autoblogged
Allows users to pull in content from another RSS source. Maybe useful for news services

These are just a few ideas for the kind of tools that are available to help you build an affiliate website and offers a number of ways to add auto updating content. Like I say though, it is not a “be all, end all” solution – you still have to put in some hard graft. The main benefits we have found using some of these tools:

• Adds more quality content for site visitors
• More page views for Advertising
• Allows us to add Product feeds
• Allows us to create more internal links between pages and allows us to add in keyword rich links back to our main pages.

Here is a great little script to add more content to your affiliate blog sites. I would only suggest using this to do two things:

Add a guest article section to your site
Use with WP Affiliate to add inbound keyword rich links form these articles to the other main pages of you site…

Just make sure you also keep the author links intact!

It can be a pain to manually update your blogs with fresh content.

But don’t think that the old-fashioned method of using content from RSS is the only solution.

As you know, it will make a website for Search Engine bots, but not for REAL Visitors.

RSS feeds only pull information to your blog from the first few sentences of various content sites…
usually not more than 55 words.

So if a visitor really wants to read it, he will LEAVE YOUR SITE and go to the article source to continue reading.

You are losing visitors instead of converting them into customers!

Here’s a simple and powerful solution that will automatically post QUALITY content to your blog.

Automatic Blog Wordpress Plugin gets fresh new articles each and every day and posts them automatically to your blog.

You get FULL ARTICLES to your blog, at least 300 words long!

It’s so “Set-it-and-Forget-it” simple!

You install it in less than 3 minutes and then it works automatically! This is a great tool if you have multiple affiliate sites. You can set this up on any number of blog sites.

I suggest you take two minutes out to have a look at the Automatic Blog Wordpress Plugin.

If so this will be a good thing to read! One of the beauties of the Yahoo Publisher Network over Google Adsense is that you can keyword match the content ads displayed on your pages. This means you can add really relevant ads for each post immediately. And you can also look for those that pay more income (Just keep them relevant).

With this in mind, I set about figuring out how to add Yahoo results to my blog posts in a quick and
easy way and still retain control of the results.

This is what I came up with. You will need to copy the code from your account to set up the results how you want the results to look but this gives you an idea. Also make sure you have your own affiliate links in their too!

I am using an iframe to display the results in the post. Here is the code:

<IFRAME id="iframe" name="iframe" src="http://yahoo.omgeu.com/search_overture.asp?keywords=<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID,'keyword_ysm',true);?>&amp;aid=713&amp;wid=16734&amp;FontStyle=verdana&amp;BaseFontSize=10&amp;hideButton=true&amp;hideNext=false&amp;vspacing=6&amp;hspacing=6&amp;vmargin=6&amp;BoxStyle=1&amp;BoxColour=&amp;BoxN=&amp;BoxA=&amp;BoxF=222222&amp;HeaderCol=111111&amp;NavLink=660000&amp;HeaderLink=000088&amp;UrlLink=006600&amp;format=&amp;ResultCount=10&amp;Preview=0&amp;homelink=&amp;feedtype=&amp;searchBox=1" frameBorder=0 width="99%" scrolling="no" onload="GotoAbsTop();" height="800"> 
      <p align="left">We are sorry this section of our site requires frames to 
        be enabled on your browser in order to function.</p>
      </iframe>

Look for this bit of code:

<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID,'keyword_ysm',true);?>

This is the key custom field call. Add the full iframe code to your single.php template for your theme.
Remember you can amend the display using the control panel in OMGUK. This will allow you to change background text size etc…

Then in each post simply add a custom field called “keyword_ysm”. In that field type in the keyword you want to display results for. If you want use a different field name feel free.

Job done.

This gives you a lot more control over what is displayed and will also help to increase your revenues from the OMG / Yahoo Programme.

Not a member of OMGUK. Sign up here: OMGUK

I was looking for a list of document sharing sites so I could upload some Word Docs, PDFs and PPT files in the hope of driving a little bit more traffic and get some of our unique content out there.

I couldn’t find a big list so here is wwhatI found from 30 minutes googling:

www.scribd.com
www.yudufreedom.com
www.issuu.com
www.calameo.com
www.docstoc.com
www.thinkfree.com
docs.google.com
www.divshare.com
www.edocr.com
www.slideshare.net

These are mostly free and allow you to share documents. Some of these also have widgets so you can add them to your blogs and websites.

These can drive more traffic to your site in a way most won’t be doing and also it can save on YOUR bandwidth by hosting this stuff elsewhere.

Soft launched a new website 3 weeks ago. Just added content around the theme of small business insurance. Left it alone and haven’t added any more content. Google search for “Small Business Cover” shows us at Number 1 with over 22 million sites (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=&=&q=small+business+cover&btnG=Google+Search&meta=lr%3D)

Maybe I should sell the site now while it is ranking so well! Building sites on a Wordpress platform seems to work well and adding content that is thematic also looks like a winner for Google optimization.

Be interesting to see what happens to the site when we start work on the link building and adding more content….