Wanting the Truth About Internet Marketing

The second PANDA update has inspired me to write about my experience with outsourcing and how you need to be vigilant with your online real estate.

The PANDA update has been modified again and more webmasters are complaining about the “slap” that they have received. How bloody frustrating (please excuse my language) but I consider myself an ethical person and an incredibly hard worker. I think I offer good information on things I am passionate about namely internet marketing and playing the guitar.

I was gutted to find after 2 years hard work on a particular blog on guitars that my traffic has been halved after the PANDA update. WHY WHY I cry, I haven’t done anything black-hat, the only thing I have done recently is hire an outsourcer and let me tell you my experience was a disaster. The outsourcer was. . . I won’t name names but they were based in the Phillipines. I wanted some basic backlinking to be done (simple I thought) I listed my websites, with their corresponding descriptions and keywords which were specifically chosen for each website to rank for. I gave a list of wesbsites to submit to and also simple methods to search for linking sites for the niche.

I thought it was simple and straight forward just copy and paste from a spreadsheet. Simple but mind numbing for me that’s why I wanted to outsource it. Boy what a huge learning curve. Not only did it take me time to make sure that everything was in order for the outscourcer and creating step by step instructions.

You wouldn’t believe that when I finally had the time to go through the sites that my sites were submitted to that the wrong descriptions and keywords were linked to the wrong websites so any link on their were was worth not at all, a waste of my time and money I was furious. I felt guilty because I had always done everything myself and as soon as I try and let go of the reigns a little I get this slap in the face.

The company I was using was pitched to me at an Internet Marketing seminar, I was made to believe that they were all trained in online marketing to understand the tasks. In my case I provided training material written by myself after my years of learning what works and reading every book there was on backlinking. Alright I am no expert but I do know how to get it done!

So my warning to you all is monitor outsourcers like a hawk until you are comfortable with the work they are doing. Ask more questions, check the work done thoroughly don’t expect the end of day report is correct either. So I repeat PLEASE check the work done.