Need help link building, but can’t afford to hire an agency or a full-time employee? There are some great resources out there that can connect you with qualified freelancers to help you meet your goals. The trick is knowing what to look for in freelance SEO help. Unfortunately, there are a large number of "SEOs" that deliver low-quality and/or out-of-date strategies that will not help your site, and at the worst could actively hurt your site’s rankings. In this post, I am going to describe some best practices for finding quality freelance help for link building through oDesk.

oDesk is a service that connects companies or individuals with contractors in a variety of marketing mediums, one of which is SEO. Through oDesk you are able to post a job description, hire help, manage the time they work and pay your freelancers. I am not a representative of oDesk or affiliated with them in any way; I have simply used it successfully over the last two years to help me build my start-up marketing agency.

Set Your Budget and Goals

The first step is to set your budget and goals for the project. If you are a small agency hopefully you would have planned this out during the pitch for a new client and if you are an in-house team you will need to get buy-off from internal stake holders. Either way, having a budget of $200 per month vs. $1000 per month will dramatically affect how you divide the hours spent on various projects and how much you are willing to pay each freelancer.

During this process you will also want to determine what type of link building you will need for the project. The reason this is important is because different link building techniques require different levels of competency and capability. So, some link building techniques will cost more than others based on the skill level of the freelancers that will be hired for the work.

For this post, here is the list of link building techniques that we will be finding help for:

• Guest Blogging
  • Writer, Researcher and Project Manager
• Local and Business Directory Submissions
• Blog commenting

Map Out the Desired Freelancer Qualities

This is where you are able to build in a lot of budgetary efficiencies. I would highly recommend hiring several freelancers in order to complete all of the necessary work.

For example, I would hire 2-4 people to cover-off on my Guest Blogging line item. I would look for 1-3 writers and then I would find someone else that will act as a project manager (oversee writers, find the posting opportunities, reach out to the potential blogs, etc.). These skill sets require different types of people. A decent writer with experience in the niche you need content for can generally be found for $20-$50/hour. A good researcher and project manager can often be found for $15-$25/hour. However, when hiring the project manager you really want to do your homework on them (A Skype interview is recommended) to make sure you find someone capable.

Then for directory submissions and blog commenting you can look for freelancers that charge lower hourly rates. This is fairly simple work; it is just time consuming. I would look for a freelancer at a rate of $5-$15/hour. Sometimes you can find a contractor from India or the Philippines that can perform this work successfully or you can find an entry level North American SEO at an affordable rate. I would always recommend native English speakers first if you can afford it.

Post a Job

Once you have your budget set and list of link building needs, then you are ready to go! After you create a profile on oDesk.com you can navigate to the “Post a Job” section. Be as detailed as possible in this section and make a case to the potential freelancers for why they would want to work on your project.

Suggestion

I have noticed that it is very helpful to ask for some type of action from the applicant. There is potential to get a large volume of low-quality applicants, but if you ask them to do something when applying it is easy to sift through the applicants to see who took the time to tailor their application to your job posting.

You will begin to receive applications pretty quickly, so once you have had a chance to look through them it is time to follow-up with the applicants. Before hiring someone it is good to message them with a secondary question or task to gauge their capabilities and response time. You want to find a freelancer that will respond to your emails and work requests the same day you send them, so the application process is the best way to see who is quick and who is not.

*Note: You are able to counter-offer the hourly rate the applicant has provided. I have noticed that most are willing to come down a little bit from their initial offer. And, if they aren’t it was at least worth a shot.

*This is the screenshot from an old job posting for a copywriter, so you can see the large volume of applicants. Please disregard the date since they applied. I filled this position within a week of posting the job!

Set Strict Goals

Now that you have hired your team of freelancers you are ready to go! It is crucial to the success of the project that you provide straightforward and attainable goals for your freelancers. Tell them exactly what you want. When dealing with freelancers you want to spell out your requirements as plainly as possible so that all parties involved know what to expect.

Managing Workflow

oDesk offers a simple to use interface that tracks all hired freelancers and the number of hours they have worked on a given project. oDesk also takes periodic screen grabs of your freelancers computer screen, so you can see exactly what they were doing. It is a very transparent process.

If oDesk and Excel are not detailed enough for the link building work you require, then you can easily have your freelancers work in project management systems such as Buzzstream or TeamBox.

Regular Reporting

As a part of your goal setting, make sure to establish guidelines for the frequency and type of reports that you would like to receive. For link building I prefer monthly reports showcasing the links that have been prospected. However, for large volume projects you may need more frequent reports or you can ask freelancers to track progress in Google Docs, so the progress is shown in real-time. This reporting can also be leveraged for the reporting that you provide to your client or boss.

Build Those Links!

And now you can rinse and repeat. This process is easy to scale up or down depending upon your link building needs at any given moment. You are able to find freelancers that will work a few hours a month all the way up to nearly full-time employees. Utilizing oDesk for finding talented freelancers has allowed me to offer large agency quality work out of our boutique agency. Good luck with your next link building project!