I Made The Internet

Over the past 2 years I have had two projects freelanced out, one to India and one to China.

Foreign freelancers are cheap, very cheap. Quote $2,000 for a Joomla based website, while American based companies were $15,000+.  The graphic design was pretty good, did not have any complaints, all free stock photography was used and the sites were all search engine optimized by default.

The areas where outsourcing work to a foreign country got bad is during the communication. India and China are both across the world from New York. The Indian company would only contact me in their afternoon hours, our time 1am-3am. I was at college during this so it was not too bad. The Chinese company had what seemed to be a night guy. He worked about 8am to 1pm our time, 8pm to 1am their time. At times I was talking to this person at 3am his time. Communication was mostly done through Skype. The Indian company would email me every few days with updates.

In both instances the project took double to triple the amount of time quoted, time was not an issue for us.

The time I spent with an American company was short lived mainly because of the time it took to get something done, and the price we were paying for it. They would charge a company $10,000 every 4 months for 10 hours of maintenance, and ongoing SEO. In my mind this was completely ludicrous for the size and purpose of the site. I first found out about this when I was going to add an “Our Friends” link to the main menu to designate an area for link swaps. (This was back when I thought reciprocal links meant something). To get this link and page added, our representative at the web development company had to submit a “ticket” to the developers and the time it would take would be quoted, then would need our final approval. A “ticket” took three days to be processed, and we were told it would take 8 working hours. Well, ok, whatever, it would be free.

We were emailed a few days later saying our project was done, it was not. The developers only added the link to the main pages, none of the subpages (all the pages were static, no backend). After about three weeks of calling this company back the business relationship between us was terminated. Its pretty sad that this company let this small problem get so bad to the point where we didn’t renew the contract. This company was making $30,000 a year to do practically NOTHING. The onsite SEO sucked and link building was none existent.

In my opinion I like the Chinese freelancers more because of the better communication.

All in all, if you have the time, freelance it out, (I know it hurts the economy) but from what I hear, American companies can do a great job, and sometimes will even write all the copy (text) for you on the site.

A few moths ago I came across the importance of bounce rates on a website. A bounce rate is the percentage of people that leave the site after the first page they land on. I hear people getting around 20% bounce rates. At the time I was hovering around 80%-90%. I was curious how I could make people click through my blog more. After I started increasing the amount of anchor links I was getting bounce rates of 40%-60%

The number one thing that I started doing that nearly immediately shot the bounce rate down was adding more anchor links in my posts.

Anchor links are a link under a word. For example this is an anchor link. As you can tell it is blended within the text. Not only is this good for keyword targeting it will get visitors curious to what you wrote about.

Famous tech-startup-blog TechCrunch uses told on anchor links, back to previous posts. I have to admit, after I read a post I will go and click on one of those links to see what they wrote about it.

This is how you would code an anchor link <p> Today it was quite<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com”  />Sunny</a> out site</p>. This sentence would target “Sunny” as a keyword to yoursite.com. I will use about 5 anchor links in very post, then one link at the bottom of the post if you have to attribute where the story came from.

There you have it anchor links are not only a great way to keep visitors on your website, bust also boost SEO value on your site.

If you are in the internet marketing industry, this topic always raises hell. Automatic blogging, is a blog set up to parse and re-post RSS feeds. A script will extract a summary of a post, and provide a link back to the source. The auto blog does this in hopes of driving traffic from Google. The most common scripts for auto blogging run about $50.

With the traffic from search engines, the auto blog owner attempts to lure the visitor to the ads or an affiliate banner for a related niche. This will generate money for the auto blogger.

Here are the topics people start asking questions about

1. Is this ethical? You are taking an excerpt of text from an author’s post, re-posting it on your site, and linking back. This could be free promotion, or lost profits for the author.
2. It is profitable? I would have to go with, YES. Lets figure this out. A beginner hosting account with 1&1 internet, with a domain included is $3.99 a month. This equates to about $48 a year. at $0.13 a day, its easy to cover this cost with AdSense or similar ad networks.
3. Its this spam? This is up in the air for how you interpret what “spam” means. Some auto blogs are so covered in ads you can even read the short excerpt for the post. In my opinion that is a spammy site.

Please leave a comment if you run auto blogs and let us know what scripts you use and how it has worked out for you.

Typical auto-blogged post, note the link to the original source