As an online business owner, social media user and digital consultant I am the first to extol the benefits of outsourcing, in fact one of my own quotes is:
“Experts who tell you to be successful you have to get out of your comfort zone have never heard of Outsourcing”
Yet it is vital that if you are employing freelancers to do work for you; you have a deep understanding of what they are doing and follow each action they take with your brand. In some instance not following the steps your outsourced team are doing on your behalf can be your undoing!
I see this first hand when approving companies for my business directory Leads4biz.net, which is an opus of around 10 new each day and 7,200 business have registered on my site since 2012.
I never let any business just be auto-approved, that would be professional suicide for me!
Around 70% of the business that join our website and give us their business details to be advertised on our site make so many mistakes:
- They add their business in the wrong category (well with over 700 categories maybe too lazy to look?)
- They add the wrong country (well there is a drop down of 20 odd countries to choose from maybe they ran out of time?)
- They forget to add their website or telephone number (I mean what’s the point really?)
- They add their social media links and conveniently forget to pay for the upgrade (God loves a tryer eh it is clear the differences between free and paid listings)
- When we ask them what they are currently buying, they tell us what they are selling (It’s like I ask them to pick A, or B? and they answer ‘yes!’)
- They get their own address wrong (more than you think!)
Straight to the bottom of the class you lot! In fact maybe 1 in 20 fill in the details correctly and I jump out my office chair fist pumping the air, faith restored in humanity.
But the one biggest and detrimental mistakes I see is when companies use sub-continent SEO companies to get them backlinks. They read somewhere how back links are the holy grail of getting your website to the very top of Search engines like Google and Bing, and this SEO company can get 100 links for you this week for just $50 well you have to ask yourself when selling a lot at a cheap price can the quality be that good?
Yes getting your link to your website on big news sites like Pattayaone with a guest post and by having your business page in Leads4biz is a good link and a signal to Google to rank your website higher.
there are also bad links on spammy sites or sites with no relation to what your business does, and these links can have the opposite effect.
When most people add their business to a directory, and like most marketing out there, the savvy business owner kind of understands the branding principle, as in; get your name and logo seen as much as possible on the internet and there is a karmic effect of business coming back to you from the trust your name inspires. So they don’t expect immediate direct leads from directory websites like mine, some would be nice, but most don’t expect much at all.
but one of the reasons you didn’t get leads could be that your sub continental chap on $2 an hour to add as many businesses to as many directories as he can in one day, uses an email program that creates the email that is needed to register on as many directory sites as he can find, and this email is not checked, and it’s this email address that the one person who is looking at your business details send their message to, and guess what?
Poor old Pandey Singh in Delhi has 2,000 email addresses never opened, he has no time whatsoever to check. New email addresses are just created each day and used to click a link (the robot clicks) to get the business registered and it is never checked again!
So all your leads of that directory are sat in a robots email program never opened. This is when you look back at me and say yeah Alan okay, your site got me 1,000 clicks but no one ever contacted me on email!
When using a SEO company, make sure they use your own email address to add the listing and you click the registration link sent to your email, that way you will always get the leads direct. Or better still do it yourself.
I always can tell the SEO outsourced companies because the English is just not great:
“We are being the sublime gracious skilled man to do clean windows in Solihul, be gratefully ringing us today Sir!”
Yeah, kind of stands out, your average window cleaner from the West Midlands does not write or speak like that, so this could also be costing your business dearly.
Point is; yes getting your website link on as many good websites that have a lot in common with your subject matter is good for your website, and not all SEO companies use robot emails and write awful English, but; just take some time to check over what freelancers or outsourced companies have done for you, it is after all your brand message and that must remain intact and central to what your mission and aims reflect.
