I am always trying and testing different methods to reduce my outsourcing costs – while no affecting quality. The other day I created a job on oDesk to outsource link building and I may have found an extremely low cost method.

As the title suggests, I have decided to outsource link building for one of my sites to a worker in the Phillipines for just 83cents an hour! That is right -  less that $1 an hour for an employee means I could have a full-time staff for under $40 a week.

If you have used oDesk or Elance then you will know that the wage range for workers can be extremely diverse. Today I want to give you some tips on how you can outsource your link building for under $1/hr!

1. Make Your Maximum Price Known

If you came though a Google search for ‘outsource link building‘ you may have seen an advertisement for oDesk that says the following:

Inexpensive Link Building
Hire Link Building Gurus $10-25/hr.
Interview Experts for Free Now!
www.oDesk.com

Maybe $10-25/hr is cheap seo for businesses, but if I had to pay that much for a link builder I would just do it myself. I needed cheaper – so I asked!

When you create a new job in oDesk you are asked to place a maximum bid (per hr) that you will accept. However the minimum you can place in that field is $3. That is a good start, but I still wanted cheaper.

So what I did was, in the job description I placed a line of text simply saying that I would only accept bids under $2/hr and all other bids would be automatically deleted – it doesn’t stop people bidding more – but it does make some of them lower their price.

This got me down to $2/hr to outsource link building – but I still wanted to see if I could pay less. [Read more...]