I have talked about the benefits of outsourcing, but I’d also like to share a personal anecdote about a negative experience I’ve had with outsourcing. After this experience, I have been careful to only outsource work to people with whom I have a prior relationship.

In the Summer of 2007, I was running a hobby site about wakeboarding. I was experimenting with various Search Engine Optimization and Link Building techniques, and in the course of my research I read a lot about article submission as a link-building tool.

The basic premise is this: you write (or hire someone to write) an article and then submit it to an article directory or get another website to publish it. At the end of the article is a link back to your website which will bring in traffic and help boost your search engine rankings.

I’m not a fan of article directories so I started looking for a related website that would let me guest-write an article for them. After a few days, I found a high-ranking, popular, highly-related website that was looking to expand their wakeboarding tutorials section.

I got in contact with the webmaster and he was enthusiastic about letting me do an article for him. So we worked out the details (topic, audience, length, etc).

At this same time I was still reading about how popular content-sites were run and found that a large number of them outsource some or all of their writing.

It was nearing the time of year where I would be returning to school, so I wasn’t going to have much time to write new articles for the site. I figured that paying someone to write some articles in my absence would be a good way to keep the site fresh. But I didn’t have a need for it quite yet, so I had decided I’d wait until I needed a writer to try it out.

When the website admin and I finished working out the details of the guest-writing deal, I was on vacation in Florida. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone and try out an article writing service.

I am a member of DigitalPoint forums, and have done some business in their marketplace before, so that seemed like a logical place to start. I posted a thread with what I was looking for and within an hour I had a few people send me messages with writing samples and their pricing.

I was astounded by the low prices. How these people could get by charging two or three dollars per article baffled me.

Price wasn’t too much of a consideration for me since I was only buying a single article. So I chose the candidate with the best writing sample. His rate was $6 for a 500 word article.

I was pretty excited about this deal because the writing sample was so good and because his rates were so cheap. Had the result been as good as the samples it would have been very profitable to outsource all of my writing (because the hour it takes me to write a good article for that site is worth a heck-of-a-lot more to me than $6).

Anyway, I gave him the details of the assignment and pointed him to several resources that contained all the information he would need. This included an article I had previously written for my own site on almost exactly the same topic.

After a few days, he sent me this:
(apologies for the image, I don’t want this indexed)

The Article
Incredulous. I didn’t even know what to say. Not only was it incoherent and useless, but the parts that I could actually make out were blatantly incorrect. I found out later that what he did was copy and paste arbitrary paragraphs from the reference articles I had provided, added superfluous adjectives and replaced a third of the words with synonyms.The result was this: a mangled, nonsensical, useless piece of fluff.

Obviously I couldn’t use this for anything. But I paid him anyway because a) it was only $6 and b) I figured I’d be able to use it later in an article about outsourcing.

Moral of the story: only outsource to people you can trust. Luckily, I learned this lesson inexpensively. But it could have been a much more costly mistake.