I’ve attended a lot of conferences on the subject of internet marketing and been involved in a few mastermind groups and the topic that comes up quite often is outsourcing. Everyone wants to outsource every part of their business after all an internet marketing business is just about sitting back and cashing checks…if only. Well, I’m here to tell you it’s not as easy as it sounds. We have used outsourcing and still do for some small tasks. We have had some bad experiences with outsourcing which included link building, website building, and even content creation. It was not until I read “Delivering Happiness” the Zappos story by CEO Tony Hsieh. One thing jumped out at me in his book and it’s the title of this post. “Never outsource your core competency.”
I started thinking about this and it’s so true. This business is hard enough not being able to control the outcome of your results with Google, then you add an additional layer by outsourcing your SEO and you end up with a recipe for bad results.
In order to run a successful internet marketing business, you need to understand and fulfill your SEO service in-house.Even if you do it yourself and then hire and train your first employee to do it. In my opinion, and I speak from experience, you need to know your main service, your core competency, inside and out in order to successfully sell and deliver your service. Keep in mind in order to get to a seven-figure agency you cannot be doing all the work yourself, but you do need to understand it so you are not at the mercy of someone else or worse yet an outsourcer.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not totally against outsourcing. We have a guy in India who originally started as an employee of a company we used for outsourcing. He later left that company to go out on his own. We contacted him and made him a full-time employee of the company. He is gold and we have built a great relationship with him and treat him like he works here in our Miami office.
We also use another outsourcer to claim citations for us within our Bright Local account. It works great because we can very easily track every citation they claim. Outsourcing can be a very powerful tool, but it takes time to find the right person or team to get it done. That being said, in order to grow to a successful seven-figure agency, you should never outsource your core competency.
Do you have any questions about outsourcing? Let us know in the comments below.
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