Outreach, Relationships and Link Development

[aohostmaster]

We are a small inbound marketing team working in a very competitive industry with sites across the globe.

We work very hard on our content marketing and social media and find that we are lacking manpower when it comes to outreach to third party sites and industry leaders...

We were thinking of hiring a number of freelance marketers (individuals not agencies) to help us with this task.

Does anyone have any experience with similar issues? Have you worked with freelancer marketers or agencies globally?

Any recommendations would be appreciated.

[ClaytonJ]

Yes, we use freelancers for specific tasks.  There are 1000's of great people out there, much better qualified than you  think...  We use freelancer.com, elance etc.

That said the first and safest place we have found and start looking is stay at home parents (usually mum's). Start in your own backyard.. they often only want to work 1-2 days a week and at their convenience.  But they deliver in spades, over qualified, better contacts than you... etc etc.. and in expensive ...

Hope that assists.

[JordanLowry]

I would recommend looking at sites and platforms like upwork and thumbtack. Depending on your location Thumbtack will help you find local freelancers if there are any in your area to contract work out to. Also, it could be beneficial to consider peopleperhour they seem to have a pretty large freelance base.

Just make sure you have detailed job descriptions and properly vet your candidates before making any hires.

[GlobeRunner]

Using freelancers can be very successful--and it can also be a nightmare as well. What we typically recommend is that the more specific you are in what you want that freelancer to do the better. So, just asking them to get more links or work on outreach is setting yourself up for disaster.

If you are able to set up very specific tasks, use a task management system, and have the proper training in place then using freelancers should work out well for you.

[ronell-smith]

When I ran the content marketing department for a successful agency in Dallas, I took our department down the precise path you now look at. I worked to identify (through social media interactions, in-person meetings at conferences and introductions by friends and acquaintances.)

What I found to be most successful was selecting individuals who had an understanding of PR. These folks can work wonders in helping you create, share and promote the types of content worthy of getting links and mentions. These are also the folks who are most likely to have the needed connections that can help the brands you work with attain meaningful traction.

When it comes to link building and outreach, mindset is as important is an important to the connections you hope to form.

RS