Search Media Optimization / Outreach has become one of the most popular traffic building activities to outsource. And paraphrasing comment on my previous post, when it comes to finding a qualified needle in a freelancing haystack SMO is even more challenging than SEO and others activities alike. First, a couple words on typical aspects of SMO, here are just a few things that you can consider:

• Building Twitter follower crowd and posting ongoing tweets to the community you’ve created
• Creating Profiles on Social Networks, generating “friends”, update of status / spam friends with info
• Creating SM advertising campaigns using follow / vote / fun tools
• Bookmaking the target using sharing engines such as StumbleUpon
• As well as traditional resources such as forums

Each of these activities present a fairly easily outsourced task, at least it appears to. For example you can create a mascot for you’re your service. That mascot can have its own twitter page. Using variety of available tools and offshore labor you can

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I had several interesting discussions about blog SEO outsourcing with a few of my friends a colleagues. I think some highlights of those discussions deserve a full size post or two. Since we are talking about blogs I just have to start with some classic points. Trisha Okubo did a phenomenal job covering those in her almost classic “Blog Your Brand”

In case you did not read the presentation, here are the main points:

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In case you found Best Places to Find a Freelancer helpful you may want to check out the updated list. It now has 42 entries and also includes Google PR and Alexa ratings. These two numbers are quite helpful indicators of traffic. Google rating is a mystery number that measures from 0 (I guess “O” is for obscurity) to 10. Sites with PR 0 are typically brand new, inactive or have been penalized by Google for applying “black hat” SEO techniques. Sites with high PR are active members of web community, with a lot of traffic, popular content, and large number of quality back links. There are a lot of theories and speculation behind what determines PR, ask any SEO expert and you will get an ear full. How much of that would be true is a big question though. Many of PR rating aspects are kept secret by Google for a very good reason.

Alexa rating is much more strait forward measure, it goes from 1 – top rating to I do not know how many gazillions or zero, what apparently means the same. The higher the number the lower the rating. So there is practically no limit to how bad the could rate on Alexa. With Alexa rating being fairly simplistic there are plenty of ways a company can increase it by buying traffic and other means, that to a degree decreases the value of rating, however it’s still one of the best, easy to understand measures. Generally, Alexa rating consider low and a site practically irrelevant if the site doesn’t appear in Alexa 100,000. I would not recommend dismissing the sites with low rating though. Low Alexa rating means a bad news for the company’s traffic. On the other hand it could mean less vendor competition / niche market / and so on for you. However, for you convenience I will soon add a list sorted in Alexa rating linked from the table header, stay tuned :)

Here are the top five by Alexa rating (as of 2/1/2010)

Site	PR	Alexa	Brief Description
www.craigslist.org	7	37	Oh should I say anything here?
www.elance.com	6	628	Elance is an online workplace where businesses find and hire people “on demand” to get work done quickly and cost effectively. Founded in 1999, Elance was established to help small businesses easily and efficiently hire freelance talent. Today, Elance is the leading workplace for hiring and working on demand. Elance is privately-held and headquartered in Mountain View, California.
www.odesk.com	6	709	oDesk enables buyers to hire, manage (that’s different from many other similar services), and pay technology service providers from around the world. The service is fairly well organized, fast and reasonably priced – that’s if you are prepared to pay fees. Last time I looked at it the brokerage fees were 10% of the contract.
www.GetAFreelancer.com	6	844	GetAFreelancer.com claims to be one of the largest sites of its kind. It indeed earned a decent reputation in freelancing community. You can find a large number of freelance programmers, web designers, copywriters and translators at that site.
www.rentacoder.com	6	1,908	The site has about 20,000 registered buyers. When you get a project done through Rentacoder you put the entire project fees into an escrow account. You don’t release the fees until the project is complete. This is good because it gives reassurance to the coder that they are going to pay you

Best of luck and let me know if you find sites that are worth including in the list.