Outsourcing SEO work - how to make sure your workers are working? Screenshot software?

Use people who charge a fee instead of paying hourly?

Well, that would work but I want to hire them full time to work, ie - 9AM to 5PM every day and so they can be told to work on more than just one project. Usually if they give a fee, then they want more of a fee for a second or third project, etc - whereas I want to hire a full time employee.

You can sometimes ask them to turn on Team Viewer tool so you can watch their work remotely. Then you can let them know your assessment of their work speed and results.
Anyway, you should reach to reliable and reputable SEO company to hire full time/part time VAs for your work. In fact, you will have to pay them a bit more than a freelancer but it's worthwhile I believe.

Instead of paying based on their time, which you can't control at all....pay based on tasks and results.

Line out specific tasks for them to perform and pay a flat rate for the tasks.

Thanks Daniel, but wouldn't that be too hard to dictate? Like, I could say I will pay X for a 1st page ranking for this and this KW but what if Google is slow to update etc and the worker does not think it is worth their effort to keep working if it takes too long etc? Have you had much success using this type of method?

Hi guys,

Thanks again for your answers and support. I believe I did not include some vital information upfront which left you guys guessing as to how I would intend to run the operation.

When I hired my last guy for SEO, I did tell him the work I wanted. I would specify blog links, profile links, etc. So that each day they would know what they needed to work on (I didn't leave the SEO strategy up to them but rather the work)

So I want to hire a full time SEO worker again, this time I want to do it right though. Because last time, I would say, spend all of today doing X, but then at the end of the day, performance was low. So they did as I said, they did spend the day doing X but they did definitely not spend all of that time actually doing the work (they probably are doing work for other people too).

Since I will maybe have around 2-3-4 projects coming up, I want to hire one guy who is overall good with everything (writing, link building, etc) to work on all of those projects. As such, I want to make sure that when I tell him to do so and so on Monday and so and so on Tuesday, that he is actually working for me as intended and not for someone else. I will still be dictating the work that should be done.

I just want to be sure that they are working and not on FB or whatever else they might be doing, as my last guy certainly was not providing the amount of work as to be expected for 5 hours a day of work. Hope this clears up my issue!

I see, well that definitely puts a good perspective on it. But then that begs the question, how do you know what amount to pay for X amount of work?

I mean, you can hire someone for $400 a month full time and tell them to build links all day for example, but if you're doing it by job to job - it becomes a bit harder to price it?

Thanks for that, and all the other info here guys I will be putting it to good use!

EDIT: So it seems a lot of you pay by the job, instead of hiring a full time employee to do whatever you tell him to do?

I run 5 full time outsoursers and dont have a worry about what they do we have 30 sites all on page 1 and their pages to and most of them are in top position with out them these sites would not be their and the revenue covers there wages easily the best thing is they know how our business works and they are always their when you want them the key is to train them and get to know them

Thanks Mel, but how do you actually ensure they do their work? Maybe I just had bad luck with my first hire... and i guess in your case the evidence is in the rankings, but do you do anything specific to ensure they don't go off working for 2-3-4 other people?

That tells me he must have been applying like crazy

Well he applied to my new job for a new hire within 2 hours... so he must have been spending a bit of time looking at news jobs instead of working, haha.

Use rentacoder to hire people.
Agree with winner coder about deadline and require each day reporting
If he will not meet deadline you can use arbitration to get funds back and look for new coder

One of the questions was about screen cap software .. leaving it up to them to do the screen caps is no better than leaving it up to them to do the work. They'll screen cap when they want? bah Most of these outsourcers work so cheap that of course they're working other jobs too. They can do the repetitious work for 3 clients at a time as easily as 1. Time management on their part I guess.

Hi

I will suggest you to go for Odesk here screen showt of user screen will autometicallly get upaloaded to server it also track web cam and mouse clicks to, you need to manage payment through odesk

I have been outsourcing for years the best and only way is to compare them to.what you can do! I can do everything and more than any of my staff so I instantly know if they are not performing, also some out sourcers work upto 60 hours a week so it may be in some cases natural for them to apply to other posts, in your case it may have been a bad egg.

Pm me lets see if we can work together.