Outsource SEO or learn it yourself?

I guess it is for a reason that all senior employees have learned their skills before they were just supervising them.

I just see the following problem: They might just tell you they did something and you can't really tell, if they are helping you or just ripping you off.

The approach that you are taking seems to be pretty good. You get immediate results and can continue learning. Don't forget to check their results, though.

I would go myself, it increases my confidence and it also gives me fun.

You absolutely must learn SEO (and I mean advanced SEO) if you want to outsource otherwise you're going to have no idea what to instruct your workers to do and more to the point whether they are actually doing a good job!

if you have a lot of spare time then its fine to learn SEO.

Also you will realize that SEO takes a lot of work and sooner or later you will need to outsource to save time and focus more on your business.

True but I think it's a bit of an overstatement to imply that you have to know everything about SEO to be able to outsource it.

For instance I have been studying it alot recently and been doing the usual run- forum commenting- blog commenting - article writing treadmill. Now I know in general what the process is but I have not seen front page rewards form it yet- though my initial site which I'd left to catch dust for a bit has shown some rather promising improvement.

So maybe I know just enough to get myself into alot of trouble..lol that isn't relevant but I just like that term so wanted to use it.

I think I know enough now that I could instruct someone on specifically what I want but I dunno if I can pull it off yet. Also there is the time management thing in that maybe I could pull it off given enough time but it would be quicker to get a team of SEO experts to do it for me.

Then again this is why I'm really interested in these auto submitters etc. cos they seem to effectively act as a personal SEO army which you can give instructions like you would to an SEO team and perhaps do it even more effectively than them.

I originally began thinking this when, after reading quite a few of the WSOs, I noticed that alot of them were using these very same softwares anyway so why not just cut out the middle man.

But yea overall both I think is the answer for me esp. since I like doing it.

I outsourced and didn't like my results. So I decided to take it under my wing! BUT I happened to have the time. SEO is all consuming. I think your plan is a good one. I hired when I didn't know anything and that was a mistake!! good luck!

Outsource tasks which are tiring, ex writing, building forum links (since they need more time)
You can focus on core building yourself and learn at the same time.

Ye the dependency thing is something I'd considered myself and one of the main reasons I became self employed.

Yea I would definitely do it myself, at least at first. As it was pointed out in an above post, senior management do this in most companies. If nothing else you will learn a great skill.