Scritty, wow! With 1,000 articles, you can do a white-hat (ouch) authority site. You can put 800 on the site, and use 200 as backlinks from web 2.0's, and you are cooking (and blast tier 1's with garbage). This should have tremendous ROI by itself.
Question: VA Networks? From where, elance? oDesk is my guess for individual VA's.
BTW: Rep Given. For this, and all your other posts.
I was a bad boy here
Failed a few times, got terrible results from some VA's joined a network and that was epic FAIL
Needed some work done - advertised on Elancer $5 an hour web content writer.
Completed 2 weeks work part time ($200 plus about $30 expenses for 2x20 hours a week) She got an article out every 30 minutes on average, and has got a lot quicker since then. (I used a local online service to send her speech to text hardware and software and she is a master at it now) she can rip out 5 or 6 x 600 word articles an hour. Research is an issue, and 2-3 hours a week are put over to that.
Weekly skype chats are also vital, as is being understanding of holidays, family issues, hardware breakdowns and all of that stuff. It's worth budgetting 15% over in the long run to cover "stuff"
Anyway I asked if she would rather work FT for me for $500 month for
13 months a year (December is two months over there)
Given how much was going to elancer, this represented a good deal for both of us, and we already had a good working relationship.
I write all my onsite SEO content myself, but once a week her work goes into my tools, lightly spun (custom thesaurus per niche - I try and get 5 very good articles out of her 1 original) and get's distributed to my first tier sites over the next week until the next lot comes on.
I know this is going to sound crap - but yes - I do use UD for distribution. I can't be logging into 50+ sites a day and doing that. I also need to add, remove, pause and re-instate sitres all the time, and I want a broad mix of platforms.
There are also some site types where adding more than about 10 pieces of work has very little benefit in the short or medium term, so every month I'll stop adding to about 50% of the sites, create a few dozen more, maybe re-introduce some I dropped previously to get them back up again and replace any that have been deleted. My excel sheet shows I am currently controlling about 520 sites in total for first tier linking across my 6 main websites.
These are PR2 or greater only. WEB2. WIKI and article profiles plus in some niches 4 or 5 sites from my first tier that are self hosted (on in some cases the paid version of Wordpress.com or Tumblr or even Blogger 3rd party hosted with my own URL) UD handles 99% of the admin work for that, makes posting a case of just pointing at some prespun files and fecking off to the cinema. It posts, bookmarks and pings - then maybe gets on and syndicates my daily video and then does the same bokkmarking and pinging to that.
Developing a method that works - but is flexible - is the best decision I ever made. I wake up every day pretty much knowing EXACTLY what I have to do, where everything is, how long it will take....
Then UD goes back on again adding bookmarks, forum posts or whatever. I also create a shit load of videos. demondemon has about 70 on it (which represents about 10 a month) and these get syndicated all over the place as well - again using UD.
It's not really blackhat at all, "bluehat" more like - but without a ton of content to support 6 pretty big sites (demondemon is the smallest - by far, and that now has almost 1/4 of a million hand written words on it) I need a good automation tool and help with content creation to support this lot. I thought of paying a VA to spin and post this lot, but that aspect of it is just much more cost effective with automation rather than outsourcing/ It's "horses for courses" as they say
My only consideration is - as Suzi is so bloody good at her job - can she find me another VA just as good?
And that bit is luck and gut instict. She is a vital part of my business and from feeling a little awkward for the first 2-3 weeks talking and understanding each other I now consider her more important than any other aspect of my SEO capital - by far.
But I could do with a second VA working part time, and that's something I'm going to have to look into in 2013 - and again to begin with that will likely be pure luck.
Scritty
[edit] Gratuitous plug - Kontent Machine now does subsequent tier, but with a weeks delay (so the original work is indexed and attributed to my first tier sites) The new "mix your own work with scraped articles" idea is working well at the moment, and this is NOT blue hat, it's a very sullen shade of grey - and UD does all of that distribution as well. So if you want 20% off KM - you know where to go [/sorry for plug]
