I had a frightful lesson in outsourcing today: You’ll need to keep tabs on the efforts of the people you’re outsourcing work to, otherwise it could be to the detriment of your business.

You may already know that in addition to this blog, I own a network of content sites.

In particular, Internet Marketing Cookbook has been one of my pet projects.

But in the past couple of months, with the activity surrounding Affiliate Summit West and a couple of new projects I was working on, I didn’t have time to manage all my sites.

So it seemed like a good idea to have an Asia-based unemployed programmer who claimed to have “extensive dotcom experience” manage a couple of my sites.

I was more than a little shocked when I discovered the changes he’d made to the sites. For one, he’d installed a script which made the text rotate in a ghastly manner.

In fact, a fellow marketer commented that the site looked ghastly, and if it was meant as a joke.

Worst still, the Internet Marketing Cookbook members area had several time sensitive offers listed. BUT they’d never been announced.

“Why didn’t you announce it to the list?” I asked.

“You were in the US and I couldn’t meet up with you” he said.

I gave him a piece of my mind, especially since I was contactable by email and phone.

But the cardinal sin had to be locating the free eBay auction success offer which expires on Feb 5th hidden at the bottom of the page.

I promptly made him move it to the top, where it’d be more visible.

So the lessons learned are this:

• Quality and reliable outsource talent can be difficult to find.
• Closely monitor your outsourced efforts, especially during their first two projects.
• If necessary, have someone monitor their efforts if you’re busy.

From the looks of things, WordPress might provide a better content management solution, compared to a static HTML website.

PS: The eBay Auction Success offer (a great value in my opinion) expires on Feb 5th and is accessible here. [Valid only for US addresses]