Paid an overseas freelancer $1500 and about $1200 to webmasters for backlinks. How can I do this myself?

Hi All,

Based on the advice of my web designer, I hired this overseas freelancer from UpWork (a person my web designer specifically recommended) for backlinks to improve the ranking of my small IT services business.

This was an "outreach project" where the freelancer:

• Identified websites relevant to my industry
• Obtained their monthly traffic
• Reached out to the webmasters to ask how much they charged for a backlink
• Counter-offered their fee based on what I was willing to spend - most links were anywhere from $25 to $100
• Had a running spreadsheet with all the data on there including the backlinks and status of various sites (paid, no reply, etc.)

My job was to:

• Have an article professionally written to place on my site with keywords and Yoast optimized
• Pay the webmasters' fees

I had a lot of trust in my web designer's recommendation but I'm now a little skeptical of the work performed by this "outreach consultant" for the following reasons:

• For whatever reason, he didn't list the traffic for some of the sites starting off. I had no idea if these sites were of value or not. I then called him out on it and he started listing the traffic.
• His charge is $7.50/hr and he charges 40 hours a week. He is now starting week 5. I know that the research and sending these emails could probably be time-consuming but I'm struggling to understand how this could take 40 hours a week for 4 weeks so far. I've paid 25 webmasters for backlinks.

Right now I'm starting week 5 and have told the freelancer that I would like to conclude the project. In retrospect, I'm wondering:

• Did I overpay for the freelancer? Again, I find it difficult to understand how creating a list of 50 sites, emailing the webmasters, negotiating prices (for 25 sites so far) could take 120 hours. In retrospect, I may have put too much trust in my web designer's advice.

In any event, I will have paid about $3K total for the freelancer and the backlinks. I hope that these links pay off and my local ranking is improved.

In these times of COVID I have much more free time. I'm wondering if I could start a second project and do it myself.

I'm unsure of:

• How to research sites and identify ones who will be beneficial for backlinks and how to determine if they place backlinks on their site
• How to find monthly traffic
• What the protocol is for emailing webmasters. Do I just say "Hey, I have this really informative article. Can you link to my site?"

Thanks for any advice!

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