SEO - The Dirty Little Secret To Getting Free Work Done

What you have to ask yourself is “how committed am I to my success? And am I willing to be a little bit dirty to get ahead?”

This is something I actually use legitimately today, in fact I learned about it (the whitehat version) in a business course I read about 6 years ago having to do with building a team of super employees virtually overnight and in all honesty it’s a big part of how I got ahead really fast.

The blackhatter in me just took it to a bigger level and in doing so it becomes a bit uncool because it exploits peoples time.

Let’s put it this way:

There’s no law that says you have to hire anyone that you interview for a job, nor is there a law stating how many people you can interview.

What is an interview?

Most people think its questions like:

If you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be and why?

Then it’s looking at a resume which is almost always full of bullshit, calling references that are probably fake, blah blah blah.

Well that’s exactly why most companies end up with nothing more than a group of monkeys working for them.

What this course taught me was that successful businesses conduct real interviews; they make damn sure that this person is super qualified to work for them.

They do this by having the potential employee prove their skill in the area they claim to be an expert in before getting a job offer.

If you were interviewing a web designer, you might have them build you a quick page around specifications you state.

If it was a graphics person, you might have them create a banner for a product or service you specify.

Professionals happily do this day in and day out. The only people that won’t take a test are the ones that know they’ll probably fail.

I’m sure you see where I am going with this.

What I did early on was basically mass test the hell out tons of applicants to job postings I made. All simple stuff to them, but the volume was what made all the difference.

I could have 9 web designers doing 9 different quick landing pages for me, 7 graphic designers doing 7 banner projects, 10 content spinners doing 30 top quality articles for me, 15 general workers doing 200 blog or forum posts, all in one week from a few job postings, and all for FREE.

Top companies use this process legitimately every day, if someone is applying for a sales job, they might be asked to make some test sales calls to show their closing skills.

I simply took a great strategy in the real business world, made it blackhat and blew it up to where I could have 18 sales guys make 10 calls each for me to call lists I provided and report back on success because that was their interview test.

It’s dirty because obviously with my way we aren’t going to hire very many of these people if any, we just want to get tons of helpful work done free that otherwise would have cost a fortune in time and money.

As I said, I now use this legitimately to find the best staff, and it has helped me reach great success.

I’ve been able to test methods I come up with basically for free to see if they are profitable, if they are, I hire the person that brought in some good results, knowing that I was basically guaranteeing myself profits.

I struggled with giving this trick of mine away for fear that some of you will really abuse it too much.

When you realize that you can get hundreds of tasks done absolutely free every month it becomes almost like a drug addiction, and you can lose sight of the fact that you are exploiting people for their time when they could be interviewing for a company that actually might hire them.

This is where that grey area you hear about comes into play. When I used it, it was to help me get ahead and be in the position to really hire quality people like I am today, I always made sure that my “tests” were light, never taking an applicant more than a few hours of their time AT THE MAX.

Anything more than that and you are a real asshole. One could argue that you are an asshole to even do this, but believe me, people can lose a couple of hours of their time and not be any worse off.

As the silver lining to this whole thing, I would ALWAYS call them up and say:

“Thank you so much, your work was excellent but we’ve decided to promote a current staff member, even still please feel free to give my name and number as a reference in your job search, I would be more than happy to let another employer know that your work ethic and quality was top notch and had we decided not to promote an internal staff member we would have hired you in a heartbeat.”

I remember giving at least a couple dozen references over the five or 6 month period I was doing this, people can never have too many, and I like to believe that at least a few of those got the job, so it’s really not all that bad in the end.

Does that justify it? Probably not, I don’t think stealing time from people is ever justified no matter how hard you work to pay them back for it, but if it’s going to feed your family and pay our bills to “borrow” some skills from others, well to me its acceptable practice.

I knew without a shadow of doubt that this little strategy of mine was not only still viable today, but a thousand times more so because of how many free classified sites we have now, and how many people are searching them each day for work.

So I tested it last week with a few postings on free classifieds, made some call backs, and sure enough people were more than willing to submit some work as proof they could handle the job correctly. Honestly I think it makes them take you more seriously as a potential employer.

Only you can judge if this is something you are comfortable with doing, it’s my job to tell you how you can get ahead in business, both whitehat and blackhat, not to sugar coat what really goes on behind the scenes.