123outsource.net and our users
I started 123outsource.net outsourcing directory in 2007. I was going regularly to India for spiritual reasons and wanted to work with some local programmers. I found the winning team in Pune — fast and fun to work with. We didn’t begin to really populate 123outsource.net outsourcing directory with sites until 2009. In early 2010 we started calling out listings to get to know them a bit. We put outsourcing companies all over the world. There were web designers in Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, India, and all over the world. We had SEO consultants in India, there were BPO companies, Call Centers, Accountants, and many other types of companies too. I thought this directory would be focused on India, but we have clients throughout the world.
Learning from experience
As I started marketing our outsourcing directory site using google adwords, I learned that we were getting many clicks from India and the Philippines. Other counties didn’t give us hardly any traffic. But, the inquiries were coming almost exclusively from India, and only a small percentage from the Philippines. Although there are so many great call centers in Cebu, Manila, Davao, and other cities, we were not hearing from them. It became clear that this was going to be more of an India directory rather than a world directory like we previously thought.
Pakistan comes into the picture
As my testing out of different areas evolved, I decided that Pakistan was a serious country in outsourcing too, and that I should add them to the pay-per-click system. We got good inquiries and signups in Pakistan and Bangladesh too. I guess that those countries think like Indians — outsource, outsource, outsource!!! But, later I found that Pakistani and Bangladeshi companies had a low sign up ratio compared to their countries’ populations, and was not worth the advertising budget. We like to have at least one sign up per 300 clicks from a particular country for it to be worth while.
Browsers were not exactly in the proportions I expected.
What I started off thinking, was that America, Canada, and the UK would be the main browsers looking for services. This turned out to be true. I thought we might get a little extra traffic from Singapore and United Arab Emirates since those countries have a huge Indian expatriot population. What happened surprised me. I knew that Singapore would be a major browser on our directory. But, I never guessed that they would be the #1 browser country in the world. India still gets more clicks, but India functions as a service provider and not a browser looking for services.
Singapore tops the list
Since Singapore is our #1 browser, I’m putting much more attention on our campaigns targeting Singaporeans. None of their neighbors such as Thailand, Malaysia, or Indonesia gave us any significant attention on the web.
Canada
Canada was disproportional in terms of population and clicks. Canada is giving us almost as much traffic as the United States, but Canada has only 10% of the population of the whole U.S. California has more people than all of Canada put together (including mooses). We will be investigating putting more specialized effort into attracting Canadians to our site.
UAE
The “Maratis”, not to be confused with Marathis are some good browsers as well. People from the Emirates are called Maratis. To me that sounds like what people form Maharashtria are called too. They are homonyms. I guess if you moved from Mumbai to Dubai, you would be a Marati Marathi or vice versa. There are only 5,000,000 people in UAE, but we are getting disproportional click traffic from there. Since they are a business hub, I expected a good search volume originating from their territory. But, they are averaging 30% of the total clicks from the United States.
Conclusion
It looks like America is not outsourcing as much as we think. It looks like Americans will not have to worry as much as they think they will have to about losing their job to Ajit in Hyderabad or Manish in Noida. Its the Canadians and British who have a much higher rate of outsourcing based on my site’s statistics. I read that UK will be outsourcing more and more as time goes on. Programming and Data Entry are the first chores to be outsourced. I think that as a courtesy, India should offer a special type of visa to people who’s jobs were outsourced. They should be allowed to go to Navi-Mumbai and get their job back! Please visit our outsourcing directory today!
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