We have lately been thinking about outsourcing the more basic parts of our link building (submitting to directories, link exchange, finding free links, etc) and wanted to know if someone has some comments and experience in this area.
Hi there, I definitely find it to be a pain in the butt to go through the process of link building - specially if it is one of my newer sites. Right now a lot of link networks are getting punished and the penguin update hammered a great number of sites out there, so I guess we need to re-think the process of link building and how we approach this from now on. Frankly I used some networks in the past but i am trying to stick to the players that’s been around for quite some time. Plus i am looking for international experience and a global portfolio of high quality links - ideally with a support staff that knows their trade. Let me throw to names at you…I work with LinkWorth (more US oriented) and teliad (Their core markets: European markets plus the US)…check 'em out 
[FONT=Verdana]Outsourcing link building can be a dangerous strategy, because you will have no quality control over the work done – there’s no tangible product to check, and it would be very different to quality check retrospectively. That means you’re taking a huge gamble with the integrity and competence of the contractor. Now, I’m not saying that all professional SEOers are liars, fraudsters and charlatans, but it’s fair to say that a significant proportion are.
As 4daLUV says, the latest Penguin update has really tightened things up, and it’s going to be increasingly difficult for people – particularly those working outside your industry – to build relevant links that carry useful quantities of googlejuice. And you really don’t want to waste your money paying people to build links that aren’t going to do you any good at all.[/FONT]
Outsource Link Building make it easy for you to promote your website or compete with your competitors online and you only to take burden of checking their link reports to see relevancy of link and quality of link and ask them to strictly to make quality links for your site.
Have you thought of doing those off-page optimization techniques by yourself if ever you still have the time to do them? Even though there are some people out there and even here in the Sitepoint forums who are willing to take that kind of job, wouldn’t it be better if your persona would be the one carrying your company online instead of other people? Not that I’m doubting the talents of the people who are doing this, but there’s this chance that you may be misrepresented. If you really want to go for outsourcing, I suggest that you take a look at the reviews of whatever company you find before you actually make a deal with them.