Sure you can make thousands of dollars sitting at home from blogging but it can sometimes get really painful when you are the only person working nuts on your blog for making it successful and making loads of money with it.
I too own a blog, so I know how it feels when you have a long to-do list, of things to be done for your blog and you can’t manage to find enough time to complete each of them or even sometimes you don’t even care to do them as they start looking very insignificant to you because of your laziness.
Now here’s when outsourcing your blog can help you eliminate all your blogging pains.
Outsourcing Your Blog
Outsourcing your blog is a process by which you can outsource different aspects of blogging such writing content, editing posts, proofreading, marketing, link building etc., to a freelance worker so that he does the work for you when you take a nap or hang out with your friends.
You can even outsource the complete blogging process to a freelance worker so that he writes and maintains the blog completely and you just sit at home making money from your blog and drinking hot coffee.
Blog outsourcing can save you a lot of time and energy and can help eliminating all the pains that you have to face while blogging.
Say, you’re not good at writing content but are good with marketing – outsource content writing for your blog and do the marketing yourself.
Or, you’re not good at building link (or you get bored doing it!), but are good with creating compelling content – just outsource link building.
Or, you love to write for your blog and know the marketing stuff but don’t have enough time to do it –outsource marketing (the content marketing and guest blogging stuff).
Lastly, say you are a pro-blogger and know how to build blogs that make money but are too lazy to do it yourself – outsource everything!
When you outsource your blog, you hire some person to blog for you, a freelance worker, who maintains it and keeps it updated according to your requirements and you pay him/her for that.
You can find cheap and very skilled freelance workers from freelance sites who are really good with writing content and the blog marketing stuff and can take the burden away from your head.
Blog Outsourcing Is Not For Everyone
Blog outsourcing is not for everyone. If you own a small business online or are new to blogging, I’d recommend you do things on your own and keep the outsourcing thing away for the future for after your business grows and your pockets get deeper.
There are two reasons you should stay away from outsourcing your blog when you either own a small business online or are new to blogging – firstly when you are just starting out, you don’t have enough experience of what should be done and what not. So you may ultimately end up losing a lot of your money and not achieving anything significant.
Secondly, when you are new you don’t have any large scale work that you can’t do alone. So in my opinion this again is wastage of money and time which you could have rather invested in educating yourself about different things.
Blog Outsourcing can be benefited by the following three groups of people:
1. Solopreneurs With Multiple Blogs and Businesses
If you are a solopreneur and own multiple blogs and businesses online, you’ll love this concept. You may already know that blogs are a great way of driving traffic to your products or services, but what if you have a lot of them?
It can be very difficult to manage multiple blogs and keep them updated regularly when you have a lot of other things to take care of. So, if this is the case with you, you can outsource your blogs to that freelance workers to manage them for you.
2. For Micro-Niche Blog Builders
If you make money online by building multiple micro-niche blogs you can outsource your blogs to freelancer workers for them to do the work for you. You just need to explain them what your requirements are and the time frame for the work to be completed.
This may include writing content for your micro-niche blogs or marketing them online by building links or sharing them in social media etc. Just be sure that you know what you are doing so that you can save your time and money and get what you desire.
3. Professional Bloggers
There are a lot of things a blogger has to do in order to build a successful blog. As a pro-blogger there are a lot of things that you need to do such as – writing great content, optimizing your site for higher conversion, content marketing for link building and driving traffic, on-page and off-page SEO, being active socially and on forums etc.
Practically a pro-blogger alone cannot do everything on his own because he already has a successfully running blog that needs a lot of things to be done and taken care of. So in my opinion if you are one of these pro-bloggers, you should not even try to do everything on your own. If you can outsource almost anything, then why take the pain anyway.
So if you are a pro-blogger just focus on doing what you are best at and outsource everything else.
What Are The Things That You Can Outsource?
You can outsource almost anything involved in blogging to the freelance workers. I’ve written top 6 things that I personally have outsourced in the for either this blog or my other micro-niche sites and saved myself a lot of time and energy.
1. Blog content
If you are not good at writing content or want content to be written for your micro-niche blogs, you can outsource it to freelancers. Just show your freelance worker what you want to be written and how you want it to be written and give them decent article titles and keywords to work from.
When outsourcing your blog’s content always remember that the freelance worker you hire won’t be a mind reader. So show them exactly what you want, otherwise you’ll probably get back something entirely different from what you were expecting.
2. Search Engine Optimization – SEO
This includes both on-page and off-page optimization of your blog. Almost 95% of bloggers out there don’t know how to optimize their blogs and blog posts for getting getting search engine traffic (even if they say they do). So it’s always a good idea to outsource this work to someone who actually knows how to do it.
3. Social Media Management
Social media management is a process of managing your social profiles and being active socially for more exposure of your blog and its content on social media. Engagement in social media is a great way of driving traffic to your blog and having better search engine rankings as well as building better relationships with your fan base.
So you can hire a freelancer for keeping your social profiles active and engaging.
4. Content Marketing
You can also outsource content marketing of your blog on other blogs and sites to drive traffic and get more subscribers. You can outsource guest blogging, video marketing, article directory submission, slideshare presentations and all sorts of other content marketing strategies.
5. Design & Multimedia
This is where almost all of us need help – for designing beautiful looking logos and customized themes for our blogs. This may also include making intro videos for your video posts or animation videos for your products. Sure you can make these on your own if you feel there’s a hidden artist in you, but it’s always better to hire someone to do the work.
6. To Handle The Tech Stuff
There is a lot of tech stuff involved in blogging that tech savvy bloggers are literally afraid of. This may include setting up landing pages and integrating your email opt-in to it or editing different parts of code for customization or something similar. There are a lot of tech guys you can find on freelance websites who can help you with your technical requirements so that you don’t have to worry.
What Should You Do Yourself?
As I described above you can outsource almost anything, but there are still a couple of things that I think you should not outsource. It’s not because you can’t outsource these things, but because it’s better to do them yourself for preserving the quality of work and for other privacy issues. You’ll know what I mean when you read further.
1. Buying Domain and Hosting – Decide on a domain name and hosting plan and buy it yourself. Install WordPress using One-Click Install (most of the hosting providers have this option) and do the basic settings before handing over the login details to your freelance worker – saves your credit card being used by someone you don’t know. (10 minutes maximum)
2. Keyword Research – Keyword research is the most important thing that you should do on your own for finding keywords that have high search volume and conversion potential and have low competition. Do your own keyword research and give your freelance workers the keywords to write blog posts or to do SEO.
This is important because writing content for keywords that don’t have traffic potential will be a total waste of time and money. So you should do this yourself for getting better results. (30-45 minutes)
3. Develop A Link Building Strategy – Although your entire link building burden will be taken care of by your freelance worker but it’s important for you to explain them how you want the links to be built. With the unexpected Google algorithm changes like the Panda and Penguin it has now become important to build a link building strategy that will enable you to get the most out of the links you build.
Link building strategy is something you should take seriously as it can completely make or break your blog. You may even end up with being deindexed in Google search results if you do it in a wrong or spammy way. (15-20 minutes if you have a right link building strategy in place)
Where to Outsource?
You can find freelancer workers and Virtual Assistants (VAs) on various freelance websites where you can hire them on an hourly or fixed price basis or get in contract for completing your blog’s work. I’ve written a post on World’s 5 Best Freelance Websites where I’ve shared the top 5 freelance websites where I’ve outsourced to earlier and worked as a freelancer.
Finding the right freelance worker for your job can be a difficult task if you have not done it before. So before choosing a freelance worker for your job remember the following two things, just to be on the safer side.
Check Average Feedback Score – Generally denoted by stars. A feedback score over 4 stars is good and over 4.5 stars is excellent. Anything below 4 stars is something what you should be cautious about.
Previous Work Experience/Portfolio – Carefully check the work experience of the freelance worker for if he has already done the type of work you’re looking for. If he hasn’t already I seriously suggest not risking your money, no matter how promising his application letter looks.
I’ve had a lot of previous bad experiences where I hired people just be reading their application letters, but later regretted.
Things To Keep In Mind
After deciding what to outsource and where to outsource keep the following things in mind for a better blog outsourcing experience:
1. Outsourcing a blog is not easy – The point where it gets hardest is finding the right freelancer workers. There are a lot of freelance sites out there where you can find good freelance workers but finding the right person for your job is more important than anything else.
2. Outsourcing a blog needs money – a lot of it, if you are looking for quality work. This is why I don’t recommend it to absolute beginners. So outsource only if you know what you are doing or if you can risk the money (I’m using the word risk here as you don’t always get good freelancers) or the overall result of the job you posted does not impact other aspects of your online business.
3. Outsourcing a blog requires management – Do proper management of time and work before you allot it to your freelance worker to get a quality output. If you have a lot of work to be done, don’t burden everything on your freelance worker all at once. Bombarding your work without management will just create panic and a lot of incomplete work.
Can you think of anything else that can be outsourced or anything that you think should not be outsourced? Share it with us using the form below.We’ll love to hear from you and maybe we could end up learning something new from you.
