Should You Outsource Your Blog?

That’s what most advanced bloggers talk about on their blogs and white-papers. Most professional bloggers attribute their success to outsourcing. At the end of the day, whether you are a one man show or you work with your partners to run a few blogs, you will have a lot of things to take care of. Here are a few things you need to worry about with your blog:

• Content Creation
• Content Distribution
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media Optimization
• Blog Advertising
• Relationship Management

Now you can break all these tasks down and bring about 100+ sub-tasks that need to get done for your blog to become successful. If you are planning to do all this yourself, then more power to you, and good luck. Most professional bloggers only focus on one or two of those tasks and delegate other tasks to experts.

You can not be everything to your blog. You can’t be the advertiser, the search engine optimization expert, the relationship management guy, and the author. These are a diverse set of tasks and can spread your focus thin. Your goal should be to give 110% to your core competency, whether it is article writing or site promotion. If you focus on too many tasks, it becomes almost impossible to do all the tasks justice. So you should definitely consider outsourcing?

What to outsource?

Now that’s the million dollar question here. You have decided that you can not do everything by yourself, but you are not sure what to outsource? First you need to figure out what your main area of strengths is. It may be that you do not feel comfortable writing content day in and day out. If that’s the case, then you can hire a few article writers to deliver good solid content for your blog. But the first step is to recognize what your strengths are. A lot of folks are too stubborn to accept that they can not be good at everything. That’s why those who know their strengths and weaknesses often outperform those who don’t.

You can outsource everything under the sun these days. But let’s take a look and see the benefits of outsourcing the above-mentioned tasks:

• Content Outsourcing: this is one of the areas that I have always been skeptical about. Your blog tone can’t often be duplicated by your outsourcing partner. We all have different personalities and your voice is what’s unique about your blog. However, you can always hire folks to do research for you or write draft articles. At least, that’s what I have done in the past. Changing a draft article is much easier for me than writing articles from scratch. Then again, your strenghts could be very much different than mine.
• Content Distribution: I have personally not outsourcing this process before, but the possibility is there. You can always hire people on Guru.com or Elance to do this job for you. But if you decide to outsource this process, do not forget the concept of “segregation of duties.” In other words, never give the same person the task to write and distribute your content.
• Relationship Management: I personally like to be on top of my blogs and be in communication with folks who are coming to my blog. You can always hire someone to answer your e-mails, but I don’t think responding to comments should be outsourced. You should have some presence in your community or you’ll have no community at all.
• Content Promotion: this is my favorite task to outsource. My background is SEO, and I personally feel confident about being able to optimize my sites for search engines. However, dealing with blog advertising and social media is what I believe needs to be left to the experts. It’s not to say that you should just forget about those items. But depending on your strengths, outsourcing the content promotion process could save you a lot of time and effort that can be spent on more important tasks.

Outsourcing a task does not make it go away. It’s not a set it and forget it switch. You need to stay on top of your outsourcing partners and get status reports from them on a consistent basis. The process of choosing the right outsourcing partner is outside the scope of this post, but you should always be careful who you choose to work with. Without the right staff, you are only going to go backwards. That’s just a fact.

Have you outsourced any part of your blogging process? If so, what are the challenges that you have faced in that regard?