The Many Hats Bloggers Wear

Blogging is the easiest job in the world, right? That seems to be the reason why everyone’s so excited about getting into this business and making a pile of cash. In reality, when you get started with blogging, you are going to have to wear lots of hats. Unless you have money to spend and outsource your business processes, you are going to end up doing a lot of work yourself. Now as your blog starts to pick up traffic, and you start attracting sponsors you can outsource more of these processes, but I have seen bloggers who have done all the below steps themselves for a quite a while:

• Design: if you know how to design websites, you have a head start over your peers. Instead of spending money on a designer, you can do it all by yourself. But then again is that the best way to use your time?
• Search Engine Optimization: SEO is a big part of blogging for success. If you don’t know anything about it, you can always pick up a book or two. Major SEO work could be quite expensive.
• Networking: networking with other bloggers and writing posts on other blogs should be a big part of your overall strategy. Can’t get around this that easily.
• Moderation: moderating your own community is important too. Someone needs to moderate comments, interact with readers, and handles guest posts.
• Social Media Optimization: optimizing your social media effort can bring you lots of new visitors, but guess what? It take a lot of time.
• Advertising & Promotion: SEO and SMO are nice ways to drive traffic to your website, but pay per click marketing is a significant traffic driver also. You should probably handle your pay per click campaigns in your early days.
• Monetization: blogging for fun is nice but not everybody is a billionaire like Warren Buffet. You can’t blog for fun and avoid starvation these days. There are many ways to monetize a blog but you need to put time and effort forward to get this right.
• Research & Developments: you should never stop researching and innovating. But you can’t hire someone to do this for you. Not in your early days anyway. As you go along, you can hire folks to develop ideas for you and help you with your research process.
• Analytics: you’ve got to watch your blog’s statistics to figure out what you are doing right and how you can improve your blog.
• Writing: the most important process in your blogging business. If you can’t write properly, you are not going to retain your traffic. If you are not a good writer, you should take time to read books about the art of writing. You’ll get better as you go along. This probably should never be outsourced (except having guests on your blog once in a while).
• Finance: tracking your revenue, your monthly budget, and your business expenses can be outsourced to a software package. But you should still take time to enter the information and preserve your data (especially for the tax time). No profit, no food to eat…

So which of the above processes do you do by yourself? Which of the above processes have you outsourced in the past?