Having blogged since 2009, I honestly believe that if you were to start a blog today for the first time, I really believe that you should not outsource the blogging portion. You can certainly outsource and hire someone to setup the blog for you (if you look around, you could pay someone around $50 to get it all set up inexpensively).
However, I would recommend NOT hiring out the writing. If you are in the business of creating a blog purely for generating ad revenue and affiliate income, I do believe that you need to learn how to do it yourself before you hire someone to do it. Here are my top tips on things you need to know for outsourcing blogging work.
Outsourcing Blogging Work Tips and Tricks
Learn How to Write Discoverable Content First
When you start a blog, you need to know what your readers are looking for and how the search engines will find your content. You need to learn how to be in the trenches first before you can teach and delegate the work to someone else.
Create Standard Operating Procedures
As you begin writing blog content, you’ll progress in figuring out that there is a standard way that you begin your introduction, your body, and the ending of your content. In addition, you’ll learn what words to link and what content interlink. I would recommend jotting this down and writing it in third person. That way, you’ll have an outline for yourself as well as when you hire out.
Create Ideas for Blog Posts
Many bloggers who start out do not know what to write about. If you don’t know what to write about, I would recommend going on YouTube and learning about keyword research. This will be highly important as you don’t want to hire someone and NOT have content ready to go.
Hire for Consistency
Once you begin hiring out, I would recommend setting a budget that you can hire out for so that the person you work with learns your style. I’ve hired for onesey twosey articles, and they differ so much. I would recommend sticking with one person first, but the risk is that if. you lose that person, you’ll have to retrain.
Use Upwork or TextGoods
Upwork used to be known as eLance back in the day, and I feel like I get more trustworthy hires than on Fiverr. I generally pay around $15-40 a blog post depending on the niche.
Create Acceptance Criteria
I’m a product manager by day which means I write a lot of use cases for engineers to work on. The understood agreement in the industry is creating acceptance criteria, which basically defines what “done” means for an article. I would recommend writing as detailed acceptance criteria as possible. Acceptance criteria can also include requiring them to not plagarize and also not reuse content anywhere else.
Outsource Syndication
I’ve learned how to outsource things like creating images. While I love images, I don’t love bulk creation of them, which is what’s needed when you need to feed the Google and Pinterest algorithm. I would recommend creating standards and save inspiration ideas for pins or Facebook posts so that when you are ready to hire out, you have these standards created.
Mindset of the Editor
When you outsource, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do quality assurance. The goal of outsourcing should be so that it frees up more time for you to think strategically as a small business owner, but keep some control in terms of editorial.
Strategy Tradeoffs
If you are going to hire out, think about what you’d work on by paying someone to do the dirty work. It’s important that you just don’t spend your time squirreling on ideas (which youc an) because you want to ensure that you make use of your time in a way that will move your business forward.
Give Great Feedback
If you like your writer, give great feedback. People love hearing that they are doing a good job. You literally are taking on the job of being a boss, so act like it. Learn positive affirmation so that you can allow people to continue working for you.
Calculate ROI
Remember that blogging is a long game. The reason it’s a long game because you aren’t paying Google or Bing for any of this traffic, which means that it will take a longer time for you to rank. As you hire out and spend that money, it will generally take a longer time to generate an ROI, so take that into account.
Final Thoughts
Having blogged for a decade, I’ve been able to learn from my past mistakes (like hiring an SEO writer). By focusing and learning how to WRITE well and get content ranked, I am able to use the investment back in my business wisely to get a bigger return. Basically, what I’m trying to say is this: You should know the nuts and bolts on what you are hiring out for (you should know how to do the thing you are hiring someone else to do) in MOST cases. Rare exceptions are when you are trying to create an app that requires a software developer.