A critical part of building a successful online business for myself is saving time so I can focus on the most critical of tasks. One opportunity to save time and increase my efficiency is by outsourcing various jobs to others. As I work to build several niche websites that generate passive income, I am burdened with publishing content on each site as well as creating content on external sites that link back. All of these tasks take a considerable amount of time and effort on my part.
In order to reduce my time and effort building these online sites, I have outsourced some of the articles. Outsourcing can be a huge time saver, especially when you consider it can take a few hours to write a quality article for a site.
The time savings factor is a huge benefit to outsourcing articles, but there are many risks that you need to consider. Over the past several months, I have come into many roadblocks by hiring out this type of work that are highlighted below.
Risks of Outsourcing Articles
Here are a few risks that you first need to consider before outsourcing your articles. While outsourcing this type of work can be an excellent way to save time, you need to be aware of the potential hurdles you may face.
- Useless Content – This is probably the biggest issue I see with outsourcing your articles. Often times I get back content that is just plain junk and offers no real purpose other than filling up a bunch of space. If you want to pay for content that has a long lasting purpose to your audience, you are either going to have to pay a premium or write the article yourself.
- Posting to Online Content Sites – If you are looking to build a really slick passive income model by outsourcing articles and then posting them to online revenue content sites, it may be harder than you think. You need to assume that the content you are getting back is good enough to pass several of the pre-screening steps that are now in place on a site like eHow. In the end, you may be tasked with spending time cleaning up articles that you have already paid for just to meet the requirements of the site you are posting to.
- Ethics – There are some out there who believe paying for content and publishing it under your name is not good practice. I tend to believe that if you are willing to put your name on it, then you are assuming the responsibility and ownership of that content and must live with any consequences down the road. Just keep in mind that you may be spending additional hours screening the content that you get back to ensure it meets your standards.
- Get What You Pay For – I can say this from first hand experience that you truly get what you pay for when it comes to outsourcing your articles. I have hired several ghost writers in the past couple of years and each time I accept a lower bid on a job, the writing gets worse. If you are looking to outsource some of your articles and are expecting quality work, you need to expect to pay more.
- Different Writing Styles – One of the areas that I struggle with is realizing that other authors have different writing styles than myself. No matter how much time I put into explaining exactly how I want an article to be written, it never comes out the way I expected. That is not to say the content I get back is poor, it may just be written in a different format or style than I am use to.
- Poor Grammar – If you are paying bottom dollar for your content, chances are the grammar will be poor at best. I tend to find articles coming back to me with run on sentences, broken English, and a variety of other issues. This goes back to the point of you get what you pay for.
- Duplication – As much as you can try to stress to a potential writer that you want unique content that can never be published elsewhere, you are still taking a risk. Who is to say that a year down the line, your ghost writer doesn’t publish the same article provided to you on another site? If you are paying others to write for you, then you need to be aware of this potential issue.
- Extra Time – There are times that I have found myself spending more time trying to get articles fixed than what it would have taken me to write it in the first place. Unless you have established a good rapport and understanding with a freelance writer, you need to be prepared to spend some extra time walking through your requirements with the writer several times.
Final Thoughts
I won’t be giving up on outsourcing my articles anytime soon. While I have had some hiccups along the way, the time savings for me continues to make this a necessity.
As I continue to hire more and more freelance writers, I am starting to establish a professional relationship with a few that are my favorites. These are the authors that I plan to go back to time and time again and am willing to pay a premium if necessary. I believe that this is a critical step in maximizing my earnings potential and reaching my ultimate goal of financial independence!
What has your experience been with outsourcing articles? Do you find yourself spending more time editing content than what you had expected?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi John,
With my own blog now and full-time work, I haven’t been able to create any new content for eHow. I have thought about outsourcing writing projects but after dealing with outsourcing a programming project, I want to do things right.
Can you give us an example of how much you paid for a poor article and how much for decent article? (For example, how much did it cost for a decent article and what was the approx. word count). So when the times comes for me to outsource a few articles, I might know what’s a good rate.
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pfincome Reply:
January 25th, 2010 at 10:47 pm
@Moon – I would estimate most of the lower quality articles run about $0.02 per word and the better articles have been running $0.05 per word. One thing I have found to be helpful is to find writers looking to build their references on sites like Elance and oDesk. They tend to bid lower to get some good feedback on those sites.
One other thing is that if you use Elance, the minimum a writer can bid on a job is $50, so you want to make sure you post the job for several articles.
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I have not outsourced any article writing yet since I enjoy writing. Instead I’ve outsourced the site building part which I don’t fully understand. I have been working with Constant Content and I’ve blogged about it several times. They solve all the issues you so correctly identify. (duplicated work, quality grammar). Good luck in your quest.
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pfincome Reply:
January 25th, 2010 at 10:48 pm
@Jade – How do you like Constant Content? I will check out some of your articles. While I enjoy writing, after awhile it can get old for me. Thanks for the tip!
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Very true about these risks. I use certain websites and sometimes they are good, sometimes they are just junk to fill up space, as you described. I really feel like the writers just have not *point* to the article, and I just don’t like publishing those kinds of articles. So true that you get what you pay for, I wish more people would realise this. When I was writing more, clients wanted so much for nothing – it’s just the mindset of many marketers. I really hope I can earn enough income to pay for good writers, get good content and make sure both parties are happy. Unfortunately I’m not in that position at the moment and doing most of the writing myself!
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pfincome Reply:
January 27th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
@Ruth – To be honest, I am still writing the majority of my articles. At some point I hope to find a couple quality writers who I can bring on to my staff.
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