Outsourcing your blog

There are definite advantages to running a blog, which I won’t cover here, but one of the biggest down sides is that it takes time – potentially quite a lot of time.

So how can you provide posts that are longer enough to be useful and frequent enough to increase website traffic when you don’t have enough time?

One option is to outsource your blog to save time – and there are multiple ways to do that:

1. Outsource the basic maintenance of your blog – for instance, have someone do back ups, upgrade plugins and delete spam every few weeks. It won’t just save you the time of doing these tasks, but the fact of trying to remember to do them frequently enough.
2. If you’re able to write the posts yourself, write a number of them and give them to a VA or similar to add to your blog itself. This saves time as you don’t have to deal with the software, add in keywords, select categories and set publication dates.
   You still have access of course so you can add any time critical posts yourself without needing your VA.
3. You can save even more time by having someone else write your blog posts for you – this is called ghost writing unless you add their name to the posts. Once they’ve been written, you can just add the posts to your blog.
4. Getting someone to write all your posts and upload them into your blog is obviously the biggest time saver of all. However, you may want to incorporate a system of approvals so you maintain some control over what goes into your blog.
5. Guest posting is where someone else writes a post that is published in your blog under their name. It saves you the time of writing (and possibly uploading it), gives a new perspective to your blog and can increase your blog’s exposure – it also fills your blog without risk of ‘pretending’ another’s work is yours.

On the other hand, I strongly suggest that you do not outsource the comments section of your blog. It is good practice to reply to comments people leave in your blog and I think someone within the business ahs to be the one to make such replies.

By responding to comments yourself, you

• build trust and relationships with your readers
• stay aware of readers’ ideas and attitudes – this can be valuable information
• can answer any technical or administrative questions accurately
• maintain control and ownership

Until your blog is busy and popular, comment moderation and responding is not very time consuming – you can get emails to tell you when comments arrive rather than needing to check for them. Your VA could moderate comments whilst entering your posts but it’s just as easy to do that while replying.

PS If you do decide to outsource the writing of blog posts, be careful of how it is presented and ideally create a system so your ideas and knowledge is being shared.

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Tash Hughes is passionate about clear communications and has helped many business get their communications working. Tash's business, Word Constructions, can prepare content, manage communications projects or work with you to assess and improve your overall business communications.You can connect with Tash via Facebook and find out more about Word Constructions at www.wordconstructions.com.au