What Do You Outsource (Content/Publishing/Images/On-Page)?

[mrpotato]

I'm curious to know how many people take the time to create and/or publish their content and handle other aspects (images, on-page, inner-linking etc) and how many choose to outsource the work?

I am mainly curious how many do so that can easily afford to outsource these tasks?

If you do, why do you choose to do all of it versus outsource it?

 

[Asad]

If you run your sites like you run a brick and mortar restaurant then you understand the futility of trying to
- make the fries
- cash out customers
- mop
- manage
- and market
... at the same time.
In the beginning you do and document the process. You make standard operating procedures for each task that are so easy to understand that a distracted teenager can replicate your results according to standard.

You then turn your attention to higher level tasks and outsource the lower level ones.

With a good enough SOP you can pay your Sister or someone in Bangladesh pennies to go through the steps because it involves zero thinking on their part.

You can also 'outsource' programmatically. Parts of your SOP can be handled by scripts, SAAS, and other inexpensive tools.

As a responsible business owner it is your duty to focus only on things that serve your market best and move your business forward strategically.

Sure, you could do everything yourself and you should absolutely experience what its like to work in different parts of your business to standardize practices and develop a hands on knowledge of your processes.

But if you are smarter than I was, you will take every penny of early profits and outsource everything you should not be doing. You then work on increasing market penetration, decreasing inefficiencies, and innovating your system and products/svcs so that your outsource spend yields tangible ROI.

You could always do work you are good at and outsource the rest, but I would outsource what you are good at to someone who is better at it.

So what you are left with is work that you MUST do (the C-suite tasks), then work that you WANT to do if you have leftover bandwidth. Systematize and outsource the rest.

Imean, you got Fiverr dude. Cmon.

 

[mrpotato]

If you run your sites like you run a brick and mortar restaurant then you understand the futility of trying to
- make the fries
- cash out customers
- mop
- manage
- and market
... at the same time.
In the beginning you do and document the process. You make standard operating procedures for each task that are so easy to understand that a distracted teenager can replicate your results according to standard.

You then turn your attention to higher level tasks and outsource the lower level ones.

With a good enough SOP you can pay your Sister or someone in Bangladesh pennies to go through the steps because it involves zero thinking on their part.

You can also 'outsource' programmatically. Parts of your SOP can be handled by scripts, SAAS, and other inexpensive tools.

As a responsible business owner it is your duty to focus only on things that serve your market best and move your business forward strategically.

Sure, you could do everything yourself and you should absolutely experience what its like to work in different parts of your business to standardize practices and develop a hands on knowledge of your processes.

But if you are smarter than I was, you will take every penny of early profits and outsource everything you should not be doing. You then work on increasing market penetration, decreasing inefficiencies, and innovating your system and products/svcs so that your outsource spend yields tangible ROI.

You could always do work you are good at and outsource the rest, but I would outsource what you are good at to someone who is better at it.

So what you are left with is work that you MUST do (the C-suite tasks), then work that you WANT to do if you have leftover bandwidth. Systematize and outsource the rest.

Imean, you got Fiverr dude. Cmon.

@Asad I didn't say that I don't outsource these things or anything. I have 5 writers, 1 editor (part-time on-call), 1 programmer (part-time), 1 Outreacher (full-time).

I simply asked who does it themselves and why? Sure, Loom and Word Docs for SOPs work just fine. I'm just curious who's doing everything themselves and why?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I've gotten as far as I have by using other pre-built teams like a content agency, an outreach agency, etc. I've hired temporary VA's to things like data finding and data entry, and I've had bots written. But nothing "in house" on an on-going basis.

Some things you simply can't pay a team to do, a team that already exists. I've been using every bit of my spare time that I can to build out a training center full of SOP's and training videos, etc.

The whole thing is a procedure from start to finish of "writing a post from the keywords provided, to formatting the post, to sourcing and editing images" and all that. It's busted into work for 4 workers eventually but I'm going to have it be done by 3 people at first: myself, a writer, and a formatter/image editor.

Once all the kinks are ironed out I'll start bringing on more people at scale and seeing if I should compartmentalize it or have one person continue to be both the formatter and image editor. I think there's time savings there in terms of them becoming familiar with the article once, versus having two people become familiar.

But yeah, I agree wholesale. We all have to get out of the trenches ASAP. Most of the basic stuff we keep busy with can be done by anyone and get the same results depending on how well we write the SOPs.

For me, I will continue to manage:

• Keyword Research
• Setting up Drafts (and setting up some meta data)
• Creating the Workflow Cards (in Trello)
• Quality Assurance and basic per-post promotion

Writing is currently outsourced to a team and I'm not sure I'll bring that in-house, but I'm doing the writing guide and templates for each article type so I can always point writers to that. It'll be there and done.

Otherwise, I'm going to have someone else do:

• Content Formatting (setting headers, paragraph sizes, etc.)
• Image Sourcing & Editing & Adding
• Using a Photoshop project to create the featured image, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.

This is the time consuming stuff. The more the kinks are ironed out, the more I'll let go of, especially when I see that one of the workers can be promoted to a manager.

Anything else, like link acquisition, marketing, etc. I'll keep doing for the time being. But getting those 3 bullet points out of my hands just above will turn this into a true conveyor belt of production and let me turn some attention back to my main earner (where I'll outsource as much as I can too). All future sites will run on this same theme I made and use the same SOPs, so scale will be unlocked.