Call this a case of “dealing with the demands of having someone else do it”, that is, the demands of outsourcing content creation.
If you haven’t outsourced article writing here’s a few things you need to be aware of.
Unless you are working with highly tuned in writers, ones who can advise YOU what ought to be covered in the next article, you are going to have to spend time researching topics TO cover.
That’s easy, right? No, not quite.
You need to know if there is demand or market for the information contained in the article. If you plan to pay writers for their work then, to earn money from the articles, you need to know if there are advertisers who target people interested in reading about the topic. You might also want to know how much their willing to pay, how many there are competing for interested eyeballs, and whether the topic is evergreen or only of passing interest – in which case you better be pulling in traffic ASAP or your investment will show no ROI.
That’s just the beginning.
Next, you might want to know what’s out there in terms of “source material” and have an idea of how you might avoid redundancy (regurgitation) and add value. IF you have a gifted writer you might not need to ponder these questions. However, when most folks think “outsourcing content creation I suspect they aren’t thinking about paying for writing talent so much as they’re thinking about word count and pennies. So, you best be prepared to spend some time thinking and articulating (explaining to your writers) HOW they might address the topic to make it new, fresh, interesting or worth a reader’s time.
That’s just the beginning of the front end of the writing process, i.e., the process of deciding what to write about and how to approach the subject. There’s more to cover at some later time about the pre-writing phase, but what about the time and effort that has to be invested AFTER a copywriter has submitted an article?
Who is going to proof-read what is being created? You, of course, the person paying for the articles. So you need to read them, but not “just read them” for logic, grammer, typos. You also need to be concerned about “originality” (no plagiarism, no copyright violation) – which takes time to check even minimally. You also need to be concerned about the overall quality (if quality matters to you), reference to authority (for further reading or to support arguments or ideas in the article) and the quality and originality source material.
And more.
You also need to be in charge of managing the work flow. Assigning topics. Picking topics that can be “done justice” in the time allowed for writing. And replenishing the work pipeline. Constantly. With relevant, interesting articles to write.
So, what’s the point of writing about this? The point is that outsourcing content creation is not necessarily a solution without its own inherent problems or demands or limitations. Oursourcing is not a panacea, nor a cake walk.
Outsourcing content creation or article writing, while meant to save time and effort, itself imposes demands on one’s time and creates new demands on ones time. Paying others to write articles for you has costs that go beyond writing checks to your copywriters. You need to assess “all the costs” in order to determine just how well outsourcing writing will work for you and whether or to what degree it will be a profitable endeavor.
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