There’s something in the air today – everyone seems to be talking about outsourcing your blogging (or elements of it).
Daniel is writing about it from a perspective of outsourcing some of your non core blogging activities (like design, blog maintenance, marketing and even content creation) and Yaro is talking about his journey of outsourcing his own blog’s content creation and management.
It’s an interesting topic for discussion and something that a lot of blogs are moving more towards with numerous large blogs around the wider community moving to a group blogging model. To some extent I’ve even done it a little here at ProBlogger with the invitation to a couple of fellow bloggers (Tony and Glen) to submit articles every week or two.
I’ve also tinkered with it over at DPS where I’ve been using more and more reader submissions (from semi-regular contributers mainly).
Why would you want to outsource elements of your blogging (particularly content creation) by adding new authors to your blog? Well there are numerous advantages that immediately leap to mind:
- fresh ideas
- new styles/voices
- less reliance upon you personally to drive the brand
- introduce new skills, opinions, experiences and expertise into the mix
- potentially increase posting frequency
- having people in different time zones to keep things well maintained
- gives you a break or allows you to focus on new projects
Of course for every upside there’s usually a downside to accompany it and some of the negatives of outsourcing through adding new bloggers can include:
- more time spent on managing others and the issues that they can bring
- motivational issues for bloggers
- potential dilution of your own personal brand
- risk of lower quality content
- new voices can disenfranchise some loyal readers
- compensation challenges – finding the right model and administering it
- recruiting – how do you find the right person with the right ‘fit’?
I certainly don’t have all the answers to any of these issues and like most others at this stage am still finding my way with it. My own ‘outsourcing’ has been largely out of wanting to free up a little more time and a desire to add a few new voices into the mix – but I suspect we’ll see more and more blogs going the multi-blogger direction in the coming months.
