21 Reasons Why People Think Outsourcing Content Is Attractive

Have you ever screamed after looking at your To Do list? I have. You can continue struggling, or discover why smart entrepreneurs outsource content.

How in the world am I going to accomplish all this work in one day?

That’s one question I often ask myself whenever I view my To Do list in the morning.

But picture this:

You’re an entrepreneur and have enough clients to fill your day…every day. While they aren’t the highest paying clients, you’re happy working with them because you’re doing your passion.

But you want more.

Coupled with this, you’re writing a book (which you’re about to finish). To you, this book would really help you launch your career as a Consultant. You’re hoping to break into a wider audience with this book and perhaps launch a speaking career.

With doing client work and the daily task of writing your book, you practically don’t have a life. You have no social engagements because you’re super busy.

Now, you’re looking to build a more profitable business so you don’t get drained so much.

And you want your book to get into as many hands as possible. Perhaps with this, you’ll be able to take one day off work every week to spend with friends (and perhaps renew your love life).

Deep within you, you know you have to market your business and you’re looking to do it online.

But the question going through your head is, “How in the world would I combine marketing with my present workload?”

Is it possible?

Yes! In fact, it’s important that as a professional who is good at what you do, you need to know how to market yourself and your brand.

But here’s the consequence of that:

If you don’t have a life now, don’t expect to have a life for some time.

Depending on the services you offer, you’ll need to learn a new set of skills to effectively market your business online.

You can’t just be the person working with clients. Or the author of that neck twisting, bestselling book about to launch.

You also have to be a Marketer. And for this to happen, you need to learn the skills.

Content marketing is actually one of the best ways to build a brand that an audience will love.

And according to a content marketing report by Eloqua, customers develop a certain affinity towards content that’s custom created for them.

But regardless of that fact, that doesn’t mean it’ll work for you from the onset. Being that you’re just learning the marketing craft, expect to make lots of mistakes along the way…

Mistakes that’ll cost you time and of course money.

Even profit would be far from you for the first couple of months.

According to a study by Curata, Marketers do “feel” that content marketing is working! However, 75% of marketers are not on the correct path to success.

Yet, they’re supposed to be marketers.

Now imagine your results being a marketing newbie.

In order to leverage time and money, smart entrepreneurs have gone down the route of outsourcing their content marketing. One of the reasons for doing this is due to the fact that it may not be their strengths.

According to the same study, 17+ percent of companies are currently outsourcing created content to agencies.

However, the purpose of outsourcing is not so that you can play, while leaving all the work to your freelancer or agency.

The purpose instead is to leverage that time to do more important tasks that are more profitable and that grow your business.

In case you’re still on the fence about whether or not outsourcing is for you, I’ve compiled 21 reasons why people outsource content marketing and why you should consider it if you want to leverage time and money for more important tasks.

 

1. Content Marketing Requires A Specific Set Of Skills

If you’re still new to the word “Content Marketing”, then I’m guessing you don’t know how it works yet. If this is the case, then you’re still learning about how it can work for your business. That’s an awesome step.

But after all that planning, most people have a problem implementing content marketing for their businesses. Trust me it’s a struggle sometimes. And 51% of marketers who actually have a strategy don’t really follow it.

Image via Content Marketing Institute

So you can learn the skills and get your hands dirty doing it for your business, or you can outsource it to someone who can.

 

2. You’re Probably Not A Professional Writer

Being able to write a 300 page book doesn’t qualify you to write a 2000 word landing page or blog post that converts. While one primarily requires creativity, the other requires some knowledge in psychology and of course copywriting.

There are a ton of resources available if you want to go down that route, one of which is Copyblogger’s Copywriting 101. But with your present work load? I wonder if you can bear it.

 

3. You Won’t Have To Be Your Own Copy Editor

The role of the copy editor is becoming very important now. And the reason is clear: people who think they can write actually can’t. The copy editor is there to cover your poop so your content actually works for you.

But that doesn’t mean every online writer has an editor. In that case, there are ton of things to learn and best practices to implement for your content to really shine through. Stephanie Flaxman, the Editor-in-Chief at Rainmaker Digital created an epic post of 15 copy editing tips that you’d want to check out.

 

4. You’ll Focus More On Your Additional Responsibilities

Do you consider spending time with your family an important responsibility? If you do, then replacing content creation time with a time out with them would do you a lot of good. But you can’t replace marketing time with family time if you’re still doing it all on your own.

This is what leveraging time means. You could either use the time on your business, or invest it in your important relationships. Either way, you win, but one has to go for the other to work.

 

5. You’ll Have More Free Time

For some, growing a family is a lot of work…really. That’s why it’s called a responsibility. If you’re in the class of people who just want to rest whenever you have the opportunity, you can do that.

But your marketing has to be working for you while you’re away walking the dog or watching your favourite Telemundo series.

Not only that, but taking leisure is good for your health as an entrepreneur, says this study by Professor Matthew Zawadzki of UC Merced.

 

6. You’ll Work With The Best Talent

It’s not like you’d willingly outsource your marketing to a group of quacks anyway. But if you really want to grow a business, it’s your job to search for and hire the best talent.

What does this mean for you? Simple: you’ll leverage their expertise in your business and get the results, without you being the one with the marketing talent.

It’s called taking the credit. Chris Ducker over at YouPreneur.fm has this super-duper awesome episode on how to start building your team anywhere in the world.

Image via Chris Ducker

 

7. You’ll Trust Them Enough To Create Current Content

There’s something called evergreen content. Then there’s content that leverages on present happenings. Both have a way of attracting lots of readers.

A professional content marketer understands the importance of using current statistics, case studies and research in any piece of content. This way, whatever you’re trying to teach doesn’t appear obsolete.

 

8. You Won’t Have To Teach Yourself How To Write

Remember I said being an author doesn’t make you a professional writer. And to use content marketing for your creative business, it’ll involve you writing content (without even taking quality or length into consideration).

Now what if you don’t write at all? That’s even worse.

Neil Patel, in his post stated that,

“If you’re a terrible writer, it’s unlikely you’ll be successful.

It’s harsh, but it’s true.”

 

Image via Buzzsumo

The “wrestlers” at Buzzsumo and the Moz “droids” did a joint research on Shares and Links: why some posts get a lot of shares and links and why others don’t. After sampling 99,990 posts, what they realized is that lists usually attract the most shares online.

List posts are written text. And their impact on social media surpasses video content and infographics.

Image via Buzzsumo

Creating a list post doesn’t mean packing a bunch of mumbo jumbo together and attaching a number to them. That’s so wrong.

There’s a terrific resource on Boost Blog Traffic on how to create viral list posts that get shared. It’s not easy, but if you’re determined to learn how to do your marketing on your own, you gotta learn it.

 

9. You Won’t Have To Learn The English Language

You can write in French. You can write in Latin or any language of your choice. But what if English is your second language and you’re not very fluent in it? Are you really prepared to go through that learning curve?

So why limit yourself?

 

10. You’ll Focus On Your Strengths

Coupled with the fact that you don’t need to relearn a language you’re not very good at communicating with, there are a ton of business tasks you’re good at, asides marketing.

Unfortunately, most people put their strengths on hold and try as much as possible to turn their weaknesses into strengths. Sometimes, this isn’t a good investment of your time.

 

11. You Won’t’ Have To Be A Super Hero (Even If You Want To)

Always being the man that saves the day is a fantastic ego booster. And most entrepreneurs are the superheroes in their businesses. They do everything required, whether it’s keeping the accounts, content marketing, sales and even customer service.

Here’s what you’ll probably look like if you did that for 10 years:

 

Image via Wikipedia

 

You really need to stop smacking the moles in your business as they rear their ugly heads. Instead, if time is not something you have in abundance, delegate your marketing responsibilities so you can focus on the parts that matter.

 

12. You’ll Have A Content Machine For Your Business

Blog posting frequency matters. Having a variety of content consistently also matters. According to the Curata study of 10,000 business bloggers, 90.5% of bloggers post weekly or more often.

 

Image via Curata

Google loves fresh stuff and when your site is proven to produce fresh sumptuous content that readers love every time, you’ll get your share in the rankings (with due promotion of course).

According to CMI’s trends report, 76% say they will produce more content in 2016.

Image via Content Marketing Institute

Will you be among this group, or the other 24% who aren’t looking to up their game?

 

13. You’ll Have Better Search Ranking Due To High Quality Content

Frequency isn’t everything. High quality content in this case has nothing to do with what keywords you used or your Meta data. I’m referring to well…quality… depth.

60% of people have a challenge with producing engaging content. And content has to be engaging to an extent so your readers would actually share it.

Image via Content Marketing Institute

Google ranks content that people respond to. Readers share content that they see other people share and respond to. It’s a chain reaction. But you probably can’t create this effect by doing it on your own.

 

14. You’ll Be Able to Measure Success and Have Better ROI

To most entrepreneurs, content marketing is just about putting content out there. But like every other business, it needs to be measured. You don’t want to go investing all your time into something that isn’t bringing results.

Unfortunately, that has become the norm. Not every marketer measures the impact of their content.

And yet…they’re the marketers.

Tracking and measuring actually tells you what kind of content to continue creating, and what kind of audience to continue targeting. Not knowing this and more is just like throwing spaghetti to the wall and seeing which one sticks.

 

Image via Prolifiq

 

15. You’ll Have Unique Content Outside Your Perspective

There’s a reason why some professionals have a team of writers and not just one person doing all the brainstorming. Having a team brainstorming session actually leads to more ideas than doing it on your own.

There’s no know-it-all. So you don’t need to do it all.

 

16. Your Content Will Leverage Updated Knowledge In SEO

Pre-2011, if you didn’t stuff your article with keywords, you weren’t going to smell Google’s first page.

Post-2011, after “Kung Fu Panda” and “Happy Feet” hit online content producers, if you’re not writing for humans and content discovery, you won’t be smelling Google’s first page either.

While this doesn’t exclude the importance of keywords, it commands the usage in moderation and with wisdom.

One big problem most of us have is getting our content ranked. Sometimes, it could mean your site was built poorly that it blocks the Google spiders from crawling around your online home (which is something you want). A smart content marketer knows well to audit your site even before embarking on a new content marketing project. Did you know that?

 

17. You Won’t Have To Learn The Rudiments Of Marketing

Well, this starts with developing a content strategy by first knowing who you’re speaking to. That is, your one customer. And this is something a ton of us struggle with.

Don’t believe me? Ask the 35% of entrepreneurs who don’t have a documented strategy.

This is the foundation of any marketing done online for your business. A smart content marketer knows how to create one and definitely needs it to make your content marketing work. And that leads to one thing…

 

18. You’ll Have Strong Marketing Guidance

Content marketing has lots of moving parts. From a mechanical point of view, it’s like a car engine, necessary to make the car move.

From a biological point of view, it can be likened to the digestion process. You have no idea what goes on behind the scenes in your belly.

From an emotional point of view, it’s like a woman’s mind. They’re so hard to understand.

So when you have a problem with your car, you go to the mechanic because he’s the expert. When you have a problem digesting milk (because you didn’t know you’re lactose intolerant), it’s the doctor.

And…um…when a woman sets her mind on dealing with you, well, you need a Therapist, Counsellor and Pastor to deliver you.

Now you see the importance of having a marketing expert on your team?

 

19. You Can’t Afford To Fail

Failure is not even an option. It should never be.

Having expert guidance eliminates the possibility of failure. Sure, mistakes will be made along the way, as well as setbacks. But failure is the extreme end of the journey that must never be reached.

If having a marketer with a good track record and testimonials to back them up would keep you calm, then go right ahead and search for one. But going it on your own with trial and error can be disastrous if you don’t have the guts.

 

20. Your Content Will Have A Wider Reach

As the one doing the marketing for your business, you’re more likely to go the “Publish and Pray” route where you write something and pray people see it.

With the 2 million blog posts published every day, according to this post on Marketing Profs, you need to take it a step further.

Asides creation, promotion is just as important. In fact, 76% of marketers use promoted posts and search engine marketing as primary paid advertising methods for B2C clients.

Image via Marketing Profs

And a professional content marketer knows that your content isn’t an island. It needs help.

Promotion of a single blog post can take up to 4 hours to do, if not more. That’s valuable time to do some client work you know.

 

21. It’s A More Cost Effective Approach

Think about how much time you’ll invest in trying to make your content marketing work, or by even promoting it.

How about the amount of money you could spend by building an in house team of marketers. If you don’t run a virtual business, you’ll have to think about infrastructure and tools.

But working with talent from anywhere in the world removes all that headache. And you only get to pay for the skills used on your business. This doesn’t mean it’s cheap. Sure there are cheap writers and professionals, but you get what you pay for.

Never sacrifice quality, it does have its benefits.

 

Are You Ready To Outsource?

It’s a big decision to make, especially when you have to start paying for services. But with your present clientele, goals, challenges and workload, not to talk of your suffering relationships, it’s something you should consider as a smart entrepreneur.

Go through the 21 reasons in this post to make a decision. If you’re looking to have more free time, or creating content is hard because English is your second language, then outsourcing is the way to go.

So here’s the next step: go through this simple post to determine whether or not you should outsource your content marketing to a professional.

What do you think? Do you find content outsourcing attractive?

This is the first post in the Content Outsourcing series. Look out for more posts on content outsourcing so you learn what it involves and how to make it work for you.