Savvy Affiliate

Some Bloggers Are Outsourcing for Success, Are You?

With the recent release of the 4 hour workweek by Tim Ferriss, the blogosphere has been buzzing with the idea of outsourcing work. 

Tim Says

“Outsourcing is no longer just for Fortune 500 companies.  Small and mid-sized firms, as well as busy professionals, can outsource their work to increase their productivity and free time for more important commitments. It’s time for the world to take advantage of this revolution.”

And if that doesn’t describe most bloggers in a nutshell then nothing will.

I am tempted to order Tim’s book and see all that he has to say about outsourcing.  However just reading reviews of his book has made me think of things that I would like to outsource on this blog, letting me free up time to expand

1) Blog Design - I have no desire to learn how to create a Wordpress Theme and take the hours or dozens of hours necessary to design a perfect blog page.  That is why this theme is a old Daily Blog Tips theme which they were giving away.  However sooner or later I will want to move this blog into a theme that is recognizably, and brandable, Savvy Affiliate.  When it is time to do that, what is a better use of my time?  Learning to create a theme in order to do it once?  Or hiring another blogger to create a theme for me?  Clearly the most productive thing I can do is outsource, spend some money to save a lot of time

2) Trouble Shooting - Every site runs into technical trouble every now and then.  Some things I can handle, most things I can figure out after a Google search or two.  However these bugs can cost a lot of time. Once this site grows and is starting to make some money, it will be well worth it to me to pay some college student to trouble shoot my blog whenever it has technical bugs, instead of taking the hour or more necessary to figure out the bug and rectify it myself.

3) Comment Moderation - Although this site is still growing, I can easily see comment moderation becoming an onerous burden.  Even with Akismet installed, I still need to go through and verify that the spam comments are spam.  (I’m told http:Bl, project honeypot can help with this, I haven’t tried it yet) When the site gets larger I’ll need to take the time to make sure verified users aren’t abusing the comments.  I like responding to my readers at present, but  if the site grows too large I may forgo that in order to free up time to write content.  In that case outsourcing the comment moderation would be a great thing to do.

4) Content Writing - I would love to get contributing bloggers writing on this site.  Although I would still continue writing, it would be nice to have other people generating content.  This would greatly increase the total number of pages indexed in the search engines, driving up the search traffic.  Additionally it would put another point of view on the site, broadening Savvy Affiliate’s personality and potentially making it more interesting.

5) Social Bookmarking - I currently spend a fair amount of time now Digging and Stumble-ing posts, both mine and other bloggers.  I do it for mine in order to make my post more visible, and self promote.  I do it for other bloggers both because I enjoyed that particular post and would like to share it as well as the hope that they would reciprocate for my site.  I wouldn’t mind hiring someone to do some promotion work on my blog and kick start it much more than I have been able to.  Of course, by the time Savvy Affiliate is generating enough cash flow to make that worthwhile, there is a good chance my readers would be bookmarking posts themselves.

6) Finding Plugins / Upgrades - Which plugins are the best?  Which give the most competitive edge and make you the most productive?  Although every site has a list of the best plugins, there are new ones being released all the time.  It would be nice to have a side by side analysis of all the plugins with similar functions, much as I shop for gadgets or airfare.   However this might not be something best outsourced, it might just be a good idea of a webpage another webmaster could create.  I would frequent it, and I know others would as well.

So what sort of thing would you be tempted to outsource?  What tasks tie up your time without being very productive?