Savvy Affiliate

Some things are good to outsource, others, not so much

Recently I had written about some parts of my blog that I would be interested in outsourcing.  I wrote about how some bloggers are able to greatly expand their sites, and make a lot more money, by outsourcing the tedious and time consuming aspects of blogging, leaving themselves more time to focus on making money.

The impetus behind this series of post is a recent book called the 4 hour workweek.  The author extols the virtues of outsourcing, and people are quoted as loving the book with such quotes as

“With this kind of time management and focus on the important things in life, people should be able to get 15 times as much done in a normal work week.”

 That is all well and good.  However, although there are some parts of my blog that I would like to outsource, there are others which I would never consider doing.  Here are some things which I can never believe I will pass off, and that will always cause me to have a greater than a 4 hour workweek.

1) Give up writing any content - Although I would love to have contributing authors on this blog, I would never give up writing content.    Other authors would be a great way to expand this blog, but I think that my posts would be necessary to keep the flavor of the site the same.  Additionally, if I stopped writing content I would stop learning more about blogging, and may quickly lost interest in the site.

2) Let other people handle the money - I would never pass off the monetizing aspects of the blog to anyone else.  Learning how to monetize a blog effectively is arguably one of the most important skills you can acquire while blogging.  I am willing to take the time, and maybe even do it less effectively than whomever I would hire, to gain experience on monetizing a blog.

3) Build Blogging relationships - I have stressed many time that building up relationships with other bloggers is vital if you want to be successful.  I think that it would be disingenuous to hire someone to build up relationships for my blog.  Additionally, if I did that, there would be nothing to stop my employee from taking his relationships with him if he stopped working for me.

4) Back up my blog - Regular backups of your blog are essential.  Let someone else do this at your own peril.  If you keep this to yourself you know that it will be done, and done correctly.  If you pay someone else to do it, you won’t find out about a problem until your site crashes, and then it is too late.

5) Control over employees - If I do hire people to help me run this site, I would maintain the relationships with them myself.  I have no interest in adding another level of management, i.e. hiring an employee to run the employees.  I think that maintaining control would enable me to ensure only high quality work was being done, because in the end everything that goes up on this site reflects on me.

So do you outsource?  What are you interested in shipping off, and what will you keep for yourself?