Friday Q&A: Should you outsource your blog writing?
Every Friday, we’re answering your questions about business, startups, customer success and more.
Happy Friday!
This week’s question comes from Pedro C., who asks:
We get some form of this question pretty often.
To try and be as helpful as possible, I’ll explain why we DON’T outsource our content, but why it might still be a good choice for some.
Outsourcing our blog content was never an option we considered. Here’s why:
- The blog is about OUR journey as a business. Who can tell the story of that journey better than we can?
- It was really important to us to build deep relationships with our readers, because those relationships are the reason that many of them later become customers. One of the best ways to build that relationship is to have them hear directly from us every single week.
- There’s a lot of value in writing beyond simply as a marketing strategy. Our blogs help us reflect thoughtfully on our own business and the things we’re doing; they force us to think more critically about the decisions we’ve made and the results of those decisions. That’s helped us tremendously in becoming better thinkers and doers.
At the same time, many businesses have found great success outsourcing content creation, both to content agencies and to pools of individual freelancers. That might be a good option if you don’t have the time to produce content internally, or can’t bring yourself to do it.
If your blog content doesn’t revolve around stories from you, then you can still deliver value-packed content from outside sources, while remaining authentic (after all, you’re giving these writers bylines and credit).
And of course, there are plenty of agencies and writers out there who will ghostwrite for you, which can also be done well and honestly (for example, here’s a good look at how Gary Vaynerchuk works with his ghostwriter).
I’d love to hear from others who have tackled this question: what did you end up doing for content production, and are you happy with your decision?
