6 Valuable Tips On Outsourcing Your Blog’s Posts

As you might have heard, Alex recently went down to Florida for a mini-vacation and was not able to post at all for the week. Of course this meant — I had the blog to myself for a whole week! It was quite daunt­ing at first, to post + man­age + mod­er­ate the blog on a daily basis, but so far — so good.

I thought of try­ing out “Arti­cle Out­sourc­ing” as the receiver for the first time. (Usu­ally I write for other peo­ple, but a good change.)

In this time-span of about a week, I’ve wasted almost $50 and came across some very frus­trat­ing peo­ple to deal with. But I’m not stressed at all, because I walked away with some valu­able lessons.  Just so that you won’t suf­fer the same fate as me, I want to share with you my mis­takes + their solu­tions (only if I thought about these last week!)

What is Arti­cle Outsourcing?

“Arti­cle Out­sourc­ing” on a broad term, has been around ever since we invented writ­ing mate­r­ial (pens, papers and even the Egypt­ian civilization’s  “early-paper” — papyrus). Just like the tra­di­tional mean­ing of “out­sourc­ing” means to “sub­con­tract a process to a third-party company” — Article out­sourc­ing means quite the same. It’s the process of actu­ally get­ting another per­son to write your con­tent for you.

Why Would You Do This?

Time. That’s the only rea­son any­one would out-source their arti­cles. When things get hec­tic, and you get caught up in other things (even your offline world, which is fair to say) — you can find it hard to spend a solid 2 – 3 hours writ­ing a post. Now, some peo­ple out-source their con­tent because they are just lazy — I don’t con­sider this a rea­son, because if your too lazy to write your own con­tent — then you shouldn’t prob­a­bly be run­ning a blog.

Quite frankly, when Alex told me he was going — I knew I wouldn’t have been able to post every­day for a whole week. Still, I promised myself — I would try my best. Luck­ily though, he left me with two unpub­lished guest posts (Over­com­ing Blog­ging Bar­ri­ers and Track­ing Your SEO Per­for­mance).

This gave me a cou­ple of solid days to really work on some­thing of my own. I spent more time brain­storm­ing and research than actu­ally writ­ing but I really like where it’s going. If you’ve missed the first post, check it out: The Top SEO Blogs Series. All is well, but it is tak­ing much longer to pro­duce than I had first anticipated.

So, what did I do? I went on the hunt for some good writ­ers to help me cover a day or two. This didn’t work out as well as I had planned but I learned some very, very valu­able lessons.

The 6 Tip-Top Tips.

1) Don’t limit your­self to a spe­cific place.

Per­son­ally for me, I find myself on the Dig­i­tal­Point Forums more than any other, and quite rea­son­ably — I feel quite com­fort­able deal­ing there. Sure, there’s many hoax-sellers on it, but my com­fort­able­ness around the forums itself — helps me make some rea­son­ably fair deci­sions. Quite iron­i­cally though, this kind of over­shad­owed my other pos­si­bil­i­ties — I found myself eager to find a writer from solely the Dig­i­tal­Point Forums.

Later did I only real­ize that there were many other forums, ser­vices and com­mu­ni­ties at large — that offer the same thing. As I was say­ing, Dig­i­tal­Point was where I felt the safest to out­source my arti­cles but it greatly nar­rowed down my choice of writ­ers. So, con­sider all your options and give your­self the chance to select a good ser­vice.

2) Check for Author’s Reputation

Almost every web­site that offers a ser­vice — tends to have some type of a feed­back sys­tem. Some of them get really advanced such as the sys­tem eBay uses, then quite oppo­sitely — some of them are sim­ple like ‘iTrader’ found on forums. Use this to see, what kind of per­son your are going to be deal­ing with. If the major­ity of the feed­back is quite neg­a­tive; then no mat­ter how sweet the deal sounds — don’t do it. Sim­ple as that.

Hav­ing said that, not all feed­back must be taken into fac­tual con­sid­er­a­tion. If you let lit­tle com­plaints pre­vent you from work­ing with the writer — then you’ll never find one. Stay open-minded and just use this feed­back to help nar­row your choices down — and not elim­i­nate the writer as a whole.

3) Make sure you request a sam­ple, beforehand.

As the buyer, you are enti­tled to see what you are get­ting. If the seller denies a sam­ple excerpt of the con­tent — then it’s most likely because he/she is hid­ing some­thing. It’s absolutely crit­i­cal that you do receive the sam­ple — because then you can judge for your­self on so many things, includ­ing; writer’s style of writ­ing, gram­mar, punc­tu­a­tion and also the effec­tive­ness of the arti­cle itself.

Just keep in mind — Peo­ple can bab­ble on about some­thing and pro­duce 1000+ words OR they can write an hon­est piece of 300 words and still make a bet­ter point. Qual­ity over Quan­tity any day.

4) Check for uniqueness/authenticity of the content.

From a SEO per­spec­tive — dupli­cate con­tent is one of the biggest “No-No’s”. So if your seri­ous about your blog and want to dom­i­nate the SERPs — don’t ever sub­mit dupli­cate con­tent on to your blog. This is a gray-area when it comes to out­sourc­ing your arti­cles because you just don’t know for sure how uniquely writ­ten the con­tent is. With that said, there are a cou­ple tech­niques to help min­i­mize the chances of cop­ping some of the bad stuff.

First up — Copy­scape is the best tool out there to detect pla­gia­rized con­tent. It’s not fool-proof but it catches most con­tent, unless you buy a pre­mium account which has some promis­ing features.

Then you can type an excerpt (per­haps a sen­tence or two) between inverted com­mas (“con­tent”) and run a quick search on Google. This will pick up any other text on the web that has that word-for-word sen­tence struc­ture. It does bring in some rogue sites every now and then, but once it retrieves the URL you can go check for yourself.

5) Ver­ify the con­tent is not re-written using soft­ware.

Before you get your arti­cles out­sourced — you need to know about the dreaded soft­ware that just rewrite con­tent. The pur­pose is to get a body of words, then match it to sim­i­lar words using their the­saurus database.

Most of the time, the arti­cle loses a lot of it’s coherency and you can pick up rewrit­ten arti­cles quite eas­ily. But what if some­one actu­ally took the time to rewrite the arti­cle? These would pass Copy­scape + The Google trick quite eas­ily as well.

When this hap­pens, it’s a bit harder to pick up — but try Googling the title of the con­tent. Most times, devi­ous writ­ers spend a lot of time rewrit­ing the body but sim­ply for­get to change the title of the arti­cle. Out of the many arti­cles I bought this week, many of them were found to be rewrit­ten — and all I did was Google their titles.

6) Under­stand their perspective.

Finally, a point that takes on the writer’s per­spec­tive. True you are buy­ing a ser­vice, and your pay­ing for it. How­ever, you can’t expect every­thing to be as per­fect as you want it to be. The writer is a com­pletely dif­fer­ent per­son — and will write accord­ing to his/her style.

So, expect things you per­son­ally don’t like in arti­cles — words you don’t under­stand — grammar/spelling mis­takes etc. It’s the inevitable. As the cliche that gets thrown around so often; if you ask 10 peo­ple to write a descrip­tion of an inci­dent they all saw at the same exact time — you’ll get 10 dif­fer­ent sto­ries. Just like that, the arti­cles you out­source (regard­less of niche) will be some­what dif­fer­ent to what you would ini­tially expect.

There We Go!

Hope I didn’t bore you to death — but turned out to be longer than I thought it would be.. Hope­fully you can take some­thing from my expe­ri­ence and pre­vent your­selves from falling into the same mis­for­tune. Good luck!

Wait, before you leave — tell us what are your 2 cents on Arti­cle Outsourcing?

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