7 Tips for Better Content Outsourcing
So, you’re working more or less alone in marketing for a company that needs a lot of marketing. It may feel like you’re spreading yourself thin to cover all the things you should be doing for the company, stuck in an endless spiral of execution.
Fortunately, these days we can automate so much, letting us move from execution to monitoring and management, at least to some extent. Outsourcing has never been easier, either.
The concept of content outsourcing services is really simple. Subscribe or place an order, specify what you want, and someone writes the text for you. Blog content, emails, ad copy, the type doesn’t matter. There’s always a ghost writer that can do the initial work for you.
Obviously, ghost writers are not mind-readers any more than you or I are, and need something to work with. If you only have a general idea what you might want, you can just ask for something like “500 words on fear of flying”.
However, the more expectations and restrictions you specify, the closer the ghost writer gets to perfection within those rules. On the other hand, creativity often suffers when restricted. Finding a balance is difficult and requires case-by-case testing.
I’ve used one of the biggest services quite extensively for work for the past year. Actually, I don’t think I’ve missed the plan word quota a single time, which has allowed me to beef up the blog content of the company quite a bit.
7 tips for better processes
Here are some simple guidelines on how you can streamline the order process to make work much easier and faster for both you and the ghost writer, not to mention the improved content quality.
1. Set up a brief template
When ordering a piece of content, you want to create a “brief” for each text you request. While you can do it completely on some platforms, setting up your own brief template in your preferred text editor makes life much easier in the long run.
Write all the non-moving parts up in the template to avoid writing everything from scratch for every order.
2. Explain who you are
As previously said, the ghost writer is not a mind-reader, and they are not part of your company. They may need to know at least the very basics of what your company does to get an idea of who they are writing for.
Including a short description of who you are and what you do along with a link to your website in the brief template makes it much easier for the writer to “get in” on your operations.
3. Give them something to emulate
After you have presented the ghost writer a demonstration of who you are and what you do, showing them what you sound like is an obvious next step. You may have something you’ve written already. Simply include a link to such example in the brief.
If you don’t have anything yet, that’s fine too. Simply experiment with orders to find out what you might want to sound like and use that.
Some basic ideas for guidelines and requests with or without content to be emulated include examples such as:
- “Present a new idea or perspective in every paragraph”
- “Use images in every fitting context”
- “Use statistics wherever available”
- “Write in short and simple sentences”
- “Avoid complicated words and industry jargon”
- “Finish with something to lighten the mood”
- “Make short lists with explanations”
4. Consider the “moving parts”
Obviously, regardless of what you do, every order is going to be different. I’ve left only the word count, title, description, and source fields empty in my template, filling in only those parts manually. In most cases this is more than enough, as the presets in the other fields are quite thorough. This saves me a lot of time.
A finished brief template might look like this before you fill in the blanks for a new order.
- Word count (left empty)
- Title (left empty)
- Description (left empty)
- Audience (can be left empty, if you cater to a variety of different audiences)
- Intent (preset your goal)
- Type (if you mainly order some type, such as blog posts, enter it here)
- Tone (specify your “voice”, is it casual, formal, or something in between)
- Person (1st, 2nd or 3rd person or even passive voice)
- Example style (link to a text you want to use as an example of how you write)
- References/sources (leave empty, every text probably has different sources)
- SEO keywords (if you know your keywords, use them here)
- Description of business (fill in with info on what your company does and why)
- Comments and other optional guidelines
To sum up, only the word count, title and description might be left empty in the template. Even the word count field could be filled with a standard value of say, 500, 800 or 1000 words.
If you like to do your own research as well before ordering, giving recommended sources to the writer helps them and might speed up the delivery of the text.
On the other hand, if you do not have the time or the knowledge on the subject, the field can be left completely empty and the writer will do their own research.
5. Pace your content orders
It may feel easier to simply order multiple texts at once to save time. However, pacing them out evenly so that you only have one order posted at a time maybe more beneficial.
As far as I know, most content outsourcing services allow each writer to claim a limited number of jobs at a time, some only one at a time. If you have a preferred writer, pacing can help ensure that as many of your orders as possible are delivered by them.
On the other hand, having the orders drop at a regular pace also makes it easier to schedule your time to read and evaluate each piece of content as well as edit and publish them.
6. Specifying preferred writers
With content outsourcing services that use a wide variety of ghost writers, you might never know your writer’s name and cannot ensure that they take your order, but at least you can increase your chances of getting texts from a writer whose content you’ve liked in the past.
In the platform I’ve used the most you can use the evaluation system implemented in the hand-in email to sort of “specify” your preferred writer. However, it’s all in the background and you cannot really do it manually.
By giving a piece of content a high rating, the writer will receive the first notice when you order content next time. They don’t need to take the order, but familiarity with your business may increase the chances they will.
7. Know your goals
Regardless of the goal you have for your orders, being specific on its nature is highly beneficial to both you and the writer. Much like you yourself would want to know why you write what you write, the writer needs to understand your goal in order to provide quality content.
The goal may be the most important guideline in the end, as the writers may be able to use their creativity to figure out the right angle for the content by the goal alone.
In the end, editing is the key
While the content quality you get out of content services can get surprisingly good after you’ve found out what works for you and what doesn’t, you have to remember that the ghost writers rarely are experts in whatever field you work in.
Editing is a must more often than not. Keep in mind that even the most skilled writers need an editor.
While I could be classified as a writer first, I often feel even more comfortable editing. In this context of marketing (and especially startups), it can be much faster and allows me to skip potentially time-consuming parts of the process, streamlining the research process required for each new topic.
“Outsourcing weakens my credibility as a content creator”
No, it really doesn’t. If you’re a writer, you probably know what helps you become a better writer: reading. Reading both your own texts and those written by other people.
Everyone has their own voice, even in writing. We take influence from others every single day, and the more you read, the better you can adjust your own voice to match what you vision it to be.
Learning to emulate others, and making what others have written work for you are both strengths for a writer in general. Also, anyone who’s done any editing (and let’s face it, none of us publish the first draft we produce) knows that editing is at least as valuable for the quality of the text as the initial writing. Become a verbal chameleon.
Fun fact: roughly 70% of the time I spent on this text went into editing. Even simple restructuring can totally change the tone and the feeling of a text.
There is no shame in admitting that you have a lot on your plate, and cannot handle churning out a full-length blog post every single week.
That’s where you choose to either push out less content, or can “resort” to outsourcing. What you do and how you do it is up to you. Not all of us can spend most of our time on content creation. You do you.
