How to Outsource Your Online Content Creation, But STILL Keep Control of It!

This is a guest post by Chris C. Ducker.

Blogging, writing and creating content can be a great way to get your point across, help people, promote yourself, build a business and lots of other things.

I don’t know about you guys, but when I was at college I used to write a lot. I was always working on some short story, or the odd essay for school. I was, and still am a big reader – averaging at least one book (normally business focused) a week. (I’ve recently gone back to purchasing ‘real’ books, and not downloading them on Kindle. I just miss the feeling of holding and smelling a ‘real’ book – does anyone resonate with me on that?).

Anyway, I digress…

As someone who owns and operates an outsourcing company in the Philippines, I see a lot of people contacting us to outsource all types of tasks. Telemarketing, customer service, back-office work, chat support – the list is, literally, endless.

Plus, as someone that is seen as a bit of an expert on the subject of virtual business and in particular, working with virtual assistants, as well as being a blogger myself, I am often asked the question “Can you use virtual assistants to create original content to use online..?”

The answer is yes, of course you can.

But, what you decide to do with that content is a different ballgame, obviously.

Here are a handful of tips worth considering if you’re looking to hire a virtual assistant to create original content that you can use online, for either personal or business purposes.

1. Don’t get a VA to unashamedly write blog posts for your personal blog. Your personal blog should be ‘your place’ (except for the odd guest post, obviously!). Having a VA write content for this outlet of yours kind of defeats the object of blogging in the first place!
2. If you are going to use a VA to help create content for your blog minimize it as much as possible. Activities such as online research for a particular article you are planning to write, then perhaps formatting your blog post with bold and italics, and headlines, etc. to help save time on the publishing side of things.
3. VA’s are perfect for creating online content for anything related to link building. These articles are generally easy to write in a short time, are rarely seen by your target audience and work excellently. As long as they are 100% original. Plus, most VA’s can even go ahead and submit them to specific article submission or marketing sites for you.
4. You can also use a VA to help edit your eBooks or other types of written content. Having a VA do the first round of proof reading is huge. You can then send it onto a second source (perhaps a colleague or family member – my favorite is my wife!) to give it the final once over.
5. Be sure to pay your content writing VA what they are worth. There are many, many good VA’s working as full-time content creators. However, the fact of the matter is that if you don’t pay them what they are worth, they will either do a bad job for you, or simply not want to work with you at all.

Whether you’re utilizing the services of a domestically based virtual assistant (you can check out textbroker.com for this, as one resource), or one from another country, such as the Philippines, the simple rule of thumb to remember is that even though their writing may be good, it probably wont be as good as if you were to write the content yourself. So, always spend some time reading over their work and making sure that its good to go – before it goes!

Using virtual assistants for creative writing and other types of written tasks, such as sales copy, website content, etc. is ultimately a great move for all us who are busy business owners or entrepreneurs – either online or off.

Nowadays you really don’t have to do everything – the world is a much smaller place, we’re in a global economy and the skill-set’s of people from all around the world are out there for us to get our hands on and utilize.

Try it out for yourself with a simple 500-word article on whatever subject you can think of. Look at the quality, and then simply figure out if it makes sense to do it again. And again. And again.

The chances are, it will be.

Chris C. Ducker is a 20-year sales, marketing and PR professional from the UK. He blogs at VirtualBusinessLifestyle.com, and is the Founder of Virtual Staff Finder, a professional match-making service that helps busy entrepreneurs find experienced, high-quality virtual assistants. Feel free to also download his FREE eBook and AudioBook Course on the subject of hiring, training and working with virtual assistants, too!