Another thing to think about is if you added up all the time and money it took to learn about article writing, website building, search engine optimization, etc… You might be better off outsourcing those tasks to begin with.

Great post!

Another Good point. Being time poor is definitely a reason to consider outsourcing. But going haphazardly and simply outsourcing without a plan can be akin to simply burning your money too. The fact that you have the intelligence to take your lumps and learn from them is definitely a good position to be in…

Plans are important. Plans that are measurable are better. BTW, there are other “wisegeek” sites out there. And most use the same business model. I have studied the site partly because they are my competition in some of my long keywords for home remedies and could tell you what they are doing, but that would be better expressed in a post, not a comment. Thanks for the comment.

You make some really good points and it is dissenting opinions like yours that I actually encouraged feedback. I agree that when you are trying to do things like implement a shopping cart, or build a plug-in, you need logo help ect. ect. that outsourcing is a good option. But most marketers who are just starting out, aren’t outsourcing this kind of stuff; They are trying to scale by having folks write articles without any way of measuring what the articles will actually be worth in their business model. In essence they are gambling.

One main thing I outsource is my content. I don’t want to spend 3 hours writing a 400 word article about how to choose the best camcorder. I can use that time to build about 5 or more links.

I wish I could learn more about that wisegeek site. That site is made me believe that if you have an authority site, you would be able to rank easily for most keywords.

But we do part ways a bit on the ‘when’ to outsource. While I do agree that once you’re making profit, and your business has grown beyond what you can personally manage, then I agree: it’s time to outsource. However, there is another point, before that where outsourcing can be beneficial and that’s before profit and when you’re struggling with an issue (technical or otherwise) that’s preventing you from progressing. It’s halting your progress to profit. You need to outsource that which is preventing you from reaching your goals, in order to reach your goals!

I am an outsourcing services provider. For more than 10 years prior to my current business model, I was a web designer specializing ecommerce design and also did a lot of blog installations and many other technical/VA-like tasks for my clients. I was per hour at that time and a good majority of my clients were new to the internet, or new to getting a web site online. They needed to outsource their web design and technical stuff, as they did not know how to do it and were managing offline businesses.

Fast-forward a bit when I saw that many folks are technically challenged. They have the business idea, but they are stuck trying to wade through a WordPress issue, or how in the world to create a squeeze page and connect it to a shopping cart so it ultimately delivers the downloadable ebook they want to sell and get those folks on their mailing list: all at the same time. They know what they want to do, they are struggling in how to accomplish it.

So I saw a need to help these people with the skills I already have. Changed my business model to compete with the overseas outsourcers in my pricing, but beat them hands-down in quality. My workers are all American… English is our first language.

While I do agree with you overall in most cases, outsourcing can wait, if the business owner can manage all aspects of their business ‘Lone Ranger’ style; but remember – even the Lone Ranger had Tonto.

So if you’re at a point of not making progress because you are once again trying to essentially learn a whole new job field/skill set to do something in your business that will get your product online, get your blog or web site up and running (or updated); then outsource that and move on to doing what you do best, and let an outsourcer help you.

Thanks…I didn’t realize that I would be killing so many trees when I started writing some of my longer posts, lol.

As far as dealing with outsourcing and the possibility of exposing yourself to your competition, it could happen, yes. But traditionally, outsourcers are there to simply get paid for whatever work they do. Most aren’t marketers. The argument could be made for having programmers build plug-ins for you as well…once again, they aren’t thinking about what they could do for it and how to market it…they would rather have a job, know what I mean?

Domain?…depends on how you intend to brand it. Personally I like bigtimemarketing but it really depends on your angle.

Anyway, I think about today’s post is great on how to expand your business -However- I think that you might have missed a little something; When you ask someone to outsource articles with the set keywords, he will write the articles and will know all the good keywords that you’re targetting. And for example, if there’s a guy that is my competition, I can send him an email to ask for an outsource writing job, and is he says yes and gives me assignements and instructions, I’ll forward these to another third world writer – he gives me his work, i pay him, I give the work to the guy whove I asked a job, and he pays me – but now I also know what my competitors are doing. So just a little theory that outsourcing if not done carefully might attract more competitors in the same way as guestposts and linkbacks to your site. So is it worth worrying much about this?

Also, I have a question as im remaking my make money blog; what do you like best as domain – marketingbigtime.com , bigtimemarketing.com , blog.marketingbigtime.com , blog.bigtimemarketing.com …im not sure if the “bigtime” sounds best before or after, anyway if you like any of these and/or have any other suggestions please let me know! thanks for the post leo, bye!