5 Beginner Questions About Outsourcing Content Creation (Your Questions Answered!)

We live in an age of outsourcing. To outsource something means that you look outside of your business for someone who can do certain specific duties that you don't care to do yourself. If you have a webmaster, then you've outsourced your website management. If you've hired professionals to handle your customer support, then you have outsourced that element of your business. If you have a virtual assistant, then you've outsourced some of the administrative tasks in your business.

Outsourcing means that you entrust certain jobs in your business to specialists who are technically not under the umbrella of your business. You get the same benefits of having an employee without the hassle of having to be an employer. Especially since business owners are realizing that all the work that is done for a business does not have to be done under one roof, outsourcing has become a key element to successfully running a business.

The sorts of things that you would outsource are tasks that you either don't want to do or are not able to do. You have other things to attend to, and your time is best spent focussing on things that you're really good at, rather than things that you struggle with.

Writing content for marketing purposes is an ongoing activity for any business owner. Many of the top online marketing tools require consistently creating new content on a continuing basis. Here are some common questions that people ask when they're considering outsourcing their writing:

1 - Who owns the copyright of the content that I outsource? Am I the copyright owner or is it the person who wrote the content?

When you hire a ghostwriter (someone who you pay to write content on your behalf), you want to be sure that you will be the sole copyright owner of the work that you pay for. The finished work should be owned by you, and you can legally put your name on it as if you wrote it yourself.

2- Will people mind if I've employed a ghostwriter to write your content?

As long as the content is high quality and approved by you, then it's perfectly fine for someone else to have written it.

For every piece of work that you use in your business, you will have thoroughly read it over to be sure that it is in line with your business philosophy and work ethic. The content that is created for you should not be something that goes against what you stand for. In other words, the writing that a ghostwriter produces for you would be something that you would have written yourself if you had the time. The ghostwriter is a stand-in for you, and he is simply writing on your behalf. You can confidently attach your name to the work.

3 - What qualifications should I look for in a professional writer?

Ideally, any writer that you outsource your content creation to should have a few different qualifications. It's preferable if the writer you work with has a Bachelor's degree or above. This helps to ensure that the writer has experience with effective research, writing to deadlines, and would be more aware than most of the necessity of avoiding plagiarism.

However, a degree certainly doesn't guarantee writing ability or suitability to become a writer. In addition to the advanced education, the writer should have adequate skills in grammar and spelling, as well as providing some writing samples.

There are also content creation services that screen writers for you so that you don't have to go through that extra step. Writing services should also employ professional editors who proofread the work before passing it to you, and who check to be sure that the content is unique.

4 - How can I be sure that the content the writer provides is unique?

While it would be impossible to absolutely guarantee the content supplied to you is unique, there are a number of checks and balances to help ensure this and also reduce any chance of plagiarism.

Copyscape is a plagiarism checker software that you can use to verify if the content is unique or not (it looks for potential content matches online and alerts you to any issue). If you're working with a writing service, the service should do the plagiarism checking for you.

5 - Can I request content that is keyword optimized?

Yes, if you have keywords that you're targeting for your website, you can tell the ghostwriter what keyword you would like to target in the piece of content that he or she will be creating for you. You can specify keywords you wish to appear, as well as whether the writer can use variations of those keywords to ensure that the content reads naturally.

Outsourcing to a ghostwriter or content creation service is a great way to ensure that your business marketing is done on time and at a high quality. It also saves you loads of time and takes that stress off your shoulders. Are you thinking of outsourcing your content creation? What questions are you wondering before you get started?