Marketing Your Website: Should You Write Your Own Content ... Or Outsource It?

Most online marketing tools involve communicating via the written word. First and foremost, you'll have a website that has pages on it with information about your business and your niche. You may also have a blog that needs posts to be published on a regular basis, and possibly a newsletter you send out once or more a week ... maybe you also do article marketing, press releases, guest posting, reports, and more.

That's a lot of writing, isn't it? You may have wondered, should you try to do your writing yourself or outsource it to a professional writing service?

The answer depends on a number of factors, and in this article I'll present you with some pivotal questions that will hopefully help you figure out if outsourcing is for you.

Question 1: How much time do you usually invest in writing content for your blog, free reprint articles, newsletters, or other types of content?

When you figure out how much time it takes you to write the different types of content you need for your business marketing, you can better determine whether it's worth it to invest that amount of time in content creation.

Most people will take at least a few hours or even a few days to produce a well researched, thoughtfully written and grammatically correct 600-800 word blog post, free reprint article, or piece of content for a newsletter. Keep in mind that writing like this is a recurring need--if you publish 2 or more times a week, then writing your own content can quickly take up a lot of time.

2 - Does the thought of writing your own material excite you or drain you?

You will spend much more time and energy trying to do things that you are not naturally gifted at than in doing things that you are passionate about. And if you dread doing something, chances are you'll procrastinate and not develop the necessary habit of producing content on a regular basis. In that case, enlisting the services of a professional writing service may be absolutely essential to your online marketing success.

On the other hand, if you really are excited about the prospect of writing your own content, it's a worthwhile investment to take the time to develop a writing schedule so that you can produced content on a regular basis. If you have things to say in your blog posts, articles, and other content that you think only you can say, then you'll probably only be happy producing your own content.

3 - Does it make sense financially to outsource your writing? Could your business benefit more from you outsourcing your content creation or doing it yourself?

If you have more time than money in your business, then you may be at a point where it is more cost effective to do your own writing (assuming you have the writing skills). But if your business is growing, it's in your best interest to start figuring out ways to stop "working in the business" and start "working on the business".

If all of your time is tied up writing content for the marketing of your business, then you won't have that time available to think of new products, develop improvements for your business, meet with clients and customers, or concern yourself with the growth of your business.

In deciding whether it's the right time for you to outsource your writing or do it yourself, you may just need to do a hands-on experiment.

For one month, write your own blog posts, free reprint articles, newsletter content, and whatever other writing you need, and at the end of the month ask yourself these questions:

- Did you produce content as consistently as you needed to? For example, if you set out to produce 8 articles and 8 blog posts during the month, did you meet your goal?

- Is your writing of a quality that you and your business can be proud of? Many people are very intelligent and skilled, but they still struggle to write. Their gifts lie in other areas. Is that you? Or are your writing skills good enough to represent you in a professional manner?

- Did other aspects of your business suffer as a result of the time you spent writing your own content? Do you think that the time you spent writing was well spent, or should you have been using your time doing something else?

The second part of this experiment is simply spending one month outsourcing your content creation to a writing service or ghost writer. At that end of that month, ask yourself these questions:

* Were you satisfied with the quality of the writer's work? Did the writer get the work done in a timely manner?

* How did outsourcing your content creation affect your business? Did you feel less stressed? Did you get more done?

You may be surprised at the results of this experiment. You may decide that you enjoy writing and you can totally handle the responsibility of producing content on a regular basis. On the other hand, you may discover that the month when you outsourced your writing felt like a vacation compared to trying to do it yourself. What do you think--will you try this experiment?