Should you outsource blog writing?

Every few months I get the same question from someone running a site. They are behind on posts, they have read that they should outsource blog writing, and they want to know if it works.

It does work. I have done it. But almost everyone asking has the maths wrong, because they are counting the writing and the writing was never the expensive part.

Here is the honest version.

What you are actually handing over

You are not handing over "a blog post". You are handing over one step in the middle of a job that has five.

Somebody still has to decide what the post is about. Somebody has to write the brief, because a writer who does not know your reader will guess. Somebody has to find the sources, or accept whatever the writer found. Somebody has to read the draft and check it is true. Somebody has to put it on the site.

Outsourcing gives away step three. You keep one, two, four and five.

That is why people say outsourcing did not save them time. It saved them the writing and left them the brief and the checking, which is where the hours were.

When an agency is the right answer

I ran my own news sites before I built anything, and I hired for them. So this is not a straw man.

An agency is the right answer when:

• You need somebody to own the whole thing, including the thinking. A good agency will tell you what to write about. That is worth paying for and it is the thing nothing else replaces.
• The subject needs a person who has lived it. Trade press, regulated industries, anything where being slightly wrong is expensive.
• You need it to be somebody else's responsibility. There is real value in a contract and a person who answers the phone.

Expect to pay real money. Expect a ramp of a month or two while they learn your voice. Expect to still be reviewing drafts, because you are the one who knows if it sounds like you.

When a freelancer is the right answer

A freelancer is better than an agency when you already know what you want written and you just need hands. They are cheaper, they are faster to start, and a good one will learn your voice faster than a rotating agency bench.

The catch is capacity. One person has one throughput, they take holidays, and the good ones get busy. If your plan depends on four posts a week, you are really hiring two or three freelancers and becoming the editor who coordinates them.

Which is a job. Yours.

The part you never get to hand over

Whoever writes it, you are still accountable for what goes out under your name.

This is the part I would not compromise on, and it is the reason I ended up building software rather than hiring more people. When a draft arrives, you need to know where each fact came from. Not "the writer researched it". The actual page, the actual claim, so you can check the bit that matters in a minute rather than re-reporting the whole piece.

Most outsourcing arrangements do not give you that. You get prose. You either trust it or you do the work again.

The third option

Go back to the five steps. Outsourcing hands over step three, the writing, and leaves you steps one, two, four and five. That is the whole problem with it.

Mastheads takes three, four and five.

Three, the writing. It goes and reads real pages first, writes from what they say, and cites them inline. A topic it cannot source is not written at all, which I would rather have than a confident article about nothing.

Four, the checking. This is the one that matters and it is the one no outsourcing arrangement solves. Every claim is checked against the source it came from, and the whole trace sits on the article: what it read, what passed, what it could not settle. You open it and check the part that worries you in about a minute, instead of re-reporting the piece to find out whether to trust it.

Five, publishing. It goes to your site on your schedule, to any of seven platforms, or you take it away as Markdown. Nothing publishes until you press the button unless you decide otherwise.

What you keep is steps one and two: deciding what is worth saying, and saying who you are. I think that is the right split. Those two are your judgement and your voice, and I would not hand them to an agency either.

An agency is still the answer for step one, because step one is judgement. Everything after it - the writing, the checking, the publishing - is work, and work is what software should be taking off you. What we replace is the arrangement where you write a brief, wait four days, and get back prose you have to take on faith.

How to actually decide

Ask yourself which of the five steps you are trying to give away.

If it is the thinking - what should we even write about - hire an agency. Software will not do that for you and a freelancer will not either.

If it is the writing, and you already know the subjects - a freelancer is the cheapest good answer, up to the point where you need more than one.

If it is the volume, and the checking is what is drowning you - that is the case for software, and it is the case I understand best because it is the one I had. Four posts a week from freelancers means three writers and you as the editor. Four posts a week from software means four articles arriving with their sources attached, and you reading the ones you care about.

And if you are outsourcing because you think content is a box to tick, none of the three will help. A post nobody needed does not get better because somebody else wrote it.

One last thing about cost

Compare the whole job, not the invoice.

A five hundred dollar post that takes you two hours of briefing and an hour of checking is not a five hundred dollar post. Whatever you pay, add your own time to it, and then ask what you would have to give up to get that time back.

That number is the one that made my decision for me.

If you want to test it rather than take my word for it, write one article and read it. There is a free trial, no site needed to start, and you can take the article away whether or not you stay.

Try it on one article - or read how an article is actually made first, which is the page I would want to see before trusting anybody with this.