Blogs are a lot of work. For me, anyway. I spend a lot of time, every single day, doing blog related activity. Even when I am on vacation I still try to answer blog related emails.
As my blog has grown, I’ve found myself getting more overwhelmed with the time and effort required for me to sustain it. I’m not complaining, because at any time I could just stop blogging if I didn’t like it, but it’s a known fact that running a blog isn’t easy.
I didn’t know you could outsource anything blog related until early this year. It turns out you can outsource a whole lot, though, and you can find a lot of the services on Bloggers Classifieds.
Here are 5 time sucking blogging activities that can be outsourced:
(Also, I realize that this sounds like an advertisement for Andrea, but it’s not. I have the best of intentions, I swear!)
Commenting
Commenting takes up, hands down, the most time of any other blog related activity on my end. It’s a time suck. Especially if you want to leave thoughtful comments that are more than one sentence long.
You can outsource commenting, and a couple of bloggers will go out and leave comments for you for per-comment fee.
This is not something I’d pay for, simply because while commenting is a time suck, it’s also my favorite part of blogging. Plus, I feel like I’ve built relationships with the bloggers that I frequently comment on, and it would be odd if somebody else was to comment on their blogs on behalf of me.
However, if you can’t comment on the amount of blogs you’d like to, and you want to respond to frequent commenters on your site, outsourcing commenting can be a good way to do it.
Carnival Submissions
Submitting to carnivals can be a very important way to build links, create relationships, and drive traffic to your blog. Carnivals are essentially just a big, long link round up, usually on a specific topic, that a host posts on their blog.
Because these roundups are so big, it’s not like a weekly link love that you are included in because a peer liked your post. Instead, you have to actually do some leg work and submit your posts to these carnivals.
While this isn’t as big of a time suck as commenting is, carnival submissions still take a bit of hunting around, and let’s be real – it’s not even close to being as fun or engaging as commenting.
I outsource my carnival submissions to Corey over at 20′s Finances. He’s great.
Techie Issues
I’ve mentioned before that I suck at the internet. Anything techie is really beyond my scope of knowledge, and while I’m sure I could learn, I have no interest in it either.
When something goes wrong on my blog, no matter what it is, I take it to Twitter. Twitter rarely has the answer, so then I take it to Andrea. She’s a godess and saves me a huge chunk of time every time (which is often) I break something on my blog.
Since internet/tech/blog issues are the things that give me the most headaches, it’s always worth it to outsource it for me.
Design
The average blogger does not have the know how or eye to go and design their blog to make it look half decent.
A bunch of them thing they do, but in reality, owner designed blogs can be hard to look at, not very functional, and inefficient.
That includes me. My blog is suffering right now but I have something in the works for it. Once again, Andrea is your go-to girl on this one. She’s fabulous and, frankly, kind of a perfectionist. Which can definitely work in your favor.
There’s something so nice about having a beautiful new blog design without having to lift a finger.
Social Media
I handle all of my own social media now (Twitter, Facebook, Google+) but it’s getting time consuming having to update all of the social media that I am on, and sometimes I let it slip through the cracks.
You can outsource social media management so that you don’t have to worry about keeping up with all that is out there.
This is something I should definitely do, because my Facebook page looks a little empty, but I do plan on working on it eventually.
What do you outsource blog-wise? If you don’t outsource anything, do you plan to?
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