By : Nidhi Gupta

Attracting new writers to your blog is a difficult process and there are many variables to consider. Your goal is to sustain the value your blog offers, or ideally, increase the value it offers to your readers. As most bloggers know, value comes from content, and content comes from the minds of people, so your first goal when outsourcing the writing of your blog is to find the right people.

It’s pretty clear that the best blogs have talented people writing them. While talent alone isn’t enough, it’s important to focus on attracting, then filtering and finally retaining talented individuals as the key outcome of your outsourcing efforts. Even if a blogger can’t commit to as many articles as you would like them to write, having one great blogger send in one article a month will do more for your traffic and blog growth than a mediocre blogger writing once a week.

Finding talent is not a process that can be done quickly and you won’t really know if a new writer you bring to your blog works well until they have published to your blog for a period of time. Watching how the blogosphere reacts to your hired bloggers is a good way to determine if you have added a good person to your team. Look for comments, trackbacks and incoming links generated by your bloggers as key metrics to assess their performance.

When Is The Right Time To Hire Bloggers?

This is a tough question to answer. You have two variables to consider -

1. You
   How much writing do you intend to do yourself and what role do you want to play at your blog(s).

2. The current status of your blog
   How much traffic you have, how entrenched is your personality with the current readership, what can your blog and you offer to incentivise contributions.

The first part, only you have to decide, since you know what volume of work you want to contribute to your blog and what role you want to play. You may have an end goal of stopping writing altogether and acting as the manager of a team of writers. Or you may want to continue writing to your blog but want to bring on additional bloggers to increase traffic, or start a new blog or even a blog network.

The current status of your blog is a crucial element because it determines what leverage points you have to offer people you hire. If you have a hugely popular blog then many people will consider it a privilege to write for your blog and will likely give their best work because they know how much they gain from the exposure your blog provides.

The less traffic you have the harder it is to attract writers without offering some form of payment. If you plan to outsource from the start, with no traffic or brand in the blogosphere, you will either have to offer partnership or pay money. Other options include a contra deal where you trade products or services you provide in exchange for blogging, for example consulting, or web design/hosting, or SEO work in exchange for writing.

Given all these conditions you can decide when or why you think outsourcing your blog writing is something you want to do. The position you are in now dictates what options you have and what resources you can leverage.

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