Risks of outsourcing mass content?

AhFreshMeat

AhFreshMeat

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I have 30 articles on my first niche site. At the moment I’m grabbing 145 sessions a day (& 350 page views per day.).

I want to outsource mass amounts of content and I have the process down pretty well.

The thing is... it’s a lot of money... $25 per article... (i edit them myselves). I have the energy/process to publish 6x a day. This comes to thousands per month, which I have...

Many of you have done this. i’m Curious of the risks of me making less than 50% of that money back... for example someone pointing backlinks at your site, super low EPMV, and other things I’m unaware of as a first time builder of these sites.

Any thoughts here/notable contributions You think I’m intuitively missing/not thinking of as you read these thoughts?
 
You're not going to be able to scale unless you outsource. If you're happy where you currently are, then keep doing what you're doing. If you want to grow to be much bigger, then start outsourcing.

It's impossible for anyone to say if / when you'll make your money back. If you believe in what you're doing, then start scaling.
 
Scaling up anything has two aspects to it:
  1. the technical aspects
  2. the mental aspects
Scaling content production is pretty simple. You create templated content briefs that you can ad-lib and change quickly, maybe for a set number of "content templates" your site will use. These are standard operating procedures for writing.

Same goes for publishing, which you seem to have figured out yourself if you can publish 6x a day. If you can create SOPs for this, too, you can offload that, too.

You weren't asking that and I really just typed that for the benefit of any reader it might help. I really wanted to talk about "the mental aspects" of scaling.

On one hand you're asking about the raw numbers, which is absolutely what you should be thinking about when it comes to anything related to scaling (aka "a numbers game"). But then you undermine it all by fearing the loss of 50% of the investment.

It may seem reasonable and definitely is to some degree, but at the end of the day it's fear. Nobody escapes risk when it comes to investments. If it was a sure thing, we'd all be running out to the bank to take out loans for a guaranteed 150% return, etc. That's what I mean about it seeming reasonable. Everyone that scales faces these same challenges. It's a mental hurdle to get past, for sure.

I'm currently spending $31.25 per article on this project, and I spill all the details about how the revenue and expenses are stacking up, etc. It's up your alley if you want to see some transparency.

I'm soon going to start outsourcing the formatting, image sourcing, and posting too, which will push the price per article up further. And then you start thinking about the price of marketing and/or buying backlinks and calculate that in. It's daunting, especially when you compare it to you average RPM over the site.

You start seeing numbers like X months to break even per article, and start thinking about how 80% of them will be duds that'll probably break even in 2 years.

But then you remember that 15% of them are going to pay for themselves and the other 80%, while that final 5% are going to make so much money you wish you scaled sooner and faster and harder and higher.

I wouldn't worry too much about someone sabotaging your site with negative SEO. Google has the typical "send a ton of fiverr spam links" type of attack under control. The more sophisticated methods that actually work are probably not going to be justified as worth the time in most niches. And when you get to the point of worrying about that, you'll find the solutions.

When you start thinking about reducing expenses per article, the options start to become "do I pay for lesser quality or do I cut the word count" most often. You need to actually have an idea of what your actual average RPM across the entire site is, and then balance your expenses to keep it all in the realm of the sane and rational.

For instance, last month on that project I linked above, my RPMs across the whole site was $43.34. If I'm spending $31.25 per article right now, then I need... 721 sessons per article for each one to break even, from organic traffic sources (social media drops the RPM drastically). I know exactly what's needed to break even.

Now I can look at average traffic per post, and even get rid of the outliers that do real good, and figure out exactly how many days it'll take before I hit the break even point on each piece of content. That might be 3 months, 6 months, a year. But if I can float the expense and my site can exist longer than a year (it will) then I'll be soaking up some serious cash flow at that point. And the sooner I get this time period out of the way for each article (aka publish sooner and faster), the more cash flow I'll see that'll allow me to scale harder or start taking out profits.

I'm going to stack the odds in my favor by spending cash on backlink acquisition. That's what I plan on doing, which is going to heavily upset the balance of my $xx.xx per article, but should shorten the average time to the break even point, too.

I hope this helps bring some clarity, and if nothing more, just help show you that everyone in your boat is thinking the same things, facing the same risks, and doing the same calculations.
 
Ryuzaki said:
Scaling up anything has two aspects to it:
  1. the technical aspects
  2. the mental aspects
Scaling content production is pretty simple. You create templated content briefs that you can ad-lib and change quickly, maybe for a set number of "content templates" your site will use. These are standard operating procedures for writing.

Same goes for publishing, which you seem to have figured out yourself if you can publish 6x a day. If you can create SOPs for this, too, you can offload that, too.

You weren't asking that and I really just typed that for the benefit of any reader it might help. I really wanted to talk about "the mental aspects" of scaling.

On one hand you're asking about the raw numbers, which is absolutely what you should be thinking about when it comes to anything related to scaling (aka "a numbers game"). But then you undermine it all by fearing the loss of 50% of the investment.

It may seem reasonable and definitely is to some degree, but at the end of the day it's fear. Nobody escapes risk when it comes to investments. If it was a sure thing, we'd all be running out to the bank to take out loans for a guaranteed 150% return, etc. That's what I mean about it seeming reasonable. Everyone that scales faces these same challenges. It's a mental hurdle to get past, for sure.

I'm currently spending $31.25 per article on this project, and I spill all the details about how the revenue and expenses are stacking up, etc. It's up your alley if you want to see some transparency.

I'm soon going to start outsourcing the formatting, image sourcing, and posting too, which will push the price per article up further. And then you start thinking about the price of marketing and/or buying backlinks and calculate that in. It's daunting, especially when you compare it to you average RPM over the site.

You start seeing numbers like X months to break even per article, and start thinking about how 80% of them will be duds that'll probably break even in 2 years.

But then you remember that 15% of them are going to pay for themselves and the other 80%, while that final 5% are going to make so much money you wish you scaled sooner and faster and harder and higher.

I wouldn't worry too much about someone sabotaging your site with negative SEO. Google has the typical "send a ton of fiverr spam links" type of attack under control. The more sophisticated methods that actually work are probably not going to be justified as worth the time in most niches. And when you get to the point of worrying about that, you'll find the solutions.

When you start thinking about reducing expenses per article, the options start to become "do I pay for lesser quality or do I cut the word count" most often. You need to actually have an idea of what your actual average RPM across the entire site is, and then balance your expenses to keep it all in the realm of the sane and rational.

For instance, last month on that project I linked above, my RPMs across the whole site was $43.34. If I'm spending $31.25 per article right now, then I need... 721 sessons per article for each one to break even, from organic traffic sources (social media drops the RPM drastically). I know exactly what's needed to break even.

Now I can look at average traffic per post, and even get rid of the outliers that do real good, and figure out exactly how many days it'll take before I hit the break even point on each piece of content. That might be 3 months, 6 months, a year. But if I can float the expense and my site can exist longer than a year (it will) then I'll be soaking up some serious cash flow at that point. And the sooner I get this time period out of the way for each article (aka publish sooner and faster), the more cash flow I'll see that'll allow me to scale harder or start taking out profits.

I'm going to stack the odds in my favor by spending cash on backlink acquisition. That's what I plan on doing, which is going to heavily upset the balance of my $xx.xx per article, but should shorten the average time to the break even point, too.

I hope this helps bring some clarity, and if nothing more, just help show you that everyone in your boat is thinking the same things, facing the same risks, and doing the same calculations.
Click to expand...

There should be a donate button for answers this good. Well, you’ve convinced me that its worth facing the fear! I’m gonna give this a shot. Hearing this makes me feel much more content about taking risks
 
A writer just told me I should be grateful that he chose to work with me and I should watch what I say to him.

Guess who is suddenly unemployed this week?

I hate searching through the shit for a diamond.
 
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