As a web property owner, you have to wear many hats to manage your property.
You have to build your sites. You have to design your sites well. You have to write articles and do copywriting. You have to build or search better products and services to sell. You have to promote your sites. You have to SEO your sites, as well as your sites’ link building. And the most important thing of all – managing your assets.
And those are not all – other ‘little’ things, but important, such as book-keeping, CRM, etc., etc., etc.
Whew! What a complex world we are in…
As long as you can handle all of those tasks, no problem. However, I’m sure you won’t stick to one or two web properties.
Just like the real estate, you want to own as many assets as possible, while flip web properties along the way. The latter has it’s own set of problems – you have to move sites from your web hosting to your web property buyers’ account, you have to negotiate with your prospects, you have to create sales letters and/or listings in online marketplace, etc., etc., etc.
Ouch.
I think you should do outsourcing, more now than later.
How to outsource you web properties management tasks
Outsourcing your web property management tasks is not as daunting as you might think.
The first thing to do is to look for candidates.
Basically, you have several tasks to manage – I group them into four bigger groups – that can be outsourced: technical, content writing, promotion and business management.
If you notice, the tasks above don’t involve money management and book-keeping issues, as well as asset management. Those tasks are the tasks that you should handle yourself, in my opinion
Here’s the short explanation of each.
Web property technical management
Technical management of web properties involves site design and building, including registering domain names you want and opening web hosting accounts.
You can learn to do some tasks your own, but if you ever need a techie, you can hire one from outsourcing service provider.
A better way to outsource is to seek recommendations from your colleague about someone or an outsourcing company to work with.
The cost of technical management is widely variable, but hiring a good, experienced one might cost you about $400 to $500 per month. You can hire for much lesser cost, but you will compromise with work quality.
Please consider and reconsider.
Web property content writing management
Content writing, including copywriting, is crucial in commanding quality of your web properties.
If you can write good content – excellent. But if you view yourself as an average writer, consider hiring a content writer.
You can outsource writing tasks to the same outsourcing company above. You can also go to forums and freelancing websites to look and hire candidates.
For a 500 words article, you can expect a good writer to charge you for anywhere from $5 to $20 per article. You can get $2 per article or even much lesser than that (I saw a service buyer posts a $300 for 400 articles listing and he/she gets dozens of bids!), but again, price tags often command quality.
Web property promotion management
Web promotion involves search engine optimisation and link building tasks – the ultimate aim: higher placement in search engine result pages (SERPs) for certain keywords if someone search for them in search engines.
Although not as hard as you think, SEO and link building – especially the latter – often time consuming and results might not be seen immediately.
SEO Experts can offer you SEO services that includes optimising your web pages and link building through various methods, such as paid reviews, link exchanges, and many more.
Just make sure you hire an SEO Expert that use white hat (‘honest’ and legitimate) techniques and non-spamming methods over the one that is ‘willing to do everything’, including black hat (‘underground’ and border-lane legality) techniques to get your sites on the top of the SERPs, at least on the first page.
SEO services could cost you tens to thousands of dollars monthly, highly dependent on the quality and scale of offered services.
Web property business management
I mentioned before, you should manage your assets and financials yourself. However, when things get too overwhelming, hiring a virtual assistant (VA) can give you a break you deserve.
VA can help you with many tasks, such as responding to emails, data entry, even website update and several link building tasks.
Hiring one can cost you as low as $3 per hour to $75 per hour, or even more – again, it’s totally dependent on the VA service quality and quantity.
Words of advice
I only have one advice for you – test your outsourcing partners, instead of trusting the whole projects to them – you can do the latter later.
For example, test your writer with 10 articles or so for a start, instead of 100 articles, hoping for a bulk discount. Do they finish work on time, with high quality articles? Do they communicate well with you?
Good luck outsourcing!
Ivan Widjaya
Outsourcing is king
Images by re-ality(“outsourcing Santa”) and yummyporky(“cat assistant”).