I’ve always been a firm believer that the content on your website should be your own work. But, even old ducks can learn new tricks and also realise there’s actual benefit in outsourcing tasks to others. Time is a precious commodity and no matter how many pointless sites we kill off or tasks we automate there’s always something new to fill the void.

Affiliate marketing was meant to get easier, but it just seems to be an endless stream of admin, updating, twittering, coding, stat checking, blogging, facebooking, emailing, banner removing, banner updating, writing content and hoping that someone buys something to earn you a couple of quid.

This often means that somethings, well one thing – content – tends to get slammed to the back burner. It’s often the “I’ll do that later” item on the to do list I’ve not yet written. Yet, in order to keep some sites ticking over they do need a little bit of daily content and they’re just not getting it and therefore not keeping up with The Jones.

So enter right Content Now and their news service.

Having been the primary writer on Loquax (well actually only writer), giving up this task to an unknown quantity was a bit scary. I like knowing what’s being written, have a structure I like and know (roughly) how I want it to appear. Letting someone else do this is a big deal… ask Jude! So, having emailed Kieron and Simon at Content Now to get the ball rolling for content, I honestly expected a couple of weeks of tweaks, alterations and “not quite rights”, possibly followed by “well we tried it”.

I needn’t of concerned myself and in fact wish we’d done it sooner.

The content is more than fine and more importantly frees up a boat load of time. After the initial month we doubled the order. Any questions are immediately answered and if there’s something not quite right, it’s sorted out quicker than Robert Green can say “whoops, slippery ball”.

Recommended? Most definitely!

Outsourcing “news” though does have a disadvantage in that you’re never quite sure what’s going to arrive in your inbox. Is it what you really want? Is it what you’d do yourself? It can be a worry, at least initially! However, this is actually an advantage. More often than not the content I was writing was a bit fixated (i.e. I stuck to the stuff I wanted to write about). Outsourcing has broken a few barriers and expanded what we cover.

The outsourced content also means I can focus on what I like doing, and if that involves nothing or watching 11 gutless Englishmen lose to Germany then so be it. It’s all good news.

As mentioned above picked up free time has an uncanny knack of getting rapidly filled and there have been much needed tweaks to a couple of sites and extra content added in places, which previously wouldn’t have been done if I’d been doing the routine bits and bobs. However, outsourcing was to make my affiliate life easier not busier.

The key now is to make sure it stays that way!