Do You Need To Outsource To Earn Six Figures Blogging?
Do you need a team of writers and coders to earn six figures online, or can you do it alone?
Most people start out at Wealthy Affiliate, and in the affiliate blogging space on a bootstrap budget. They start with no experience, and are learning how to run a successful affiliate blog by themelves. They are a single person, learning, writing, publishing, emailing, and doing everything needed to run their business by themselves.
They are one owner, wearing many hats.
I was the same at one point. In fact, I was exactly that person for many years. It's only been within the past 2-3 years that I've really started to delegate tasks and hire people do some tasks for me.
Earning Six Figures Online Without Hiring Anyone
Let's be clear to start.
YOU DO NOT NEED TO HIRE ANYONE TO EARN $100,000+ PER YEAR DOING AFFILIATE BLOGGING.
I've done it. I've seen other people do it. If you are thinking that you need a "team" of writers and multiple websites, then you can stop worrying. It's very possible to earn six figures online as a one-person team.
Working online full time, it's really not that big of a deal do do a full article every single day, plus a video or two per week. Very doable, assuming you're working online "full time", M-F, 8-5.
Even with a full time job, you can still do 2 articles a week (1500 words each), which would be 100 articles per year, and after 2-3 years, you'll have 300 articles on your site. That's plenty to be earning amazing income with your website.
If you have 300 articles and your site isn't ranking or at least earning a little money, you need to change your strategy!
Do You Need To Hire Writers?
The first thing most people progress to as they grow their business is starting to outsource articles. I think people start with this first because they see the connection between the volume of content they write with the traffic results they see.
Most of the time, more content = more traffic. So it's easy to see that hiring a writer to publish more quality content for your blog is a direction path to more traffic, thus more clicks, and then more affiliate sales.
Hiring writers is an art to itself, so if you start hiring writers, expect to learn a lot along the way (that's code for make mistakes & waste some money).
Do you need to hire writers to be successful online? Is hiring a writer something you absolutely have to aim for with your business? No!
The thing is, though volume of content has worked for me many times, there are plenty of blog owners out there who focus more on improving the quality of their content over time instead of doing a high volume. Some of the best websites out there, like Mr. Money Mustache (a finance blog), or Art of Manliness (a self-improvement blog) have always been a single personality behind the blog.
Just one person writing.
Many YouTube channels are like this too.
If you have a passion for your niche and spend the time to run your site right, it's very possible to create a six or even seven figure blog as a single person without hiring any writers at all.
Will You Make More Money When You Start Outsourcing?
Yes and no. It's my belief that when you start outsourcing, you'll have better potential to scale, so therefore more potential to earn more money in the future. If you can hire someone to help you make $1 net profit, then you can hire 100 people to help you earn $100 net profit. That type of thinking.
The trouble with that is you need to actually figure out a formula where you are guaranteed to gain profit from your hires.
The difference between doing the work yourself for free and paying someone to do the work for you is that even if they don't produce results, they still get paid (by you). When hiring, if you start a project which ultimately doesn't produce the income you expected, you end up in the red. That means you need to make even more money in other areas in order to just break even.
Had you done the work yourself, you wouldn't have lost any money, and any profit from other areas would still be actual profit, and you'd still be in the black instead of just breaking even.
Do You Need To Outsource To Earn Six Figures Blogging?
The clear answer is no. You do not need to outsource anything to earn six figures online. You can earn earn multiple six figures from a website doing all the work yourself. I've done it, and know people who have done it.
You don't need to be some kind of Silicone Valley genius to get it done. You do have to put in a lot of work, but it's not rocket science. Keyword Research. Publish Articles. Google Analytics. Have a genuine interest in helping people.
Those are pretty much all you need to reach $100,000+ of online income with affiliate blogging.
On a longer time scale though, I personally found that I got tired and a little burnt out. I also saw the insane potential of what I call "time arbitrage", meaning that I pay for other people's time in order to have more of my own time.
To scale my business, without scaling my own time investment, I had to change my mindset. You don't have to do that, but I would imagine that most of you will. Don't feel pressure to do it right away.
Would You Rather Make Lots of Money Online Managing A Team And Or Do It Yourself As A One Person Operation?
Recent Comments
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Nathaniell, for people who are just starting out to blog, outsourcing would be a bad idea. Like you said, waste of money, and can be in the hole financially.
I would rather be a one person operation than to hire a team of writers. The whole point of writing as an individual reflects the person's personality (the voice).
I did hire a team of writers in the past and I found it to be a waste of money because it was someone else's writing. It was not my voice, not my writing style, nor was it representing my true brand. Mostly, I hired copywriters for my ads when I was in the mortgage and financial industry. Real estate agents markets themselves. They represented their own unique selling proposition by having a voice to their marketing slogan.
I feel this is the same way for writing my own blogs. If I want to scale, I would seek out using paid ads or more advertising on social media than to hire a team of writers that do not reflect my personal voice or brand.
Nathaniell, your posts are always informative and helpful. It is awesome to think that one can earn a great living with just our own effort. I do however, see where hiring some to help could be beneficial in the longterm.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this subject and explaining it so well.
I have read several of your posts and your website blogs.
You say that your earnings are over $10k per month.
How much of that is left as a profit?
One of our hometown business earned $70,000,000.00 in one year. That's $70 million dollars. It is a township.
In a college business course I gave a talk and mentioned it.
Students were excited about that earning. But the story didn't end there.
This business spent/invested $72 million dollars to earn $70mm. In that year, it had a lose of $2 million dollars.
Another business had $300mm earning. It invested $250mm. This business had a $50 million dollar profit for that year.
Best leads,
I believe that would all depend on where he paid for ads, has paid for software, plug-ins, any monthly membership fees, domain fees, etc.
Only Nathaniell can tell you what he has invested monthly. What he pays for and what he doesn't.
Everyone here is different, some of us may not use paid ads, may use free software but we may have membership costs and we all have domain costs, but those are annual fees.
Barbara
Talk about website + traffic + content + speed index first.
Example ur website + content quality.. get traffic 1 day 300k visitors. Ur product $300, all purchased. $300x300k.. see
If run ads, u get money too..
But important key must patient.
Good luck.
Awesome, as always.
Thanks for sharing.
I tried a couple of different writers last year, just to test the waters. I was unable to use any of the articles that they produced. I know that there are writers out there that can produce any content we want, and we just have to keep looking until we find them.
But for now, I like to put on 'spin' on my articles. It keeps my site as 'my site,' however, I would like to find someone to share the workload with in the future :-)
I also like to keep my content with my own "spin". I think it adds some personality to the writing, and helps develop the brand. My recommendation for you if your previous writers didn't work out would be:
1. Do a few test articles before hiring someone for a consistent project. You can usually suss out their work style within a couple of articles and then you don't have to commit to a full project
2. Stay away from agencies like iWriter and TextBroker. I have tried many of them, and they are not very good.
3. Pay a bit more. Sometimes going with the cheapest writer just makes more work for yourself.
I hope those tips help for the next time you're ready to try hiring some writers!
See more comments
I think that based on this article outsourcing is a waste of time, money, and resources. Speaking of which, I've barely been on WA for two weeks and I've already written four content-rich articles, my site health is pretty strong, and my blog has been indexed by Google. I do wonder what my initial results might imply.
Do you have to use Google Analytics if you already use Keyword in Jaaxy, or is that an add-on?
This is very helpful, informative, engaging, & strategic!
Hi, Google Analytic is different than Jaaxy.
Jaaxy allows you to find topics to write about... And Google Analytic allows you to analyze your data such as the number of visitors you get, posts that are ranking high in the Serp, etc
That said, you need both of them