Apologies for the longer than usual radio silence by the way. I went on a holiday to celebrate the end of the destruction of my home!
Yep, that’s right… Today was my first proper day back at work after all the general noise and mess of our renovation project. During the 3 months of utter chaos I found it unbelievably difficult to get any actual work done but I was determined to at least do something with the time that I could look at and say “that was really a worthwhile achievement”.
Kicking Office Boredom into Touch…
Back in March I realised that the way I’ve been working just isn’t jiggling my affiliate mojo any more. With that in mind I set about analysing how we use time and what it would cost to significantly reduce the amount of time spent engaged in repetitive tasks that aren’t particularly specialised.
So What’s Been Drinking Up Our Working Hours?
I decided to look at two key things: -
- Writing Content
- Posting Content
Short phrases, but these two things are a huge part of what keeps our business moving and growing. For the last 15 months Duncan and I have done a tremendous amount of this as we’ve shifted the business away from reliance on PPC and put a lot of effort into making the sites we do send PPC traffic to unique and filled with added value for the site user.
It’s Been Great, But Dear God It’s Boring!
We had a sit down and worked out how much time we were spending on average doing this important, but frankly simple, task. You ready?
Time Kirsty Spends Writing & Posting Content: 35 Hours Per Month
Time Duncan Spends Posting Content: 40 Hours Per Month
Total: 75 Hours Per Month
Thats An Awful Lot Of Hours!
Not only is that a mahoosive chunk of time, I realised that it also represented a bottleneck. I’ve been outsourcing some content writing for quite some time now to increase output. However, Duncan had no more time he could devote to posting up said content without going mad with boredom and letting other important tasks slide. In fact, for a long time now he’s struggled to keep up with all his tasks and I’ve started “slacking off” because I was getting fed up.
It Occurred To Me That All of This Was Work That Someone Else Could Do. So…
- I got a friend to write me a WordPress script that will post all our content for us from a CSV spreadsheet.
- I increased my order with my content writer(s) so that output was the same as previously, and then added 20% for good measure. All content is now output into csv format by the writer all ready for posting.
This means that not only have I freed up 75 hours that Duncan and I can do something else with every month, I’ve removed a bottleneck that was stopping us from growing the business more quicky.
How Much Has Freeing 75 Hours Cost Us?
Content: £800 per month
Script: £0 (excellent mates rate eh?!)
This means that to free up no less than 5 days per month each (and bearing in mind we only work an average of 17 days per month) we are paying the roughly £10 an hour to have someone else do tasks we really have grown to hate and therefore have started to do badly. 30% of our workload has now been lifted and at a cost that represents a *lot* less than 30% of our business profits.
Obviously I will have to spend some time every month sorting out who is writing what, but I’m hoping to get that down to about a morning’s work at the start of each month.
I Feel Great!
It’s a great feeling to have finally sorted this out. Words can’t express how good I feel so I shall leave y’all with a picture from my recent wee break that really sums it all up.
Ahhh… that is SO much better 
P.S. I’m hoping to now have a little more time to spend on here engaged in writing I really do enjoy 
May 5th, 2010 at 9:46 am
Glad to hear you’ve now got your mojo back, and found a way to outsource all the boring crap!
MB
May 5th, 2010 at 10:18 am
Hi Kirsty, great post
Who are you using for your content writing? Can you recommend anyone?
I’m about to launch a few niche sites and it might be more cost-effective to hire someone to write out the tedious content pages
May 5th, 2010 at 10:34 am
Was just about to ask the same about content writing recommendations, we’ve been trying to find a service that meets our requirements for a while now.
May 5th, 2010 at 10:38 am
Thanks Mark!
Hobbsy & Geoff, well I have two content writers. One is my Mother and she only works for me LOL. The other is a chap I got off elance but I can’t share as I’ve got most of his time sewn up
Have youse tried textbroker.com? I’ve heard the odd good comment about them.
May 5th, 2010 at 10:50 am
Thought that might be the case, it seems like it’s worthwhile trying to find your own freelancer (or Mother of course).
We’ve used Textbroker for a while now, main benefit is it’s cheeeeeep and usually pretty quick! Unfortunatly the quality varies. Our main issue is most of the writers appear to be foreign based so even if the grammer is ok (which it very often isn’t) it’s written from an US perspective. It’s mainly our finance stuff that we have the problem with as it’s quite a specific topic.
Cheers for advice anyway, might give elance a try.
Geoff
May 5th, 2010 at 10:53 am
If you find the right person or persons on elance I think it can be good. Particularly if you have lots of articles of a similar nature or structure you need writing. Means you know the writer understands your requirements and you can build a good relationship over time.
Good luck!
May 5th, 2010 at 11:05 am
I think Kieron is behind ContentNow:
http://www.contentnow.co.uk/content-writing.php
anyone used them?
May 5th, 2010 at 11:12 am
Thanks Kirsty.
Hobbsy,
Yea i’ve spoken to Kieron about ContentNow. It looks a good service, definatly good quality for the cost from the examples i’ve seen(and UK based writers). Only reason we haven’t tried them out yet is because the timescale for writing content was too long for the way we’re working at the minute. This might be something we have to change at our end though if we need better quality.
Geoff
May 5th, 2010 at 11:19 am
Oh yes, I’ve used Content Now for writing in the past and I must say the quality was really excellent. Would definately recommend!
May 5th, 2010 at 11:30 am
Hi Kirsty
Yeah, writing content about “stuff” can get really boring – especially when you’re not really interested in the subject.
I’ve had a couple of articles from textbrokers but by the time I tweaked the text I might as well have wrote it myself. Suppose that’s the trick …find writers who you can leave alone to get on with it?
How much time do you have to spend checking your outsourced content writing or is your mum just totally ace
On the flipside you’ve added £800 worth of costs that needs to be covered. Or do you value the extra free time instead?
John
May 5th, 2010 at 3:42 pm
I’ve had samples from a few guys on elance and the link but never been happy with the quality for my own sites (fine for filler on linkwheels etc though).
Part of the reason Im trying to get the misses into AM, then she can do some of the writing for me
Good to see you nominated over at A4UAwards again Kirsty!
May 5th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
It’s actually a good way to get into AM Shane. I learnt quite a lot by doing the odd bit content writing for Kirsty herself!
I’ve always been keen on the idea of trying to use students on a ‘mentoring in exchange for cheap work’ basis. Not just for content writing but for online marketing at a whole. Never really been sure how to approach it though.
May 5th, 2010 at 11:03 pm
Regarding textbroker – you can get some good articles on there as long as you make sure you keep rejecting the bad ones. Direct orders are the way to go once you’ve found some high quality writers.
As a freelance writer who does OK but not great with online marketing I’ve often wondered about trading my time for some mentoring. Seems like it could work out quite well for both parties if it was arranged correctly.
If anyone wants to discuss it further they can email me at fox_mmpkxp@rcpt.at assuming Kirsty is OK with it.
That’s a temporary email address by the way.
May 6th, 2010 at 1:45 am
John – I don’t do any checking of content beyond random quality checks. And although we’re now paying £800 a month for our content the fact we’ve spent so long doing it all ourselves has increased our profit enough to pay for it several times over! We do value that time more and felt we’d be better spending it either having more leisure or working on things that require our more specialised skills.
Alex – as you can see I’m fine with you popping your offer up!
Shane – thanks, it’s always a pleasure to find out people like the blog enough to think of me at nomination time
May 7th, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Good for you Kristy! I’ve been following your home improvement progress with enjoyment as my wife and I are also in the midst of doing a mountain of home improvement/repair. Soon I will be working f/t out of the new house and enjoying the new view so it will all be worth it. Maybe we’ll cross revenue paths some day while enjoying our newly renovated homes. There’s no greater motivation to excel at Aff Mktg then paying the bills.
May 7th, 2010 at 4:06 pm
Geoff – just a quick reply to your comment on response times from ContentNow.co.uk. To be completely honest the turnaround times we offer differ from week to week depending on how busy we are. If the order is our minimum of 20 articles then we could get them back to you in a week. Sometimes this is longer but we will always prioritise them for you if there is an urgent need. Maybe one option is to consider our daily news service where you can get a fresh news item delivered each day? More info here: http://www.contentnow.co.uk/news.php.
With regards to quality of content that people have mentioned from other suppliers, at ContentNow we don’t offer any different grades of quality, it’s all excellent
Our staff are all based in the UK and speak English as their first language. But not only that, all content is also proofed by real people to make doubly sure of quality. If any clients are unhappy with our work we will rewrite the content free of charge.
Kirsty, thanks for your kind words and sorry about the plug, just thought it may add to the discussion.
May 8th, 2010 at 12:10 am
How do you deal with the affiliate deeplinks on the content and your writers? I have 4 writers at the minute and have to put all the content on the site myself which seems to take forever as I dont fancy letting them free with my affiliate accounts!
May 11th, 2010 at 5:47 am
I personally use a deeplinks spreadsheet which relates to a single PHP file which I use to manage all my affiliate links. I now use a bulk upload script in tandem with this which means all my content is zipped into my desired templates in the blink of an eye (well, with some tinkering from me). The added bonus of using php link files (where one file controlls multiple links) is that it’s easier to switch my traffic between merchants and update URLS.
May 15th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
What content are they writing? Product reviews/descriptions or articles? I’ve started outsourcing articles to go on my sites but not the product reviews.
Would love to get to the point where I can afford 800 a month! Maybe I should spend a whole months profit (500) just on content for one site and see how far it gets me?