A Guide to Outsourcing Content Tasks for Your eCommerce Business

Inbound marketing is one of the most important sources of traffic a website can have, eCommerce stores included. If you’re clued up on inbound traffic, you’ll already be well aware of the fact that content marketing is one of the most effective forms of drawing these customers to your website.

However, the creation of this content is a challenge, to say the least. If you were to dedicate your marketing department solely to content creation, you would need a vast range of skills at your disposal which includes at least:

• Writers
• Editors
• Researchers
• Proof-readers
• Graphic designers
• Social media managers
• Content producers

Of course, as an eCommerce business, this number of hires would put tremendous strain on your budget and most businesses simply cannot afford to invest at this level. However, thanks to modern technology and mainly the internet, there is an affordable solution that more and more businesses are starting to use – remote freelancers.

By investing in remote freelancers, you can outsource your content marketing tasks to more affordable solutions while still maintaining the highest quality of production. Not only will this help you to manage and maintain your budget, but it can also save you a ton of time which you can spend on more important areas and processes, such as expanding your target markets or increasing your product lines.

So, how do you get started with something like hiring a few freelancers for your business? To get you off on the right foot, here’s everything you need to know.

The Benefits of Remote Freelancers

Of course, as a business, you want to make sure you’re making the right decisions. So, if you’re on the fence about whether or not to use remote freelancers, here are some benefits you can enjoy:

• A Cost-Effective Solution

One of the best benefits you can experience by hiring remote freelancers is the cost for your business. In most cases, freelance content professionals are much less expensive than hiring full-time ones for your office. Their rates vary for different areas and skillsets, of course, but you don’t pay when the remote freelancers aren’t working and only pay for services rendered.

• Pay for What You Need

Remote freelancers are plentiful online, and you can be sure that you can find the right person in that wide pool, whatever you’re looking for. Whether you need a long-term writer to produce content for your business, or a short-term writer to produce something urgent, you’ll be able to find someone suitable.

• A Flexible Answer

By hiring freelance remote freelancers, you can enjoy a ton of flexibility with different freelancers. Not only do you have the ability to hire them to work on certain projects and end contracts as your needs dictate, but you can also effortlessly change between full-time and part-time schedules.

Additionally, freelancers will typically get to work hours that they want to work, such as overnight or during weekends. This means that you can get content and solutions faster than typical hires since they work outside of your typical office hours. You can order content whenever you need it.

Getting Started: Do Your Research

The first thing you need to do when entering the world of remote freelancers is do your research into the industry to find out what you and your business want from it. As we mentioned in the introduction, there are a lot of cogs in the content marketing machine, some of which you’ll need and some of which you won’t.

To understand this aspect fully, you’re going to need to create a content marketing plan. This means planning what content you’re going to release and when and how it aligns with the goals of your eCommerce store. There are a ton of tutorials online on how to do this if you don’t know already.

With your content marketing strategy in mind, you can actively set about hiring the respective freelancers for the tasks in the most effective and productive way possible.

The First Steps of Hiring Remote Freelancers

The first freelancers you’re going to need are writers since these are the people who will be creating the bulk of your content. Wherever you choose to source writers from as a business, be sure to sample a range of writers before deciding on the ones you want to use.

“Even if you choose writers based on a range of reviews and past experiences, they may not be the writer your business needs, so be sure to try out a few before finally deciding who you want to work with you long-term. This will help your business to save money and minimize the risk of costly mistakes,” states Sarah Smith, the team manager for Academized.

Sourcing Remote Freelancers

One of the biggest challenges that e-commerce stores have had is sourcing the remote freelancers that they want to work with. However, there are a plethora of options available now, thanks to the World Wide Web.

For example, you could try checking out freelancing websites like Upwork or Freelancer. Here you’ll be able to find freelance professionals who can help you in many different areas from writing to graphic design. There are also a ton of online writing services that can help with the entire content creation process from writing to editing and proofreading. Some of these services include iNeedArticles, Boom Essays, Essay Roo and UKWritings. The Huffington Post recently featured an article on academic writing services of this calibre. If you need a service that focuses on introducing you to remote contractors who are already pre-vetted for the skills and experience you need, there’s FreeeUp.

Enhancing Your Instructional Skills

When you’re working in an office, it’s easy to pop down the hall to tell a freelancer what you need them to do. You can consistently check up on the work they’re doing and receive regular updates on everything that’s going on with the task.

However, with a remote freelancer, this aspect gets a lot more complicated for obvious reasons. One of the main skills you’ll need to practice is providing freelancers with clear, precise and accurate instructions.

When sending content briefs to remote freelancers, you need to make sure you include as much detail as possible, so there is minimal room for error. Not only are these errors costly, but they can also lower the morale of remote freelancers, and you may find yourself losing the top talent fast.

Using Online Tools

Relying on remote freelancers is not the only way you can enhance your content marketing strategy. There is a vast range of online tools and services you can use, some of which include:

Grammarix  – A free online grammar checker.

Who Vs Whom – This blog has a ton of posts on improving grammar.

Cite It In  – A free online tool to check and format any citations added to content.

State of Writing & My Writing Way – These two blogs are loaded with articles on how to format content posts professionally.

Easy Word Count – A free tool that tracks the word count of content posts.

Introducing these tools to the freelancers you hire can help them align with your content standards.

Aim for Long-Term Relationships

When sourcing remote freelancers, you want to approach the task with a long-term and positive relationship in mind. Consider it identical to how you would hire people in your physical establishment. You want to hire people that you can work within the long-term, so you can produce the highest quality content possible.

“The best way to do this is by providing remote freelancers with a comprehensive and complete form of feedback on the work they produce. Since the freelancers you hire could be working on the other side of the world, it’s not always easy to show them that you appreciate them and their work,” shares Derren Summers, the outsourcing manager at AustralianHelp.

However, work satisfaction is still an important part of the remote workforce, so this level of feedback is essential. Be sociable with freelancers, ask them about their weekend, ask them how they are, what they are up to, get to know them and create relationships that will benefit everybody involved, helping you and your business rise to new levels of success that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

Using Your Saved Time

Since you won’t be producing content for your own eCommerce store, this gives you more time during your working hours to focus on the more important aspects of your business. For example, your marketing department can not only check through and manage the publishing of your outsourced content, but they’ll also be able to focus on other marketing projects and campaigns that you might want to them to work on.

Even if your eCommerce store is relatively small and you only have a few people working with you, your content does not have to get pushed aside. Not producing content for your blog and social media pages, for example, can rob you of the chance to expand and draw more focus to your business by keeping your website updated and providing your customers with a better experience. Grab that opportunity by singing up and requesting a freelancer today.

Mary Walton is an editor at PaperFellows, writing service. Read her ramblings at Simple Grad, her blog. Also, Mary helps with content management at Assignment Writing Services, Australian website.