Outsourcing Potentially Profitable Blog

[Dus10]

Hello All,

I have a potentially lucrative blog idea, and I already have the domain name, software, theme, and general money making opportunities setup. The problem is, I have not been dedicating enough time to it. This is something that needs to be updated frequently (at least with the appearance of daily updates). Now, the scope of content is very specific. What I would like to do is outsource, or crowdsource (ala MTurk), all of the content generation.

How far could I reasonably going with automating this?

The subject of the blog is a specific person, so I plan on putting HITs on MTurk to find news publications of this person and blog about them. It addition, there are all sorts of products that would be relevant to sell, and I would like to post about one product a day.

At first, I would definitely like to approve all content, but eventually I would like to find a few trusted people to just create it, and then I could truly have it on auto-pilot, merely checking on it weekly, or so.

Is this feasible?

[Sven]

That is difficult to get going.

In practice any website that runs well is the result of passionate writing. If you find the right person and can spend the cash as a real investment (1000s) you may be able to pull it off.

But someone needs to put in a lot of work to get it going.

[jetpacklife]

Most blog software allows you to schedule posts.. so you can get ahead of the posts.

You can't write 7 blog posts in 4 hours, once or twice a week??

You could troll message boards related to the person.. and find some dedicated fans, then offer them $ to write blog posts for you. They'd be more passionate about the subject.. Once you get going, you might be able to find these people for free.

[sub8hr]

If the blog itself is the money maker, why would this person write it for you as a job and not just do it on their own for 100% of the return?

[kamakiri]

I have to echo sub here. If it is potentially profitable it is like a bank selling $1 bills for 90 cents. In any sense of the word, you are using it wrong when you don't say that there is a far higher probability of it being a potential time sink. I have 1000 'potentially profitable' ideas that aren't going to come to fruition.

I already have the domain name, software, theme, and general money making opportunities setup

That takes what? An hour with godaddy? You aren't bringing anything to the table. I am not saying drop it, but I am saying you have one long road to travel before you start earning money off other's backs (croudsourcing).

Throw up a business plan here.

[DaveCraige.com]

blogging is hard.

you should probably have at least a normal post a day, or a super post a week like tim's.


its tought to keep up with.

feel free to drop the link to your site.

all the best!

[camdengirl]

I'd go via two ways - I'd probably not let untested bloggers post without my approval, so I'd stockpile a load of articles/posts and make sure they were up to standard.

Mturk/elance/guru.com/craigslist would be an excellent way of getting lots of posts in a relatively short space of time. I'd also suggest contacting local unis/colleges to recruit some students too.

You could also "batch" your time into writing several articles and then pre-posting them to appear on certain dates. Or if you don't have that facility on you blog, hire a VA to post as you on those dates.

We have a client who has a blog with 33,000 unique visitors a month and he hasn't done any monetarisation on it at all. If your site is already monetarised and getting visitors, why not split profits with someone whose writing style you like and who is an expert in the field? they may not want to be a blogger or do the set up, but be quite happy to earn money talking about their chosen subject.

[jetpacklife]

People work for money. Not everyone can set up a profitable blog. It's certainly going to be an investment in the beginning if you're not going to do it yourself.

I have hired people in past to set up pure article / content based sites. Using my traffic and SEO knowledge, I was able to triple the amount I paid for the content. I also own the content and it's continually making more money for me. If I didn't have other, even more profitable options, I'd probably be doing a lot more of it.

Here is a forum where people buy and sell content creation:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=102

Obviously, the very low priced options may be pretty low quality.
I paid $3 for a 500 word articles, and it certainly wasn't the best, but
it was more than adequate for SEO.