The Dangers of Outsourcing Your Freelance Work

Many freelance writers turn to outsourcing their work to a third party in order to stay on top. In today’s guest post, writer and marketer Mitch O’Conner warns us why that might not be a good idea.

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When faced with the stress of tight deadlines and overwhelming workloads, many online freelance writers decide to outsource their content creation to a third party.

Outsourcing does have some potential benefits. You can spend a small percentage of your going rate for the meat-and-potatoes portion of your content while you worry about “bigger” things, such as the overlying structure of your work and forging relationships with new clients.

Unfortunately, outsourcing your freelance work has a number of potential dangers as well. Before you chop off a portion of your budget and hand it to an online assistant, consider the following:

You’ll Lose Your Writing Style and Voice

As a writer, you’ve probably worked hard to develop your own writing style and voice. By mastering the rules of the English language, you’ve allowed your own personality to shine through in your written content, and your client and audience appreciate the effort. Unfortunately, the same can’t necessarily be said about your potential outsourced writer.

Even if your outsourced work is returned to you with perfect grammar, spelling and composition (which it won’t be, in all likelihood), your audience will be able to tell that it’s just not you. This could result in an uncomfortable conversation with your client, who may immediately notice a sudden shift in the way “you’re” writing.

A dramatic shift in style and voice isn’t the type of thing that you can easily fix with a quick once-over of the finished product. If you have to go through the work sentence by sentence in order to make it read like you wrote it, you’ll immediately regret spending the time and money on outsourcing it in the first place.

Of course, it’s important to note that this is more of a concern for opinionated and editorialized articles, which allow your voice and style to shine through brightest, and less of an issue with dry, encyclopedic content that could be written by basically anyone so long as it’s accurate and clearly composed.

You’ll Spend More Time Editing

Potentially, a lot more time. In many cases, the recipient of your outsourced work will have a different definition of “acceptable quality” from you. The writer may breeze through the work, never stopping to review the overall structure of the content, much less the spelling, grammar and sentence structure present in each paragraph.

Many online writers accepting outsourced work speak English as a second or even third language. Even if they do speak English natively, it certainly doesn’t mean that their writing will be without fault. This can present plenty of challenges in the form of misspelled words, chopped up sentences, missing punctuation and phrases that make little sense to an American audience. These are all things that you’ll need to spend time correcting before presenting the product to your client.

Your Work May Become Disjointed and/or Repetitive

What many online content creators don’t realize is that when they outsource their work to a “writer,” they may actually be hiring a group of writers that will split up the work however they see fit. This doesn’t necessarily bode well for your finished product.

Are the writers communicating efficiently and reviewing each other’s work as they go? If not, you could end up with a lot of duplicate copy throughout the overall project, with pages that echo one another in a way that your client (and your eventual audience) could notice with dismay.

On the other end of the spectrum, the finished product could end up with significant holes that you’ll end up needing to cover yourself. One of the outsourced writers could expect his colleague to cover an important topic in detail, while that colleague may expect the same of the first writer. In the absence of a final review by a “head writer,” this could spell trouble.

Adding More Links to the Chain Reduces Reliability

How much do you really know about the person (or persons) to whom you’re outsourcing your writing? Does she have a reliable wireless internet connection, or will she phone you just hours before your deadline saying that she’s been unable to get online to complete the work?

Does she possess a sufficient level of experience in the given subject matter, or will she be learning it on the fly through some simple Google searches?

Can she work independently, or will she batter you with questions at even the slightest hint of confusion? Remember, outsourcing is about saving time, so a constantly-curious writer will defeat the purpose.

What’s the quality of her finished product? Can she produce any testimonials from satisfied former clients?

The Bottom Line

With all of that said, it’s important to note that in some cases, outsourcing is still a viable option. Understanding the potential dangers of outsourcing your freelance work will help you identify when it’s appropriate and when it just isn’t.

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Have any of you ever outsourced your writing? We’d love to hear from you if you have! Please share your experiences in the comments below.

Images courtesy of stuartpilbrow, Monceau and greenpeanut.