Who Should You Hire To Run Your Site?

I’ve been putting out a lot of content related to analyzing sites and some of my most successful purchases, but I’ve only recently realized I should also cover the aspects of running a site.

Full disclosure, I own a business which operates websites for investors, but my goal with this article is to show you how to build your own team, or at least what kind of help to seek out first.

I recently helped somebody acquire a small site from Flippa, and I then gave him a list of things he should do to grow the site. That list included:

• Writing more articles
• Cleaning up the onpage SEO
• Cleaning up technical aspects of the site
• Building more links

Basically everything that anybody would want to do to grow a site. 

The problem is, he didn’t know who to use for all of these tasks. Should he hire a freelancer? Should he use an agency? How much would it cost? How would he determine if they’d done a good job?

This was when I knew what the topic for my next Flippa article would be.

Today we’re going to talk about getting help running your website. Note, I’m talking specifically about a content website here. For eCommerce or SaaS, there will be other hiring requirements.

Who Should You Use?

There are a few options:

• Freelancers
• Full-time team members
• Agencies

Most of the time, you’ll want to use a mixture. A quality full-time person will cost you several thousand dollars a month, unless you can hire someone quality from Eastern Europe (such as from jobrack.eu) or another region that has a lower cost of living and plenty of quality people. South Africa is another useful tip.

If your site can’t really support the wage of a full-time team member, or you just want to get your feet wet first, you’re left with using freelancers or an agency. Usually people use agencies and freelancers in an “as needed” fashion.

For example, many people will just use an agency like Authority Builders, Outreach Mama, or Smash Digital when looking to build links. This is especially true if you have a limited budget and want to build a bunch of links one month, then wait before ordering more. 

Similarly, there are agencies that can handle your content, such as Human Proof Designs, Content Refined, Word Agents, and dozens more. 

We ourselves also recently started a Pinterest Management agency to cater to that aspect of people’s needs as well.

There’s no shortage of agencies to cover the main things you’ll need. 

Of course, agencies are paying freelancers and employees and then charging you a mark-up on top of that, so if you’d rather try to save money, you’ll want to go about hiring your own freelancers. 

Bear in mind though that many people find it actually costs them more in time and failed efforts trying to build a team than it does just paying an agency. This could be because managing people has a learning curve, or it could be that you don’t know exactly what work you need done and how.

Which Tasks Are Best Suited To Hiring In-House

If you do want to hire somebody, here are the tasks I recommend you consider delegating first:

1. Uploading and formatting content
2. Writing content (unless you enjoy writing or have specialist knowledge)
3. Creating images for content using something like Canva 

These are the most basic and easiest to hire for. If you are a complete novice, it should still be fairly easy for you to check someone is doing a good job with those tasks.

Next in difficulty:

1. Optimizing existing pages for SEO
2. Outreach for link building

These are a considerable jump in difficulty compared to the first phase though, so you’ll want to have the ability to do these tasks yourself first, if possible. You might want to check out one of the courses by Matt Diggity or Authority Hacker to at least give you the basics (and then send your freelancers through said courses).

Other things that are important are:

1. Optimizing the speed of your website
2. Keyword research
3. Other onpage seo tasks, such as internal linking and fine tuning

I wouldn’t recommend hiring directly for these though. Optimizing your speed can be done pretty affordably if you use someone like Wpspeedfix or Meyerdigital.media and can go terribly wrong if you hire the wrong person on the cheap. 

Keyword research is something that takes time and effort to get right, and it’s unlikely a freelancer will do a thorough job. Instead, I’d consider looking for a content agency who can include keyword research in their services, which most of the ones I mentioned above can do.

The same is said for OnPage SEO. I’ve not seen many agencies that focus on OnPage SEO, but some of the better general SEO ones will advise on it.

What’s Your Reason For Hiring?

Ultimately, when deciding what to outsource, you have to figure out why you’re doing it.

Is it because you don’t have the time? Is it desire? Or do you simply not have the skillset.

The first two things are much easier to outsource, because you presumably know how to do the tasks yourself, and can judge the work. The latter requires a lot more faith in those doing the work, and considering a lot of that work has a long feedback loop, you may have no idea if they’re doing the right thing at all.

Hence, starting with the 3 items I mentioned above is the best way to go about it. That should free up a lot of your time and take the lower value tasks off your plate, allowing you to focus more on improving your own skills, or performing the higher value tasks yourself.

Now, if you already have all the skills and just don’t have enough time to do it all yourself, you have no real excuse for not delegating to someone else. You have skills that most people don’t have, so you shouldn’t be doing the $10/hour tasks yourself.