How Much of Your Membership Website Should You Outsource?

Posted on 17. Jun, 2010 by Steve in Tips & Tricks

When it comes to creating and maintaining your membership website, the entire process can mean a lot of effort and even more time. The most common way to bypass this problem is to simply outsource the work to someone else. However, many people are left wondering exactly how much of their membership website can actually be taken care of by someone else.

There are several aspects of membership websites that are most commonly outsourced. The first is the graphics/design of the website. Learning how to create professional looking graphics is a skill that not everyone has, and the same is true for the actual design of the entire website. Outsourcing this type of work is extremely common and can be done by an independent contractor or through a professional website design company.

Creating the actual content of the website is often outsourced as well. Sometimes all of the content is outsourced and ghostwritten and other times only some of it is. It is becoming increasingly common for people to outsource all of the text-based content and then creating one or two videos so that members still see their face and it also makes it appear as if all of the content was created by them.

Website management is also commonly outsourced. This is especially true for membership websites once they have become fairly established. Web management may include only basic maintenance and help desk support, or could include a gambit of interactive tools and traffic generation.

SEO efforts are also commonly outsourced to either businesses or freelancers. This could be something as simple as article submissions and forum commenting to complex link building and other SEO tactics.

If you want to create a membership website that is completely hands-free, then the best thing to do is hire a virtual assistant This person will be responsible for managing your entire website. They will also be the person who is in charge or organizing and hiring additional freelancers (such as writers and designers) Think of a virtual assistant as the General Manager of a restaurant. Commonly, virtual assistants will be give cost constraints and be responsible for meeting certain goals, such as member retention or traffic generation.

Creating a membership website that requires only the most minimal amount of time doesn’t have to be difficult. By hiring a virtual assistant, they can outsource and manage almost every aspect of your membership website, from creation to maintenance However, if you want to be a little more hands on, you can hire freelancers to take care of any task that you do not want to do, or simply cannot do.