As my blog has grown, I’ve found myself getting more overwhelmed with the time and effort required for me to sustain it. I’m not complaining, because at any time I could just stop blogging if I didn’t like it, but it’s a known fact that running a blog isn’t easy.

I didn’t know you could outsource anything blog related until early this year. It turns out you can outsource a whole lot, though, and you can find a lot of the services on various classifieds for blogs.

Here are 5 time sucking blogging activities that can be outsourced:

Commenting

Commenting takes up, hands down, the most time of any other blog related activity on my end. It’s a time suck. Especially if you want to leave thoughtful comments that are more than one sentence long.

You can outsource commenting, and a couple of bloggers will go out and leave comments for you for per-comment fee.

This is not something I’d pay for, simply because while commenting is a time suck, it’s also my favorite part of blogging. Plus, I feel like I’ve built relationships with the bloggers that I frequently comment on, and it would be odd if somebody else was to comment on their blogs on my behalf.

However, if you can’t comment on the amount of blogs you’d like to, and you want to respond to frequent commenters on your site, outsourcing commenting can be a good way to do it.

Carnival Submissions

Submitting to carnivals can be a very important way to build links, create relationships, and drive traffic to your blog. Carnivals are essentially just a big, long link round up, usually on a specific topic, that a host posts on their blog.

Because these roundups are so big, it’s not like a weekly link love that you are included in because a peer liked your post. Instead, you have to actually do some leg work and submit your posts to these carnivals.

While this isn’t as big of a time suck as commenting is, carnival submissions still take a bit of hunting around, and let’s be real – it’s not even close to being as fun or engaging as commenting.

Tech Issues

Many people aren’t great with this aspect of blogging. Personally, I’m learning how to be more self sufficient when it comes to troubleshooting, but it used to be that anything techie was beyond my scope of knowledge.

When something goes wrong on my blog, no matter what it is, I take it to Twitter. Twitter rarely has the answer, so then I take I refer to somebody who knows what they are doing. Everybody should have a friend who is good with tech stuff.

Since internet/tech/blog issues are the things that give me the most headaches, it’s always worth it to outsource it for me.

Design

The average blogger does not have the know-how or eye to go and design their blog to make it look half decent.

A bunch of them think they do, but in reality, owner designed blogs can be hard to look at, not very functional, and inefficient.

This included me up until I started opening up far too many sites, gave up, and learned the basics of web design. It would cost me a pretty penny to get a professional design on all of my websites, so I had to learn for the sake of my wallet, but if there’s something so nice about having a beautiful new blog design without having to lift a finger.

Social Media

I handle all of my own social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google+) but it’s getting time consuming having to update all of the social media that I am on, and sometimes I let it slip through the cracks.

You can outsource social media management so that you don’t have to worry about keeping up with all that is out there.

This is something I should definitely do, because my Facebook page looks a little empty, but I do plan on working on it eventually.

Starting a blog? You may also be interested to read some of my other posts about the subject:

Blogging 101

• Why Should You Blog? I Have a Bunch of Reasons!
• If You’re Just Starting Out, You Should Start on WordPress. Here’s why
• Ways to Inject Personality Into Your Posts (because nobody wants to read boring stuff)
• A Post About Knowing Your Audience
• Make Sure You Are Running Your Blog Like You’d Run Your Business
• Learn From My Mistakes in Blogging

Should You Blog Anonymously?

• Blogging Anonymously – How to Do It
• A Case for Blogging Publicly
• My Beef with Blogging Anonymously

Feel free to email me with any blogging questions and I’d be happy to help!

5 Things That Can Be Outsourced On Your Blog is a post from: When Life Gives You Lemons. Did you like the post? Follow me on Twitter, like me on Facebook, or hop on over to my blog and leave me your feedback.