by Rachel Smith
23 January 2023
Updated January 2023
As a freelancer, it’s natural to try to do everything yourself to save money and keep your business humming along and more money coming in to support your family – but should you? If you can make $100 an hour copywriting, isn’t your time better spent taking up those gigs than doing admin, cleaning the house or toiling away on your tax return? I think so.
You’re not making money if you’re not at your computer and I’m a big believer in outsourcing so as to free up more hours for working. Here’s what I outsource when time-poor – without a shred of guilt!
It’ll come as no secret to readers of the blog (or any fellow journo who knows me) that I loathe transcribing. It is the number one thing I procrastinate over, and apps like Otter.ai and oTranscribe have made things far easier for me. Bottom line: I’d much rather prefer to spend my precious work time researching or writing.
I haven’t done my tax return for years and I’m not about to start now. My accountant, the lovely Clare Willows at Congdon Fuzi, handles everything for me once a year. All I do (which I’ve written about before) is use Rounded to keep track of my income and expenses. Did you know as an annual Gold Member of Rachel’s List you get a month free at Rounded? Contact us for details.
Outsource your social? Hells to the yes. I have two people helping with aspects of our social media – Jonelle, one of my long-time VAs, uploads regular posts in three-monthly batches (to promote Toolkit resources, job post ads and other ad type posts). I handle more of the day-to-day social, as a lot of it depends on when jobs are posted and when they’re filled and I keep track of all that. The other posts I don’t do are our audiogram posts for Instagram, promoting our weekly podcast guests. These are created by our marketing manager Claire Chow, who is given a script snippet with time stamps and an image of the guest. She puts the post together using a template in the Headliner app. So worth it!
When we started The Content Byte, we realised that a weekly podcast is actually a huge amount of work. And although Lynne Testoni and I try to split the workload evenly – which requires booking guests, writing scripts, writing show notes and uploading episodes – neither of us had the time or inclination to do the audio editing. My husband helped for a while but he has a super busy job and it became clear we needed a permanent podcast editor or producer. Enter Josh at Marker Creative Co. He edits the podcast, tidies up any errors or mistakes, adds in the music and any sponsorship we have to include – we’d be lost without him.
I’ve built a few websites now and have pretty good WordPress skills. And the great thing about WordPress is there are heaps of tutorials and forums out there where you can basically find out how to do anything, or even get the right snippet of code to insert in a php file. But finding what you need, testing it out, making changes if necessary etc etc takes time and again, it’s time I’d rather be working or chasing work. So I rely heavily on two developers whenever my sites need help (happy to share their details if you need a good developer!).
Most of you will have read a newsletter or had email correspondence from one of our VAs and they are worth every cent in my opinion, for the different tasks they handle behind the scenes for Rachel’s List. If you’re struggling to manage everything, I would absolutely recommend hiring a VA – you can off-load admin tasks to improve your efficiency. I’d recommend using the VA Lead Network to find a good, local VA.
What tasks do you outsource? Or do you try to do everything yourself?
