John Jonas outsourced his writing to Filipino specialists and built a QA workflow with Grammarly and a dedicated reviewer. He trained writers to match his voice by cutting phrases like "if ever" and "to avail," so newsletters arrive near-final and he gets his time back.
Chapters
Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing. This is episode 185, how I outsource writing to my OFS. So one of the things that I consistently outsource is writing. And it's not that I can't write, it's that I hate it. I really just do not like writing something formal. And it's also super time consuming. And then it's just hard to run a business while you're doing things that are time consuming. So when I started my online business, though, I wrote all the time. I wrote articles and submitted them to article directories. I wrote blog posts and landing pages and sales pages and squeeze pages, and I did it all. And it wore me out. It wore me out mentally, kind of wore me out physically, which is super weird that something that is just sitting at your desk and typing can wear you out physically. But that's what it did. So naturally, it was one of the very first things that I outsourced. And immediately, it was so relieving. So in my typical day, one of the. The first things that I do is force myself to do something that is impactful for the business and hard for me. Because usually the impactful things are not easy. And if the impactful things are easy for you, then sweet. But writing is one of those impactful things that's not easy for me to do. So I have to force myself to do it. And as soon as I outsourced it, it was amazing. Like, it opened up this whole world of I can do better things now with my time, which sometimes includes writing, but I get to write things that I think are fun or rather than things that I think I have to do. So here's what I did. I mean, the very first person I ever hired, I hired him to do writing for me. And he wasn't that great at it. So I had to teach him how to do it better. I had to structure the content better so that he could do it better. His grammar was pretty good. Since then, I hired a really, really good writer. And this has been amazing for me because, number one, I don't have to correct everything for them. I didn't have to teach her how to write, how to structure sentences, how to structure paragraphs. I didn't have to teach any of that stuff. She already knew I had to correct a few grammar things that were, like, common grammar mistakes that she would make. But her English was fluent. She would just. She was just writing these grammar mistakes. They Were like Filipino grammar and not American grammar. And I wanted the American grammar, so I corrected those things. And it's pretty dang flawless. Sometimes she makes mistakes just like typos or whatever. And so I sent it through an editor. But this has been amazing because it allows two of us to be creative. So she will come up with topics. She'll come up with brainstorming ideas. She'll propose things to me, like saying, hey, we should write about this. And that's so awesome to me because instead of being forced to be the one coming up with everything all the time, I get to have her come up with things, and then I can contribute to them. And that is a really big deal. Also, if I have ideas for things that we want to do, she'll contribute to them. And now the writing just gets better, and the content creation just gets better. So then the next step for me was helping them write. Like, I write, like, in my voice so they could write for me and it could be from me. So the way I've done this over the years, I've tried this a couple times. So first of all, I make them read a lot of stuff that I've written. I make them read all kinds of stuff so that they start to feel my voice. Then as they write, I will give them feedback on it. I'll make a lot of videos, like, talking through. Like, I'll open up snagit and drag it out on a piece that they wrote. And then I'll just talk through it, like, hey, here's this. I'm going to read you this sentence. And then like, okay, this sounded kind of odd. It's not how I would say it. Filipinos generally are formal, and I'm very conversational. And so I had to. I had to walk her through being more and more conversational. It took us a few months, actually. I'd probably say it took us like six months. But she got it, and she's really, really good at it. So along with that, let me give you a couple tips. So Filipino English can be really, really good, but the. There are a couple phrases specifically that they like to use that we don't use. One of those is, if ever. So can you do this for me if ever? Well, that if ever isn't how we do it. It's correct. It's fine. It works for them, and it's just not American English. And so I had them take if ever out. I don't ever want to see you use. If ever they use, you can avail of this service to Avail like it's grammatically correct. It's the correct usage of the word, but it's just not the way we do it. We would say you can use or are you able to instead of to avail. And so I just said, don't ever use to avail. And those are two specific things. If ever and avail. That I would tell someone immediately, like, hey, don't use these two things. They're not in. They're not an American English. Not that they're not in American English. It's just not the way that we would typically say something. Another tip would be if something to me starts off with a mistake, I just make them reread the whole thing. I don't even read it. Like the first paragraph has a mistake, either a grammar mistake or typo mistake. It means it wasn't read over, it wasn't edited. I'm not even gonna read the rest of this. I want you to go back and find your own mistake. I often don't tell them where the mistake is. I just say, there's mistakes in this. Go correct them. That's where I am now. Before, when I was correcting a bunch of stuff, I realized, man, there's a better way to do this. So I bought them a Grammarly subscription, which was really helpful towards Grammarly catching mistakes before it got to me. And then I hired a QA person, someone that it was their job to like, read through something and make sure it flows perfectly and make any corrections like tenses or person talking. The third person versus the first person. I want you to correct all these things before it ever gets to me. Make sure it's perfect, and then I want to see it. And all of this is how my current newsletter works. Either I will come up with an idea and I will give some bullet points and Julia will write it, or Julia will come up with an idea and give me bullet points and Julia will write it. And then it goes through jam, our quality assurance person. It also runs through Grammarly. I always read them before getting. Before publishing them. I always add my own thing to them. But Julia writes most of our newsletters, and they come out perfect before they get to me. And not everyone's perfect, but they're so much better and so much easier than if I had to write it all myself. So if content is part of your business, consider hiring someone else to produce content for you to create articles to do writing for you. It can free up a lot of your time and it can be really well done in your voice so that you get to contribute the way that you want, but you also free up your time. If you're interested in seeing exactly how I hire people like this and how you can hire a great person every time, check out 1vaoa.com my 1vaoa challenge where I will walk you through finding a great person and I guarantee you find someone great the first time.
