I got into a spirited discussion on Facebook this week with a friend of mine on the value of business people writing their own website content. Her position was yes, they should — even if they’re not great at writing.
It’s all about developing yourself, as a business and as a person, she said. “How can you grow if you’re running away from the thing that’s meant to develop you?” she wanted to know.
She makes an excellent point. We all have areas in our lives that we’d like to change to better ourselves. And if you’re trying to develop yourself in to a writer, by all means, go ahead and do it yourself.
But if you are more interested in heating and air conditioning systems than in writing, why would you force yourself to write? You got into business to do something you do well, not the stuff that holds you back.
Don’t lose sight of your strengths
Don’t focus on weaknesses to the point where you lose sight of your strengths.
There is nothing wrong or shameful about saying, “You know what? I’m a lousy bookkeeper. I’m going to hire someone to keep track of that for me, so I can focus on growing my own business, and doing only the things that I can do.”
A good reason why you’d want to focus on improving your bookkeeping skills is because you want to become a bookkeeper yourself. But if you’re that bad at it…why would you want to? And does becoming a bookkeeper really advance your core business?
The same holds true for writing content for your website (or blog or social media). Not everyone is good at everything and that’s what makes the world an interesting place. So if you are not a good writer, why spend countless hours doing something you don’t like when you could simply hand it over to an expert and move on to more important things?
Consider: While you’re slogging away, trying to find just the right words or sweating blood trying to get your receivables in order, you are wasting the time and energy you could be using more productively. Like making sales calls. Like developing products. Like attending networking functions, taking seminars, going to trade shows and so on.
Do not forget your own value
Say you charge $50 an hour for your services. What is more economical? Frittering away eight hours to crank out a few usable pages of website content when you could hire a competent (or even talented) writer to get your whole website done quickly and for about the same price? And if you’re not a strong writer, chances are very good to excellent that you’ve been putting it off way too long. That is not good for your business, either.
Take yourself out of the equation and think about it from a management standpoint. If you’re a great boss, you give your employees tasks that best suit their skills. And when you hire someone for a specific position, you hire her for the strengths she has in that area, not to do a job for which she has little talent and probably no interest.
So if you ask me, “Should I hire someone to write my website content,” I’ll tell you yes.
If your next question is, “Can I afford to do it?,” I’ll ask you another one:
Can you afford not to?