Outsourcers Anonymous

Update (4/2): It’s just jokes! Did I fool you? I didn’t think so. Had to try, though.

I am the lone blogger at LBC and responsible for every post, good or bad. I wish I could take credit for coming up with the outsourced blogging idea. I shamelessly and without shame stole it from Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, who did the thing much better than I.

I didn’t do an April Fool’s post last year, because I didn’t think I could top the one I wrote in 2006, Secrets. As the story goes, I was really a white woman posing as a black woman, and I used a black friend as a stand-in to pose as “La Shawn Barber.” That was fun.

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Wow. It’s early. I haven’t been sleeping well. I need to say something, so please bear with me.

This is the first time I’ve blogged in eight months. I can’t believe I held out. And I’m not sure if this little experiment worked. I’ll explain.

I wanted to take time off, but I didn’t want to shut down LBC. Totally burned out and disgusted, I thought of asking a few people to guest blog for me. Then I read a book about people who outsourced everything from answering e-mails to picking up dry cleaning. As I mentioned before, when I get excited about something, I tend to take it to the extreme. That’s when I decided to outsource blogging.

I hired someone from India (super cheap!) to update the blog a few times a week. I asked him to review at least a year’s worth of posts to get a sense of my blogging style. I checked in with him once a week and let him know if I wanted him to cover a certain topic. I asked him to avoid politics like Black Death, which he did. I must say, I’ve been pleased. My traffic is half what it used to be, and he closed comments, but that’s spilled milk under the bridge now.

The only BIG issue I have with him is his Hanson fixation (though I dig his interest in music and digital tech). Maybe that’s my fault. Shortly after he started blogging for me, I told him I “rediscovered” the band and wanted to write an article about what the brothers had been up to the last 10 years. Well, he became a huge fan and kept linking to this photo of me and Hanson every chance he got. Talk about embarrassing.

“Great, now everyone will think I’m obsessed,” I told him. He laughed heartily and told me to “take a pill.”

Anyway, I don’t care about that anymore. I’m still trying to decide whether to resume blogging or just shut this thing down. I sort of feel bad for pretending, but I like a challenge. I wanted to see if I could outsource blogging and get away with it. Based on feedback I’ve received, I did get away with it. But at what cost?

Sorry. I’ll update this post later with a better explanation. When I say I’ll update this post, I mean me, La Shawn Barber.