Tim Ferriss pulled an early April Fool’s joke yesterday by claiming that his popular blog, which is in Technorati’s Top 1000, has been written by two folks from India and the Phillipines for the last year. Ferriss, who wrote The Four Hour Work Week (highly recommended, though take it with a grain of salt), set out to prove that, yes, you can work just four hours a week and have a best selling book and a top blog.

Even though Tim revealed that the outsourcing was a hoax, it got me wondering if outsourcing really canbe applied to blogs in general. If you are willing to pay the people who write your posts enough money, the answer is probably yes unless it’s about some specialized topic. Ferriss paid his fictional outsourcers a total of $35 per post. Could you do the same and still make money from your blog? Let’s do some math:

According to Compete.com, Ferriss’ site gets about 100,000 people a month. There’s no way to figure out how many of these people are reading the blog part of the site, but we’ll assume all of them are. We’ll also assume that each visitor turns an average of 3 pages, so we can posit that Tim gets about 300,000 page views a month. For March I counted 15 posts of Tim’s blog. Let’s also assume (yes, I know, I’m making tons of assumptions here, but stay with me) that half of the monthly page views were for those 15 articles, so that each article generated 10,000 page views. Tim doesn’t have ads on his site, but if he did and averaged, say a $5 CPM, that would mean each article generates about $50 in revenue. That’s enough to pay your outsourcers and have a little left over.

Of course, this only works if your site generates a good amount of traffic. If Tim’s blog gets half the traffic we assumed above, then the economics of outsourcing fall apart.

Am I advocating running out there and hiring someone from India to write all your posts? Certainly not. But if hiring someone to do research and track down links and photos allows you to post more often then maybe it could work. Hmm…

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