Ask HN: How to outsource marketing for my bootstrapped 'lifestyle business'?

I don't want to blow them on expensive Adwords

As a marketer this bothers me. While I assume I am completely oversimplifying this statement, an ongoing bug bear of mine is business that treats marketing as an expense. Marketing is an investment. It should be treated and monitored as you would your investments. Adwords ads are not expensive, they have a positive or negative ROI/ROMI. It doesn't matter if a click cost $1 or $1,000, its about the following profit you get back from that click. You need to understand how you track + what your avg revenues and margins are. Adwords (and other channels) should never be expensive, they should be positive or negative returning assets.

Your questions;

Has anyone done this before? I've on both sides of contracting marketing. It makes sense to pay for specialization if you can earn a reasonable salary elsewhere.

who do you outsource to? Depends on what you need? Be careful going cheap. There is no industry accreditation and many people jump in selling promises they cant deliver. ALso yyou sound like you need someone that can advise you as much as 'do as I say' type contractor. Look for experience and someone that can show you specifically why they succeeded when they took of other marketing gigs. Don't go for the cheapest or biggest promise as an absolute.

What does it cost ?Please share. As above, you can do affiliate type deals where you only pay for success. Or you may pay $5 to $500/hr depending on what you look for. Try not to go in too light on spend. If you want to spend $500 on advertising anyone decent will cost more than that alone setting up a solid performing campaign. People often test with small amounts, hire some low cost person and then decide 'marketing doesn't work'. You need to do a shotgun type approach where you blast tests across a bunch of channels/approaches, see where the profit pattern is for you to chase. Also when you budget budget a decent spend in addition to a person. I see businesses hire a marketing person and then allocate not budget. Thats a waste of money unless they are literately after a blogger/web developer in one and that's all you want.

Are you doing any sales/bizdev work at all? Like identifying potential customers, and calling them? Or e-mailing them? Or finding forums your customers spend time at, and participating there? Making deals with other products your customers use to cross-promote?

Writing on a blog nobody reads isn't going to do much for you. The way content gets backlinks typically involves the people who write it hustling just as much to get those links: posting them themsleves, talking to influential people who can share them, running contests and giveaways, guest posting for exposure. Content creation is less than half of the work of successfully using content marketing for customer acquisition.

You can't really outsource this stuff at the beginning IMO. Nobody else is going to have the knowledge and the passion to get those early customers for you. You need to be in the loop personally to hear the rejections and see how your product is being used to know how to move it forward and how to market it more effectively.