Hiring a blogger for your business blog is a big step.
You might have have attempted to handle blog writing in-house, but might have got too busy to write.
Or maybe your blog content isn’t getting results in terms of new leads or SEO traction.
The truth is that when it comes to creating professional content, most businesses have it as a low priority.
And this can be a costly marketing mistake.
Hiring a freelance writer can dramatically help grow the interest and attention to your blog.
A business blog can be a successful marketing tool only if it is updated regularly. The consistent creation of new content is what keeps Google coming back to visit your site, and helps it to rank well.
But unless you have the time and willingness to write it yourself, you are much better spending a little more on hiring a freelance blog writer to do it for you.
Hiring a Blogger To Attract New Business
Sharing helpful ideas and insights through your business blog will help you grow keywords and backlinks for your website. The more your SEO improves, the higher you will rank organically in the search engines.
The biggest benefit of investing in your SEO through your blog content is that you can reduce spending on Google ads, social media ads, and get free leads from organic traffic.
Finding The Right Blog Writer Is Difficult
There are three challenges when finding the right blog writer for your business:
- Finding the right blog writer at the right price to make the investment valuable. While you can spend only a few dollars to get something written, it might make sense to invest more money to increase the quality of the blog content.
- You want a blog writer who can translate your industry knowledge into helpful and engaging content. Ideally, if they have some industry experience, that is even better.
- To get the best results, you must ensure the freelance blogger you hire has some understanding of SEO, Keywords, and how to rank in search engines.
With these challenges in mind, here are ten tips to help you hire a freelance blogger to write your small business blog:
If you are paying someone to blog for you, what is your role? What do you need to do to make sure the posts are suitable for your business blog? Here are ten things to do before, during, and after you hire a blogger to write for your business blog.
1) Decide Which Kind of Blog Posts You Need
Blogs come in all different forms. You can share news about your business, product specials you’re offering, industry news, new product commentary and reviews, interviews with customers and industry experts, how-to articles for your niche, top 10 lists, short bios of employees, etc.
Some of these blog topics are easier to write than others. Typically, you will pay more for a post that requires more research (such as interviewing an employee or researching a ‘how-to’ article. Generally, any blog post that is well researched will take longer to write as well. But remember that informative and useful blog content and will generate more search engine traffic and web links.
2) Start with Search Engine Basics
Having quality content that is interesting to readers only is not enough today. Your business blog posts must include the right keywords for the search engines to begin ranking them. Blog writing for SEO takes a little more expertise and costs a little more. An SEO content writer will first do keyword research for you to see if a particular blog article is worth writing.
If your blogger doesn’t have an SEO background, you may need to do a little more work to optimize your blog posts for Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). You can hire an SEO expert to do this, or you can hire an SEO blog writer who does both.
3) Be Prepared to Pay $100 Per Article
Today there are a ton of freelance blogger platforms like Fiverr and Upwork that offer freelance blog writing for $10 or $25 per article.
However, the issue with low-cost blog writing is that it lacks quality.
Blog writers who charge less than $100 per piece have to write a lot of articles to make a living. That means that they can’t spend the time needed to create a quality piece. Anything worth doing well takes time, and if you are not willing to pay somebody for the time, then you will sacrifice quality.
Low-cost freelance bloggers are everywhere, but very often, their work is full of plagiarism and is usually just copied from other sites. Just like with most things in life, you get what you pay for.
Be willing to invest at least $100-$200 per blog article, and it is much more likely to get attention and rank well in the search engines over time.
One thing to remember: if you agree to do more than one piece per month with a freelance blogger, you may be able to get a discounted rate for volume. Invest in two or more well-written articles a month on your blog, and you will also increase attention and traffic.
4) Understand What a Professional Writer Offers
Everybody can write. We all write emails and text messages all day. But that doesn’t mean that everyone is a professional writer.
When you hire a freelance blog writer, they should have some experience in the mechanics of writing. They should know how to write headlines, how to create high readability in the paragraphs. They should know how to add keywords to a sentence without ruining the meaning.
Most of all, a professional writer should be able to keep people’s interest. That is no small feat online today, as people are very distracted. But if a person knows how to write clearly, and with some personality, it helps a lot.
For these reasons, you should always look to hire a professional writer. It’s ok to let somebody on your team write drafts of your blog content, but a freelance blog writer should edit it if you want it to stand out and gain traction online.
How do you know if a person can write? Simple. Ask for samples of past work. Look at their portfolio to see what they have written in the past. Review what kind of results they have been able to get for others.
Read through a few of their posts to get a feeling for their personality and readability. Only then will you know if you’ve found the right blog writer for your business.
5) Hire a Local Writer if Possible
A freelance blogger can work from anywhere. And thanks to sites like Upwork and Freelancer.com, you can access talented writers from around the world. However, if this is your first time hiring a blogger, it can help to be able to meet with them face-to-face. Perhaps they can come into your place of business and spend a day working together to get a feel for your business and the brand.
Of course, there may not be a local blog writer in your area that you feel is a good match for your business. In that case, broaden your search to surrounding cities or the same time zone.
If you do hire a freelance blogger who is not local to your area, it’s essential to make sure he or she has experience working remotely. Ideally, some references or reviews can attest to his or her efficiency.
6) Take Time To Educate Your Blogger
A good blogger-for-hire needs to learn the details of your business. At a minimum, they should know what products and services you sell. They should also understand all the industry terminology your customers use.
If you want to get your freelance blogger to understand your business better, you can start by asking them to interview your team and write some articles about them. This project will give the writer excellent training, and also create some good content to share with your audience.
Also, ask the blogger to research some of your most popular industry websites or magazines. This review will give them an idea of what written content is interesting to your site visitors and how they can
7) Schedule a Monthly Blog Review
Many businesses hire a blog writer and then leave them alone to write. This situation might seem ideal for a busy business owner, but very often, there is a communication breakdown.
Having a regularly scheduled time to brainstorm new blog topics and educate your blogger helps them to write knowledgeably. Schedule a regular half-hour in-person or zoom conversation at least monthly to plan upcoming blog posts with your blogger.
You can also review search engine ranking results and figure out which keywords matter most for your niche to focus on. Spending time together regularly to discuss what is going to make your blog’s posts more relevant and timely.
8) Keep a List of New Blog Post Ideas
During your workday, there may be new topic ideas that come to you. They may be based on questions that customers ask, or maybe they are about new trends.
Use your smartphone notes or a small notebook that you can carry with you wherever you go. You never know when a good idea might hit you. Jot everything down, so you have new topic ideas for your blogger to write about. You can then review your blog ideas list during your scheduled meeting.
9) Review New Blog Posts Before Posting
You don’t need to act as an editor for your blog writer. Simply review each blog post for accuracy and the correct use of any industry-specific terminology.
If you have feedback for your blogger, you can give it to them to do a new draft before posting. While it’s a good idea to publish blogs regularly and quickly, your blog posts need to be good enough quality to reflect the professionalism of your business accurately.
Finally, don’t nitpick the work of your blog writer, or you’ll end up spending too much time rewriting, and the content will be delayed in getting posted.
10) Promote Your Blog Content Regularly
It’s a company’s responsibility to promote blog posts. Your blogger’s job is to write and potentially post your blog content.
Unless you’ve hired your blogger to assist with your social media and SEO link building, it’s up to you.
Always share your new blog content with your customers in your email newsletter, through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. You can even share blog posts as updates on Google My Business.
Remember that content creation is different than distribution. To get people viewing your content takes a different skill set, and hard work, just like blog writing itself.