Do you have a professional or commercial blog that is underperforming? Maybe it’s failing to increase your web traffic. Maybe it isn’t helping your bottom line. Maybe it’s becoming a chore that gets postponed day after day, week after week until the entire project seems like a waste of time. When faced with this situation, many businesses look for a blog writer to come on board and start adding posts; but a far more effective approach is to work with a blog management service.
What Is a Blog Management Service?
Unlike freelance writers, blog management services are companies that can add insight and strategy, in addition to posting fresh material. They work with clients to create a blog that will become a generator of traffic and revenue. This process rarely happens overnight, but the compounding effect of posting targeted, SEO-driven material will reliably increase a company’s online profile and lead to more business.
5 Reasons NOT to Hire a Blog Writer
Freelance Blog Writers Create Content While Lacking Strategy
One challenge with freelance bloggers is that not all of them are looking at the big picture when it comes to your blog. Content writers get paid based on the number of words they generate. In many cases, they are creating content for multiple clients.
While many of these freelancers are gifted writers and can produce good copy, there is no guarantee that they have time to do all the extra work of creating an SEO strategy for your website and blog. If they do, you can expect to pay extra.
Freelance Blog Writers Can Be Unreliable
There are a couple of risks with relying on just one writer. First of all, if the writer becomes overwhelmed with other clients, you may find your own blog becoming an afterthought. Furthermore, if the blogger decides to take a vacation (or quit entirely) then your blog will suddenly be left hanging and you’ll need to start the search all over again.
Freelance Blog Writers Have a Limited Ceiling
It’s also true that one freelance blogger can only do so much. If your blog is posting on a weekly basis, one writer may be able to keep the blog afloat and current. Still, even the most productive writers reach a maximum limit per day. Writing demands time and focus, and if a freelance writer starts to be overburdened, the quality of your blog may suffer.
Freelance Blog Writers Do Everything Themselves
If you hire a freelancer, you’re hiring one person to do a lot of different jobs in creating your blog posts. The freelancer isn’t just your writer, but also the SEO researcher, fact-checker, formatter, and editor as well. Blog companies usually have multiple people available to oversee these diverse tasks. Solo writers, meanwhile, have to check all these things for themselves, which increases the odds that mistakes will show up on a post.
Freelance Blog Writers May Need a Lot of Oversight
If you are working with a freelancer, they will often need a certain amount of oversight as they send material. This is especially true if you wind up hiring multiple freelancers, each with their own rates and work styles. In many cases, you won’t wind up saving much time at all. Instead of writing the blog, you’ll be managing all the details.
This is where a blog management service is the perfect solution. By managing the details of the blog from top to bottom, these companies really do “give you your time back,” as they are able to take care of SEO strategy, keyword research, writing, editing, and even posting.
5 Reasons to Hire a Blog Management Service Instead
Minimum Amount of Babysitting
When business owners outsource their blogging, the top goal is almost always freeing up their schedules. They know that their company blog is a valuable tool for their business, and they know that the benefits to their web traffic can be more than worth the effort.
Still, not everyone has the available time to learn how to create SEO-driven content. This is a whole specialty that has become its own niche career, and most business owners already have enough to worry about without having to learn a completely unrelated skill set. Blog marketing is best looked at as a long-term investment. The best blogs are ones that build over the course of months and years, increasing rankings while covering a wide variety of industry-related topics.
If you hire a service to manage your blog for you, there will be a certain amount of work in the beginning. You want to communicate what your blog’s goals are, after all. The advantage is that once this initial setup is done, a “managed” blog can almost be set to autopilot by the owner, as the blog company takes care of details, adjusts its SEO strategy based on current trends, and produces a reliable, steady stream of quality content.
Added SEO Insights
Blog services have access to resources that may be beyond the budget of an individual freelancer. Creating an effective SEO strategy for a company requires a certain amount of imagination, but it also requires the ability to look at big data that is constantly being updated. This almost always requires a financial investment and cutting-edge software.
By looking at search trends in your industry, a blog company will be able to see the best path forward––something that many freelancers aren’t able to do. In addition, if you’re working with a company that specializes in blog management, then it’s likely that there is a certain division of labor built into their structure.
They may have a team of SEO specialists that focus solely on researching topics and keywords, allowing the writers to focus on creating the best possible content. This helps you avoid a situation where you hire a good writer who can’t conduct SEO or a good SEO researcher who simply can’t write. You have a large team looking out for you, thinking about the big picture instead of just individual posts.
Capacity for High Volume
There are many instances where high-volume blogging can be advantageous. Is your company rebranding, relocating, unveiling a new product, or trying to reach a new audience? Any of these situations can get a big boost from an influx of SEO-driven content that is targeted to your company’s goals.
If your business goes through one of these periods, you may find yourself wanting a few weeks or months of high output for your blog. Unfortunately, a single freelancer is probably not going to be able to do this for you, but a blog company with dozens or hundreds of writers can do it without missing a step.
A Dedicated Editing Team
Even the best writers need editors. The last thing you want on your blog is a post that has been poorly edited or a post that contains loads of factual errors. These can wind up doing more harm than good.
Readers will often overlook the occasional error, but if they notice that there are a lot of them or that the information is just wrong, then this can lead to damaged credibility and a decline in customer confidence. Having an extra pair of eyes pass over material helps ensure that every one of your posts is of the highest and most professional quality.
Freelancers are often working on their own, but a blog company will have an editing system in place, meaning that no post gets published unless multiple people have taken a look at it. When your blog goes through higher standards of testing and quality control, you will notice. More importantly, your customers will notice, and that is a real benefit.
Far More Resilient Over the Long Haul
When a solo freelance writer quits, your business has to go through the process of vetting a replacement. When a writer at a blog company leaves, there are many more writers who are able to fill in immediately. This built-in resilience can save you valuable time over the course of years.
How much time will it cost you if you have to replace a freelance writer every three or four months? With a blog company, you can forget about this particular worry. The company worries about retaining their writers and sending out assignments for blog posts. All you need to do is watch the posts arrive in your inbox.
SteadyContent: Managing Blogs the Right Way
At SteadyContent, we pride ourselves on being a small business that’s built itself up over the years. We’ve been producing high-quality, targeted, SEO-driven content for businesses since 2010.
Our goal is to make sure that your blog is the most effective it can be. Of course, if you haven’t had a blog manager before, you may not have experienced all the benefits for yourself. If you’re new to working with SteadyContent, we invite you to take advantage of our introductory trial offer, where you can get a blog post for just $1. We’re confident that once you see the way we operate, you’ll be eager to work with us more. See the difference our content can make for you and get in touch with SteadyContent today!
