Whether you’re a solopreneur or the owner of a successful and growing business, you probably have a blog for your company (and if you don’t, you need to start one).
With your website, a company blog acts as your core branded destination on the internet to where all of your online (and offline) activities lead potential and existing customers.
A company blog is a place where you can offer meaningful and relevant information to your audience and build the brand experiences and brand perceptions that you want customers to have.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and other social media destinations, you’re in control of your company blog. It’s an essential part of your content marketing strategy and should be prioritized as such.
Who Has Time?
Writing, managing, and marketing a blog is time consuming. As a business owner, you might not have the time to blog on a daily basis. Successful blogs are updated frequently with fresh content, so a stagnant blog won’t help your business. In fact, an inactive blog could hurt your business.
You Need Help!
If you don’t have time to learn and do everything required to run a successful company blog, then you can hire a professional blogger to help you. Most professional bloggers work from their own homes as independent contractors or they offer blog writing as part of their company’s marketing or freelance writing services.
It’s important that you hire a professional blogger, not just any writer. An experienced blogger knows how to create a successful blog.
They have the experienced needed to immediately start writing compelling content for you, interact with your audience on your blog and across the social web (if you want them to), promote and market your blog, optimize it for search engines, analyze performance results, and more.
Pricing will depend on the blogger’s experience and which tasks you want him or her to do for you (e.g., writing, finding and designing images, marketing, search engine optimization, performance tracking, and so on).
Be Careful!
If you decide to hire a professional blogger, make sure you have a complete understanding of that person’s blog writing, management, marketing, and search engine optimization experience (depending on what skills you need and want to pay for) before you hire him or her.
Not all professional bloggers are the same. Experience counts a lot when it comes to hiring a blogger who can actually help you grow your business through your blog.
You get what you pay for, so hire wisely. Your company’s future success will be greatly affected by your blog investment decision today.
Originally published 1/4/15. Updated 1/17/19.
Susan Gunelius
Susan Gunelius is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Women on Business. She is a 30-year veteran of the marketing field and has authored a dozen books about marketing, branding, and social media, including the highly popular Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing, 30-Minute Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing for Dummies, Blogging All-in-One for Dummies and Kick-ass Copywriting in 10 Easy Steps. Susan’s marketing-related content can be found on Entrepreneur.com, Forbes.com, MSNBC.com, BusinessWeek.com, and more. Susan is President & CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc., a marketing communications company. She has worked in corporate marketing roles and through client relationships with AT&T, HSBC, Citibank, Intuit, The New York Times, Cox Communications, and many more large and small companies around the world. Susan also speaks about marketing, branding and social media at events around the world and is frequently interviewed by television, online, radio, and print media organizations about these topics. She holds an MBA in Management and Strategy and a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing and is a Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC).
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You bring up great points about hiring a professional blogger to write a company blog. A dormant company blog can certainly hurt a company more than it can help it. Also, for most companies, I recommend hiring someone who not only knows how to use social media, but who knows how to represent a company in the right way. I’ve had personal experience with a few companies where the owner chose to do their own social networking. The challenge with this is that they are emotionally vested in the company and sometimes they have a hard time remaining calm and professional. If someone else is monitoring their social media then the message will remain more consistent and professional. What are your thoughts on this?
Kristy, I agree. It is critical that a business owner, entrepreneur, etc. doesn’t hire a blogger (or social media/content marketer) who can use the tools but doesn’t understand how to write, what branding is, and what marketing is. The company’s results will absolutely reflect the depth of experience that the blogger (or social media/content marketer) has.
There are absolutely benefits to small business owners, entrepreneurs, etc. doing their own blogging and social media marketing, but as you mention, they do need to make sure they’re the type of people who can handle it. The truth of blogging and social media is that the anonymous online audience will say mean things. They’ll say REALLY mean things. Not every business owner can separate themselves when they need to, and the results of taking things personally rather than professionally could be detrimental to a business..
Bottom-line, each business owner needs to determine what they’re actually capable of doing (i.e., which tasks they’re right for and which tasks they’re wrong for). If they’re the wrong person for the job, then getting help is critical. Of course, that’s one of the keys to being a good leader–recognizing when you need help, right?
One way a company can help ensure the message they want to be delivered is delivered is by working with the professional to develop a marketing plan (which should be done anyway). This way, the owner can approve content before it goes out. And as they become more comfortable with the professional, they can slowly turn the reigns over as their comfort level increases.
Kristy, I agree!