IT’S A BLOGGING NIGHTMARE!
Top Tips to Avoid The Blogging Snake Oil
To blog or not to blog? You’ll get a lot of debate from fellow business owners on this, but any marketer worth their salt will tell you that fresh, continually changing, and updated content is essential to building and maintaining a ranking on Google and other search engines.
Blog writing is a crucial part of any good SEO company’s package. The problem is that these services are often drastically overpriced, unethically produced, and are more often than not just digitally presented re-writes of other people’s work. There aren’t many business owners we’ve met who don’t have a content and SEO horror story or two.
In this article, My Office Help Marketing & Creative Content Manager Andrew Robinson offers his top tips for hiring a blog-writer and avoiding the pitfalls of content mills and snake oil SEO companies.
Tip #1 – The Right Writer
It seems like a no-brainer, but if you’re hiring a blog writer to expand your brand and help take you to the next level, you should be sure they know their stuff.
Every writer with experience has an extensive portfolio of work that they should be able to provide for you to browse through and judge their skill.
Is the company you’ve hired willing and able to give you the writer’s name? If the answer is no, you should run as fast as you can. If you can’t see proof of this writer’s worth, their skills, and have regular contact with them, whether by email, text, or call, then they aren’t the writer for you.
Tip #2 – Can You Speak To Them?
Whatever your package is, whether it’s one, three, five, or fifty blog posts a month, a good blog writer will set aside 30 minutes to discuss the posts, get your impressions and ideas, and narrow down details like keywords, and voice.
Whatever your package is, whether it’s one, three, five, or fifty blog posts a month, a good blog writer will set aside 30 minutes to discuss the posts, get your impressions and ideas, and narrow down details like keywords, and voice.
Your writer should be writing as you or someone in your company, not as themselves. They represent you as a brand, and you should have total control over what they produce in your name. They should also take the time to get to know your area and your customers.
The content they produce should never be generic and should speak to your customer’s needs, your business marketing goals, and your revenue.
Tip #3 – Re-writes and Control
We’ve said this before about marketing and content materials. Still, it is absolutely VITAL that you establish who owns the content being produced. If it isn’t you, then you need to walk away.
You’re paying good money for this content, and professional writing is an investment that should remain YOUR asset. If you don’t own it, they can post it anywhere else and cost you ranking authority and relevance on Google for plagiarism.
Everything a content company produces needs to include a total transfer of all intellectual and real property rights to you.
Any content that’s ever produced for you should have an exact number of revisions included in the contract. This is another thing we talk about until we are blue in the face. Some contracts force you to accept the original draft; others have expensive re-write fee structures for revisions. If it doesn’t have at
least three revisions included in the price, it’s not worth it. It should also clearly lay out the cost per revision for anything over your agreed-upon number.
Tip #4 – Plagiarism
So much content created for service companies is generic, boilerplate copy that is so similar to thousands of other pages out there that it actually hurts you, rather than helping.
You will only benefit from blog and content updates if that content is both fresh and UNIQUE.
It is absolutely key that any content produced come with a plagiarism proof – either a direct link to a plagiarism checking service or a screenshot copy of one of the bigger plagiarism tools like Grammarly, which checks billions of web pages to verify originality.
Plagiarism can also deliver much bigger financial hits. If another author can confirm that your words are similar enough to theirs that you’ve infringed their copyright.
This is also why you must ensure that any company you hire for external services has liability insurance. Most don’t, and with their plagiarized content on your site, you can be sued years later for infringement and have no recourse but to pay.
There you have it, our top tips for hiring a blogger. I’ll be back next week with more top tips.
In the meantime, to get some detailed, professional advice on this, give our friendly marketing team a call at 618.681.4030, or book online using the handy button above.
Remember, do what you do best, let us do the rest.
About the Author: Jason Shadowen
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