| The Cost to Do it Yourself | |||||||||||||
| Task | Monthly time required | ||||||||||||
| Managing writers Finding qualified writers, training on your business, managing their schedules and demands |
3 hours | ||||||||||||
| Content strategy Identifying top-selling keywords, coordinating with internal marketing efforts, prioritizing for writers |
1 hour | Generating ideas Coming up with ideas around each keyword that will drive business and be interesting to read |
3 hours | Editing Receiving content from writers, making edits, asking for revisions, getting internal signoff |
7 hours | Publishing Copying over Word document, finding images, formatting for readability, adding tags, proofing, pushing live |
4 hours | Reporting Trying to figure out if anything you’re doing is actually growing the business |
2 hours | Media Management Media strategy, planning, ongoing optimization across various channels |
20 hours | TOTAL MONTHLY TIME SPENT Note: Does not include cost of hiring writers |
40 Hours x your hourly value |
The importance of a brand’s content strategy cannot be overstressed. It doesn’t mean advertising has gone away, but because of the sheer volume of information available to everyone all the time, the impact of traditional advertising channels isn’t what it used to be. That’s where a great content strategy steps in.
One of the pillars of the content strategy is the blog, even when mobile social media is all the rage. Building your content strategy solely based on Tweets or Facebook posts is like placing a roof on top of support posts: it makes a great picnic shelter when the weather’s fine, but when things get difficult, you’re going to wish there were supporting walls to hold everything up.
The successful content strategy relies on a lot of just plain research, because content works best when it is uniquely suited to the ideal customer you’re trying to reach. Therefore, you have to understand what they’re like, what questions they have, what they’re influenced by, and what kinds of content they respond to best. A great content strategy also depends on knowing what your business objectives are, whether that’s building a social following, getting press coverage, or increasing online conversions.
It’s not enough to have a handful of staff members, or an intern create what Russell Sparkman of Fusion SparkMedia calls “random acts of content.” A content strategy represents a true commitment, whether that’s by someone you hire specifically for content creation or whether you choose to outsource to a blog writing service. Want to see how much it’ll cost your business each momnth to run its own blog? Just click the calculator.
Having a copywriter on staff can be fantastic, particularly if you’re in a specialized field and need a subject matter expert. If you elect to create such a position, you’ll want someone with several years’ worth of experience, preferably in your industry. They need to have initiative, work well with minimum supervision, have a knack for paying attention to details, and understand the importance of the editorial calendar and deadlines.
If you live in a typical American city, like Chicago, the median annual salary for this person is just under $64,000. To attract and retain someone of the right caliber, you will need to put together a decent benefits package as well. If your content writing needs increase, then you’ll need to think about hiring additional copywriters.
How Outsourcing Works
Outsourcing to a blog writing service means you don’t have to find and hire a copywriter, so you can get started with your content writing strategy sooner. The range of services offered is fairly broad, so if you just need a professional writer to create a weekly blog post and email it to you in a Word file, you can get that for around $50 per week. You can also get a blog writing service to develop ideas, do SEO keyword research, assign posts to writers, send them through editors, upload them directly to your blog, and promote those blog posts. You can get services that fall between these two extremes as well.
As with any outsourced service, you can find blog writing services that are exemplary and that you would want to write your biography for you. They know how to make a post gain traction and understand what makes content go viral. You can also find blog writing services that are atrocious – unprofessional, slow, hard-to-reach, and generally clueless. Fortunately, as businesses understand more about the importance of a strong content strategy, these latter types are increasingly being flushed out of the gene pool.
“Viral? ‘Viral’ is practically my middle name.”
Benefits of Outsourcing
Perhaps the biggest benefit of outsourcing, particularly for the small to medium business, is the cost savings. You don’t have to hire a writer and cope with paying his or her salary and benefits, and then be left cold and alone when they take a job elsewhere. If your blog writing needs are greater during certain times of the year, outsourcing to a blog writing service allows you to scale up your content production easily and economically.
If you are planning a major marketing push, and you need for your content production to fall in step, that probably means doing some SEO research, promotional activities, and social media tie-ins. An experienced blog writing service can often provide these things, so your most critical blog posts are exposed to more of the people you want to see them. The best blog writing services have a range of subject matter experts, so if you need to go in-depth with a series of blog posts, or do something different like create a whitepaper or an eBook, you can do so without it being a baffling, costly ordeal.
A Finely Tuned Content Production Machine
A content strategy is a business strategy like any other, in that it must be planned and executed with consistent, high quality in order to deliver the ROI that you want. Say you’re a company in Chicago thinking about putting a copywriter on staff. Assuming you can find someone with the chops and the drive to do it right, you need to be prepared to spend around $64,000 a year, plus benefits.
For that amount of money, you could purchase 1,280 single articles from Media Shower. But even better, we offer monthly pricing packages where you pay a set monthly fee and we deliver the services that do the most with what your budget dictates, with the focus on making measurable improvements over what you’re currently getting. We offer the flexibility to do everything from delivering blog posts to you to do what you want with, to posting directly to your blog, to doing SEO and keyword research as well as idea generation and blog promotion. Plus, we make scaling your blog writing package up or down easy.
Media Shower has worked with startups, Fortune 500 companies, and everything in between, across a huge range of industries. We have subject matter experts with backgrounds in fields like business, law, and STEM, as well as the SEO professionals who know how to give your posts maximum exposure. We succeed by helping you succeed, and delivering a positive, measurable return on your investment. Are you at that crossroads where you know it’s time to get serious about your content strategy? Give us a shout, and request a free content marketing assessment, so you can learn about the practically limitless world of options available to you. We also highly recommend you check out The Ultimate Guide to Blog Writing Services.