You know you need to blog. Maybe you’ve even published a few blog posts to reinforce your SEO strategy and drive readers to your site. But like most marketing departments strapped for time and copywriters, you need a way to churn out helpful content without eating up valuable resources.
Outsourced blogging services can help maximize your limited marketing manpower while still working toward your content marketing goals.
But too often, companies rely completely on ghostwriters or services like Scripted for original, thought provoking content. Without a strategy driving your outsourced blogging initiative, you’ll likely come away with bland, generic content that no will one want to read. To get blog posts that drive new eyeballs and even sales, you need to invest time in perfecting your pitch.
9 Tips for Using Outsourced Blogging Services
Next time you’re in a pinch to produce a blog post, use these tips for successful outsourced blogging:
1. Leverage Employee-Generated Content
A huge drawback of ghostwritten blogs is that they lack real insights from your team. Your blog should directly reflect your team’s experience and knowledge. Without those rich tidbits to show what you know and guide readers through the education process, your blog will read like every other one out there. Instead, create a system to extract real insights from your team and supply those to the ghostwriter. Armed with real-world knowledge to impart on your readers, ghostwriters can craft more revelant content.
2. Include a Keyword With Specific Usage Instructions
Is your marketing department making a push to rank for a particular keyword this quarter? Include it in your pitch to align your blog with other onsite SEO efforts. Most importantly, educate your writer on how to use the keyword. Most writers are not SEO experts. If you expect to see a keyword in the title, a subhead and naturally throughout the post, let the writer know to cut down on editing time.
3. Don’t Rely on a Keyword to Drive Your Topic
A keyword is not a blog topic. I repeat: A keyword is not the same as a blog topic. Rather, your keyword should inspire your topic.
For instance, if you’re going after the keyword “sweat shield,” supply the writer with a topic like “5 Ways Sweat Shields Save Your Confidence at Work.” Providing a specific topic will help the writer stay focused, resulting in more targeted copy.
4. Choose a Specialist
Choosing a specialist will stretch your budget a bit. But specialists are generally able to string together your ideas and fill in the gaps using their own knowledge. As a result, your final product will be much more cohesive and require fewer edits that one written from someone outside your industry.
5. Supply the Writer with Your Goals
First, you actually need to define the goal of your blog post. Do you want drive awareness around a certain problem? Or further qualify a particular audience segment? Or are you creating bottom-of-the-funnel content that should prompt readers to sign up for something? Relay your goals to the writer so you're on the same page. Take it a step further and equip the writer with a specific call to action, link and context around the service or offering you’re naturally trying to promote.
6. Provide Detailed Audience Persona Information
This step is so incredibly important yet so often overlooked. You created your blog for a specific audience; writers need to know who they’re speaking to! When content doesn’t draw from specific pain points or a mindset your audience can relate to, it won’t capture their attention. Define the audience for your blog post, and provide a detailed description to the writer beforehand. Rich details about the audience (such as their role, pain points, age and income range, etc.) set the writer up to create more engaging content.
7. Equip the Writer With Original Information
You’ve chosen to outsource blog writing to take tasks off your plate. But expecting a writer to come up with all the ideas is a recipe for boring content. Engaging content centers on real-world experience and serves up fresh ideas. Supply the writer with unique points and lessons learned that readers can’t find elsewhere on the web. It will require a time investment upfront, but the meat of your content should come from within the company.
8. Provide Guidance on Structure, Tone, Etc.
Outsourced writers aren’t mind readers. They won’t know your expectations for a blog post unless you clearly lay them out. Are you looking for scanability in a blog post? Instruct your writer to use bullets, subheads and bolding to add structure and break up the sea of text. Is there a specific tone or emotion you are attempting to evoke in readers? Tell the writer! The more guidance you can provide, the happier you’ll be with the final product.
9. Develop Relationships With Good Writers
Good writers are hard to come by. When you find someone who has experience in your industry and can bring your ideas to life, start a conversation and request the writer again. As your writer learns more about your company, goals and what successful content looks like to you, the writing will only improve.
Outsourced blogging resources can work. But they shouldn’t serve as your only blogging vehicle. You should only use these services to bring your own ideas, insights and SEO goals to life in a way people can understand.
At Human Marketing, we work with clients to scale their blogging efforts through outsourced blogging services. By plugging into their teams, we help extract right insights that result in helpful, experience-driven content. Need help getting your outsourced blogging inititative off the ground? Learning more about our content marketing services.
