Should You Hire a Writer for Your Company Blog?

by Sarah Greenberg | Jun 2, 2022 | Content Creation

Does your company have a blog? If so, are you running it with the ease and confidence of Kat Stratford dancing on a table? Or have you hit a wall with your blog, much like when Kat hits her head on a chandelier? If you think the latter applies to you, consider me your Patrick Verona and fall into my arms.

Launching and maintaining a company blog is tough. It’s a lot more work than the rest of your company realizes. You have to know your audience very well, conduct in-depth keyword research, maintain a posting frequency, ensure the back-end of your blog runs smoothly, etc. It’s no joke. In fact, there are plenty of reasons why not to start a company blog. If you do want to take advantage of the many benefits of blogging and get better results from your current blog, keep reading.

One of the best ways to make your blog more successful and sustainable is to hire a corporate blog writer. Not sure if hiring a corporate blog writer is the right decision for your business? This blog will help you decide.

Key Takeaway

If your blog isn’t achieving the goals you envisioned and it’s taking up a lot of your time, it might be time to hire a corporate blog writer. Running your company’s blog is a lot of work. Hiring a corporate blog writer is a great way to make that work more sustainable and make your blog more successful.

What is a Corporate Blog Writer?

A corporate blog writer is someone you hire to write your company’s blog content. Corporate blog writers are skilled in writing professional online content that appeals to a particular target audience. They have expertise in writing clear, well-structured, well-researched copy that makes your company stand out from competitors. In other words, they are excellent writers with solid digital marketing skills.

You can hire a corporate blog writer by using job listing sites such as Indeed or LinkedIn. Or if you have in-house staff who would make great corporate blog writers, you can use them. Just clear some of their responsibilities so that they can spend more of their time on the blog.

The purpose of adding a corporate blog writer to your team is to save you time and increase the success of your blogging efforts. Writing content can be the most tedious part of running a company blog. You and your team have many responsibilities. And 53% of bloggers struggle with the content creation part of the process. Wouldn’t it be nice to hire someone whose sole responsibility was to write all of that content for you? With writing off of your plate, you would play a larger role in crafting the blog strategy, providing raw content for your writer, reviewing drafts and making the posts live on your website. You and your team would have more time for higher-level blog tasks, as well as your other marketing responsibilities. And your blog would stay active under an expert eye. Win-win.

The role of a corporate blog writer on your team

Some business and marketing leaders worry about handing their blog content over to a writer. They worry that the writer won’t be able to produce quality content because they don’t know the company as well as in-house employees, or don’t have the industry expertise of higher-ups. If you have similar worries, I encourage you to keep an open mind.

As a business or marketing leader, your time and expertise are still crucial to the blog’s success. Your role will include providing blog strategy, topic selection, audience analysis, content approval and more. You just won’t have to do the actual writing yourself. If you hire a corporate blog writer with strong writing, research and digital marketing skills, your blog content will be in great hands.

Key Takeaway

Corporate blog writers write your content for you. They have excellent writing and research skills, and a strong command of digital marketing practices. In other words, they know how to write strong online content for a given target audience. When you hire a corporate blog writer, you free yourself and your team from one of the most labor-intensive parts of blogging. You then have time for your other marketing tasks, blog strategy and more.

Keep in mind that while a corporate blog writer handles the writing portion of your blog, you and your team need to be involved. For example, writers will look to you for blog topics, keyword guidance, raw data or content you want them to use, revisions and more.

Should You Hire a Corporate Blog Writer?

Now we’ve come to our big question. Should you hire a corporate blog writer for your business? While I’d love to give you a straight “yes” or “no,” the real answer to this question is “it depends.” To help you make the best decision for your company, use this question to guide you:

What do I want my blog to accomplish?

The answers I hear from business and marketing leaders typically fall into one of two categories.

Those in the first category want their blog to keep their business at top of mind for customers. In this case, the purpose of the blog is to demonstrate to customers that the business is active, successful and targeted to them. I think of this category of blog as a Brander blog. The main goal of a Brander blog is to raise brand awareness for your company. Brand awareness refers to the level of recognition or familiarity your target audience has with your company.

A Brander blog, or a blog with the goal of increasing brand awareness, is perfect for companies who want to achieve the following:

• Increase social media followers
• Keep current customers engaged
• Get more business via referrals
• Gain partnership opportunities
• Gain public praise from colleagues, partners, leadership and customers
• Attract top job candidates
• Create buzz for a product launch or new offering
• Demonstrate to customers that the business is active, focused on their needs and trustworthy

For a brand awareness blog, do you need to hire a corporate blog writer?

For Brander blogs, aka blogs created to increase your company’s brand awareness, you do not necessarily need to hire a corporate blog writer. A Brander blog is not typically responsible for ranking high in Google searches or bringing a ton of traffic to the website. Rather, a Brander blog relies on your team’s effort to promote it and bring attention to your company. In short, a Brander blog is a valuable supplement to your current marketing tactics.

This means that your blog post length can be on the shorter side 500-800 words. They can also feature company-focused topics that don’t require a ton of outside research. Hiring a writer isn’t 100% necessary because there’s just less work involved when running a Brander blog.

When Does Hiring a Corporate Blog Writer Make Sense?

Business and marketing leaders in the second category want to use their blog as a main source of website traffic, leads and conversions. I like to call this type of blog a Generator blog. Generator blogs are perfect for companies who want to:

• Rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs)
• Generate website traffic that turns into high-quality leads without paid ads
• Make the blog part of the buyer’s journey, in which readers download a lead magnet, subscribe to an email list or even make a purchase after reading

Generator blogs are more labor-intensive than Brander blogs because they are responsible for generating traffic and leads themselves. And their purpose isn’t to generate just any type of traffic. Generator blogs are meant to attract organic traffic, aka traffic that they generate without the use of paid ads. This requires an SEO strategy with in-depth keyword research, proper formatting on the back-end, keeping up with search engine algorithm changes and more. The blog content itself not only needs to provide top-notch quality to visitors, but also needs to be long-form. That means at least 1,500 words.

If you want your blog to generate traffic and leads, do you need to hire a corporate blog writer?

For Generator blogs, the answer to this question is a hearty yes! Successful Generator blogs pair consistent, long-form content with a killer SEO strategy. Assigning this type of content creation and strategy to your marketing team is unsustainable. If your team has other responsibilities, they will likely burn out from the amount of content needed to generate long-term results from your blog. When your team burns out, the blog suffers. It looks bad to your audience to have an erratic posting schedule. Additionally, it eliminates a big source of your organic traffic and thus leads.

But when you hire a corporate blog writer, you free up your team to focus on the overall blog strategy and their other responsibilities. In short, you take a big step towards making your blog sustainable and successful.

How Often to Post to Your Blog

How often should I post to my blog? How long should my posts be? Knowing the answers to these questions is crucial, especially if you have a Generator blog.

Experts such as Julia McCoy and Hubspot share some important data.

• B2B buyers consume about 13 pieces of content before making a purchase. The meatier and more comprehensive your content is, the more trust you build with your buyers. (Source)
• Long-form content performs better with buyers, ranks higher in SERPs and brings more traffic to your website than shorter content pieces. (Source)
• Some of the highest rated blogs are more than 2,000 words long. (Source)
• The more content you post on the blog, the more successful your blog will be. Publishing a blog 2-4x/week has been found to result in the highest conversion rate and traffic. (Source)
• But blogging consistently is better than blogging frequently. If posting 2-4x/week is not possible for your team right now, that’s fine. Try posting biweekly or weekly, then work your way up. Posting on a regular basis will help you achieve long-term results rather than posting constantly just to hit a volume number. (Source)

Key Takeaway

To sum up, running a Generator blog requires more work from your team than a Brander one. That’s because Generator blogs are responsible for generating organic website traffic and valuable leads that hopefully become buyers. Successful Generator blog posts need to be at least 1,500 words.

Companies that run a Generator blog need to hire a corporate blog writer. Creating that amount of content on a regular basis is simply unsustainable for a team of marketers who have other responsibilities.

How to Hire a Corporate Blog Writer on a Budget

If thought of going through the hiring process exhausts you, I understand. But to hire a corporate blog writer, you don’t need to execute the long, often expensive process that you may have used in the past. There are many ways to hire for this position on a budget. Here are a few tips:

Use freelance websites such as Upwork and Fiverr. Your corporate blog writer doesn’t need to be a full-time employee with benefits. A freelance or contract writer is all you need. These websites have a ton of professional writers who have writing and digital marketing skills. Even if your industry is highly specialized, you can find a writer who matches what you need.

Look to your own team. Do you have any particularly strong writers in your company? If so, can you reprioritize their responsibilities so that they can focus on blog writing? There are benefits to using in-house writers. For example, if they need to interview subject matter experts in your company, they may have an easier time communicating and planning with them than an outsider.

Hire an intern. You can find fantastic, affordable writers by creating an internship for corporate blog writing. There are plenty of students, young professionals and professionals changing careers who want hands-on experience in the digital marketing and content world. Look for someone pursuing a degree or certification in digital marketing, content writing, content marketing or related areas.

Hire Hey Sarah. Hey Sarah can run your entire blog for you! Whether you need an end-to-end blog strategy or a writer who can take some of that tedious work off your plate, Hey Sarah can fill in the gaps on your team. You and your team will be free to focus on other marketing or growth-focused activities while your expertly-run blog brings in regular traffic, leads, brand awareness and more.

Key Takeaway

In sum, hiring a good corporate blog writer doesn’t need to be exhausting or expensive. There are several ways to hire an affordable corporate blog writer who creates high-quality, results-focused content. While all of the above options are great, the one I recommend the strongest is to hire Hey Sarah…especially if you’re looking for someone who appreciates Shakespeare film adaptations.