Ah, the painful task of writing content for your company blogs — which is still extremely important if you want to be relevant in your industry today.
Writing content can be rather tricky — especially if you’re a small marketing team. I know large marketing teams with five to fifteen plus people in their department dedicated to marketing tasks, and they are still struggling to get their content done.
You have to sit down (or stay at your standing desk if you’re like me), concentrate, focus, create a framework, and plan in advance, so you’re not falling behind each month. It’s much more laborious than pulling up a video camera and just recording a quick clip.
Many companies turn to freelancers to write their blog articles and newsletter — or produce their long form content. Sometimes, they’ll hire SEO freelancers to write content to boost SEO on their website.
I’m here to tell you, from our 20 years of experience supporting hundreds of different organizations in getting their content done — hiring freelancers is not going to get you the marketing results you deserve.
Most of the time, you end up with the opposite of the effect you want. And spend even more time, money, and energy than you realize.
We found out a long time ago: You can’t just go out, hire a freelance writer, and magically get content with the reach, results, and constancy you need in modern B2B marketing.
Do you know everything hiring a freelancer to get your content done entails? First, even if you hire a freelancer who’s an expert in your industry, they may not be a marketing expert. They may not know how to communicate your marketing message. They may be so close to the material — and working in a vacuum — meaning you will end up having to manage your freelancers a lot more than you would other options, and it’s going to cost you a lot of time and energy that should be spent on higher impact activities.
What happens when you get that article written up? Well, if we’re talking in terms of actual marketing impact, you don’t just need an article, right? Your article needs graphics, backlinks, and research checks. It needs to match your brand voice, have strong calls to actions, and much more to be ready for distribution. If you’re doing it right, each piece of content needs optimizing for your website, for social media, and again for sending to your email list.
If you fully calculate the staffing you need to produce a single blog post, you’ll need not only a writer, but also a project manager, graphic designers, and content and copy editors. I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve checked out on people’s websites — people who’ve told me they’re using freelancers — and found embarrassing grammar and spelling mistakes in their content. And I’m no grammar expert myself btw, so it’s even worse when I catch it!
And what if your freelancer ups and leaves or changes careers or something else happens, and they can’t serve you to the extent you need? You spend more time, money, and energy that could be allocated to higher impact marketing activities.
Although it may seem like it’s cheaper to leverage freelancers to get your content done, realize it’s costing you much, much more than you think.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “Dang, dude! We really need to get our content done and we’re just stuck. We’ve also tried this route, and we agree with you. It doesn’t work.” I have alternate recommendations for you.
There is a plethora of fantastic organizations out there who can manage the entire process with dedicated project managers, writers, designers, marketers, editors, distributors, etc. — a whole team to manage the entire flow of your content for you, and our A-team at Active Blogs has been included in that category for over 20 years now.
Results? Take your content production time down from maybe 40, 60, 80+ hours a month to two hours or less. So, yes, you can go use freelancers; I’ve used freelancers for various different things. This message might even be more for your CEO or a decision maker in your company who’s like, “Hey, go hire writers if you can’t get it done yourself,” and then months later they’re like, “Why haven’t we published a blog in weeks???” The freelancer dilemma is the reason, my friends!
Once you’ve got the content machine up and running, and you have a process for producing it with the right partner, you’re able to get much more content out in a much shorter amount of time — without as much labor and babysitting on your end.
So, don’t get me wrong, folks. I’m not bad-mouthing freelancers by any means. There’s a lot of great freelancers out there. The big picture point I’m trying to make here is: If you really want to be winning at this content marketing game — and be as consistent and valuable as possible — and ensure you’re not just adding a bunch of noise to the digital world, it’s in your best interest to avoid going straight to freelancers and consider using a content marketing organization that can get it done for you — and get it done right — like our A-team at Active Blogs.
To your success!
