Author Archives: Kristen Hicks

B2B Content Marketing: 6 Data-Backed Insights for 2020

While the basics of good B2B (business-to-business) content marketing tend to stay consistent, the details of what the industry looks like as a whole change every year. To keep the pulse of how companies in the B2B space are approaching content marketing, each year the Content Marketing Institute releases their research on B2B benchmarks, budgets, and trends.

Reviewing the whole thing is worth it—it’s packed with useful data. But if you want a peek at what’s in there first, here are some of the standout pieces of information shared this year. 

  1. Businesses continue to invest more in content marketing.

No surprise here. As trust in content marketing grows, many companies expect to see their budgets grow as well. 46% said they anticipate a larger budget in 2020, and notably only 4% expect to see a decrease.

That suggests that B2B companies believe in content marketing and are seeing results they like. And it’s good news for content marketers, as it means our jobs should be secure, and bigger budgets can open up access to better resources for achieving our goals.

2. Most internal content marketing teams are small.

In spite of the trust shown through increased budgets, B2B companies are still slow to invest in full-time employees. Nearly a third of companies don’t have anyone dedicated to doing content marketing full time, and close to another quarter have only one person.

Anyone familiar with content marketing knows that it’s a lot of work. One person (or less!) handling all the content marketing for an entire company is unsustainable. For those that have grown beyond one person, two to five is the norm, which still likely means a lot of overwhelmed employees.

And somewhat surprisingly, this is a trend across business sizes. As you’d expect, small businesses are much more likely to have 0-1 person devoted to content marketing full time. But even 74% of large businesses in the survey said they have fewer than five people on the team. 

3. B2B marketers are using freelancers.

Teams of that size can’t do all the work of content marketing effectively alone. Those small teams make a lot more sense when you learn that 50% of all respondents in the survey say they outsource some of their content marketing work.

While the survey doesn’t break down who they’re outsourcing it to—and marketing agencies will account for some portion of the outsourced work—it’s a safe assumption that some of it is going to freelancers.

The most common type of work companies are outsourcing is content creation. That bodes well for us who offer B2B content marketing writing services, as well as anyone that helps companies make videos, podcasts, infographics, or interactive content. 

4. Outsourcing works.

Some in-house content marketers may worry that an outside party won’t be capable of learning your brand and audience well enough to do good work. The survey data shows no clear correlation between how successful a company is and whether or not they outsource.

That suggests that you can hire freelancers and agencies and still see success with content marketing. The right content marketing freelancer will know how to do the research to learn all they need to know about your business and audience. And hiring someone skilled to help out will definitely produce better results than trying to do everything with too few people—a surefire path to content marketing burnout. 

5. Serving customers’ informational needs is (still) important.

This probably isn’t news to anyone reading. Content marketing is all about helping your audience first so you can build a relationship, and trusting that will lead to sales down the line. Yet a third of companies in the survey said they still don’t prioritize serving their audience’s needs over pushing a promotional message.

This is a significant differentiator between those who are successful and those who aren’t. 50% of companies who report not feeling successful with content marketing don’t prioritize the audience, 88% of those who report being successful do.

There’s a place for selling in content marketing. And in fact, 77% of the most successful marketers also say they focus on creating content for different stages of the customer’s journey—so they’re making informational content and content more directly intended to help convert prospects into customers.

But for content marketing to work, you have to be willing to put the sales pitch aside until your audience is ready for it. So if you still have higher-ups pushing you to be more salesy, this year’s research can help you make the case for putting your customer first.

6. Content promotion is crucial.

Hopefully you already know how important it is to promote your content via channels like email marketing and social media. And the research shows most B2B companies have that part down. But the research also found that the top performers were more likely to include non-owned channels to promote their content.

In particular, tactics like influencer marketing, paid promotion, guest posting, and speaking at events proved to be some of the most successful methods for getting your content in front of the right people. Getting the content creation part of the equation right is a prerequisite for content marketing success, but figuring out the right promotion strategy plays an important role as well.

Conclusion

Data like this doesn’t tell you exactly what you should be doing for your business. Every B2B company needs to evaluate what your unique needs, challenges, and goals are. But knowing what other companies are doing—and what seems to be working best—can help you improve your own approach. 

Breaking Through the Buzzwords: 3 Takeaways from Content Marketing World 2019

For those of us coming up from the south, the best thing about Content Marketing World this year was a break from the Texas heat. OK, maybe I only speak for myself on that one, and the conference packed a lot of benefits beyond the cool breezes I start to forget exist in the thick of August.

Professionally speaking, one of the best things about Content Marketing World was, as usual, the ability to tap into the pulse of what’s happening in the larger content marketing industry. Amongst the insights that came through the chatter at this year’s event was acceptance that content marketing is no longer in its infancy.

Until very recently, content marketers still had to spend a chunk of our time advocating for the industry’s right to exist—making the case for why content marketing was even worth it. While those days aren’t 100% behind us, for the most part, the case for content marketing has been made. Most businesses are past the point of questioning whether they should do content marketing, and have now moved into the phase of figuring out how to do it well.

But the more conversations an industry has around how to do something well, the more the same lines and platitudes start to come up again and again. Multiple sessions this year touched on an unfortunate side effect of our growth as industry: the epidemic of buzzwords.

Robert Rose poked fun at the most common content marketing buzzwords in his talk on opening night to a response of knowing laughter from the crowd. We all recognize them—most of us have used them all at some point. 

But the thing about content marketing buzzwords is that they’re not exactly wrong. We do need to care about having empathy, and focusing on our target audience, and storytelling, and optimizing based on analytics, and earning ROI, and all those other things we all hear over and over again.

The problem is that when you hear the same words repeated ad nauseum, they start to lose meaning. Hearing that we should have empathy doesn’t help us figure out how to do so (something Margaret Magnarelli helpfully covered at last year’s Content Marketing World).

Luckily, many speakers provided specific suggestions for ways to break through the buzzwords and turn the generic advice we all know inside out into something you can use.

1. Don’t chase trends.

Joe Pulizzi’s keynote included a list of specific content marketing tips for businesses. One that stood out to me was the simple, but practical message: don’t try to do too much at once.

 Anyone that consumes content about content marketing knows that there’s a whole long list of trends that some blog post or video is always saying you must do.

Start a podcast! Invest in influencer marketing! Video content is the wave of the future! 

There’s nothing wrong with those tactics and they may well belong in your content marketing strategy. The problem is that you have a limited budget and only so much time in the day. If you spread yourself thin trying to do everything, you won’t succeed at anything.

Instead, Pulizzi recommends that you start with doing one thing well. Put your budget towards just a blog, or just a podcast, or whatever one thing you’re confident you can do a really good job with. Once you’ve built an audience in the channel of your choice, then you can diversify and bring in different content formats and tactics.

2. Make sure “optimization” takes a backseat to your brand story.

Another buzzword we all hear a lot (and not just in the realm of content marketing): optimization. As the martech landscape continually grows and more products that provide analytics come onto the scene, talk of “optimizing” your content strategy is hard to avoid. While creativity is still a big part of the game, content is becoming industrialized. Machines now have a bigger role to play in our conversations.

Doug Kessler from Velocity touched on this in his session about creating a galvanizing story. He was clear that “optimization” isn’t a bad thing. There’s definitely a place for data in building a successful content strategy. But it can’t take the place of having a clear story that defines your brand.

All those different tactics you track metrics for can’t exist in a vacuum—they all have to be connected by a unifying theme. He suggested defining a meaningful brand story first, then telling it in a million different places. Once you have that down, then turn to your data to optimize for things like tactics and strategies.     

3. Remember “audience” is more about context than categories.

Content marketers talk a lot about audience. Figuring out who your target audience is and how to talk to them specifically is both an important part of doing content marketing well—and something we’ve all heard so often that it falls firmly in the buzzword category.

Two different speakers touched on an important point that it can be easy to forget about “audience.”

Annie Granatstein from the Washington Post pointed out that “audiences” aren’t rigid categories. Often, there’s overlap between two audience categories you may target, and which category an individual belongs to can change based on what they’re currently doing. For example, the same person approaching your content in a work mindset will interact with it differently than when they’re on vacation. 

Similarly, Chris White from Capital One talked about how every person has traits that are constant, and others that become important or dominant temporarily. So someone in your audience can consistently be a movie lover, but when the toilets back up, they care a lot less about what movie they want to see next than figuring out how to fix the problem. 

In other words, context matters. A collection of demographic traits isn’t really enough to understand your audience. You also need to consider what they’re dealing with in a given moment. As White pointed out, relevance can make content that would otherwise seem dull riveting. 

On a normal day, you’re not going to watch that badly made 10-minute video about how to fix a backed up toilet, but at the moment you need it, you’ll watch it to the end.

If you can manage to deliver relevant content when your audience needs it, they’re more likely to respond well later when you start talking about your products. Capital One’s data shows that people who view blog content are 4 times as likely to click on an ad. 

Don’t Let Buzzwords Distract from Creating Useful Content

The buzzwords we’ve all encountered 100 times are common for a reason—they often tie back to worthwhile tips for your business. But you have to filter through generic advice to figure out how it applies to your business and customers.

Content marketing isn’t and never will be a one-size-fits-all solution. This year’s event provided important reminders not to get distracted by the shiny new thing. Focus on what makes sense for your business specifically. 

How to Avoid Content Writing Burnout

When a company embarks on a content marketing program, they often don’t realize just how hard creating great content is. Writing is a high-energy activity. It takes a lot of time, thought, and effort.

Research bears this out:

  • Orbit Media’s blogger survey has found the average blog post takes 3.5 hours to write.
  • Yet research into modern work habits has found the average knowledge worker is only productive 3 hours a day. The specific number of good writing hours you can get in a day will vary for different people, but there’s a hard limit for everybody (and I’d be genuinely shocked to meet someone who can do 8). 
  • HubSpot research reveals a clear relationship between blogging frequency and getting results. More blog posts = more website traffic. 

So, if you need to write a lot of blog posts, each post takes over 3 hours, and you only get around 3 good writing hours in a day for each content creator on your team—well, I’m a writer not a math person, so let’s just say it probably doesn’t add up well for most businesses. 

Content Writing Burnout is a Serious Problem

Burnout isn’t just about feeling tired, it’s a genuine health issue. If you overwork yourself for too long, it can lead to an array of health problems in the long term. But if protecting your health isn’t enough incentive, burnout will also hurt your work product. Good writing requires creativity and energy. Someone trying to crank out words while exhausted doesn’t have much of either to work with.

Avoiding content writing burnout is important both your team’s general well being, and to continue creating valuable content that gets results. 

How to Protect Yourself from Content Writing Burnout

There are no shortcuts in content marketing. To get results, you have to put in the work. So how can you do that without burning out? Mostly by working smarter, rather than harder. 

1.  Be strategic.

A strategy doesn’t just help you do better content marketing, it also helps you figure out your priorities. Someone who tries to do everything will burn out faster than someone who thinks carefully about which tactics and topics to tackle to get the best results.

Take time to learn who your audience is, what they care about, and how they learn about and consume content online. You’ll still want to do testing to see what works best, and be willing to change up the strategy you create based on the results you get. But being strategic will help you cut down on the total amount of work you do, since you’ll know where to focus your energies for the best results. 

2. Keep your goals realistic.

A lot of people don’t realize how much work creating content is until they start trying to do it regularly. Setting goals that require more writing than your team is capable of is a sure recipe for disappointment and burnout.

If the most you can reasonably create is one blog post a week and an ebook every other month, then don’t aim for two posts a day and an ebook every week. Make sure you give yourself and your team the time you need to do quality work, it’s not good for anyone if you put out rushed, sloppy pieces.

Create a content marketing calendar that helps you plan out realistic timelines for all your content pieces, and keeps you consistent in getting great content out there. 

3. Keep a swipe file.

Content marketing requires creating new, original content on an ongoing basis. At some point, you’re going to hit up against the challenge of figuring out what to write about. Having a strategy will help with that, since researching keywords, competitors, and your audience usually leads to healthy list of topic ideas.

But you don’t want to reach a day where you run through the list and get to the end. To avoid that fate, keep a swipe file. This is a folder or document where you save other good ideas you see around the web. Any time you’re doing research, browsing the web, shopping, or just going about your life and you see something you like, save it. Over time, you’ll have a file full of links, screen shots, and hastily scribbled notes you can turn to for inspiration.

When it’s time to fill in your content marketing calendar with new ideas, your swipe file will keep them flowing. 

4. Create outlines before writing.

Staring at a blank page is a notoriously frustrating experience for writers.

You know what’s easier than starting to write from scratch? Creating an outline. Then you’re not faced with a blank page when writing time comes, you already have your structure and basic ideas in place. 

Creating an outline not only makes content writing easier, it also makes the end result stronger. It forces you to do research and organize your thoughts before you start putting words on the page. Organization at the front end produces a piece that will be more intuitive and readable on the user end. 

5. Figure out your best process.

Writing productivity isn’t one size fits all. Each content writer will have to figure out for themselves what process most efficiently leads to good work. Analyze your working style carefully and try out a few different ways of approaching the creative process to see what works best for you. 

Some techniques worth trying are:

  • The Pomodoro Technique
  • Batching your blog posts or outlines (i.e. doing a bunch all at once)
  • Identifying your most productive time of day and scheduling all your writing work within that time
  • Creating mini-milestones to work toward to keep a big project moving

Track your time as you try out different techniques and see which ones lead to getting more writing done in less time. 

6. Take breaks.

When you’re overwhelmed and looking at a to-do list for the day that’s still far too long, taking a break feels like the last thing you should do. But breaks aren’t something to feel guilty about. They’re a necessary part of the creative process. And more than that, they’re proven to improve productivity.

Taking more breaks can mean getting more writing done.

If you’re not intentional about breaks, your brain will probably force them on you. Ever find yourself scrolling Facebook when you’re stressed out and have a million other things you should be doing? 

Instead, schedule breaks into your day intentionally, and find ways to use them that help energize you. For me, an exercise break inevitably translates into more productivity in the hours afterward. For you, a nap or a few minutes of meditation may do the same. This is one of those things to test out when figuring out your best process. 

7. Outsource.

No matter what hacks you use to get more content out of the time and energy you have available, you’re human and can only accomplish so much on your own. The most important step to avoid content writing burnout is recognizing when your team is overwhelmed. At that point, you can either scale back (which will likely mean slowing down your results), or you can outsource. 

An overworked, stressed out team is a good reason to hire a freelance content writer. Someone who specializes in content marketing writing will take some of the work off your to do list, and deliver work that helps you meet your goals. 

Avoiding Burnout = Better Content

Don’t work your team to the point of exhaustion. You’re much better off expanding your team with a skilled, capable freelancer (or a few) who lighten the load. 

If you’re ready to find the right freelancer for your needs, check out how I work and get in touch to see if we’re a fit. 

10 Tips to Find a Freelance Blog Writer Who’s a Good Fit

find a freelance blog writer good fit

You know that content marketing is worth it. But boy do you find it hard to keep up with the constant, ongoing need to produce new content. And good content at that.

You’re not alone. In a survey of over 1,000 content marketers, Curata found that creating enough content on a regular basis was the second biggest challenge marketers named. Writing useful blog posts that are well researched, accurate, and substantial takes a lot of work. And internal marketing teams can quickly get overtaxed.

One possible solution is hiring a freelance blog writer. Freelance bloggers who know content marketing and SEO can deliver content that’s well written and crafted to meet your business goals. But finding a good freelance blog writer is hard. And what’s even harder—and just as important—is finding a good freelance blog writer that’s a fit for how you work.

Why Fit is So Important When Hiring a Freelance Blog Writer

In years of working as a freelancer, I’ve learned that finding and working with new clients is a bit like dating. The first few interactions, including early assignments, are often a test in compatibility. When a client and I aren’t compatible in our working styles—even if I like the business or my main contact there is really nice—it won’t be a good working experience.

Taking the time to find a content marketing writer that’s a good fit for your company’s preferences and goals, instead of just one that’s a good writer, will make your life easier in a number of ways:

  • The process of working with them will go more smoothly.
  • You’re far less likely to deal with multiple rounds of edits.
  • You won’t have as much stress from dealing with minor conflicts or misunderstandings.
  • And by getting it right from early on, you can save yourself the trouble of having to start the search all over again after a failed start.

How to Find a Good Freelance Blog Writer

Before you can find the right blogger for you, you need to figure out where to find a good freelance writer to begin with.

I get it, it’s hard. And if you’ve tried job boards like Upwork and Fiverr, you may be feeling hopeless after getting a flood of responses from writers that don’t look very good.

That’s because job sites like those are full of low-paying gigs, so experienced writers who are picky about finding good clients mostly don’t bother with them.

1. Start with referrals and recommendations.

Before you go to any online options, start asking around. Between networking events, conferences, or even past jobs, most marketers have plenty of other friends in the industry. One of them probably knows a good writer or two. Send out some emails or LinkedIn messages. If you’re in a good professional Facebook group or Slack, ask there.

If you already have a freelance blog writer you’re working with and have realized it’s time to find more, ask them as well. Freelancers often know other freelancers. And most of us like helping each other out when given the opportunity, especially if it also helps out a client.

2. Pay attention to bylines on blogs you like.

If recommendations didn’t do the trick, think about the blogs in your industry you like the most. Pull up some of the posts you like and scroll down to the bottom to see if there’s an author bio. If the writer is a freelancer, often it will say so right in the bio and it may even include a link back to their website. For example: this is what my bio looks like on one client’s site.

If there’s a name, but not a bio, do a few minutes of sleuthing to see if you can find the writer on Google or social media. Freelancers usually have both a website and a social presence, and provide information that makes getting in touch easy. And if the person you contact says they’re overbooked or isn’t interested in the type of project you offer, you can go back to #1 and ask them if they have any colleagues they can recommend.

3.  Search on LinkedIn.

This is one of the exact things the professional social media networking site is for. When you search the site for freelance bloggers, you’ll see writers who are connected to people you know first. That means you can vet them by seeing who you know in common and checking with your shared connection to see what they think of the writer.

Their LinkedIn profile will share some information about their qualifications and experience, and may even include some writing samples. I recommend also looking for a link to their website and reviewing the information there before contacting them.

4. Try good ‘ol Google.

If those steps haven’t yielded the results you want, time to turn to the main place we all go to solve our problems. But here’s the thing to know about using Google to find a freelance blog writer: you may have to do some digging to find the websites of freelancers.

If you do a search for terms like “freelance copywriter” or “freelance blog writer,” you’ll find a lot of results that are either the aforementioned low-quality job boards, or resources on how to become a freelance writer. There are two main ways to get past this issue:

  • Be willing to do some scrolling and clicking to the next page to find writers’ websites (they are there eventually).
  • Get more specific in your search terms. If you search by niche (“B2B tech freelance copywriter” or “ freelance finance blogger”), or narrow it to locals (“austin copywriter”), sometimes you’ll get to writer pages faster.

One benefit of this method is that you can trust any writer that shows up in your search knows something about content marketing and SEO. Another is that it gets you straight to the writer’s website, where you can start checking out their samples and qualifications.

5. If all else fails, create a job ad on a high-quality site.

All the other tactics on this list will help you find writers that already have an established reputation, which is why I put this one last. This one puts you in the position of having writers come to you, which means you have to do more work in going through the applications you get and vetting each one.

But while I warned you away from a few job sites earlier, there are some that are a few notches above Upwork and Fiverr for finding qualified professionals. Most of these will charge either a one-time fee for the posting, or a subscription cost for joining the platform.

If you’re local to Austin, Freelance Austin has a job board to consider as well.

If you go this route, take some time to write a job ad that provides information about the type of work you need a writer to do and the budget you have in mind. Providing project details will save you time from fielding writers that specialize in a different type of work. And with so many freelance job ads that pay pennies, making it clear you have a real budget will affect the quality of applicants you get.

How to Vet Freelance Blog Writers for Compatibility

Hopefully, you now have a number of freelance content writers to consider. Now you need to figure out which of them is a good fit for your business needs.

1. Clarify your process first.

Before you can find out if they’re a good fit for how you work, you need to know how you work. If your team is new to hiring freelancers, then take some time to work out what your ideal working situation looks like. What are your typical processes for planning, creating, and publishing content now? What would be the most seamless, natural way for someone new to fit into them?

If you come to your search with a good idea of what you’re looking for, both in terms of skill and working style, you’ll know the right questions to ask to determine fit.

2. Review their samples.

Don’t skip this step! Before you hire a writer, confirm that you actually like the way they write. That seems obvious, but if you have a big list of names, it could get lost in the shuffle. Look at the writing samples on their website. Make sure you check samples from a couple different clients, so you can better see which aspects of their style and skill are theirs versus that of an editor they work with.

3. Pay attention to what their website says about how they work.

Freelance copywriters don’t want to spend a lot of time fielding clients that aren’t a great fit either, so often they’ll provide some information upfront about how they work and the kind of clients they’re looking for. See if there’s anything on their website that conflicts with the process and preferences you outlined in step one. If so, better to move on to the next person on your list.

4. Come to your first call with questions.

Once you know what you want in the relationship and have taken time to learn what you can about them, set up an interview call. Come prepared with a list of questions you have about how they work. Some of the questions in my list for copywriters will work just as well for those looking to hire writers.

Preparation will make your calls more efficient and make sure you cover all the bases you want to in the time you have. One thing to be aware of: it’s OK to ask about price on a call, but many freelancers will avoid answering straight away and instead send a proposal in writing after the fact. That’s normal, and helps us avoid misspeaking off the cuff before we have a chance to think through the details of the project. Don’t be put off by it.

5.  Treat the initial project as a trial.

Even if you do all this right, there still may be compatibility issues that come out during your first assignment or two. For that reason, it’s often best not to start with a long-term commitment, but instead to stick with a first assignment before deciding what the ongoing relationship will look like.

Be aware that the freelance content writer you hire will probably be doing the same thing though. Don’t treat it merely as a chance for them to to prove themselves to you. If you like their work, you need to prove yourself to them as well.  A good freelance relationship is a partnership with a fellow professional, and things will go better if you approach it that way.

If you need a freelance blog writer right now…

You just happen to be on the website of one. Take a look at my writing samples and some details on how I work, and get in touch if you think we might be a good fit.  

7 Good Reasons to Hire a Freelance Blog Writer

Updated October 2020

For almost any question you have or any product you decide to buy, you probably turn first to the internet. Google—and to a lesser degree Bing, Yahoo and social sites like Facebook—has become a huge part of how we learn new information and make purchasing decisions. For businesses, that means online visibility plays an important role in being the answer people find when they go looking for what you offer.

And business blogging is one of the best tools you have for achieving online visibility.

Business Blogging Isn’t Easy

If business blogging makes such a big difference, why isn’t every business doing it? Because to do it well (and it’s only worth doing if you do it well) requires a large commitment in time and resources. Orbit Media’s annual blogging survey found that, on average, it takes nearly four hours to write a blog post.

And as someone who writes multiple blog posts every week, I can tell you time is only one part of what makes it hard. Writing requires mental energy and creativity. Most people can’t sit down and write all day long—at some point your brain gets tapped out. And if you try to write too much for too long, you risk content writing burnout.

Blogging is hard work and many businesses fail to realize just how hard it is until they get started. The dead blogs you see from time to time on business websites—ones that haven’t been updated in months or years—are typically the result of overly ambitious businesses that failed to account for how hard creating blog content on a regular basis really is.

But even though it’s hard, business blogging is worth it. The results are impressive and doing it well is absolutely within your reach, you just may need to bring in some extra talent to help. For businesses struggling to keep up with the endless work a blog requires, hiring a freelance blog writer may be the solution you need.  

You Should Hire a Freelance Blog Writer If…

Here are some of the common challenges that hiring a freelance blogger will solve.

1. Your team is struggling to meet your content creation goals.

As already discussed, consistently creating good content is hard. And trying to do more than you can reasonably manage is bad for overall productivity, and can potentially even be bad for your health.

In the Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 research, 63% of marketers who reported low levels of success said content creation was one of their biggest challenges. If the main thing holding you back is the inability to keep up with the amount of content your strategy requires, a freelance blog writer can make all the difference.

2. You want to scale up how much content you produce to get better results.

While content marketing professionals often talk about the importance of quality over quantity in content, the fact is that blogging more tends to get better results. HubSpot found that companies posting over 16 posts a month got over 3.5 times the results of those who post 4 or less.

16 posts a month comes to around four posts a week. Unless you have a large team of content creators at your business devoted primarily to blogging, meeting that goal will be extremely difficult to manage without outside help. The easiest way to scale up is to outsource some of your blog writing needs to freelancers.

3. You lost an employee and need some help picking up the slack.

Talented employees are in high demand and, even if your company works hard to make it a great place to work, some of your workers will inevitably be lured away to other opportunities. When you lose one of your best employees, you need to find someone to fill in fast. A freelance blog writer (or a few) can often help you manage your content needs while you work on replacing your employee.

4. You need help, but don’t have room in the budget to bring on a full-time employee.

For many businesses, talent is the biggest expense you have. The cost of a good employee goes far beyond the amount they get in their paycheck. You have to factor benefits into the budget, including the cost of paid time off, health insurance, retirement benefits, and unemployment and social security taxes. You’re also responsible for the cost of any supplies they need to do the job, and for additional office space if they’re expected to come to an office every day.

For freelancers, you only pay the amount they bill for the work you hire them for. If you don’t have full-time needs, you can hire them for the specific amount of work you need, and you won’t have to pay for anything beyond that. The result is that marketing departments generally save money by hiring a couple of good freelancers versus finding a full-time employee to do the work.

5. Your level of need isn’t high enough for a full-time position.

If you just need help producing a few extra blog posts a month, then it probably doesn’t make sense financially to bring on a new full-time employee. Freelancers work with a number of clients, so they don’t expect to be assigned or paid for 40 hours a week from you.

If you only need work that amounts to a few hours a week—say somewhere from one to ten blog posts a month—then finding a freelance blogger is more practical than going through the hiring process for an employee.

6. You worry you’re getting rusty and need help with fresh ideas.

When you spend your days mired in the same industry, at some point it becomes impossible to see it with fresh eyes. Freelancers are good for bringing new ideas to the table. And crucially, they can often help you see things the way consumers—who don’t spend all day, every day working in the industry—do. That’s valuable for writing content that speaks to the people you most want to reach.   

7. You’ve got great ideas, but struggle with turning them into well written blog posts.

This is the opposite issue, but a common one many people face. If you’re just brimming with ideas, but find the process of turning them into strong blog posts that are organized well for readability and optimized for SEO insurmountable, that’s exactly the skill good freelance blog writers bring to the table.

The ability to create a good content marketing strategy that includes a list of blog topics is a valuable skill to have, but it only pays off if you can execute on the strategy. If that’s the part you struggle with, outsource it to someone who excels at getting the writing done.

Hire a Freelance Blog Writer

If you’ve confirmed that it’s time to hire a freelancer to help out with your blog, the next step is finding a freelance writer that’s a good fit.

Or since you’re on a freelance blogger’s website right now. you can check out my writing samples and learn a little about how I work to see if we might be a good fit.

And even when I’m not a fit for a client, I often try to help point them in the right direction to find another writer, so feel free to get in touch with the details of what you need.