Let’s talk seriously about blogging for a moment.
If your website already supports a company blog, then you know that your business blog is an important marketing activity. If you do not yet maintain a business blog on your website, you should. It is an important utensil in your marketing toolkit that helps you build your customer base and maintain relevance.
Either way, you face the question of whether to write your blog posts in house or outsource your content creation. Perhaps you’ve ruled out outsourcing because you think you’ll save money by doing it yourself. Naturally, we have some thoughts on that.
Why It’s (Often) Not Worth It to DIY Your Business Blog
First, let’s review a few statistics underlying the efficacy of blogging itself. According to HubSpot, companies that blog regularly experience better marketing results. Specifically, of the over 1,500 customers the company studied, the ones that blogged had 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links, and 434% more indexed pages.
Such statistics show a good return on your blogging investment, do they not? More visitors mean higher visibility. More inbound links mean an increased chance that your visitors will stay longer on your site. Perhaps they will leave contact information, producing leads which you can convert into sales. More indexed pages means your site is more visible to the internet search engines. That increased visibility will bring more new visitors to your site, making your site easier to find for even more new visitors. It is the circle of our digital marketing life, and it all starts with blogging.
Blogging is hard work, so who’s going to do it?
Content writers research and write blogs on various topics for their clients every day. Their years of experience make them experts in research and experts in distilling that research into writing interesting, SEO-optimized articles. At first, staff members may find blogging a fun task, a break from their regular duties; however, there quickly will come a point when you have to ask yourself whether outsourcing this function is the way to go, rather than DIY.
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that each blog takes 3-5 hours to research and write. We know that the minimum rate to remain visible to Google as an active site is one blog each week. Using that as our benchmark, four monthly blogs convert to 12-20 man-hours each month to keep up with the blogging task. That’s equivalent to a part-time employee doing nothing but researching and writing company blogs for a week. The reality is that it will most likely take even more man-hours when the blogs are written by staff members who are not experts in research and writing. And, as the old saying goes, “time is money.”
Your efforts and your staff’s time would be better spent on tasks that grow your core business and have money-making potential. For that activity, you are the in-house experts.
So let’s face it. Writing blogs will cost time and money, no matter who does the work.
We understand that you already feel that you spend more time on building your core business than there are hours in the day. We also understand that you have more core expenses on which to spend your company’s treasure than you — well, you get the idea.
The point is that an outsourced expert in writing and researching can get the job done in less time and, therefore, for less money out of your company’s coffers. The question then becomes whether your time (or your staff’s time) is worth less than it costs to outsource the blog. Blog posts written by an expert writer working for a company that specializes in content writing is simply going to cost less than blog posts written by you or your staff. The writing company’s business model demands it.
One final word: consistency.
For effective blogging, consistency is the watchword. Consistency means a higher return on your investment of time and money. If you are writing your own blog, or if someone on your team writes the blog, there will come a time when core business activities must take precedence over the “extra” task of writing a blog.
Consistency will fall to the wayside. ROI will fall. Everything you’ve gained by blogging consistently over the previous months will mean less. Visitors who no longer find new content when they visit your site will stop coming. On the other hand, when you outsource website content, the company you choose to work for you focuses entirely on creating quality, relevant content for your blog. The writers will base their articles on the interests that you communicate and the keywords that you provide. They will tailor their work to suit your audience. And the company’s writers will do so consistently for you week after week because their job is to make your blog your marketing success story.
Small business owners are very good at doing a lot of different things, and usually feel like they must do all of those things themselves in order to run their business effectively and minimize expenses wherever possible. But every business function has an expense: the only question is whether it’s going to be money or time that you spend. If writing your blog comes easily to you or your staff, and you’re able to keep up a consistent presence week after week, more power to you. But if not, continuing to DIY your business blog probably just isn’t worth it.
