Prepare for extreme whiplash.

Quick important note: SEOs and content marketers have been using AI-powered tools for SEO research for years (think Surfer, Clearscope, MarketMuse, et al).

In this post, I’m referring specifically to using an AI-powered Large Language Model (LLM) tool—like OpenAI’s GPT-4, ChatGPT, Jasper, or any of the other myriad tools using OpenAI’s API—to write content that has SEO intent behind it. That means using any of the above to produce full articles, paragraphs, landing pages, etc. that you intend to rank on Google.

There are other use cases for these tools, e.g. headline writing/brainstorming, writing meta descriptions, but this post is about writing the content itself using AI.

To attempt to somewhat-satisfactorily answer the twin questions, is AI content good for SEO? Is AI content bad for SEO? we need to start with what we know.

Thing we know #1: using AI content for SEO is still an uncertain thing

Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying, extremely naive, or arrogant to the point you should run.

There are zero people not under Google NDA who know how Google will react to AI content in the future. Google itself probably hasn’t decided, and will most certainly evolve its thinking over time.

What this means for you

While all SEO is full of ‘it depends’ and best practices that really should be tested, this level of uncertainty around AI = serious risk. If Google decides to slap down AI content, it could do so in a couple of different ways:

1. similar to how they’ve stated they’re beginning to deal with spam links: devalue any individual piece of content written by AI, or
2. websites with AI content (particularly a lot of it) could receive a sitewide penalty and disappear from the face of the planet Google.

So, yeah, worst case, each piece of AI content you publish is like planting a ticking timebomb with a broken countdown display on your website. Programmatic SEO, long a hotbed of risky SEO practices, has become a common use case for AI content. As we’ll see in the next section, results are… mixed.

All that said: while publishing straight AI output to your website comes with risk, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use AI to make you more efficient or give you a leg up in certain situations.

Thing we know #2: Google has already penalized websites with large amounts of AI content.

The theoretical future Google penalties described above aren’t all theory. We have examples already of websites with full, sitewide penalties. Here’s a search traffic graph from one such site:

I’ll let Kevin Indig, who did the case study, explain it here in more detail, but an important caveat on this one is this was bad AI content. Go read it in the article if you don’t believe me, but, like, barely readable bad (and funny, because it’s about celebrities).

Here’s another (undisclosed site)from Mark Williams-Cook (one of my favorite people to follow on this topic):

My caveat on this one: Mark published 10,000 pieces of AI content on this site. This means there are two reasons his penalty could have occurred that don’t condemn AI content as a whole:

1. As Ross Hudgens has been talking about a lot recently, there’s serious danger to publishing at extreme scale very quickly. This could have been the cause of Mark’s penalty, and it had nothing to do with AI. (Personally, I doubt this was the only factor, which leads to …)
2. This was pure, unedited AI content.

Point is: The precedent is here, now, folks.

Ross recently published another case study with AI content that didn’t do so well:

He’s careful to note that early results didn’t tell the whole story. When someone shows your a graph featuring AI content getting indexed and ranking (the big spike on the graph), that doesn’t mean the hammer doesn’t drop eventually. 

In this example, the AI content didn’t sink the website, but the growth was a mirage.

Ross also points out that while AI content can rank, it rarely converts. In his words “[AI] case studies will rarely show conversions, as this content will convert horribly due to poor quality.”

What this means for you

For the love of your website, if you’re going to publish AI content, don’t publish shitty AI content. AI needs a human editor for now. And, AI content gives nearly anyone the power to pump out huge volumes of content. That, without really knowing what you’re doing, is asking for trouble.

If you do publish hybrid content produced by AI and edited by humans, keep a very close eye on it.

Thing we know #3: folks are out there ranking pure AI content.

Wait, what?

Yeah, this is kind of the opposite of Thing #2, but with a healthy dose of nuance.

That nuance is some combination of this list:

• Scale isn’t massive (therefore the risk of being caught is lower)
• The content is better (if it’s pure AI, that means better prompt engineering and fine-tuned models)
• The sites are in less competitive niches (less competition, just easier to rank stuff)
• Content is shorter (the shorter it is, the better AI is at doing it. AI breaks down spectacularly on long-form)
• They haven’t been caught (yet)

My formative years in SEO were learning from Whiteboard Friday, where the thinking was if you’re not doing 100% white-hat SEO, you’re an idiot — Google is just too smart. I’ve now seen enoughto know there are plenty of people who win the cat-and-mouse game against Google for long periods of time and make good money doing it.

As I mentioned before, programmatic SEO is one big use case for this. Kevin Indig is working on this and getting results. (A reminder: programmatic SEO refers to creating thousands of pages based on a database of variants – [business keyword] + [location]; thing to do + [location]; Glassdoor ranking for [job title] + salary – stuff like that.) 

Zack Notes and the folks at Sandbox SEO are doing a similar thing:

As you can see from Zack’s post, this stuff is getting indexed, ranking, and driving traffic. But in the comments, it becomes clear that there’s not a lot of monetary or conversion value to this content. It’s not a space that’s monetized; Zack refers to “publishers vs publishers” as being the competition for this content.

Verblio has built hundreds of local landing pages for local SEO that also use this principle. The difference – and why we’re seeing sustained results – is that we’re taking our own advice and having humans edit every piece of copy before it’s published. The result? Our stuff gets indexed and stays indexed.

What this means for you

If you’ve got black-hat skills and want to duke it out with Google, go for it (at least on websites where you’re ok with seeing traffic go to zero).

If ya don’t, or if you don’t work on sites where you can afford to have that risk tolerance, steer clear of publishing pure AI (read: unedited Jasper/ChatGPT/etc) content.

Thing we know #4: Google has commented directly on AI content

Before you get annoyed at me for burying the lead, read this in context of what you read above. And then read the what this means for you bit.

On February 8th, 2023, Google published this blog post about AI content and SEO and updated its SEO fundamentals documentation to address AI content. This builds directly on their January 12th reply to a lengthy thread:

Here is what Google said on Twitter on January 12th, 2023:

There isn’t a whole lot of net new info in here, though it’s nice to hear it directly from the source. Talk continues of not using AI for SEO evil, and, notably, “it’s just content” and “… about 10 years ago, there were understandable concerns about a rise in mass-produced yet human-generated content. No one would have thought it reasonable for us to declare a ban on all human-generated content in response. Instead, it made more sense to improve our systems to reward quality content …”

Holy mackerel, you say. We’re in the clear! Google themselves said so!

Hold on to your hats, folks, things are about to get meta. In the screenshot below, check out what this gentleman Peter, who’s clearly seen this Google-makes-statements-on-SEO rodeo before, commented on the LinkedIn thread where this tweet was being discussed. Then check out how our own head of content (and host of the Content Bounce House podcast) Ryan Sargent responded to my pointing out that comment in our internal Slack channel:

If I just got too meta on you,the point is this: There’s a long history of Google saying something about SEO and search ranking factors, then feeling little to no obligation to stand by it. The definition of “primarily for search engine rankings” is also way open to interpretation.

Finally, here is what Google has previously said about user engagement signals: (JK Google doesn’t like to talk about user engagement signals as a ranking factor, but everyone knows they take all that delicious Chrome and Android data and use it + pogo-sticking to understand what humans think of your content.) Point of that long parenthetical is: YOUR CONTENT NEEDS TO BE GOOD TO RANK. And the problem with AI content is…

What this means for you

Again, for the love of Pete,do not publish pure AI content. If Google doesn’t punish you, people who search and find you on Google will punish you by bouncing. And then, Google will punish you.

Thing we know #5: AI detection is an arms race, watermarking is coming (or here)

Here are three things to know about this topic right now (for more on specific tools, read our deep dive):

Here are three things to know about this topic right now:

Most AI detection tools are crap

Publicly-available AI detection tools just aren’t great. They’re not smart enough, which can give you a false sense of security. They’re hard to interpret (and interpreting scores across small volumes of content can be misleading, as scores fluctuate by industry, type of content, and more).

Can Google Detect AI content? Assume Google has built bigger, badder AI detection than is publicly available

Google is heavily invested in fighting webspam, and this includes spammy AI content. So it’s probable they’ve built their own tools to detect it, and some or all of these tools will never be released to the public. (And yes, these tools will still likely be able to catch Jasper content, even if you use their Surfer integration ‘for SEO’.)

At the same time, there’s a lot more investment in AI content creation these days than AI content detection. Consider this entire topic “TBD.”

If watermarking isn’t here yet, it will be soon

You’ve heard of a watermark on a document.OpenAI is working on a watermark for content written by GPT that’s based on cryptographic methods. I’d try to explain the inner workings, but I’m not technical enough. We will give you some more details in that upcoming AI detection tools post, though.

Point is: This watermark will work by varying the probability of the next word chosen in GPT-generated content according to a pseudo-random sequence. These variances will change the words slightly, but not in a way that would be noticeable to humans reading the content. OpenAI’s ‘key,’ however, will be able to recognize the watermark by matching the probability variances, so it can definitively prove something was generated by their model. And worse, you won’t be able to remove the watermark by just doing some light editing — in all likelihood, you won’t remove the right words, or remove enough of them. This is the mother of all AI detection tools.

Ok, how does this apply to SEO? The theory goes like this: OpenAI makes this detection key public, Google uses it, detects content that was written by GPT, and punishes that content.

What this means for you

In a story that parallels many of the black and grey-hat SEO strategies of the past, AI content creation and AI detection are in an arms race. One may gain an edge, the other will surpass… you know the story. In arms races with Google, your opponent is smart, well-funded, and brutal. So:

• Do not assume lowering an AI probability score on a public tool means you’re safe. The level of sophistication isn’t there.
• Do not assume that editing AI content renders it undetectable
• Assume watermarking of GPT content is already happening. (It may not be, but the conservative approach is to assume it is.)

Now that we’ve walked through what is known about AI content for SEO, let’s move to the land of crystal balls. It’s fun in there, and, whether these predictions are right or wrong, they provide valuable insight for marketers.

SEO and AI content creation: what the experts are saying

Some very smart SEOs have put their thinking caps on around AI and SEO. Here’s a roundup of my favorites.

Ross Hudgens, CEO of Siege Media

In this LinkedIn post, Ross is commenting on AI content, but specifically using AI content to push publishing velocity (literally, how fast you’re publishing) to extreme and unhealthy levels. This applies to human content, too, but it’s much easier to achieve with AI. The point? In the short-term, extreme publishing velocity may have a positive impact on your organic traffic, but this will very likely come back to bite you. Ross’ theory: If the ratio of content to backlinks starts climbing too fast, the ‘foundation’ of links supporting the content crumbles.

Lily Ray

If you’ve been around SEO for any length of time, Lily Ray needs no introduction. And this tweet needs little explanation. Lily is predicting that what happened to the sites from the case studies way back in Thing #2 will be happening big time in the near future—a specific Google AI content update, or a broader algorithm update that includes stuff designed to target AI-written-content.

Mark Williams-Cook

Mark makes another appearance in this article with his adaptation of the classic Gartner Hype Cycle. In this case, the trough of disillusionment is the trough where your website traffic goes to zero. To provide some balance to Mark’s pretty negative outlook here, just note that recent well-informed speculation has GPT-4 arriving sometime in H1 2023. So although Gartner Cycles are often measured in years, this one … may be much faster.

Lots of naysaying from our expert roundup. Do note, though, all three of them use “mass content/high volume” in their posts. We’ve seen Google’s dislike of super-high-volume (particularly low-quality, high-volume) before, so it’s hard to argue against the likelihood of this particular use case for AI content ending badly.

Kevin Indig

Kevin is willing to make some bold statements about SGE and the future of search in an AI-powered world:

Where this all nets out (what you should take away)

Phew.

Hanging in there? It’s a lot. If you’re currently feeling some version of, ‘Huh. Well, I want the benefits of AI, but this all freaks me out,’ you’re not alone.

Here’s where I am with all this, and what I think you should take back to your lab website(s):

Assume the following:

• All of this will keep changing, rapidly. I’ve been doing this awhile, and I’ve never seen things evolve this fast. Keep your ear to the ground.
• Google has better AI detection than you have available to you, and it will only get better.
• OpenAI will soon, or already is, watermarking all GPT content. Light editing will not remove the watermark. Heavy editing still probably won’t. Running it through another, different LLM (or maybe a content spinner) probably will. But like, why?

Just say no to pure AI content:

• Beyond the SEO risk, publishing (especially poor quality) AI content represents brand risk, too. Look no further than CNET’s decision to pause its use of AI content after public backlash
• It’s not good for your human users, either. And they matter because they’re the ones who actually buy things + engagement signals
• Pure AI is so cheap and so fast, it encourages bad behavior for search marketers: publishing too much, too fast, too low quality, too far from the core promise of your website.

Create AI-assisted content with care:

• Spending 5 minutes editing Jasper output won’t make it all better. (We tried.)
• Taking care early in the process (through prompt engineering and injecting humans throughout the process, not just at the end) and using editors trained in the specifics of editing AI are all necessary to make this stuff sing (or at least go from barely readable to good reading)

Where to use AI matters:

• First, consider your website and its place in the internet. Competing in a hyper-competitive niche and have a site where a drop in organic traffic would be catastrophic to you/your client? Yeah, maybe just don’t AI.
• Don’t let your shiny new AI hammer trick you into seeing all your content needs as nails waiting to be whacked. Like humans, LLM writing has strengths and weaknesses. Deploy it on the content where it makes sense, but don’t force it beyond that.

As for me? None of the websites I work on are getting AI content on them anytime soon. They’re in competitive niches. They’re highly dependent on organic traffic for the survival of the businesses. I need people to read the content to convert. AI content might be readable, but it’s not good reading. Last but not least, I’m scared of Google.

This is not a blanket condemnation of AI content. If I were an agency serving local clients and small SMBs that couldn’t afford high-quality human content and had a sad, empty blog? Heck yeah (heck yeah to well-crafted, AI-assisted content, that is).

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for the read. If you have questions or thoughts or disagree with me, paul[at]verblio.com.

Author’s note: this article was originally published on February 3rd, 2023, and updated February 8th, 2023 with new information on Google’s blog post on AI content and SEO. I updated it again on July 31, 2023. This space is changing rapidly, I’ll continue to update this article with new information as it becomes available.

The post Everything we know about AI content for SEO (Plus what experts speculate) appeared first on Verblio.

So, I’m going to make the case that businesses should outsource content creation (or at least a chunk of it) and then dive into a quick framework for how to outsource content writing. Finally, I’ll suggest some resources for further investigation.

Here’s why you should start outsourcing (like, today):

Definitions and Questions: Content Outsourcing, Outsourced Content Writers, Oh My!

Let’s start with a couple of definitions and FAQs to make sure we’re on the same page.

What is content outsourcing?

Content outsourcing is simply the act of having someone outside of your organization create content for you, usually content to be used for content marketing and SEO. It covers everything from outsourced article writing to outsourced ebook writing to other types of content like videos and podcasts.

This is pretty broad—specifically around who you’re outsourcing too. That might be an individual freelance writer, a content writing service or platform, or an agency. Don’t worry, we’ll get into all 3 options later.

What is content development outsourcing?

Basically a fancier way of saying what I just said — development here just means developing content.

Can you outsource content marketing? Is this different than outsourcing content creation?

Phew. We could go all day on this one. The long and short of it is—there’s a lot more to content marketing than content creation. Think: content strategy, ongoing content optimization/refreshing, publishing all the content you create on your website, ensuring it makes sense as a library, creating lead magnets, offers, and internal linking to ensure the content that’s created has a logical next step in the user journey. 

You get the picture. 

Point is, someone needs to do all that other work. In my experience, outsourcing content creation is a lot easier than outsourcing all of content marketing. You might find an agency who’ll take on the whole deal, but they’re few and far between.

Are there content writing services? Platforms that focus on outsourced content creation?

You bet.

We’re one of them. Our list, so we get to go first. Rest are in no particular order, but here’s a list of top content writing services.

1. Verblio
2. Crowd Content
3. Writer Access
4. iWriter
5. Contently
6. BKA Content
7. Text Broker
8. Scripted

You’ll also find content writers on more generalized platforms for online work like Upwork and Fiverr. More on how we think we compare here.

How to Outsource Content Writing

Outsourcing content creation is a big topic. In fact, we wrote a whole e-book about it if you want to go deep. But what I’m going to do here is:

1. Outline a basic framework that’ll help you get a great start,
2. Provide additional resources when you’re ready to go deeper, and
3. Suggest a shortcut.

A Five-Step Framework on How to Outsource Content Creation

Here’s a five-step framework for outsourcing your content creation, based on everything I’ve learned over the past 12 years of creating content, testing hundreds of different writers, various platforms, and building internal teams.

Step 1: Assess your needs and budget.

There are so many ways to find the optimal freelancer to write for your business, and every price range to match.

Depending on what you need, how fast you need it, and how much expertise you require, you’ll find that the hiring spectrum of content writers runs the gamut along two major axes:

• General to Specific — How diverse is the focus of your writer? Do they have a niche, or are they a generalist?
• Marketplace to Individual — Does your writer offer their service as part of a larger platform, or do they work directly with your company?

And there are a vast amount of services (yes, including ours!) that fall into these categories:

That’s why you need to start with your budget in mind.

Starting with a budget in mind will help you understand which options are viable for you and which aren’t. While an individual who specializes in your industry may create top-notch content, you might not be able to afford them.

Legal content writers are a great example of this, as as to outsource article writing to a high-end writer with legal expertise often costs more than $1.00 per word. That’s a minimum of $1,000 for a 1,000 word article, which is about half the length you need for best-practice SEO in the legal space. You’re shelling out big bucks for something that may not even help you.

The good news is that you probably won’t have writer fees that steep in most industries—but they can still drain you if you’re not careful.

The annual report by Content Marketing Institute can be a helpful barometer for the overall content industry. Part of that publication is a section on budgets, and a lot of businesses are spending more than $100,000 per year on their content marketing in both B2B and B2C marketing:

(Image Source)

Of course, if you’re not planning on spending that much on your content this year, these numbers are only marginally useful. You ultimately need to know your business’s limits, what your competition is up to, and your industry norms as you go to make an outsourcing decision.

Step 2: Pick someplace(s) to start

Ok. Time to dive in.

My guidance: start somewhere that’s low-friction to get started. You’ll learn a lot by doing and trying. Expect you may need to test multiple places, and certainly multiple writers to find your groove.

We wrote in-depth about how to find freelance writers here.

Step 3: Test out working with your outsourcer(s)

Testing an outsourcer means setting aside a test project to actually get a feel for the way your outsourcer does business, in a far more telling way than just looking at samples from a writer’s portfolio or past work. This is how we at Verblio vet all of our potential writers to test working dynamics, finished product, editing rounds, etc.

The process you should use to test is fairly simple:

1. Create a valuable topic (or topics) that require the writer to showcase industry knowledge and researching ability.
2. Set and communicate a reasonable timeline.
3. Agree to pay the writer a fair rate.
4. Provide detailed feedback to the writer on the first draft.
5. Provide additional feedback through extra drafts, if necessary.
6. Assess the quality of the piece along all iterations (first draft and edited drafts).
7. Decide whether to hire or pass.
8. Pay the writer. (Please pay the writer either way!)

It’s very similar to hiring for any other position, only you’re looking for all of the elements I highlighted above. Any good outsourced content writer will solicit regular feedback and open communication lines along the way, and will deliver timely, polished work.

And don’t limit yourself to just one—testing a couple of writers will give you a feel for what’s possible, what you like, and what you don’t.

But with this process, there are a few temptations to shortcut. I know time is of the essence with all things business, but I encourage you to avoid these particular “shortcuts”:

• The desire to test a writer on a piece that you’d never publish
• The desire to rely on samples alone
• The desire to find someone who’s almost there

Let’s talk about why.

WHY YOU SHOULD TEST ON A PIECE YOU’LL PUBLISH:

If you try to assess your outsourcer’s ability on a low-value, low-stakes piece, there’s a good chance that you won’t assess it with the same degree of thoroughness you would on a piece that represents your brand. So low-stakes pieces aren’t exactly a great way to assess whether a writer can deliver on a high-stakes piece of content.

In other words, you’ll be shorting yourself with this shortcut.

Of course, that brings up the question of “well, what if the writer is a dud and I wasted my time and money on a piece that I wish I could publish?” A fair question—but it doesn’t change my answer.

Let’s explore a few scenarios that may play out here.

In the first, you create a high-stakes piece with a writer that delivers. Congrats, your topic selection paid off.

In the second, you still get a piece of content, but it wasn’t quite what you needed. Chances are if the writer had enough credibility to pass your initial vetting, they produced a piece of content that can be salvaged by either you or a different writer. You’ve paid for the piece, and you can have it edited into something better. Still a win.

But what if it’s a complete dud? Well, congrats—you learned how to better assess writers in the future, and you spent money dodging a bullet. 

So at the end of the day, this point is fairly simple. Test with pieces you care about!

WHY YOU SHOULDN’T JUST RELY ON SAMPLES:

Let’s talk samples. There are some just okay writers out there with outstanding samples. 

The key to understanding this point is somewhat embedded in the content creation outsourcing industry. The best agencies (that you’d want to see samples from) have a fairly intensive process, and the writer is just one cog of that machine. Behind the scenes, that writer may also be getting feedback from an army of individuals:

• An account manager
• A copy editor
• A subject-matter expert internal staff member
• The stakeholder (final publisher or client)
• Anyone else involved in the creation and quality assurance process

Meaning the writer themselves may not be the reason a final draft is so polished. 

So that really impressive sample may only be impressive because they had a top-end editor helping, or because the piece they created was heavily edited.

Point is, you just don’t know until you test them yourself—so take those samples with a grain of salt.

WHY ALMOST ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH… MOST OF THE TIME

But what if the writer is just below what you might feel is the acceptable threshold for your brand? For instance, they created an okay draft, took your feedback well, but still came up a bit short.

Should you hire them and try to “invest” in their development? Or should you pass on them in favor of a more qualified writer?

The answer here depends.

Again, most people outsource content creation because they don’t have the time (or they need an expert head to give fresh ideas). If you’re hiring for either of these reasons, they’re valid reasons to avoid this shortcut.

Step 4: Break out your content needs into buckets and scale

At this point, you’ve figured out your budget and found a writer. Now it’s time to dig deep into strategy so you can get the best bang for your buck.

The key here is to stick to fundamentals.

When you’re generating content that fall into “needs” versus “wants”, start by breaking everything into stages: top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel.

Or in other words, map out where in your funnel you need content the most, and then consider how you want to outsource content creation for it.

As a general rule, we’ve found it’s easier to outsource content at the top/middle of the funnel than the bottom. At the bottom, it’s harder and more time-intensive to convey all the nuance of your business.

(Image Source)

This is where you can ask yourself some key questions:

• What would you be comfortable outsourcing with minimal oversight?
• How does your outsourcing solution specifically fit into your content strategy?
• Is the outsourcer you’ve found qualified to help you with these needs?
• Is your content casting a wide enough net through each stage of the funnel?

These questions will help you assess whether you’re on the right track with your content creation outsourcing solution. Vary your approach as needed so you get the right balance between volume and quality.

Just as an example, here’s how Verblio handles our own internal content. A lot of our top-of-funnel content is outsourced to writers on the Verblio platform. Our middle-of-funnel content goes to a much more selective pool of freelance writers (sourced from the Verblio pool, by the way), and we keep our bottom-of-funnel or “big content” pieces in-house  with our content marketing team, which has a ton of content writing or subject-matter experience.

This allows us to prioritize (and pay for) our content as needed, and it lets us effectively create content that casts a wider net.

And that brings up my other point here: scaling.

As you design your outsourcing strategy, account for scale and volume increasing as you execute on a more robust content marketing strategy. We talked about budgeting earlier, and this is where that prep work helps you outsource content marketing with the best results. You can also take the lessons you’ve learned vetting writers to find more and more outsourcers to help.At this point, you’re well on your way past learning how to outsource content writing—but you’re not quite done! There’s one more piece I’d recommend you consider as you dial in your content outsourcing.

Step 5: Arm your outsourcer with all they need to know about writing for your company

The final key when talking how to outsourcing blog writing (or anything content creation) is to equip your writer(s) with the materials they need to deliver.

This includes outlines, applicable resources that you trust in your industry for solid, trustworthy information, all the way to a style guide of what you expect from content (including elements like tone, linking preferences, grammar usage, and much more!).

We try to address this early on with our own clients:

We wrote more about this concept here, but here’s a hint: over-communicate at the beginning. This will feel time intensive, but will pay dividends as you build relationships with your freelancers over time and save you headaches and money down the road.

Additional Resources For Outsourcing Content Creation

Here are a few additional resources if you’re ready to learn more about how to outsource content creation.

• Our e-book, How to Hire Freelance Writers That Magnify Your Inbound Marketing Results, dives deep into how to find, onboard, and work with freelance writers for inbound marketing.
•  Case studies on how our most successful clients made outsourced content creation successful with Verblio.
• Three ways to attract the top freelance writers on the Verblio platform
• 7 secrets for creating an outsourced content team [from HubSpot]
• For agencies, two resources: a case study on how a leading SEO agency outsourced content creation with Verblio, and a HubSpot agency building their agency’s own offerings on top of content created by Verblio writers.

A Shortcut

[If you clicked the anchor link to get here, you definitely need a shortcut!]

When I write content for our own content marketing, I try very hard to make sure it’s not too self-serving and is useful to folks whether or not they become a Verblio customer. I hope you found this blog post no exception.

But, time for a quick plug about Verblio, because if you’re looking for a shortcut for how to outsource your content writing, we’re worth a look—we’ve spent the last 12 years building a product designed to do exactly that. You can learn more about how Verblio works here.

PS – Why You Should Outsource Content Marketing

Note: If you’re convinced you should outsource content writing, you can skip this section. If you just read the last 3,000 words or so and are currently thinking, “wow this is going to be a lot of work”, time for a pep talk.

The biggest stumbling block I hear from folks thinking about outsourcing content marketing efforts is something to the effect of “Content is personal. No one else can tell my story like I can.”

I hear this a lot, as I run marketing for Verblio. We’re an outsourced content creation platform.

While that could bias me, I’ll still do my best to present a measured argument and make this article useful regardless of how you choose to outsource your content creation or content marketing.

So here’s what I have to share:

This ‘no one can write content like me’ stumbling block has a lot of merit. Content is deeply personal, and finding someone else who can help you capture your story isn’t easy.

Yet most of the prospects and customers I’ve talked to have decided to outsource content creation in spite of the above. (Or they’ve realized this isn’t as impossible as it sounds, more on that in the “how” section below.)

Here’s why:

1. They’ve come to the realization they simply don’t have time to create their own content (or all of it).
2. They’ve realized that writing (or at least writing well and/or quickly) isn’t their strong suit, or their time is just better spent elsewhere.

Once you’ve come to one of these realizations, or a similar one, a big part of the why behind why you should outsource content becomes a lot easier, and the logic goes like this:

• I believe content marketing will be helpful for my business.
• I want to do content marketing, but I don’t have time / I tried to but I couldn’t make the time, do the writing, etc.
• The only way for me to do content marketing is to outsource the work (or some of it).

OK, so we’ve established one big part of the why.

But there’s another big part, and it’s the same reason you’d consider outsourcing any aspect of your business. The same reason you try to bring talented people of any kind onto your team:

Outsourcing content marketing can bring a unique, expert skill set and new, powerful ideas to the table.

Whether you’re outsourcing your accounting function, your facilities management, or your content marketing, your goal should be the same. You need to find experts who will inject new, progressive ideas you haven’t thought of into your organization, and help you better execute on those ideas by delegating.

While there are other plentiful reasons you should outsource your content marketing, I’m going to call these the big two:

1. Increase your bandwidth, and ensure content marketing gets done
2. Bring experts with new, big ideas onto your team.

Now that we’ve established the why, let’s talk how.

In Conclusion

Hopefully, if you’ve gotten this far, you now understand some of the benefits of outsourcing. And, hopefully, you know more about how to outsource your content writing and the whole process feels a little more within reach than it did at the start of this article.

To leave you with two final thoughts:

1. Patience is necessary in outsourcing of any kind. Don’t expect to see immediate time savings, and don’t expect to get it perfect the very first time.
2. Because of #1, choose an outsourcing partner that enables excellent communication with your writer(s), and allows you to test a variety of writers so you can find the subject matter expertise and the voice, tone, and writing style that’s a great fit for your business.

Still have questions I didn’t answer? Happy to try and answer them.

Editor’s note: This blog post was originally published on February 21, 2018, and has been updated several times to reflect current best practices and information for 2022.

The post How to Outsource Content Writing (And Why You Should Do It) appeared first on Verblio.

Should You Outsource Your Blog Writing?

If you approach it the right way, outsourcing your blog writing comes with several key benefits:

1. Save significant time. The time to write a blog post averages about three hours.
2. Reduce your budget, especially compared to hiring a full-time writer for your business.
3. Stay flexible, increasing or decreasing the writing power depending on your needs during a given day.
4. Instant expertise through experienced writers in your industry and for your audience.
5. Better scalability as you grow your business and your writing needs increase.

In other words, it is definitely possible to outsource blog posts and do it well. And we’d know—we’re Verblio, an outsourced writing service that’s helped thousands of businesses around the world outsource their written content quickly and in a scalable and cost-effective manner.

Along the way, we’ve heard tons of questions from businesses on how to outsource blog writing. What follows are some of the most common, along with our answers and recommendations.

10 Frequently Asked Questions on How to Outsource Blog Writing for Businesses

Question 1: I’m considering outsourcing blog writing, but can an outsourced blog writer really capture my tone/style/business personality?

Writing is personal, and businesses feel like they have a unique tone or style they’re looking to capture in their blog. So the very concept of outsourcing might feel like it will, by definition, cause you to lose some of your business’s personality.

We think there are two solutions to this problem.

1. Take time to educate your writers. When outsourcing content writing, the time you put in at the start pays off in the end. Spend some quality time explaining your business and content goals to your outsourced writers. This can feel painful at first and might not seem like a time-saver, but we’ve seen it pay dividends again and again with our Verblio clients.

When they put in effort at the beginning, they create relationships with writers who require less and less coaching over time. We believe this process is so important that we’ve spent huge amounts of time building a client onboarding process designed to help our writers get to know our clients effectively. That process is so crucial, we keep evolving it. We’ve also written about working with freelance writers.

2. Don’t expect to give full control to your outsourced writers, particularly on more personal content. We often tell clients to expect the content they receive from our writers to be 85% to 95% done. But that last 5% to 15%, the final polishing and tweaking, becomes the client’s responsibility. You’re serving as the editor, and part of that process is inserting tone, style, and other unique insights about your business.

Question 2: What about quality? I associate outsource writing services with lower quality.

Outsourcing, like anything, exists on a quality spectrum. For writing, the two opposite ends of the spectrum might look like this:

• Outsource some of your writing to a freelance journalist who has written for the The New York Times (yeah, you can really do that), to
• Bad quality (think translated English, sentence fragments, etc).

Your job is to figure out where on that cost/quality spectrum you’d like to fall, and how to find a provider who can get you there. We’ve written more about your options for outsourcing here.

We’ve also produced a free, downloadable e-book where you can learn more about how to find and work with freelance writers to produce quality content for your content marketing efforts.

Question 3: Should I consider outsourcing my blog writing overseas?

In a word: no—unless you’re outsourcing to another native-English-speaking country.

Outsourcing overseas makes a lot of sense for a lot of disciplines. For example, we outsource some of our development work overseas. Writing isn’t one of those disciplines. While it’s possible to find non-native English speakers who can write English at an extremely high level, it’s very uncommon.

You’ll be searching for a needle in a haystack, and eat up savings quickly. Don’t be tempted by the low initial price tag. That advantage goes away when you waste precious time combing through writers to find the few who can cut it.

Question 4: How do I get writers for my blog?

There are a bunch of different ways to get writers for your business blog. And a number of considerations to go along with these. So, we wrote a whole post about it—our guide to finding freelance blog writers.

5 Tips to Hire a Freelance Writer or Content Creator

Going the outsourcing route? These tips can help you make sure the work you get will actually help your  business.

1. Don’t look for price alone. The cheapest writers are often less experienced, and less qualified, than those who charge more.
2. Look at past work. It will tell you a lot about the writer’s qualifications and topical sweet spots.
3. Set expectations. Share not just your brand voice and tone, but also the type of content you’re expecting to receive.
4. Outline your plan. Are you looking for a single piece of content or an ongoing relationship with your writer?
5. Look in the right spots. You can hire a single freelance writer or partner with an outsourced writing service that gives you access to a whole host of freelance writers (hint: this is what we do).

Question 5: What’s the best way to create blog content when using outsourced writers?

You don’t need to create a grand content marketing strategy here to get started. Just think through the basics.

Two things to consider here:

1. Strategy: Start by asking why. “Why do I want a content marketing strategy?” and build from there. Marketers become enamored with starting the next thing without first asking the critical “why are we doing this?” or “what are we building toward?”
2.  Support: Support your writers (this should be a bumper sticker). Give your writer nothing to work with, get nothing to work with back. It’s that simple. You’re the subject matter expert.

Writers are the ones to bring your expertise to light in a readable way. When you provide more information and direction, you’ll get more of what you expect out of your writer. 

Question 6: What blogging tips should businesses consider when outsourcing blog writing?

• Don’t outsource until you have a strategy and editorial calendar in place.
• Have a budget; commit to it.
• Understand the long game of content marketing.
• Experiment and test content lengths, CTAs, headlines, etc.
• If you’re just starting out in content marketing, start small and get early wins.
• Repurpose your content across other channels: For example, take a blog post and turn it into an infographic (see what we did there?).

Question 7: Outsourcing my blog feels kinda weird. Do many other companies outsource content marketing services?

Yep. Just like small businesses and major companies hire accountants and PR firms, outsourcing content creation is commonplace.

Companies who outsource content realize two things:

1. Scaling is difficult, especially when it comes to meeting the content needs of your organization.
2. There’s more competition for content marketing. It’s increasingly popular, which means you need specialized resources. Outsourcing your blog posts gets you specialized writers who know content marketing, inside and out.

Question 8: If I outsource my posts, will I have exclusive rights to what gets written?

You damn well better get that assurance! In modern content marketing, and particularly SEO, duplicate content (the same, or very similar, content on two websites) is bad news.

So wherever you get your outsourced blog posts, make sure you get exclusive rights to the content you purchase. Many reputable providers will offer this to you but beware of anyone whose pricing seems too good to be true (see below).

Question 9: How much does outsourcing blog content cost?

We’d ask you a couple of questions before answering this one:

• What’s your budget for blog content creation?
• What type of quality do you need?
• What are you using this blog content for?

Answering these questions will help you home in on the right answer for how much businesses should spend outsourcing blog posts—because the answer is you can spend pretty much any amount you want:

How much should you pay someone to write a blog?

• Expect to pay as little as $5 per post or pennies per hundred words on a service like Fiverr or some overseas content farms. In exchange, you’re at high risk for plagiarized content, nonsensical content, content that’s copied and pasted in large chunks from other websites, or just, to put it bluntly, total crap.
• Expect to pay between $25 and $200 per blog post with a crowdsource content solution or freelance writer community. The exact amount depends on the length, required research, and writer experience. Our pricing here at Verblio can give you a good feel for what you’ll pay.
• Expect to pay between $100 and $1,000 for an individual freelance writer. They’ll charge more than what you pay on a platform because they need to handle the administrative side of things (finding clients, invoicing, etc.) and take on the risk of working with clients directly. A freelance writer may end up spending half their time looking for clients, and needs to recoup that time when they aren’t being paid.
• Expect to pay up to $5,000 for a specialized service that creates highly-personalized and in-depth pieces with extensive research and data analysis.

How much should you pay for a blog post? That depends entirely on where within that spectrum you land.

Question 10: What else should I think about when considering a move to outsource my business blogging?

We’d offer a couple of points to think about:

• Getting ‘words on the page’. You might know blogging is important and want to write your own, but find that it continually gets pushed to a lower priority. Content outsourced to a freelance writer is better than content that never gets written.
• Professional writing. An outsourced writer isn’t going to know your business as well as you do. Period. But they probably have skills you don’t—a good freelancer is probably a professional writer, while you (likely) aren’t.
• A customer point of view. A good freelance writer will work hard to not just understand your business, but also understand how to write from the perspective of your prospective customers—something that is difficult people running or working in their own company.
• New ideas and potential topics. Trying to come up with fresh ideas for your blog is tough. A good freelancer writer (or a crowd of them) brings fresh ideas and insights that can make your blog better.

Yes, you can do these on your own. But chances are that you don’t have the time or resources to get it done. Think these points through as you decide whether or not you should outsource your blogging.

Have a Question We Did Not Answer?

If you don’t see your question here and want to discuss your outsourced writing needs, feel free to ask us any other questions you have.

Looking for a Way to Get Started?

We happen to be a company that has helped thousands of businesses outsource blog writing and other content marketing services! Yes, we’re biased, but if you wonder if we might be able to help out, let us know what questions you might have by reaching out to sales at Verblio directly.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2016 but has been refreshed and republished in 2022 to reflect current information and trends.

The post 10 Questions on How to Outsource Blog Writing for Businesses appeared first on Verblio.

But, to realize that benefit, you need to do a number of things, one of which is to ensure your blog posts are “optimized” for SEO success. This post is designed to act as a resource for just that kind of optimization, thanks to our revitalized blog post SEO checklist. 

You may be wondering, “how does a content writing platform have knowledgable advice for SEO?” — so we want to reassure you that we do in fact have plenty of experience in this arena. Content that doesn’t consider SEO isn’t good content, and we’re simply not in the business of making content that doesn’t have SEO in mind. 

On top of that, we also collaborated with our friends at SocialSEO (one of the many trusted SEO super-experts we have on speed-dial) on this piece to help ensure we nailed it all. The resulting SEO checklist for blog posts is nothing short of a valuable resource that anyone can use. 

Here’s a quick summary of what we’ll cover here:

• What is SEO for blogging anyway?
• A blog post SEO checklist
• Learn more about on-page optimization
• How should I keep my blog writers using this checklist?
• Does Verblio offer blog post optimization?

Read on to learn how to get the most out of our blog post SEO checklist.

What is SEO for Blogging, Anyway?

“SEO optimization” and “SEO optimized” are terms that get thrown around liberally in the digital marketing community. They simply mean that your blog post (the content and the supporting formatting and webpage that content lives on) include a number of things known by the search engine optimization community to help your blog post rank well on Google (and other search engines). 

This is typically referred to as “on-page optimization”. Optimizing blog posts for SEO is a lot like optimizing other content and website pages, but there are some blogging-specific things you’ll want to pay attention to when optimizing your blog SEO.

On-page optimization is an incredibly powerful SEO tool and believed by some experts to be more important than ever in getting your website to rank well. The challenge is that on-page optimization is 1) fairly complex, and 2) changing frequently.

So, we’ve created our below checklist to use the most up-to-date thinking on optimization and distill down tons of resources and thinking into one simple checklist.

A Blog-Post SEO Checklist

It’s a great idea to use a checklist for on-page SEO—there are a lot of things to do, and a checklist will help you ensure all the right boxes are checked before publishing. This is our version for blogging. It also happens to be the same checklist we use ourselves—this post, for example, is optimized for search queries like “blog post SEO checklist”.

That said, you still have to write for Google’s machine, which includes queueing up the high-value images you use in the text of your blog post. Google can’t read all of our SEO checklist for blog posts directly (since it’s an image), as an example, so we have to help tell them what’s happening and what the image is all about. (Yes, this is getting more “meta” as we go.) 

So here’s our checklist, complete with in-depth information on how to optimize blog posts for SEO, including on-page considerations, human-oriented content, and other quality assurance measures:

This may seem like a long list, but, believe it or not, we’ve tried to just stick to the basics. If you want more, check out the resources below. And if you’re feeling overwhelmed about this whole “wow I need to create a lot of content and optimize it!” thing, read on.

Learn More About On-Page Optimization

If you want to learn more about some of the advanced techniques or more detail on on-page SEO, this is the section of resources for you.

On-page blog post optimization resources:

1. How to Make Your Blog Posts SEO-Friendly (Source: HubSpot)

This is a more detailed version of our checklist above, and it’s stood the test of time thanks to HubSpot’s constant revitalization efforts with their content. If you have questions about the “why” on any of the above and how to optimize your blog posts, this is a good checklist with additional information.

2. Jump In On Blog SEO Keyword Research With Moz’s Free Tool (Source: Verblio)

Just because a tool is free doesn’t mean you’ll immediately know how to get the most use out of it. We’ve tried to help speed up the learning curve with this resource, and we highly recommend checking it out if you’re new to keyword research, Moz, or want a refresher. 

3. A Visual Guide to Keyword Targeting and On-Page SEO (Source: Moz)

Like the first article, this is another classic blog post that’s held onto top spot on Google for a long time. This covers a broader scope and goes beyond blog SEO. However, the recommendations here are excellent for webpages and blog posts. This resource gets into more complex and advanced tactics for on-page SEO. Regardless of time and resources available, you should familiarize yourself with this more ambitious on-page SEO.

4. The Anatomy of a Perfect Blog Post (Source: Yoast)

If you want an optimized blog page and a blog post with quality content, start here. This is a must-read for tackling the essentials in any blog post you publish. And beyond SEO, this is a fantastic post about the tenets of a what differentiates good blog content from crap.

5. How to Boost Your SEO by Using Schema Markup (Source: SEMRush)

Schema markup is a relatively newer, more technical, element to SEO, but it’s not going anywhere and you need to learn what you can to utilize it effectively. This post is a helpful toe-dip in that pond, and can lead to even beefier resources for those who want to dive in.

6. Guide to Site Architecture Optimization (Source: DeepCrawl)

Part of nailing your SEO blogging efforts is helping ensure Google understands as much of your website as possible, which starts with your site’s architecture. This guide covers why this is important, and gives you the tools you need to give Google a straight path to, and through, your blog content. 

7. The Role of Content in User Experience (Source: UXMatters)

One element many don’t consider with blog content and SEO is their user experience. Google watches how people use your site, and your content plays a role in that balance. You can learn the basics with this post. 

If you need help with a quick round of brainstorming on your keywords/what you should write about, paired with some light SEO research to kickstart your Verblio account, check out our 10 topics product.

How Should I Keep My Blog Writers Using This Checklist?

To make it easy for the rest of our team, we share those resources on our editorial calendar so that you don’t have to hunt them down every time. 

You can download a version of our editorial calendar here, which also gives you immediate access to a Google Sheets version of the blog post SEO checklist, too. (It’s its own tab, called “Content Publish Prep Checklist”.)

(Check out the “Resources” tab, too.)

But beyond giving them access to tools like an editorial calendar, you also need to take steps to ensure you’re on the same page with your writer before things get crazy. We put together a helpful guide on how you can tackle that balance, and I highly recommend checking it out.

Wow, This All Sounds Like a Lot of Work. Does Verblio Offer Blog Post Optimization Services?

The answer is “yes,” and it doesn’t matter if you’re a new customer or already have a subscription with us—Verblio can help with blog post SEO optimization. Here’s what you can expect.

When you work with Verblio, we’ll always ask for SEO keywords before writing you pieces of content (and we don’t charge extra for that, either) when you’re sending a request to a writer.

It’s right in the content request for our writers, to the right:

We’ll then take those keywords and work them into each piece of content from the beginning.

And if you want us to put the full weight of our blog SEO checklist to use for your business, you’ll need to opt for our +Optimize service as an optional service to your subscription. We’ll do a host of physical/formatting SEO checks for you, and include images, CMS formatting and scheduling, and an additional round of proofreading. 

If you’re a Verblio customer, you can add “+Optimize” to your subscription whenever you’d like. +Optimize ensures that every post you get from Verblio is ready to publish with on-page SEO best practices in place.

If you’re not a Verblio customer, we’re a content writing service that utilizes 3,000+ content writers to help you create awesome content for your agency or business. And with our +Optimize option, we’ll optimize all that great content for SEO to take more of the heavy lifting off your team’s plate.

Of course, we also want you to stay organized and tackle your content with as much clarity as possible. You don’t have to subscribe to do that—just download our editorial calendar. It comes complete with the SEO checklist as its own tab, and resources highlighted above too, so you’ll always have the answers in-pocket as you go forth and optimize. 

Editor’s note: SEO changes fast, so it was time for a refresh on this one. We’ve included new tips and information, and our blog post SEO checklist has been updated with all of the latest and greatest practices on maximizing blogging SEO.

The post A Blog Post SEO Checklist & Resources appeared first on Verblio.

And scary, and difficult, and heartbreaking.

And on top of all that, we have to figure out how to do everything we can to make our businesses survive and (hopefully) thrive.

Since most of Verblio’s business comes from digital marketing agencies, we spend a lot of time thinking about this particular group—understanding what makes them tick so we can create better content solutions for them.

We also get to talk with a lot of agencies through our work, and with many of the experts and advisors who work with them.

No single source has all the answers for what digital agencies and digital marketers should do right now, which is why we’re consulting an array of industry perspectives in our new video series.

Verblio CEO Steve Pockross has been talking with agency experts and thought leaders about how to navigate the current landscape and coming months.

Since every business is different, we’re gathering tips and best practices from a range of voices including agency CEOs, agency coaches, messaging experts, and MarTech and SaaS entrepreneurs.

Helping is the new selling. Do the things that are really genuinely helpful right now because marketing is always something that lays the groundwork for future selling.

-Jeffrey Pease, Messaging Mechanics

These conversations go deep on topics like:

• How to respond in times of crisis
• What it takes to weather recession
• What to do about shrinking budgets
• Planning for the near-term and the unknown
• Staying sane while cooped up indoors

Check out all the interviews here.

Follow Verblio CEO Steve Pockross on LinkedIn to get these videos in your feed here.

The post Our new video series with agency experts appeared first on Verblio.

These are important questions, and challenging ones. It can be a relief to determine you need help with your writing, someone to share the burden of what can be a challenging task, but this realization can quickly feel overwhelming when you try to tackle the challenge of finding qualified, reliable writers.

Perhaps you need a copywriter for your website or ads, or maybe you need help writing your blog posts.Should you tack a sign to your front door that says, “freelance writers for hire!” much like the “help wanted” signs that adorn so many business doors? Should you put an ad on a job board like Monster and try to make it clear you want a part-time, as-needed freelancer?

Especially if you’re looking for a freelancer—someone who will be there when you need them, but not someone who you can afford to pay a full-time salary and benefits.

Fear not! We’ve got answers for you.

In summary: start with understanding what you’re looking for and what your priorities are, decide how much you can afford to pay, find your writer(s), assign your first project, and evaluate, learn and experiment. (And FYI, Verblio has 3,000 freelance writers for hire and a platform to guide you through the heavy lifting. But, to be fair, you do have other options, which we’ll address, and some context is important.)

So stay with us—we’re going to walk through the five steps to hiring freelance writers.

Step 1: Understand Your Priorities and What You’re Looking for When Hiring a Freelance Writer

To hire a writer that will truly help you create powerful content, you have to know what you’re looking for. This sounds obvious when you read it, but it’s a critical step that’s often skipped. 

But if you take even a little time to understand what you need out of a freelancer, it will make the next steps in this process much easier and yield better results. Hiring a writer with a “shotgun style” approach will only leave you frustrated and content-less.

To help you figure out what your priorities are and what you need, here are some questions to get you started:

• What do you need written? Copy for your website? A blog post? An ongoing series of blog posts? Copy for your online ads? A video script? Social media posts? An e-book? All or some of the above?

• What quality level do you need? Before you say “the best!” keep in mind that there will be a strong correlation between price and quality, and not everything needs to be top-notch quality. If you need copy for a page on your website that’s necessary but rarely seen, perhaps better to get it done cheaply and allocate your dollars elsewhere.

• How complex is the writing you need done? How much interaction will you need to have with your writer? If you need an explanation of a common industry term, you can likely get that without spending immense amounts of your energy interacting with your writer. If you need a detailed explanation of a proprietary product feature, you’ll need to have a detailed conversation with your writer to give them what they need at the outset.

• Do you need one writer or multiple writers? You may not know the answer to this one yet, but it’s something to keep in mind. Selecting one writer will allow you to form a deeper relationship, but having several writers will provide variety with different writing styles.

Step 2: Decide How Much You Can Afford to Pay Your Writer(s)

How much you can afford to pay freelance writers is different for every business, but answering the questions in Step 1 will help you answer this. If you have at least a ballpark figure in mind, you’ll be much better equipped to evaluate your options.

That said, here are some numbers to get you started (note huge ranges for some, depending on quality, length, and varied pricing by provider):

• Ad copy: $10 to many thousands of dollars
• Copy for a website page: $50-$1,000
• Blog post: $25-$300
• E-book: $200-$2,000
• Series of posts for social: $5-$25 per post
• Video script: $100-$1,000
• Infographic copy: $100-$1,000
• Podcast summary: $50-$300
• White papers: $3,000-$6,000
• Webinar summary: $50-$300, more for series
• Sales letter copy: $2,500-$7,500
• Email copy: $35-$2,000

There are plenty more types of content, but these are the most common ones that you can get started with when considering pricing.

Step 3: How to Find Freelance Writers

When attempting to find freelance writers for hire, there are some special considerations. Primarily:

• Writing is a specialized skill set
• Finding someone with expertise or at least a basic knowledge of your industry will make your life easier
• The term “freelancer” is great for you, but not everybody looking for work is willing to be a freelancer—many people want full-time, steady work

What you’re looking for looks something like this:

Because the intersection of this Venn diagram is likely quite small, finding freelance writers using the traditional process you’d use to find an employee for your business is going to be very challenging. For this reason, we recommend heading to the internet.

How To Hire Freelance Writers … Online?

Could you virtually hold up your sign advertising ‘writers for hire’ online? Sure. Social media posts offer a great opportunity to hire a writer who already follows your brand, but you’ll likely need to wade through a lot of extraneous information and non-professional applications. Do it at your own risk.

You can also go looking for people who advertise that they are writers. This certainly has its benefits too, as you’ll likely be able to find a writer with decent bandwidth and professional experience who can throw themselves at your project. They’re definitely out there. 

But when it comes to how to hire a freelance writer, we believe the options exist on this graph’s spectrum:

So you’ll need to decide whether you are looking for an individual, want to use a marketplace to either find multiple writers, or whether you’ll need a different option to find the best writer for your business.

You’ll also need to decide whether you want someone who specializes in writing or a more general online-work marketplace. And then if you want to think back to your high-school math days, you can add a third axis to make this thing all three-dimensional and add a quality scale too. We didn’t have the 3-D rendering capabilities for that, but we’ll give you some guidance on quality below.

Let’s break down these options and examine the pros and cons of each.

Craigslist

Craigslist is everywhere, or just about. You may have even used the service to hire employees for your business locally, and that is one of the primary benefits of Craigslist—you may find someone local enough to meet you for coffee before getting to work on your writing.

Pros:

• Potential to find someone local
• Relatively cheap to do a job posting

Cons:

• Prepare to be overwhelmed with responses to your ad
• You’ll need to do 100% of the evaluation of respondents yourself
• Craigslist is notorious for being full of scammers. Cindy who claims to live just across town may actually be Bob who lives on the other side of the world and is still learning English

Online Freelancer Networks

Sites like UpWork and Freelancer.com have vast networks of freelancers of all stripes—you can find freelancers who do everything from business card design to website development to writing.

Pros:

• A large selection of freelancers to choose from
• A rating system allows you to get a sense of skills based on ratings left by previous clients
• Freelancers may post samples of their work
• Payment is securely handled by the company providing the network and platform through an escrow account

Cons:

• With some many categories of work, like engineering or healthcare, it can be hard to figure out how to get exactly what you’re looking for
• You’ll have to describe your project in detail, ask freelancers to submit proposals, and sift through them to figure out what freelancer you think is the best fit
• Since these sites handle so many different types of work, they don’t have a platform that’s tailored to writing—providing edits and going back and forth with your writer may be challenging
• You’ll pay an ongoing management fee to the company providing the platform and freelancer matching

A Note on Fiverr 

If you haven’t heard of it, Fiverr is a freelancer marketplace that offers numerous services for just $5. (Though be warned, almost all freelancers on Fiverr offer “add-ons” that make the final cost of your project much more than $5.) The prospect of getting something written—an ad or blog post—for $5 can be incredibly tempting.

But put on that “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” lens your dad told you about.

$5 just isn’t enough money to pay someone to get quality writing. You’ll end up either paying more through upsells, end up with something plagiarized, or end up with something obviously written by a non-native English speaker.

Individuals & Agencies

A simple Google search for “content writer” or “small business copywriter” will return more results than you can handle of individuals and agencies hawking all sorts of writing-related services.

These tend to fall into two camps: individual consultants and writers and agencies—a company focused on selling writing services or more general marketing services, one of which is writing.

Pros:

• It is possible to find individuals and agencies that focus on your particular industry
• There are lots of good independent writers and agencies. A good one will deliver excellent service AND excellent results

Cons:

• The process of evaluating quality is 100% on you. You won’t be able to find accurate ratings, and you may find you’re trying to judge someone’s writing ability by how pretty their website is—two very different skillsets.
• Price, quality of work, and quality of service vary hugely. It can be difficult to tell when you’re getting good work, good service, and a fair price.
• You’ll need to put together, review, and sign a contract
• It’s difficult to get variety from single writers—you’ll likely be stuck with a single style

Freelance Writer Services

UpWork and Freelancer.com are marketplaces for freelance writers work as a whole, but there are a number of companies that serve as freelancer marketplaces specifically for freelance writers—WriterAccess, Scripted, TextBroker, and Verblio (hey, that’s us!) are examples.

Some of these companies also have a platform that makes the process of finding writers, interacting with them, getting the writing product, and requesting edits much easier and less manual. You’ll note that price varies considerably across these platforms, as does ease of use of the platform itself.

Pros:

• Software is built specifically for interacting with writers about writing
• You’ll have access to lots of writers, rated by previous customers to make finding a good writer with experience in your industry easier
• It will be relatively easy for you to “test out” different writers and move on from those whose work you don’t like
• Some platforms allow you to post topics and get multiple submissions from different writers, meaning you’ll be able to see different takes on what you’re asking for and pick the one you like best
• Much of the flow of content is controlled by the system, so you won’t have to deal with inconsistent freelancer writers and can adhere to reliable timelines

Cons:

• Some of these platforms make it challenging to develop an ongoing relationship with writers you like, making the process of creating a writer who is an expert in your business more challenging
• Often involves monthly investment
• Requires learning a new system to get your writing done

Step 4: Hand Off Your First Project

Once you’ve selected your writer (and type of platform and relationship you’ll have), it’s time to get started! At least, it’s time to get started assessing whether or not they fit with your business. 

This is what we call a “trial period,” where you can hand off a project and see how the writer follows through. 

Since the best way to evaluate a writer is to have them actually write for your business, this first writing project will give you critical insight into whether the writer has what it takes to work with on an ongoing basis. It’s a helpful step to ensure that they can nail your voice, deadlines, and handle edits professionally. 

Before you can evaluate a writer, it’s important to make sure you’ve given the writer everything they need to succeed. Hint: the more clearly you can describe what you want, and the more thorough you are, the better.

As a general rule, you’ll want to give yourself a week or two to go through the trial period (and even longer if you’re dealing with larger projects like an e-book). Email is the best way to stay in touch, although setting up a phone call or video conference to get some face time are also helpful ways to build rapport and answer any lingering questions. 

Here are four keys to handing off a project:

1. Be clear. You need to be explicit with your writer about what you’re looking for. What is the goal of your writing project? What format do you expect it in? How long should it be? What sort of style should be used? Do you have an outline you’d like them to follow closely in the piece(s)?
2. Include all the relevant information. Where will this piece of writing go when it’s complete? Are there links/pieces of key information that needs to be included? What do you expect readers to do after they finish reading? Will you be including any images to support the writing? Any special instructions? Where can the writer go to learn more about your company before writing?
3. Give examples. One of the best ways to communicate what you want is to cite examples of similar work that you think are great. An ad you love, a blog post that uses the same style, formatting, and structure as the one you’re looking for, a landing page from a different industry that you’d like to mirror.
4. Establish clear communication guidelines and timelines. Set the ground rules that are in your head, and you’ll have a much better chance they’ll be followed. When do you need this piece? How will you handle edits? Do you want your writer to deliver a finished first draft, or check in after the first paragraph to make sure what they’re doing is on track?

Step 5: Evaluate Your Writer’s First Project, Provide Feedback, Learn, and Repeat

When you receive your first draft, a couple of steps will set you up for success on this project and future work:

1. Evaluate. How did the writer do against the deliverables set out? Did they go above and beyond on anything? If they missed any of your deliverables, could this be due to lack of clarity when you assigned the project?
2. Provide feedback and request edits. Any individual or service worth using should allow you to request edits. So before you dismiss a writer as not able to produce what you’re looking for, provide feedback and request edits. With writing, it often takes some back and forth to achieve desired results and communicate feedback.
3. Learn. After your project is done, ask yourself, what did you learn from the process? How can you improve your end of things? Was the service or individual you picked the right fit, or do you need to try a different approach in who you work with?
4. Test and repeat. As you work on more projects with freelance writers, use your learnings to test new approaches in how you communicate with your writers, the guidance you give, and the type of work you ask for. And remember, like anything, the more you do it, the better you’ll get. As you complete more projects with your freelance writer pool, you’ll become more proficient at getting better work, faster.

Hiring freelance writers can be daunting, but many, many businesses can benefit by working with freelance writers. So follow the process, learn along the way, and be patient—you’ll end up with awesome writing for your business.

For more details on how to hire freelance writers and incorporate them into your holistic inbound strategy, visit our ebook with much more detail on this topic, above.

Or, if you’re chomping at the bit to start working with freelancers, sign up for Verblio and give our talented pool of 3,000 U.S.-based writers a trial.

Editor’s note: Part of the content playbook is refreshing your pieces from time to time, and we make sure to practice what we preach. This article has been updated from its original form to ensure you’re getting the best, most timely advice. Enjoy!

The post How to Hire Freelance Writers: A 5-Step Guide appeared first on Verblio.

First priority is going to be keeping our customers happy.

Provide as much value as you can to your customers during times of crisis and uncertainty. This is a key message from CEO of HubSpot Platinum agency Nextiny Marketing, and one he’s clearly passionate about and has put into action at Nextiny.

In this 10-minute video interview, Verblio CEO Steve Pockross digs into Gabriels ideas about how agencies can succeed in times of crisis and uncertainty through the ideas of service, being human,

Here are 10 principles Gabriel shared for agencies:

Prepare for some customers to leave. Your agency may very well lose some customers in the coming months in industries most affected, be prepared.

Shift the focus of your leadership from sales to customer happiness. Gabriel is shifting much of his time from growing his agency through sales to ensuring his customers are happy.

Get creative to ask: “what can I do to help?” The things your customers need may be different from the services your agency traditionally provides, get creative to meet your customers needs during this time—help them go remote, set up online ordering systems, and more.

Get lean, but continue to invest in education & software that helps your customers. Gabriel is looking for areas to tighten his budgets, including some that will happen naturally—travel budget has gone to zero—but he’s continuing to invest in educating his team and software that powers results for his customers.

Communicate with customers more than ever, but don’t sell—help. Customers need to hear from you now. Use video, be human, but don’t aggressively sell more to your customers, ask them how you can help instead.

Help today, and you will grow tomorrow. This has been true forever, not just during a time of crisis.

Evaluate, cut back, or consider pausing your marketing automation. This is not the time for automated messaging that may come across as tone-deaf right now, it’s the time for one to one, human outreach.

Be hyper-aware of the tone of your content. It’s worth one more check to make sure nothing you publish (or pieces that get lots of evergreen traffic) has phrasing that may come across wrong today.

Build for the long-term. It’s tempting to focus on news-driven content, but think about what is going to build your clients’ business for the long term, so they come out stronger. SEO, evergreen content, repurposing and revamping old content into new pillar pages will serve your clients well over the long-haul.

Who is your micro audience? Think about the 100-200 SMBs that are in your agency’s sphere of education—what can you help these businesses learn that’s going to benefit their business in the long-term?

Automatic monthly payments and taking your agency remote are great moves for cash flow. If you’ve been sticking with getting checks from your customers to avoid PayPal fees, now is the time to switch—you don’t want to be chasing down checks. And, now might be a good time to consider if your agency can operate remotely over the long haul.

The post 10 principles for agencies during uncertain times—Gabriel Marguglio appeared first on Verblio.

At Verblio, we’re fortunate enough to help thousands of businesses and the agencies that serve them create content of all types to power their content marketing, SEO, and inbound marketing.

And because of that, we have a unique opportunity as content marketing enthusiasts and nerds to view a large data set about what content marketing and blogging trends in 2020 are taking center stage.

To be good at what we do, we work hard to read everything we can get our hands on any blogging trend. And we’ve uncovered nine that you need to know about.

Here’s what we’re going to cover. Click a link to jump ahead, or keep scrolling to read them all!

• Blogging Trend #1: Word Count Is Still Going Up
• Blogging Trend #2: Be Useful To The Reader
• Blogging Trend #3: Optimization After Writing Matters
• Blogging Trend #4: Promote Your Damn Content!
• Blogging Trend #5: Content Takes More Time and Effort Than Ever
• Blogging Trend #6: Google My Business Posts
• Blogging Trend #7: More Funnels Turning Into Flywheels
• Blogging Trend #8: Scannable Content Is Bigger Than Ever
• Blogging Trend #9: BERT Makes A Splash

We also feel these blogging and content marketing trends based on our customers’ buying behaviors, and especially agencies who are leading the charge on keeping marketing fresh for the small business clients.

So with our data and hands-on experience, plus reading from thought leaders, let’s answer the question: “What are the upcoming content marketing and blogging trends in 2020 that will drive results for businesses?”

DIGITAL WRITING TRENDS IN 2020

Blogging is still relevant in 2020 as an essential part of your digital marketing. It’s great for SEO, can empower your social media, and still stands as a pillar for developing your brand long-term. 

That said, we also know that video content is huge in 2020, so if you’d rather get the video cliff-notes version of this post, check out the video for this content piece our team made using Verblio’s Engagement video service.

This tool is designed to help you take your content and make easily digestible videos for social media that drive more eyeballs to the content on your website.

And now for all you old-fashioned people who prefer to read, let’s dig in!

Blogging Trend #1: Word Count Is Still Going Up

How long should a blog post be in 2020?

In 2016, Orbit Media noted that the length of an average blog post had risen to 1,054 words (up from 887 in 2015). You shouldn’t be surprised that in the years since then, word count has risen even more.

A study from SearchMetrics shared that 2019’s average word count was around 1,692 words—although there’s still some variance from industry to industry. You’d better believe that means word counts will continue to rise in 2020.

(Image Source)

Whichever way you lean, the message is the same: You better get started writing!

Short blogs just don’t get the results that most bloggers are hoping to meet. Longer blogs—those measuring 1,500+ words—tend to get more social media attention and lead visitors to spend more time on your site.

Of course, it’s not just about word count. The point is to produce high-quality posts that people are genuinely interested in reading. 

Readers aren’t looking for fluff content, and if you give them that you’ll see your bounce rate increase and your content conversions decrease. 

Instead, they’re looking for posts that will tell them more than what they can find in half a dozen different places across the internet. Google themselves are putting more weight on content comprehensiveness to determine search rankings, so remember to be helpful more than wordy. 

Long-form content like e-books or posts with 2,000+ words gives you something to promote, increases your search engine rankings, and helps further establish your authority in your field. 

And you don’t just have to create this in a vacuum—you easily can revamp old blog posts to get to a higher word count (and we’ll share more tips on this in trend #3).

Of course, to reap those benefits you need a dedicated person producing that content for you. Who is writing your long-form content, and where does the time come from? Answering that question is a critical part of building your 2020 content-production strategy.

We see this trend reflected in our data, too—our customers are choosing longer blog post lengths to power their content marketing.

Blogging Trend #2: Be Useful To The Reader

Content marketing requires brands to give freely first—before they ask for something in return from their readers. 

Blogging in 2020 will emphasize this even more.

More than ever, businesses that want to do SEO and content marketing need to publish and promote valuable content. What exactly does that look like? 

It’s a little simpler than you may think. All you need to do is find out where the intersection of “value” lies between what your customer wants and is profitable for your business:

(Image Source)

Putting more long-form, comprehensive content—often called pillar pages—out there on your public website, for free (i.e., less gated content) will allow you to build a tribe around your content and serve your customers even better in 2020. 

The reason for this is simple and two-fold: 

First, Google is getting better and better at delivering the “best” content to its users. That means if you’re creating content that’s not useful to the reader or is overly self-promotional, it may work for a little while, but your returns will diminish quicker than you might expect. 

Second, search results are more competitive than ever, and digital brands have a much more mature approach to content in 2020 than ever before. So if you’re delivering underwhelming content that focuses on you and not your readers, you’re going to lose. And lose, and continue to lose.

This all comes down to teach, be helpful, and educate first. Then, and only then, can you sell!

It’s also more important than ever to include other media with blog posts: images, video, and audio help attract readers and genuinely interest them in the content.

And even that isn’t as simple as it sounds. Writing helpful, high-value, media-laden content is a process, and you won’t get it right on your first try.

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But we see this trend in our customer data too—our best customers are creating content along their whole sales funnel. That includes plenty of top-of-funnel content that seeks to be helpful, and may not even mention their business at all. 

While this takes more time to work, the long-term success of this tactic is phenomenal. 

On the other hand, customers who ask us only to create content about themselves usually get frustrated with their results quickly and leave. That leaves two clear takeaways: 1) write about what your industry customers want, and 2) give it time to work!

Blogging Trend #3: Optimization After Writing Matters

High-quality writing is an essential foundation for great content. 

But, it doesn’t end there. To make your content rank on Google, stand out on social media, and engage readers on your website, you need to optimize them.

I’ll get to what that means in a second, but first a quick note for anyone who’s heard something like, “You don’t need to do SEO anymore, just create great content and Google will reward you.” 

Please, please, don’t follow this advice if traffic from Google is important to you. 

In 2017, we spent a large amount of time re-optimizing our older blog posts for SEO and saw monthly organic traffic to these posts go up 50-300%! And guess what? We’ve been doing it since, and 2020 is no exception!

HubSpot even did a huge case study on this where they found that updating their content with conversion optimization best-practices, higher word counts, and keyword-based revisions made their organic traffic skyrocket:

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Taking the time to update your old content is a no-brainer, but many brands have let it slide for years. If that describes you, 2020 is the year it should change.

But let’s be clear, the words of MobileMonkey CEO Larry Kim still ring true: 

“The biggest mistake people make with repurposing is to repurpose content that is garbage in the first place. A post that went nowhere on your own blog six months ago isn’t likely to have any other outcome when repurposed.”

[mic drop]

That means you need to give some thought to which posts you repost before you get to work. Don’t guess—be purposeful, consult Google Analytics, and remember that you need to add value!

But before we move on, what constitutes a good article to look for?

While every business will make this choice differently, there are a few quick indicators you can look for in your Google Analytics dashboard. 

Start by opening the Acquisition tag, then Click All Traffic > Channels > Organic Search

From there, select the Landing Page option:

You’ll now see a list of pages on your site with a performance breakdown for each. Using the metrics shown—Pageviews, Average Time on Page, Bounce Rate, and any Conversion goals you may have set—you can comb through this list and see which pages will stand to benefit from optimization.

We even did this on this very blog post, as you can see here:

If we get it right, those numbers can stay consistent in 2020 and beyond—and the same can be said for your content!

At Verblio, we’re looking to help brands addressing this blog trend with our +Optimize product. 

Our customers work with a skilled optimizer to get blog posts ready for publishing, essentially just ensuring that your content is sending all the right signs to search engines. It’s also helpful to ensure you content is on-point topically, too. 

And the results are astounding—we’re seeing more of our customers opt for this service as the importance of optimization only grows.

Blogging Trend #4: Promote Your Damn Content!

If I had a dollar for every time a client told me something along the lines of:

“I published my blog post a week ago and I’m *still* not seeing any traffic from Google…”

I could probably buy a really nice house in California.

Okay, maybe an okay house in California. 

Regardless, the point stays the same. You probably won’t see amazing results right out of the gate with your content. 

Creating outstanding content is great, and a crucial piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the whole puzzle.

You need to get your content out into the world to get it noticed and kickstart your content marketing machine. If your goal is to drive traffic to your blog, you need to let people know about your content, and there are plenty of ways to do it.

• Promoting on social media means more exposure. You want to create posts that other people are eager to share, but social media posts on one platform is just the beginning. Be sure to share on a wide variety of platforms, plus get into Facebook groups, forums, and potentially even Reddit. The more other people share your content, the more the word will get out and the better you can signal your influence to search engines. 
• Email marketing allows you to connect with people who have shown an interest in your content in the past. Solid email marketing drip campaigns and newsletters allow you to bring in customers who may have lapsed or who haven’t thought about your company in a while.
• Linkbuilding, the practice of enticing other websites to link to your site, can seem intimidating but produces real results. After you write a piece of content (or even while you’re thinking about what to write about), ask yourself, “who will promote this and why?” Do you know people with websites? Can you search and find websites in your industry with readerships who might find your content useful? Send them a quick, friendly email and ask if they’d consider sharing with their readers on their site if they thought your content would be useful for their audience.

That means promotion is more than blasting it out there willy-nilly. It’s consistently blasting it out there. 

The more you put your content out, the more people will be able to find it. This will be true 100% of the time, even if, at worst, only one more person sees your content than before you promoted. One reader is all it takes sometimes to win more business!

Blogging Trend #5: Content Takes More Time & Effort Than Ever

You already learned that blog posts are getting longer, and brands are more focused on value than ever. 

Those two content marketing trends make this trend make that much more sense.

According to one study of emerging blogger trends, the amount of time and effort most bloggers are spending on their posts is increasing. 

Between 2015 and 2016, something clicked in the minds of content marketers everywhere, and we’re still feeling the effects:

(Image Source)

According to that same study, the extra effort is paying off. Orbit Media reported that 38.9 percent of the bloggers who spent six or more hours writing a blog post felt that they saw “strong results” based on their blogging efforts.

And that raises one essential question for businesses that want to get their content noticed this year:

Who is doing your content writing?

Delegating that task to someone in-house is a great solution, as long as you have a team member who has time for your company’s 2020 blogging efforts and understands emerging content marketing trends.

Seeking out freelance writers or working with an article writing service or agency is often a more efficient means of collaborating on content without writing it yourself that you’re still proud to promote. It’s often the most cost-effective, too (if that matters to you!).

Blogging Trend #6: Google My Business Posts

Somehow, some way, Google manages to surprise us every year. 

At this point, it’s old news that Google likes to change up their algorithm, throw the SEO world into chaos, and nearly tank businesses they think are “cheating” the SEO game. 

But now and then, they provide a way for businesses to continue to express themselves through high-quality content, and 2020 is one of those years. 

Google now allows businesses to create short, copy- and image-oriented posts on their Google My Business page, and almost everyone has probably seen one of these as a consumer:

(Image Source)

That’s because they’re super helpful, when created properly. 

You can think of it like Instagram on Google, but with a bit more of a content-marketing twist. These posts will show up in your Google My Business listing at the right of Search Engines, like this example from DILAN Consulting in California:

These help you create and then “tease” your latest content directly on the front-page of Google, effectively cutting into the time it might originally take to get your content in front of a potential reader. 

And for many small businesses, this is a content marketing and SEO game-changer. 

Why is that?

Because it’s another place where someone can find your latest and greatest content. If you’re already doing well in your local listings, creating content for this space is a no-brainer and can win you even more traffic. 

If you’re not really invested in the local content marketing game yet, 2020 is clearly a good year to get started. The right team of talented writers and a simple strategy is all it takes to get started.  

And if you’re not already getting great traffic through Google My Business? These posts can help you increase your ranking. Expect to see a huge surge of these in 2020!

Blogging Trend #7: More Funnels Turning Into Flywheels

You may have heard about funnels—but what about the flywheel?

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The flywheel (which has been rolling around since 2018) is the innovative push of HubSpot, a leading inbound marketing company that you’ve probably heard of. They’re the progenitors of the Inbound Methodology that has shaped the way digital marketers do just about everything. 

So for HubSpot to change the game again is noteworthy (and also just damn impressive, come on!). 

Let’s talk about the differences.

Funnels, as you likely know, present a linear path toward your business; individuals go from prospects to customers by following the flow of your marketing materials.

The problem (as HubSpot saw it) was this method didn’t really consider what happened to a customer after the sale. Sure, you’ve probably read advice on retention, but that’s always been treated as a separate part of the customer journey. 

The flywheel is designed to change that by breaking the customer lifecycle into three stages:

1. Attract
2. Engage
3. Delight

This is represented in a circular manner, with the customer at center stage:

(Image Source)

By building your content and marketing collateral around these stages, HubSpot believes that you can build momentum throughout the customer journey—meaning customers stick around and become promoters much easier. 

If you haven’t considered the transition for yourself, we highly recommend considering it. 

You can learn more about the flywheel and how it works on HubSpot’s blog—and we’re excited that content is being created that can propel customers to be purchasers again and again (or even drive referrals, simulating the motion of the flywheel).

Blogging Trend #8: Scannable Content Is Bigger Than Ever

How do you get your readers to scroll below the fold of your blog posts?

For those who may not know, each page on your website has a “fold”—or a line of dividing content that’s instantly visible to the reader and content that has to be scrolled to. It gets its name from the olden days of newspapers. The visible content is “above the fold” and everything else is below it. 

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The reason we ask our original question is because (spoilers) it’s important. How many people go below the fold is usually a good indication about the engagement your content gets. 

And there’s both anecdotal and research-based evidence to back this idea up. 

Anecdotally, the idea of scrolling past the fold is pretty self-explanatory. If a user scrolls, it’s because they’re reading, engaged in the UX of your site and content, and want to learn more. 

On the research-based end of things, the benefit of below the fold scrolling is tied to SEO—and SEOs are concerned about one key metric: average time on page (also known as dwell time). 

We’ve known that dwell time affects SEO since about 2011, but marketers are still coming up with innovative ways to increase it for their websites. And while we don’t fully know how Google weights dwell time with rankings, the general idea is that more dwell time means Google likes you more. 

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So how does scannable content help with dwell time? Let’s look at some examples. 

A great (yet also sometimes infuriating) example of content that forces you to go below the fold and spend more time on their site is recipe blogs. You know, the ones that tell stories about grandma, the author’s kids, and summers from 20 years ago for 1,000 words before the cinnamon rolls recipe you came for? 

We all love to hate them, but the principle they teach is a sound content marketing trend in 2020—and it’s one that’s clearly being implemented by everyone from food bloggers all the way to content marketing’s thought leaders. 

Put valuable content throughout your page, and let the reader know what they can expect!

Just look at this example from the Backlinko blog:

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The preview for the entire blog post is visible—not just in the introduction—but on the preview page on the main blog. Brian Dean is making sure you can scan his content before you scan his content, which is both meta and the new best practice for blogging in 2020. 

Verblio’s advice? Start adding a scannable table of contents! We’ve started doing it in our content, and it’s going to quickly become a new norm.

Blogging Trend #9: BERT Makes A Splash

In the waning months of 2019, Google surprised the world (again) with yet another update.

This update is known as BERT, which sadly has nothing to do with the beloved Sesame Street character. 

… anyways, BERT actually stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Quite the mouthful, right?

Thankfully, Google didn’t leave us to guess what those words meant. In short, they’ve improved their algorithm to better understand search queries in context. This allows much more accurate rankings for niche topics. 

And here’s what that might look like in the search results:

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The difference here is subtle, but the results are very different. Google can now understand modifying phrases and deliver results that are much more specific than “parking on a hill” here. They actually deliver “parking on a hill with no curb.” 

A small difference for the user, but not an insignificant one. 

So what does BERT mean for blogging? In essence, nothing—at least according to Google’s Danny Sullivan:

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But “nothing to optimize” isn’t quite the best way to say it, because a lot of companies still need to create content that answers their customers questions accurately and succinctly. Our takeaways for BERT are twofold:

1. Continue to create high-value content that speaks to the reader.
2. Look closer for niche topics and low-volume keywords and target the featured snippet (like in the picture below).

(Image Source)

Over To You

Which of these content writing trends in 2020 will you be incorporating into your blog strategy? 

What tweaks can you make to your current strategy to stay relevant and competitive in the current landscape? 

Keep in mind that when it comes to your blogging strategy, little changes can make a big difference. Small tweaks to your content, like creating longer posts, changing your posting frequency, and mixing up your media can make a big difference to your audience.

Do your best to isolate variables to determine what matters most to your audience. This may mean diversifying your pool of writers, or even outsourcing your content if you haven’t before so that you can produce what your customers are looking for. 

With the right moves, this could be your best blogging year yet!

And if you’re looking for even more trends in content marketing, and some practical applications, read more about that here.

The post The Latest Blogging Trends: How to Create a Strong 2020 Strategy appeared first on Verblio.

Local SEO is hard. It, like SEO as a whole, is always changing. Client budgets tend to be smaller with local SEO. You, as an SEO or small business, need to master esoteric tools like Google My Business, citations, myriad review platforms, and more. And to do well, you need content. The same rules that apply to content creation for SEO as a whole apply to local: create content that’s helpful, authentic, serves prospect needs & questions, and ties into a local business’s overall strategy.

Ryon Gross is the founder and CEO of Dallas-based agency Local Leap Marketing, which offers website design and local SEO services for clients in Texas. Ryon has been in business for over 16 years, so he’s seen an arc of incredible change in the digital landscape for local businesses. And he knows a thing or two about longevity as a digital agency.

In 2015, Local Leap became a client of Verblio, and they’ve been working with us ever since to create content to power local SEO for clients like Iron Door Plus & Texas Air Tech.

I sat down with Ryon to ask him about running a local SEO agency, content creation, and his experiences with Verblio. What follows is the content of that interview, edited slightly for clarity and length.

Paul Zalewski: You’ve been in business for 16 years. What’s your secret?

Ryon Gross: “Coming in, our customers’ main concern is putting trust into somebody—we only meet 50% of our customers face-to-face—they need to trust us, we need to be available, responsive, [and] provide a level of customer service most people can’t keep up with.

At the end of the day we’re building something that is something that’s going to represent their business. What we build needs to be available 24×7, and therefore so do we.”

PZ: What are some of the most important lessons for agency owners that you’ve learned over the years?

RG: As far as lessons I’ve learned, there’s an old saying I attribute to Mark Cuban: “Run your business every day like someone is trying to take it all away from you.” You need to be prepared to change and adapt. You need to surround yourself with the right people.

For us, internally, we’ve done a good job of finding like-minded people [internal employees] who want to grow, be challenged, and want what’s right for the customer. Having those values is really important to us. It’s a hard thing to find these people—we’ve searched high and low to try and find these people. The people we have now have those values, so it makes accomplishing the goals a lot easier.

You offer just two main services, website design and local SEO. Why?

What we’ve found is we get a lot of customers that come to us for the web design route, then they come around to the SEO route: they need a way to make the phone ring.

Customers then…come around to the SEO route: they need a way to make the phone ring.

We’ve got some smaller child services that branch out, but these are the core two. When a client approaches us, they want to go one of two directions—they need a website—someone to design and maintain it.

The other option is a website, plus someone who can make their phone ring. At some point, clients realize they need some way to make their phone ring. The Dallas-Fort Worth area is highly competitive. If you’re not in the local three-pack or in top three [rankings] organically, your phone isn’t going to ring.

What are the most difficult parts of running a local SEO and web design agency?

Content is the hardest thing to stay on top of. We’ve got a lot of clients, and we’re producing a lot of content—blog posts and on-page copywriting. Google wants to see fresh updates and that you know what you’re talking about with respect to the business you’re in.

For us, we found that we needed a team of copywriters who had a wide variety of experience in subject-matter expertise, as opposed to one person who tried to do it all.

Before Verblio, [laughs] I’m sure it’s like most people—you or someone you find sits down to try to write a few blogs. And then you quickly find it’s a tough thing to replicate, especially 52 weeks out of the year.

For us, we found that we needed a team of copywriters who had a wide variety of experience in subject-matter expertise, as opposed to one person who tried to do it all.

What content strategy do you recommend to your clients?

We’ve been consistent for a while that content creation is the way to go, the more content you have, the better off you’re going to be from an SEO perspective. That strategy hasn’t changed that much—great content is still the backbone of local SEO.

How did Verblio come into the picture for LocalLeap?

We were scouring the web looking for a solution to this problem of how can we create consistent content, using subject-matter experts across a wide variety of industries, at a reasonable cost? We ended up finding you guys through a Google search.

What parts of Verblio took some getting used to when you started outsourcing content to us?

One of the things we’ve experienced is when you know a client so well you know their services, their clients, [and] their audience, you really know how to structure content so it matches their needs.

Another early challenge we had was going back and making sure that the keywords we were using made sense to the writer writing the blog.

There are features Verblio is putting into place so our writers understand those needs, produces content that is on point, wastes less of my time [and] the writers’ time.

Conveying those needs, both content that has the right structure and expertise for the client, and how to include the right keywords, to writers on your platform so they can see the same thing we do—that took some getting used to.

You guys are adapting that more quickly than I would have thought about. There are features Verblio is putting into place so our writers understand those needs, produces content that is on point, wastes less of my time [and] the writers’ time.

It goes back to the keyword research aspect of SEO—we have our keywords we put into our reports [for our clients], so we also need to structure those keywords when we put them into [Verblio] requests, the writer understands exactly what we’re looking for, [that is,] we want to make sure it’s something that makes sense to the person.

How does Verblio help you run your agency better?

One of the things we’ve really enjoyed is the reliability from Verblio. The consistent postings [of content] is something we can really depend on and know the content is going to be ready to review when we log in. We have a [client] content schedule that we follow, so knowing that we can log in, review, post on our clients’ social—that’s what we really enjoy.

One of the things we’ve really enjoyed is the reliability from Verblio.

I’ve seen in some of the posts that no blog is going to be perfect—we approach it with that mindset—there’s always going to be things we’re going to want to tweak, but for the most part, we’re really happy with the content.

What’s next for you on the Verblio platform?

One of the things we just started testing is the ability for one of our clients to get auto-published content from Verblio [meaning Local Leap uses a Verblio account manager to optimize content in his client’s CMS and schedule it for publishing]—if this works out it will be a huge time-saver on our end.

There’s always something to do and blogs, for us, are filling up the majority of our time—just going in and tweaking—any time we can save is beneficial.

Looking Forward

We’re thrilled to be able to deliver great content & subject matter expertise with consistency, a reasonable cost, and less of a headache to Ryon and Local Leap. As an organization, we’re laser-focused on building solutions that allow agencies to make their clients’ or internal content creation easier, more powerful for their clients, and more profitable for the agency. One of our favorite things to do is stay in touch with long-term clients like Local Leap to figure out how to continually improve for them.

The post Verblio Customer Spotlight: Using Verblio to Power Content Creation for Local SEO appeared first on Verblio.

We’ve lost money on content creation every single quarter for the last four years.  -BJ Enoch

Content creation is hard. It’s arguably harder for agencies. Clients are diverse, deadlines are tight, margins are tighter. Despite this, and despite the above quote, SocialSEO believes content creation is critical to driving results for its clients and has never shied away. Even if it can be messy.

To be doing SEO right, and do right by our clients, content creation was that ‘necessary evil’ [for the agency]. It was, and is, integral to the SEO process. But no other SEO shops wanted to do it.

So, while the content was losing them money, SocialSEO is a pioneer among SEO agencies in their willingness to create content for clients and used this as a competitive advantage.

Let’s step back for a moment.

SocialSEO is a 60+ person, a full-service digital marketing agency based in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with a presence in Denver, Colorado Springs, and Phoenix. They’ve been around for over 15 years and have never stopped growing.

At that scale, and with that strong a belief in content to power SEO and digital marketing, SocialSEO’s content needs are massive—they regularly produce hundreds of pieces of content for clients each month. (And, with Verblio (formerly BlogMutt), they hope to dramatically increase how much content they’re producing for their clients, but more on that later.)

BJ Enoch is SocialSEO’s VP of Enterprise Accounts—a title that means he is the agency’s in-house SEO guru, travels routinely doing speaking engagements, and woos enterprise clients in a technical sales capacity. And if you talk to most SEO experts in the region, they’ll have spent time with BJ. Above all, BJ loves getting into the trenches and doing real SEO work for SocialSEO’s clients.

With that sort of reputation, I expected big things when meeting BJ, and for him to regale me with tales of the latest cutting-edge strategies he was implementing for his clients. And those stories did come out, eventually.

But on the first phone call we were on, BJ told me a different story:

Last night at 10 PM I was writing a blog post for one of our nutraceutical clients about the best skin care products for women in their forties.

Wait…what? (This story is even more quirky because when you meet BJ you realize he’s a six-foot-six, cowboy-boots-wearing, pickup-truck-driving native of rural Colorado. Once he had to leave a Friday-night social engagement we both attended early because he was leaving at 5 AM the next morning to buy hay for his horses.)

What follows is a series of quotes, pulled from conversations BJ and I have had since that first phone call over the course of the past four months. During that time, we were selling Verblio services to SocialSEO, they were testing us out as a content creation partner, and they were scaling up their use of our platform to literally change the way they produce content for clients. All quotes, unless otherwise noted, are from BJ.

Why Agencies Should Outsource Content Creation

SocialSEO has been outsourcing content creation since nearly the beginning of the agency’s history. Their reason for this is simple:

If, as an agency, you can’t or don’t want to learn about a subject, contract someone who does.

Why? Subject-matter expertise produces better content—content that’s more authentic, more trustworthy. And with just a few in-house content writers, you can only have subject matter expertise in a very limited number of industries—your content writers simply can’t have deep subject-matter expertise beyond the few areas or industries they’ve personally worked in.

“An example of this is Section 105 of the IRS tax code as it applies to Health Reimbursement Arrangements. I don’t want to learn about this—it sounds really boring. I don’t want to pay one of my in-house writers to research this. They’re not going to be able to get the level of expertise needed on this quick enough.”

Not only does subject-matter expertise produce more authentic content, but it also produces content more cost-effective. If your in-house content writers are spending time researching, that’s time they’re not spending writing, and that research is costing you money.

SocialSEO also isn’t shy about using outsourced content writers:

We don’t make this a secret. We tell our clients, ‘Hey, we don’t know this, we’re going to find someone who does’.

A Brief History of Content Outsourcing at SocialSEO

Despite the belief that it’s necessary, and the long history with it, SocialSEO has had a rocky relationship with content outsourcing:

I still have a bit of PTSD from using other content writing services back in the day. We had some good experiences, but we had a lot of bad ones as well. A single author took a single subject at time, and regularly we’d go 2 or 3 turns with a writer and before we just called it quits with them, or went ahead and accepted it, then basically rewrote it with edits.

Not all freelance writers, or freelance writing services, are created equal. After that negative experience, SocialSEO has built a network of individual freelancers who create content:

Law students, for example, make great freelance writers—they’re incredibly knowledgeable, but they’ve just built a mountain of debt and are eager for work.

But, law students and other freelancers come and go, and maintaining a network of freelance writers has challenges—managing supply and demand, handling the paperwork, sorting the good from the bad.

So when they met us, SocialSEO’s content writing was done with a blend of two in-house, full-time content writers and an ever-changing network of individual freelance writers. And it was this structure that led BJ to make the statement that kicked off this article:

We’ve lost money on content creation every single quarter for the last four years.

But, again, BJ’s belief that content creation was a critical driver of results for clients kept SocialSEO creating content, even as a loss-leading investment in their clients.

Enter: Verblio

We met SocialSEO by chance, and while BJ was skeptical based on his past experiences with some of our competitors, he was intrigued. The prospect of having more than one author tackle a subject and then only choosing the one he liked, he’s recently told us, was the biggest draw by far. A few days later, BJ let me know he’d signed up one of their smaller clients as a test.

We talked on the phone the next day and BJ let me know he’d gotten back a submission from one of our writers on the first topic he’d requested in the Verblio platform. And the piece was really good. But the writer hadn’t quite followed directions and so it wasn’t the content BJ needed. I asked him to just hold on for a few days, and he’d likely get another submission from a different writer.

The next day, I got this email:

We obviously love comments like this, but the important takeaway here is that, as a Verblio client, you shouldn’t expect every submission you get from one of our writers to be perfect. That first submission BJ received wasn’t what he needed. But, through the process of only accepting posts you like, declining those you don’t, and leaving feedback, both positive and constructive, our writers will learn what you, and your clients, are looking for. The crowd of writers will get “smarter” over time, producing more and more content that’s on point.

Another key benefit of Verblio for SocialSEO is speed. Like most agencies, their clients want things fast, and deadlines aren’t always reasonable. A few weeks later BJ told me this:

I’m in love with your service. I added another topic the other day and got a post back in less than 10 hours that felt like the writer read my mind.

Oh, and it’s not just BJ who was into this whole Verblio thing:

Again, it’s important to set expectations—you aren’t always going to get outstanding content (but you’ll also see our writers blow away your expectations). I let Jill know to keep leaving feedback, keep using the “decline” and “request edits” buttons when necessary, and to “prefer” writers who were producing this outstanding content so they’d write more for her clients.

Scaling Verblio as a Content Creation Source

Fast-forward to today. SocialSEO is in scaling mode with Verblio. We’re now creating content for over 25 of their clients, and SocialSEO’s spend with Verblio is in the thousands of dollars per month range.

Overall, SocialSEO feels the process has gone remarkably smoothly, but there are things to work through. We’re still in the process of building the full list of features designed to support enterprise-level agencies like SocialSEO, including a more flexible crediting system and one monthly bill across all of their subscriptions.

SocialSEO is now also using to Verblio to create additional content types, from product descriptions, to website content, to press releases.

Looking Forward

When we’re fully ramped up, I expect to use Verblio to create between 60 and 70 percent of all of our content.

As the largest SEO agency in Colorado, and a huge believer in including content creation in all of their clients’ packages, SocialSEO’s content needs are vast. And they don’t expect Verblio to create all of it. When all is said and done, BJ expects their content creation engine to look like this:

• An in-house, full-time generalist content writer with strong research skills will continue to work on some “big content” pieces, content that needs to be turned around within hours, or to go where they’re most needed.
• Verblio’s network of specialist writers will create the majority of SocialSEO’s content. SocialSEO will continue to build teams of ‘go-to’ writers for each client, and, crucially, SocialSEO’s account managers will manage their clients’ accounts within Verblio. These account managers will act as the “editor” for their clients, as they know their clients’ businesses the best.
• SocialSEO will continue to work with a collection of individual freelance writers, particularly legal/medical specialists when needed for compliance/special requirements.

The operations of content creation can be challenging, particularly at large agencies with diverse client bases. Through the above framework, SocialSEO is achieving two goals simultaneously:

1. increasing content quality while
2. changing their content operations from a loss-leader to a profit center.

And BJ will do less of this:

I’ve written over 250 pieces of content about proctology.

And this:

This week I’m finishing up a 2,500-word article on the major types of tea. And I don’t even like tea.

And more of his first love: digging deep with his suite of SEO tools and leading technical SEO projects for SocialSEO‘s enterprise clients.

Ready to talk about integrating Verblio into your content creation operation?

The post How a Leading SEO Agency Used Verblio to Overhaul Their Content Creation appeared first on Verblio.