So You Want to Hire a Professional Blogger?

Ready to hire a professional blogger? That’s a great decision. Blogging is an important form of content marketing which can help you to build authority in your niche, drive traffic to your site and increase your online visibility. And that’s why you can’t leave it to chance. This guide will help you work out how to find the blogger you need and discover what you should expect from your working relationship.

Finding a Professional Blogger for Hire

Let’s start at the beginning. It’s important to find the right blogger to tell your story. While you can search for a professional blogger to hire via Google, this will bring up a lot of advice on problogging but may not result in many real leads. And it’s hard to tell whether you can get bloggers you can trust via Craigslist or other online ads. But there is one method that will never fail – and all you have to do is read a few blogs. You probably already have some favorite writers and bloggers whose work you look forward to. Find the ones who are writing in your niche, say you love their work and approach them to see if they are available. (I know this works because that’s how some of my current clients found me!) And then you can have the in-depth conversation about what you need.

Working with a Professional Blogger

If you’re working with a professional blogger, then you have to do your part by providing:

• a clear brief including an overview of your business
• a link to the website where the content is going
• appropriate payment (I’ll come back to that in a moment)

When I work with a client, I provide a questionnaire that asks about:

• the company and your typical client
• how you differentiate your business from that of your competitors
• the terms people use to find you (though I do my own research too)
• the tone you need (formal or conversational, for example)
• your key goal for the content
• other administrivia like deadlines, primary contact, and so on

If you provide the blogger with the right background information then you can expect the blogger to:

• research appropriate content for your blog
• come up with topic ideas for approval (or work with yours)
• write the blog post and link out appropriately
• optimize that blog post for search
• format it with heading tags
• if it’s ghostwritten, to make it sound like you wrote it

Depending on your arrangement, the professional blogger you hire may also:

• source images to accompany the post
• upload the post and images
• insert categories and tags
• fill in the appropriate fields for your SEO software
• if it’s bylined, respond to comments

The Problogger Price Tag

What will you have to pay to hire a professional blogger? There’s no easy answer to this except to say that you get what you pay for. While there are bloggers who will work for less than $30 a post (some of them much less), in general you won’t get much research or original thought at that rate. Which means that’s probably not the right route for your authority blog.

If you want a blogger who can come up with original ideas appropriate to your niche, do in-depth research and turn out well-written, optimized posts with minimal input from you, then expect to pay $100 per short post or more. And add a bit more if that writer is very experienced. (Here’s what I charge and why I’m worth it.)

I hope this will help you hire a professional blogger to boost your content marketing and authority building efforts. If there’s still something you want to know, feel free to ask questions below.