When Should You Hire A Blog Ghostwriter?
There comes a time when you should think about hiring a ghostwriter for your blog. But when?
Maybe it’s time to start thinking about a ghostwriter when:
- You’ve realized that you don’t have the time to write any more
- You need a professional approach to blogging
- You want well-optimized content that delivers traffic to your important landing pages
- Your blog isn’t performing as well as you think it should be
- You are not confident of your own writing ability
- The competition is beating your socks off
I know what you’re thinking. A blog ghostwriter will cost me money. Yes, you’ll have to pay for the service, but if you get a decent ROI on the expense, would it be worth it? Let’s say that you pay out $300 per month for a ghostwriter and you get 1 lead each month from that. The cost of your lead is $300. Is that more or less than what you are paying now per lead acquisition?
Even if the cost of acquisition per lead is less than you’d normally pay, you still need to close the sale. Right?
Well, if closing one sale means an additional $1,000 in your pocket and you know you can close one of out every three leads, your ROI is $100. You have a positive ROI, correct?
But let’s say you only close one out of every four leads and you have $1,000 coming in out of a $1,200 expense on ghostwriting services. Are you losing money? Not necessarily. Your blog could be sending you one lead per month, but it is also building up new content and building links to your website, which pushes up your search engine rankings. Let’s say it takes you two years to capture the top spot in Google for your key search term and once you do then you realize a 500% increase in traffic.
If your traffic count from organic listings was 1,000 unique visitors and you start getting 5,000 unique visitors per month knowing that you can close 1% of those, your sales conversions go up from 1 per month to 5 per month on organic listings. Your income will also increase from $1,000 per month to $5,000 per month based on the $1,000 per sale. Two years of spending $300 per month on blog ghostwriting services equates to a total expense of $7,200. You’ll make that up in two months after you hit the top spot in Google. How’s your ROI now?
I’m not guaranteeing you a top spot in Google for blog ghostwriting services. We’ve accomplished that feat for customers in the past and I believe we can do it again. But the illustration does show that ROI is not as cut and dry as measuring the sales developed from your blog alone. There’s more to ghostwriting than mere dimes and nickels.
Professional Management for Business Blogs
About the Author: 
There’s definitely more to blog ghostwriting than dimes and nickels. A more important factor is the quality and depth of the writing. Too many business oriented blogs are just out there. The articles are superficial, lack detail and really don’t have very much to say or provide much insight. Following a formula based solely on consistent word counts and SEO leads to an awfully plain jane blog.
Ideally, a reader should feel that they gotten insight into the culture of a business, its people and its ideals through a blog. To me, a key determinant of whether or not to hire a ghostwriter is the quality of their past work, their willingness to learn about your business and to produce blog posts that generate buzz and comment posts from the sites readers. Looking at the Medical Transcription blog that you list as a blog you like, I don’t see or feel any of that. The information is cursory and basic, (stuff most people could figure out without having to read a blog). It might be more interesting to see the service through the eyes of one of its employees or through statements by various customers or through someone learning to be a medical transcriptionist. The other blog about discount gym equimpment no longer exists.
My point of view is that a blog has to be more than just something that gets web hits in a search, it has to draw the interest of potential customers.
Alan, there are different types of blogs and there are many purposes for having one. Much of what you hear about blogging from the experts is good if you are interested in an interactive atmosphere. Quality of writing is certainly to be commended. Many small business owners, however, couldn’t have a blog if they had to pay a content writer $50 every time he wrote a post. Making services affordable is a value that many small businesses appreciate so they can remain competitive in their niches.
As for comments, not all blogs need comments. Many blog managers have stopped approving comments and don’t even allow comments on their blogs. It is perfectly acceptable to choose not to allow comments if that is the approach you want to take.
The gym equipment blog is a blog that was discontinued by the customer. Sometimes a customer has unrealistic expectations or doesn’t understand the product well enough, or maybe they’ve decided to try something different. We don’t manage their businesses; we just manage their blog if they want us to. The bottom line on any blog, whether it is ghostwritten by a highly paid ghostwriter who spends hours crafting beautiful prose or a more affordable solution that increases the effectiveness of a company’s search engine marketing efforts, is whether or not the business realizes a return on their investment. We have customers who have been with us for a couple of years because they see the value.