You asked your employees to start blogging for your company, and the first thing you heard was:
“I’m not a writer. I don’t know how to blog.”
“I don’t have time for blogging. How am I supposed to fit this into my busy schedule?”
Excuses, you think. They’re just resistant to change. You could address the situation by providing extensive training to your employees. You could teach them about inbound marketing and develop best practices for writing blog posts for your business. And you could have your staff set aside time each month or each week for blogging.
There are certainly good reasons to have your staff write for your blog. It can keep the team engaged with your business and can be a way to leverage your employees’ knowledge about your products or services. And there are many ways to try to motivate your staff to blog for you.
But there are also some very good reasons to listen to what your employees are trying to tell you. Looking deeper into your staff’s resistance may save you a lot of hassle, time and money. Here are three reasons to outsource your blog content creation instead of using your own staff.
1. When You Don’t Have Expert Writers on Staff, It’s Hard to Publish High-Quality Blog Posts
If your staff isn’t trained to write, let alone write content marketing materials, the quality is likely to suffer. And quality is important because both Google and your customers demand it.
It’s not just about avoiding typos or unintelligible writing either. You might have someone on staff who you think can produce relatively high-quality blog posts, but do they know how to get your blog and website pages to the top of the search engine results page (SERP)? If you're really looking to drive traffic to your site in order to produce more leads for your sales team, it may be a good idea to team up with professional content creators who know the ins and outs of inbound marketing and content marketing.
By tapping into the wealth of knowledge that people who specialize in content writing and content strategy have, you’ll be able to make your blog an engine of growth instead of stagnant content on the Internet that’s not delivering for your business.
2. When Your Employees are Blogging, They’re Not Doing the Job You Hired Them to Do
Chances are your employees are already fairly busy doing their regular work, and you likely need them to focus on it. When your salesperson is blogging, she’s not making follow-up calls. When your director of operations is blogging, you can bet something is falling through the cracks.
If you’re thinking that blogging won’t take that much time, think again – especially if your goal is to outpace your competition (and it should be). According to a Nectafy study, on average, it took their staff 4 hours and 24 minutes to write a blog post from start to finish.
Even if you’re only blogging once per week, that’s a large enough amount of time to make a real impact on your personnel and their ability to accomplish the job you hired them to do.
Plus, what happens when the employee you thought would be blogging this week falls ill or their workload suddenly doubles thanks to landing a new client? If you’re not prepared for these interruptions, it can lead to inconsistent publishing – a big mistake in inbound marketing.
With outsourced content writing services, you’ll have the advantage of being able to scale quickly and efficiently – without having to rearrange your staff’s workload. And, if you work with a content development services agency that provides topic generation and maintains a content calendar for you, you won’t have to worry about not having a post ready on the day you’re set to publish.
3. Your Budget Won’t Accommodate a Dedicated Content Writer
Now that you’re convinced that your current staff may not be the right choice for filling your blog with content, you might be asking whether or not it makes sense to bring on a full-time writer of your own. If you have the budget for another full-time employee, then you’re golden. Hiring an in-house writer who understands content marketing and who will be dedicated to your company’s blog can be a great move that shifts your blog from a well-intentioned start to a real moneymaker.
But, as you know, hiring can be costly. A good content writer will likely cost your company a mid-level salary, plus healthcare and other benefits. And do you really need a full-time employee to reach your content marketing goals?
When you team up with a content writing services company, you’re more likely to find a solution that matches your specific content needs without breaking the bank. For example, Virtucom Group offers a variety of content packages that range from basic monthly to quarterly, and if you require a large volume of content we’ll work with you to meet that need.
If your staff doesn't have a single expert writer, you won't regret a partnership with a firm that offers both content development and content writing services. Your staff and your budget will thank you.
Not Sure How to Buy Content Development and Writing Services?
If you’re not sure how to approach working with a content firm, download our free ebook for six questions you should ask to find the right content partner. Inside you’ll find topics like in-house writers vs. freelancers, hiring and training procedures, quality control and more.
