How much is your time and energy worth?
Are you spending your time wisely by creating content yourself or would you be better off hiring someone to do it for you?
Calculate how much your time would be worth to your business if you used that time to run your business and connect with your customers instead of writing content.
What is the purpose of your blog?
If you aren't sure, take some time to think about it. You might be hoping to gain new customers or convert your readers into customers. If this is the case, then you would need to consider a range of things such as the 'voice' and style you want your content written in.
Do you want a persuasive text or an emotional one? Do you want a chatty tone or an informative one? What are you appealing to in your customers? Their fears? Their hopes? Their needs? What do you provide that fills their needs and wants? An experienced copywriter or editor can really nail this for you.
Is your purpose to gain more traffic to your website by ranking higher in search engines? If this is the case, it would be beneficial to hire someone who has some knowledge of how SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) works.
Are you wanting to share your expertise and knowledge? If so, then you may be able to save a bit of time and money by creating a dot point list for your writer to transform into a blog post. Of course, the more detail you can provide, the better your content will be. If your writer has to research things independently because you haven't given enough information, this could bump the up the cost of their services.
Who is your reader?
If most of your readers are completely new to what you are offering, you may need to give more information than you would to those who are familiar with your market. The writer you would be looking for is one who is willing to research and is skilled at transforming information into easily digested chunks.
How much control do you want?
If the whole idea of blogging or creating website content makes you cringe, then you should look at handing the process over to someone who can do it all for you. Look for a writer who is not only able to come up with a range of topics, but also able to research and write on those topics. If they offer a full blog creation package, they should be able to insert pictures into the text to create a visually effective blog and then post the blog for you.
However, if the idea of blogging and writing content excites you, then you should look at writing rough drafts and then hiring someone who can edit and/or proofread your work. The editor should make suggestions for improvement and highlight mistakes. This would be a cheaper option and, the more times you go through the process, the more proficient you would become at writing and managing your content.
Whichever service you are considering, bear in mind that a misplaced word or spelling error can make a huge difference to the way your business is perceived.
By Marina Catherine (c) 2015