The Reason Behind Blog Writing As a Service
It all began with someone asking me to help them with online marketing. I explained to them the importance of content creation and suggested that they start a company blog.
Blogging takes skill and time, if you want to do it right. Like many typical small businesses they did not possess the skills and time to do a good job, nor did they have the resources to hire someone to do so in house.
I suggested that they look into a blog writing service. This would provide professionally written content at a fraction of the cost and as it turned out, could offer a hands free solution to managing their blog.
I’ve heard about these services before, but never had a chance to use them or research them in great detail.
Naturally, they asked for my help to set it all up and I reluctantly agreed. I started the same way that anyone would, by typing “blog writing service” into Google.
Immediately it returned dozens of service providers and I started sifting through them. After weeding out the obvious “Content Farms” (those service providers where most content originates from some Asian Pacific country, with either low quality, software generated content or blatant plagiarism) I was left with around 10 service providers that required a closer examination. So I began the laborious task of selecting the perfect blog writing service.
There were two categories that emerged from that pile:
1) Services like ODesk and Elance that concentrated only on writing services, where you post a job and get offers from many individual service providers.
2) Agency type of services that provided writing services ranging from supplying single pieces of content to monthly plans that offer multiple pieces of content as well as a wide range of other services such as images, additional SEO, posting and whole blog management.
ODesk/Elance Clones
If you’ve ever used these types of services, you know that you can find decent quality for bargain pricing through trial and error. If you look hard enough and long enough, it is possible. The problem with that approach is that it could take a lot of time and money before you find that “diamond in the rough” contractor. Being as such, I decided to skip these services and take the agency approach.
Agency Like Services
The first thing that struck me as odd was the wide range of pricing. I saw prices ranging anywhere from $12 per blog post, all the way up to $199 per blog post. That meant one of two things: Either there was a ridiculously wide range of quality or this was a positioning business where one could inflate their margins based on image and perception. As it turned out, it was a combination of the two… but I’ll get to that in a bit.
Something else that I noticed was that most of these blog writing services functioned like your typical SaaS. Although most of them offered to sell you a single blog post, majority tried to get you into a monthly package where they provide you with an X amount of blog posts per month. This actually made sense. A blog is a long term investment and if you’re going to outsource it, you would be better served creating a long term relationship with a provider rather than doing one off purchases.
Another oddity that I saw was that they all seemed to have picked an arbitrary word count that they offered in their blog posts. Some offered blog posts of 300 words, others offered 400 words, still others offered 600 words. This made no sense. First of all, I’ve never seen a blog where all the posts were of roughly the same length. The length should depend on the topic and the content of the post. Some make sense to be 200–300 word blurbs, while others could not convey the whole thought in 1000 words (much like this post). Besides one would have to assume that these agencies have multiple clients that could range from pet shops to IT security firms. How can you write the same length post on house breaking a dog as you do on IT security?
A blog writing service seems like a great B2B opportunity. It’s targeted at businesses who realize the importance of blogging but don’t have the skills and time necessary to do it successfully themselves and would rather outsource it like many of its other functions that go into building a successful business. Which led me to another point I did not understand about these agencies.
Building a successful business is like building a house. There are many moving parts and as a business owner your job is to hire the right people for the job. When you need accounting work, you hire a CPA. When you need legal work, you hire an attorney. When you need software built, you hire a developer. Much like building a house, you hire a framer, a mason, a plumber, an electrician, etc. to do their specialized jobs. You wouldn’t hire the same guy to do your plumbing and electrical work just like you wouldn’t hire the same guy to do your taxes and build your website.
This extends into writing. Writing a PR release is different from and requires a different skill set than writing sales copy or writing a white paper or writing a blog post. Each of these types of writing is specialized, much like parts of a house or business. So it was odd to me that these agencies claimed to be specializing in all of them. I immediately thought of the age old saying “Jack of all trades, master of none”. Now it’s plausible that these agencies have access to large pools of writers which specialize in the different types of writing. Some clearly stated that they outsource to “English speaking” writers, while others claimed to have their own staff and others didn’t mention one way or the other.
This shined a little light on the pricing differentiation. Obviously an agency with a local staff of writers would have higher costs than one that outsourced offshore to “English speaking” writers.
It was time to put them to a test!
I spoke to my friend to get a sense of what they would be looking for and to form a strategy for their blog writing outsourcing. There seemed to be a few options:
1) A completely hands on approach, where they would have input and control of each blog post. Dictating the individual topic and providing resources to the writer.
2) A completely hands off approach, where in the beginning they would tell the writer their general plan, their target audience and set some minor expectations, then let the writer loose to do as they saw fit (with minor course corrections along the way).
3) Or some sort of a middle ground. Potentially where we would start of as hands on with the idea to transition into hands off, as quickly as possible.
We figured that ideally they would be interested in a hands off approach or at least to work in that direction, but for the test we would provide the topic as well as resources. Figuring that if we provide all this guidance, then we can expect a much higher quality output than the writer would typically be able to provide on their own. This would show us their ceiling for quality and we wanted a blog writing service that had a high ceiling.
So we put together a topic, the intended audience, the purpose of the blog post, the title, and a bunch of external resources as well as an internal resource and sent it off to a mid-level (price wise) blog writing service provider.
What we received back was appalling. It was filled with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Which was odd, since they claimed to use only “English speaking” writers as well as editorial proofing. Not only that, but it did not cover what we explained and did an overall poor job covering anything even related.
Clearly we were not impressed. But we figured this could be the growing pains of setting up the relationship. So we reached out to them and provided feedback. Taking our feedback, the service provided a re-write. This time, the spelling and grammar issues were taking care of but the content was still lacking clarity and direction that we requested. Clearly, it was time to move on.
After numerous experiments that displayed some or all of the same issues, they decided to give up on this venture and move on. But not me!
I was really disgusted with the whole experience and appalled at the quality or rather lack of, that we were receiving. I figured there has to be a better solution…
read my next post to find out more — Blog Writing As a Service is born
Originally published at www.blogwritingasaservice.com.
