15. Let’s Pay Less: Do I Need Help with Blogging?

Stephanie 0:00

Have you ever been in the middle of writing a blog post and thought to yourself, life would be so much easier if I could hire someone else to do this. After all, a lot of TPT sellers hire people to help with blogging. Let's chat about whether or not this is something you need to pay for.

Stephanie 0:17

It's the final Saturday of the month, which means it's time for another installment of the Let's Pay Less series. This is a chance for us to use our marketing dollars more strategically so that we can maximize our reach without draining our bank accounts. So over the past several episodes, we've been talking about how to create an optimal blogging workflow. And as you listened to these episodes, you might have started thinking to yourself, This is a lot, and I don't have time to do this on my own, I probably need to think about outsourcing. There are many teacher business owners who choose to hire help with blogging. I mean, I have a full client roster of TPT sellers who use my done for you blogging services. But that doesn't mean that hiring a blogger is the best next step for you. So let's dive into the pros and cons of hiring help with blogging.

Stephanie 1:26

If you're new to the blogging scene, you might be thinking, hold the phone. People just have someone else writing for them? So let's talk about what it actually looks like when someone, quote, unquote, gets help with their blogging because there is a wide range of services and a wide range of budgets. So at the tippy top of the budget range would be a service provider who takes care of the entire blog for a TPT seller, start to finish. This usually would include them sourcing all of the images, coming up with the topics, doing the keyword research, writing the content, doing all of the finishing touches within WordPress. Basically, the blog would be an independent arm of the business that just hums along with very little input or effort from the TPT seller, and that would have a pretty hefty price tag. Next would be someone who does most of the work for the blog post, but the TPT seller provides at least some input on the topic and provides the images that are going to be used for the post. This would be more of a collaborative effort, but the service provider still does all of the writing and uploading of the post. This is kind of where my services fit. It's a mostly hands off process for the TPT seller, but there's just a touch more collaboration and input. Next would be a service provider who writes just the content of the post, just the words, and the business owner does the rest. So the topic and the talking points are usually specified by the TPT seller, and the writer just takes care of the words of the post and hands it back to the TPT seller to put it into WordPress and do all of the other things. And then finally, there are virtual assistants who can help with any part of the blogging process. So a TPT seller might enjoy all of the keyword research, the outlining, even the writing of the post, but they hate doing all of the uploading to WordPress. You know, adding those internal links, writing the alt text for the images, all of those finishing touches. A VA could help with that. The TPT seller might do just fine with the blogging, but really struggles with the keyword research and topic identification. A service provider could help with that. In fact, I have a package that people use in that situation. I call it my quarterly keyword research. They just tell me the products they want to soft sell in their posts, and then I do all the keyword research for them, identify actual topics, and then hand it back to them, and they take care of all the blogging, because they don't mind that part.

Stephanie 4:14

So when we talk about hiring help with blogging, there truly is a wide range of services that this could include, but regardless of what options someone chooses, there are generally the same pros and cons. So let's talk about the pros and cons of hiring help with your blog. So the first benefit of hiring help is that you have the potential to save a lot of time, because when you have your least favorite blogging tasks, or even all of your blogging tasks off your plate, you're able to save that energy for other CEO tasks in your business. The second benefit is that paying for help with blogging could help you save money. In other ways, so with the time you're saving and the consistent, long form content that you get from hiring blogging help, you might not need to pay for social media management or email marketing help, because you would have the time to repurpose that blog content that you're paying for into social media posts or emails to your list. The third benefit of hiring help with blogging is that it just it kind of encourages you to plan ahead, and it keeps you on track, unless you're paying for the convenience of never thinking about your blog ever again. Hiring help with blogging usually forces you to look at a larger picture of your marketing efforts, because if you want your writer to create a blog post that soft sells a new product you're developing, you'll want to make a plan for how you will get that product finished in time and have the photography ready to go. Many busy teacher business owners love the accountability that this brings to their workflow, because knowing that there is someone waiting on direction for a blog post encourages them to be consistent. But for some listeners, just hearing that last benefit might make them immediately think of a con. So let's start with that one. The first con is that when you hire out for blogging, you are adding more cooks to the kitchen, right? You're adding a collaborative workflow to your business. This always opens the door to adding a little bit more complication to your life, especially if you don't have strong systems in place. So for example, you might have to coordinate your blog post topics with a photographer if you also hire out your photography, so that can just start to create a little bit more complication to your life. Another con, which is probably one of the most popular complaints of hiring a blogger, is that your posts might not sound like you anymore. It can be challenging to find a blog writer who matches your voice and uses talking points that sound like something you would actually say. Because of this, there are many people who choose to make adjustments to the posts that are written by their blog writers because they want to feel like it truly represents their voice and their opinions. But this can be time consuming, and it can feel like a waste of the money that you spent hiring the writer in the first place. And so that leads to another con. So all of the time that it takes to figure out with your writer your voice and the talking points you like to use in all of your preferences. The onboarding process of hiring a writer is usually pretty involved. It takes a lot of effort to get a blogging workflow in place where the end result is content that you are proud to have on your website. So due to this, it's really not a good option for people who are looking for a quick fix. If you hire help with blogging as a short term solution, you'll likely find that you don't see an ROI on the time you spent onboarding the help. The final con that I've noticed in my work as a blogger is that oftentimes hiring help doesn't actually solve the problem. In fact, it can actually make life more complicated for the teacher business owner. So let's talk about why that happens.

Stephanie 8:30

As I've mentioned before, most of my blogging clients have been with me for years. We have had plenty of time to establish a workflow that results in blog content that represents their brand in a way that feels authentic for them. But I have helped clients with blogging that didn't stay with me for very long. Each situation was different for these clients, but it was the best call at that time to discontinue my services because for each of those clients, at that moment in their business, having me write blog content for them was not the most important solution for their business. So just like these clients, you might discover that hiring a blogger doesn't actually solve your core problem. So that's why I want to finish this episode by giving you a list of questions to ask yourself before you decide to invest the money to hire help with blogging. So question number one, do you have room in your operating expenses to pay for the services without watching your sales like a hawk every month? And so the reason you want to ask that question is because you're going to see an ROI from well written and optimized blog posts, but it's going to take time. So blogging is not one of those services that pays for itself instantly, so you need to make sure you have the funds available to pay your blogging help and not have to be stressing about it every month. Question number two, do you already have a blogging workflow in place for your business? And a follow up question, do you have a clear idea of where this blogging help is going to simplify your workflow? So if the answer to that question is no, hiring help is just going to amplify all of those sticky points in your blogging workflow. It will not simplify things, and it probably would not be the best use of your money at that time. Question number three, do you have a plan for how you will market this new steady stream of long form content, as we talked about in the last episode, you need to make a solid plan for marketing your blog on Pinterest. You don't want to be the bottleneck in the workflow with fresh posts piling up that need to be shared on Pinterest and social media. So you'll want to have a plan for how you're going to be promoting and making use of all of that long form content, and speaking of making use of that content, that leads us to question number four, which is, will you have the bandwidth to repurpose this fresh content? It's important to maximize your ROI, so be sure that you have a system set up to repurpose your blog content for email, social media, podcasts or YouTube. This goes back to having a strong workflow in place. And finally, question number five, do you have a handle on the current best practices of SEO and blogging? Because it's important that you know what a good blog post looks like, so you can assess the quality of the work that you're paying for. Because I'm going to tell you, there are a lot of service providers out there who list blogging in a long list of services that they provide to clients, but this does not mean that they can create optimized content that will get you ranking on Google. It's important to know what the industry standard is for quality blog content, so that you don't get stuck paying somebody month after month for subpar content. Okay, so those are the five questions. If you answered no to most of these questions, it probably is not going to be the best use of your marketing dollars to hire help with blogging at this point, it just might not be the game changer that you're hoping it's going to be. Instead, it might be that you're in a season where you need or want to do your own blogging, and you just need a little bit of help to set up a realistic workflow. This is when a blogging course might be a better use of your marketing dollars. It's definitely less expensive, it's self paced, and you can implement what you're learning as you go. My experience as a blogger for TPT sellers is what inspired me to create bring your own traffic. I was tired of seeing TPT sellers shelling out money for subpar content that was written by either inexperienced writers or expensive AI tools, and they were doing this because they just didn't have the bandwidth to consistently create blog content. I decided to create a course that combined the essentials of SEO blogging and Pinterest into one cohesive but very doable and realistic workflow. Because when people are looking for help with blogging, I would say a lot of times, it's not necessarily the content they need help with. It's the workflow. And so I thought this would be a much less expensive way for people to get their blogging workflow figured out. But I have had people take the course and then decide that there was still one aspect of blogging that they really didn't want to do, and that's perfect. That's what the course is there for, because then you can hire someone with your eyes wide open of what the best practices are, plus the course can help you create a blogging system that can easily handle the addition of a new team member to the workflow.

I hope that this episode has helped you consider if hiring help with blogging is the best use of your marketing dollars, it very well could be. But if you're not quite ready for that step in your business, I hope that this episode has inspired you to just save that money without FOMO.

After listening to this episode, if you feel like the next step for your business is to take a blogging course, be sure to take advantage of the free preview lessons of bring your own traffic, just head over to stephanieroyer.podia.com That's stephanieroyer dot, P, O, D, I, A.com, so once you get to that page, you'll select bring your own traffic. And once you're on that page, there are several lessons that you can preview for free. They are kind of spaced out on that page, so just be sure that you scroll down so you can see all of the free lessons that are available. There is also going to be a link to this page in the show notes.