In our previous blog post, we discussed strategies you can use to ensure that your blog is continually updated with new content that is interesting and compelling for your readers, helping to convert more website visitors into clients or customers. However, even the best strategies and plans will fail if you don’t allocate enough time and resources to blogging. Effective blogging doesn’t require you to do everything yourself, invest too much of your time or cost a small fortune – in fact, it can be one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your business online!
The Perils Of Neglecting Your Blog
Many businesses understand and accept the costs of designing, creating and hosting a new website or upgrading an existing one – it is understood that an investment of time and money is necessary to create a modern website that is aesthetically-pleasing, fully-functional and meets the needs of your employees, clients and customers. Although many website design packages now include a blog, businesses fail to properly plan for these online properties, which require a continued investment of time and resources to ensure that interesting and compelling content marketing is created and published on a regular basis. Failing to continually update your blog with new content could result in a situation that is worse than if the blog didn’t exist at all – visitors to your site, including prospective customers, may become annoyed at the lack of new content and view your business unfavorably based on this neglect.
Should You Delegate?
There are two primary methods for updating and maintaining a blog – you can choose to hire a third-party to create, edit and publish content on your blog, or you can choose to do the work in-house. Choosing one option or the other depends primarily on two factors: do you or one of your employees have the ability to create content yourself, and can you allocate and resource the time needed to complete this work on a regular basis? Some people love to write and create content, while others find it to be a chore. Additionally, some professionals have more free time throughout the work week than others, while others may decide that they either can’t or won’t take on the extra work. It’s important to remember that updating and maintaining your own blog involves more than just content creation – it’s necessary to learn how to properly edit and format your own content and to use the blogging platform or Content Management System (CMS) powering your blog.
Third-Party Blogging
Delegating the work to a third-party alleviates the need to do the work yourself, but there is an ongoing cost involved. Additionally, simply handing over your blog to a third-party can result in other, often unforeseen, problems as well – your content marketing may not match your voice or your brand voice, or there may even be inaccuracies or mistakes in the content.
Finding An Acceptable Compromise
The best solution for many small businesses is a compromise between doing the work in-house and hiring a third-party, which often involves being hands-on with the content creation and hands-off with the technical aspects of writing, editing and publishing the content. Simply put, if you hire a company to manage your blog, you don’t have to turn your back on the process – in fact, the more you can contribute and participate, the better the chance that your influence and “voice” will carry through to the published content. Even if you believe you aren’t a talented or effective writer, you can still provide a content outline or a list of facts and figures that will assist the third-party writer. Be sure to communicate not just what you want included, but the tone and personality of the content as well. By contributing to the process in this manner, you may also be able to reduce the costs associated with the content creation since potentially less preplanning and research will be necessary.