Successful business blogging, part 5: 3 ways to get your blog content written consistently

/ Red Sail Writers/

In this 5-part series, we’ve covered the philosophical and practical steps for successful business blogging, whether you’re part of an accounting firm, consulting conglomerate or catering company.

So far, I’ve covered the useful-or-funny blog principle, how to brainstorm enough ideas to give you a heart attack, using a publishing plan to keep you on track and how to get a consistent voice on your company blog.  Now it’s time to talk about how to get it all written.  

B2B businesses write blogs—according to the Content Marketing Institute, 52% of B2B marketers say blogging is critical to content marketing success in 2017. Presumably this continues in 2018.

Which means you’ll probably want to keep blogging.

There are 3 main ways to get content for your B2B blog: use internal resources, hire a copywriter or do both.  All of these options can be great or terrible, depending on the season and the content demand vs. availability of resources.  Only you know what’s right for your business but here are a couple of things to consider while making that decision.

Option 1: Get your staff to write your blogs

At first glance, this sounds like a perfect solution – you’re already paying them! The blogs will be free! Well, not so fast.

Here’s the challenge: your marketing team can (probably) write but they don’t have the expertise to write about the topics your subject matter experts (SMEs) know. Your subject matter experts know their subject but submitting an article that’s audience-friendly and meets your publication standards is unlikely.

For a couple of years, I was on a corporate blog editing team. Most of the articles were submitted by staff—good content but not ready for publication: no flow, repetition, internet copy-and-paste jobs, etc. Editing each submission took 1 – 3 hours. {Some were great and took 15 minutes but that was rare. Some were a complete abomination but that was also rare.}

This system definitely isn’t “free” but giving your technical experts the opportunity to share their knowledge is a great way to energize them and build relationships between marketing and other teams.

Getting it right

Set up a system to get content drafted, edited and published. Will your marketing team member interview your SMEs and write the article? Research the topic and get your SME to do a fact check? Will your SMEs write the article that someone on your marketing team edits? Doesn’t matter which system but it must be clear.

Build success and enjoyment into the process for your writers by:

  • Sharing your blog style guide with your SMEs and telling them that’s what the edits will be based on. No one likes other people’s edits but especially not when they appear random and inconsistent over several submissions.

  • Having a submission calendar that doesn’t strain your SMEs who are writing these articles on top of their real jobs. Your business blog submission will fall to the bottom of the priority list when time is tight. Which can leave you in the lurch for publishing if you don’t have enough cushion built into your system.

Option 2: Hire a freelance content marketing writer to write your blogs

Here you have the same technical expertise issue here as you do with the first example. But again, that can be fixed with a system.

Depending on the complexity of the topics, your content marketing writer can write blogs based on their own research or by interviewing a subject matter expert on your staff. {If staff are interviewed, a nice touch to add at the end of the blog is something like, “Thanks to Johnny Bananas, CPA, for his advice on this subject.”}

Getting it right

As above, share your blog style guide—and your expectations—with your freelance copywriter so that she can turn in drafts that need few, if any, changes (saving you time).

Don’t hire your writer one blog at a time. Organize yourself so you know your future need and hire your copywriter to write batches of blogs. Professionals don’t start a job without a letter of authorization and a 50% deposit, meaning if you contract 5 blogs, one-by-one, it makes 5 times the work for you, your accounting department and your writer.  No one likes that.

Find the balance between learning how to work together and getting rid of a content marketing writer. If you have a style guide and set clear expectations, your writer should be able to turn in a good draft blog—it’s not that complicated. But there’s probably a window at the beginning where she’s still getting used to your style and you’ll want to make some revisions. No problem. But if your chosen writer is turning in substandard blog copy repeatedly, it’s time for the heave-ho. Now, if you’ve just churned through 6 content marketing writers, you’ll be well-served by reflecting on the situation and your contribution to it.

Option 3: Use staff and freelancers to write your blogs

This can give you the best of both worlds so long as everyone adheres to your style guide.

Even if you primarily rely on internal resources, you can get your writer to do a few batches of blogs each quarter so your publication schedule never falls behind, even when it’s tax season and no one has one spare moment to dedicate to non-essential tasks like writing a blog. I’m not saying the blog isn’t essential—but some folks outside of marketing may take that view since it’s not essential to their role. And that’s okay…because you’ve got a system to ride the ups and down of the work cycle.

So, there you have it: 3 ways to get quality B2B blog content written and published consistently.

You can do it!

I'm Andrea Bassett, an executive ghostwriter and content marketing writer in Toronto and I’ve spent the last decade serving executives.

I write thought leadership content marketing for executives and/or their content marketing teams. My specializations are corporate wellness, benefits, employee assistance programs, leadership & coaching, encryption & cybersecurity and strength training for seniors.

To talk about a content marketing project, call me at 647-502-3187 or send a note to andrea@redsailwriters.com.

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