Prioritizing Your Ghost Blogging To Get The Most Out Of Your Business
Ghost blogging, what a strange term, right? No, this isn’t blogging by the undead – these are articles written for you by a ghost writer specializing in writing articles for blogs.
Why would you want to hire a ghost blogger? Wouldn’t it be better to write blog articles yourself? After all, don’t you, or your staff, know your business better than anyone?
Why You Need a Blog
Let’s step back a bit – you might be wondering why your business needs a blog. In fact, why is a blog important for a business?
- Are you trying to establish your brand on the internet?
- Do you want to reinforce your image to your customers?
- Are you trying to attract search engines, including Google, to your site so you can get more customers?
- Do you want to create a great impression?
If you want your business to expand and prosper, defining and building your brand is essential. A blog gives you a home, so to speak, or a central location on the web where your customers, employees, consultants, vendors and others can visit. By defining a blog and keeping it up-to-date with good information, you establish your brand and build your reputation.
This gives anyone who wants to find out more about your business a consistent place to go. They simply type your domain name into their web browser (or click a link), which displays your information.
A Blog is Not Static
If your blog never changes, there is no reason for your customers and others to visit on a regular basis. Once they’ve what you have written, they don’t need to come back unless they have a specific requirement. Additionally, search engines favor fresh, new content. Because of this, blogs and websites with newer articles tend to rank higher than those with older articles.
Generally, your blog needs to be updated with a bare minimum of one well-written, informative, high-quality article each month. More often is better. An article every week is a great pace, and if you can write more, that’s even better.
So why do You Need A Ghost Blogger?
Ghost Blogging can be a big help for your business because of several factors, and a ghost blogger understands how to make your articles work well for both people and search engines.
- Search engines favor longer articles. It’s not just a matter of writing text and slapping up a few images. An article in a blog needs to be anywhere from 1,000 or more words long, with between 2,000 and 3,000 words being the sweet spot. Writing an article of this length in a quality manner which provides good information is a job fora professional writer.
- Articles must contain long-tail keywords used in a “natural” way. A long-tail keyword (or phrase) is something someone might type into a search engine to look for something that’s more complicated than one or two words. It’s virtually impossible to rank high on a single word or two, so phrases such as “how to peel potatoes” or “help me find a job” are used instead. There are far more combinations and it’s much easier to get higher on a search page using these types of phrases. An article, whether done by ghost blogging or not, needs a handful of these sprinkled through the text in a fluid, natural way. In other words, the keywords must make sense in the context.
- Articles must link internally and externally. By linking to expert sites to reinforce a point or to reference additional information, you build credibility not just with your readers, but with search engines. Internal links are links to other articles within your own site. Ideally, you should have a few of each type in your articles, and they must make sense in the context.
- Authority sites must link to your articles. You need to get sites which have some authority (these are sites that are known to have an understanding of a subject) link to your article (not just your site.) This will get you visitors from other sites and search engines want to see that you are recommended by others. Generally, ghost bloggers do not perform this step (although they can) but quality articles tend to attract links.
How Long Does it Take for Blogging (or Ghost Blogging) to Work?
Search engines take their own sweet time to index blogs and other web sites. If you are publishing (on your blog) an article every week, you should be seeing an increase in search engine and other traffic in four to six months. Sometimes it happen faster, and sometimes it can take longer.
You just have to keep writing quality (quality is vital) articles regularly (weekly is a great schedule) and get a few other people to link to each one. Additionally, post your articles on social media, and get others to share them around. This is another reason why you want to write lots of articles for blogs – the more quality articles you write, the more they are shared. This brings in even more visitors.
What Does Ghost Blogging Cost?
While you can always find cheap, inexpensive writers just about anywhere, in this case cheap is not going to help you very much.
Because you need high quality, longer, specialized articles directly related to your business, you should expect to pay higher rates.
Inexperienced writers make these mistakes:
- They write articles that are not of excellent quality, which tends to turn away customers.
- They don’t take advantage of long tail keywords, which lessens the impact of search engines.
- They don’t take the time to understand your business, which means their articles are not well targeted to your customers.
- Writers from out of the country may not be native speakers of your language, and that can turn away customers.
- They make spelling and grammar errors.
A 2,000 word article written by an experienced ghost blogger will require two to eight hours or more, depending on the amount of research and interviews needed and the complexity of the subject. However, it’s important that some articles be shorter – 300 words or so – and some longer. A 300 words article should require less than an hour to write.
To be effective, ghost blogging needs to be done over a long period of time – at least six months, if not years. You can expect to pay around $750 to $1,000 per month for 4 high-quality articles (one a week) of between 1,000 and 2,500 words. If your needs are less (shorter articles or less articles per month) than the cost will also be reduced.
If that seams like a lot of money, consider that one well-written article can, over time, generate sales leads and business forever. The more articles you have on your blog, the more leads and business you’ll gain. Ghost blogging, over time, can have a massive return on investment.
How Does the Process Start?
The best way to find a ghost blogger is by referral. You can search the web for bloggers, and if you find one make sure you get samples of their writing and, if possible, references. Note that since their work is done on a “ghost” (anonymous) basis, they may not be able to give you direct references. They should, however, at least have their OWN blog with samples articles that they’ve written, a book or two published, or other samples readily available.
Once you contact your potential ghost blogger, they should be willing to give you a free consultation, usually for an hour or so over the phone. They might ask to look over your website, see samples of your products, and see a list of competitor websites.
Virtually all ghost blogging is done remotely, and it is normal to never actually meet your ghost blogger in person. They may deliver the articles to you directly in a Word document over email, or you might ask them to update your blog directly.
Conclusions
Is ghost blogging for you? If you are branding your business, a blog is essential, and if you want to bring in quality leads, give good information to your customers, and expand your business, then hiring a professional ghost blogger is a sure way to go.
it might sound expensive, but consider that it’s another business expense. Would you build your office yourself? Would you hire the cheapest intern to create the artwork for your brochures? Think of writers the same way. You get what you pay for, and if you want high quality content, you want the best that you can get.
References
- What is a Blog: Blogging Basics (9 Pro Blogger Definitions)
- What is a Blog (Youtube video)
- Tutorial: Why Blog for Business?
Richard is the Owner and Senior Writer for The Writing King, a bestselling author, and ghostwriter. He’s written and published 63 books, ghostwritten 40+ books, as well as hundreds of blog articles.
