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Should You Hire Someone To Write Your Content?

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Is it time to hire a writer? Many creatives and companies wonder if delegating content gives them a sufficient return on their investment. Some feel compelled to produce their content without any assistance.

However, many businesses pay writers. Some companies employ hundreds of writers at a time. I’ve performed writing services for others and delegated other parts of my business. Here’s what you need to know before hiring a writer.

What Is The Objective?

More content does not always produce more sales. Creatives who produce content for the sake of producing content will miss out on revenue. A vague goal makes content production less profitable. 

Writing content for your platform helps with building trust. However, an investment needs a potential payoff. If you invest $50 for a blog post, how do you get that $50 back?

Not all free content converts buyers right away. Content advances visitors to a different step in the customer journey. Some content shifts people from unaware to aware. Other content shifts people from interested to purchasers.

Promote a product or service in your content and on your website. This call-to-action turns free content into profitable resources.

What Will You Do With The Extra Time?

Handing off content responsibilities to others gives you extra time. You can use that extra time to pursue additional business projects. 

Many people hire writers to save time. They can produce the content themselves, but why do that when they can delegate that task?

You can promote your products more effectively and serve existing customers. Operating a business becomes less stressful as you delegate more tasks.

Do You Have a Long-Term Strategy?

Hiring people to write content will help your business grow. More content gives you an edge on search engines and builds customer loyalty.

Before hiring a writer, establish a long-term strategy. It takes several months to get notable traffic from SEO. Creating a library of content gives visitors more to consume.

Your content should cater to different stages in the customer journey. Various customer journey rubrics exist, but we’ll use AIDA for this example.

AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.

Create content that addresses each of these four stages. Some people are unaware of the problem. They are not actively searching for a solution. This content helps people recognize their problem.

Once people become aware, they may become interested in learning more. Create content that makes readers want to learn more about a problem. 

During the Desire Stage, consumers become loyal to the brand and are a few steps away from taking action. They’ve got the itch they want to scratch. They’ve been looking at the product or services for months without taking action. Each piece of content builds desire. Content brings the consumer’s desire front and center.

The more they see you, the more likely they will take action. At this stage, a consumer makes the full transition into becoming a customer. They acknowledge their intention to make a purchase and follow-through. 

Including a call-to-action at the bottom of each blog post fuels action. These actions can range from joining an email list to buying a product. You can experiment with several calls-to-action and see which one converts the best.

Looking for a Freelance Writer?

Hiring a writer can help you grow your business. A seasoned writer knows how to produce content that draws attention and boost sales. You can focus more time on other areas of your business.

If you are looking for a freelance writer for your team, I can help. I have written for clients across various industries. If you want to learn more about my services and how we can work together, send an email to marc@marcguberti.com 

How To Choose The Best Blog Post Topics

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blog post topics

Each blog post you write involves a time investment. And as you continue along your journey, the time investment you put towards each blog post will most likely grow. To make your time worthwhile, you must choose the best blog post topics.

That way, your visitors love your blog and you love writing the content. To discover the best blog post topics, we’ll start with the basics and then expand upon that concept.

The Basics

First and foremost, choosing the best blog post topics come down to asking yourself this question:

“What do I enjoy?”

I have a strong passion for digital marketing which is why I can effortlessly write about the topic. I once allocated 15 minutes to write about digital marketing for the day but then became frustrated because I wanted to spend more than 15 minutes writing about digital marketing.

I was like the child who didn’t want recess to come to an end. That’s the mentality you must have when you’re writing your content and know that you’re running out of time to do so.

Obviously, we have a range of answers for that question, “What do I enjoy?” We need to narrow our focus on the few things that we can write about for many years to come and that will continue to provide value.

At one point, I enjoyed writing about LEGO Sets. I haven’t written about LEGOs for a very long time because I prefer writing about digital marketing and embracing that topic. It’s also a niche I can provide massive value for given my experience (years of experience means nothing to me. Results determine the quality of those years and if I should care. This is just a teen’s rant 🙂 ).

To determine if your content will thrive, you must finally ask the question, “Is this something people want?” I know people want this blog post because several of my subscribers asked me to specifically write a blog post on this topic.

I like coming up with my own ideas, but if my audience gives me some ideas, I’m more than happy to write about those topics as well.

Pay Attention To Your Audience

As your content attracts more visitors, your visitors will suggest more ideas. Some of them will be direct…“Write about THIS.” These visitors are rare.

The majority of your visitors will indirectly suggest new content ideas. Here are some of the signs you should pay attention to…

What questions do they ask you in the comments? I always invite my visitors to ask questions in the comments. That way, I can answer these questions and write out future blog posts (I copy and paste some comments together to form the skeleton of blog posts). If I see a lot of questions about, let’s say Pinterest, I know my audience wants a blog post about Pinterest.

What’s getting the most engagement. When I first started this blog, I wrote as many Twitter related blog posts as I could. These blog posts by far got the most engagement and each Twitter blog post worked like magic. Now I’ve slowed down on Twitter related blog posts due to the immense library of them on this blog and the over-saturation of “10 Ways To Get More Twitter Followers” type of blog posts. Engagement is like votes, and engagement can take the form of social signals, traffic, clicks, comments, and any other indicator.

Which of your posts are the top performers. Keep providing these types of posts and internally link them together so they each become top performers. You never know how long a post will retain its popularity, so you want to take action as quickly as possible. For instance, one of my most popular blog posts was a blog post about getting Vine followers. Now it’s not doing so well since Vine isn’t a social network anymore. When you’re content is popular, ride that wave. Hope to never see the shore but write as if that shore is coming and you want to capitalize on all of the growth you can get from the final part of the wave.

See What Your Audience Says Off Your Blog

Your visitors spread their time across multiple blogs and social networks. This is valuable knowledge for discovering what your audience wants. During this stage, we observe others and chime in.

Let me tell you a quick story.

One of the policies I adopted is that I will respond to the comments I get from my blog. I knew it would be a tedious process, but I do so anyway. In these comments, my visitors ask questions, share suggestions, and weigh in on the blog post.

I got inspired to respond to every comment because Neil Patel does it. It’s commonplace for Neil to get dozens or even hundreds of comments for each blog post he publishes. He goes through all of those comments to gather more content ideas and discover what his readers want.

If you’re a digital marketer, especially if SEO is your speciality, then why aren’t YOU going through the comments Neil gets? After you leave a comment (yes, you definitely should), look at all of the Qs and suggestions Neil gets. Each of his blog posts (comments alone) offers a treasure trove of ideas, but you’ll only access that treasure trove if you read each one.

I know. It’s tedious, and I don’t read all of the comments for each of his blog posts. However, when I do, I get many ideas from it.

You can take a similar approach via Quora, a social networking site which allows users to ask and answer questions. When people ask questions about social media and blogging, I make it a point to be one of the first people to answer the question.

Not only does the first answer tend to get the most views, but I can also use my answers as the starting points for future blog posts. Quora’s additional advantage is that as a big social network, it’s commonplace for me to find dozens of questions that I could answer in the form of high-demand blog posts.

Sites like Quora, Yahoo! Answers, and Wiki Answers are great for discovering more topics that your visitors want. I prefer Quora because I believe it’s the easiest to use, but the decision is up to you.

In Conclusion

When you choose a blog post topic and start writing, it involves a considerable amount of your time. Not only do you write the blog post from start to finish, but you also need to promote it so that blog post gains traction.

With so much of your time hinging on each idea, it’s important to choose the blog post topics that will resonate the most with your audience.

You can discover which topics work by observing your audience on and off your blog.

What are your thoughts on choosing the best blog post topic? Do you have any suggestions for discovering the best content ideas? Have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Optimize The Back-End Of Your Book

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books

When most people think about a book as an asset, they think of sales, authority, and connections. If you don’t think of your book as a gigantic sales letter, then you are leaving a lot of revenue on the table.

Let me explain.

A reader who completes your entire book is a very warm lead for other products and services that you offer. It would be a shame to not provide several calls-to-action at the back-end of your book.

It’s acceptable to provide CTAs at the back of your book because they are optional and don’t add to the main content within your book. People will only decide to learn more about your offers at the back-end if they are interested and really enjoyed the book.

What Could You Offer At The Back-End?

Before we proceed, it’s very important to decipher what a back-end is NOT. A back-end offer isn’t your landing page where you ask for an email address.

You can provide a link to your landing page at the beginning of your book to capitalize on Amazon’s book previewer option.

This option will result in more customers, but more importantly, non-customers (which you can convert later) to subscribe to your email list.

Here are a few products/services that would make a great addition to the back-end of your book.

  • Coaching: You’ve shared a lot of great advice in your book, but some of your readers need a nudge in order to take action. That’s what you’ll offer with coaching.
  • Training Course: A frequently updated, more detailed analysis of the ideas in your book and the ability for readers to ask you questions.
  • Mastermind: You can gather a few readers together who help and keep each other accountable with your occasional input. Masterminds result in less revenue than coaching but you can mastermind several people at once, while coaching involves a 1-to-1 relationship.
  • Done-For-You Service: Your reader loves the value you provided but would prefer that you do all of the work. This is where a done-for-you service comes in. When you start out, you’ll have to do the work on your own, but as you grow, you’ll hire more freelancers to do most of the work for you. Charging a premium will ensure that you continue to make profits and accept clients even with increasing freelancer costs.
  • Your Other Books: As your readers just finished reading your book, chances are they’ll be interested in more of your books. This will generate the least revenue but also be the easiest source of revenue. Including the same back-end offers in these books will make your readers more aware of them and turn them into customers. This is more of a long-term strategy for acquiring high paying customers

Provide Memorable Links

If a reader is interested in one of your back-end offers but doesn’t remember how to access it, you’ll lose out on a potentially lucrative sale. It’s true that a reader can simply go back to the book, but since most readers never get past the first chapter, imagine how few readers decide to crack open the book a second time.

This is why you should make the links as memorable as possible. For instance, you can use yoursite.com/mastermind to lead people to the mastermind offer. This is an easy URL to remember compared to yoursite.com/2017-book-mastermind-for-success. There’s a big difference.

For the sake of argument, let’s say the reader is willing to crack open the book for a second time. The main problem is that some readers will put it off as it’s a seemingly easy activity that rarely gets put on the schedule. The bigger the time gap, the more likely readers are to forget about their desire for your product or service…or go with someone else instead.

Make it as easy as possible for someone to buy something from you.

Create A Facebook Group

Some of your readers will go through your back-end offers and decide that none of them apply…for now.

But if you continue to build a relationship, over time you can get the same people to become your customers. So how do you build the relationship?

Start off with the essentials like consistently providing content and engaging with your audience, and then move to something slightly more advanced like a Facebook Group.

Create the Facebook Group and (this is important) include it in the same place you make the back-end offers. This way, if people aren’t immediately convinced, they can opt to join your Facebook Group (it’s free so they might as well join) and become part of your community.

As these readers continue to see you more often, they’ll think about your back-end offers more and more. This is how you turn a no into a maybe and then a yes.

Sprinkle Offers Throughout Your Book

While you showcase your offers at the back of your book, you can also sprinkle them throughout your book. Now it’s time to re-visualize your book as a gigantic sales letter. When appropriate, you can talk about success stories and experiences directly related to your product.

In a book about productivity, for example, I might talk about the level of productivity I needed to create one of my productivity courses. Choosing this topic gives me the ability to describe some of the benefits of the course without being salesy.

I can also share stories of people who went through the course and transformed their productivity – I can share what they did and, specifically, how the course helped.

Finally, you can start every chapter with a quote. In my Content Marketing Book (coming out in late October or early November), I began each chapter with evergreen quotes from my virtual summit.

I’m also leading off with quotes from my Content Marketing Plaza course to drive more attention to that. Then I’ll feature CMSS, The Plaza, and a few other products at the back-end of my book.

In Conclusion

Writing a book is exciting. However, if you miss out on including back-end offers, you will miss out on thousands of dollars (or even more). Most of the people who read your book from start to finish will adore your knowledge and will want more.

That’s where your back-end offers come in, and at the very minimum, these readers will join your Facebook Group. Make sure the URLs are easy to remember so your readers have an easy time taking action on your back-end offers.

When sharing the URLs, consider that some can get outdated. For instance, contentmarketingsuccesssummit.com currently leads people to the summit that took place a few months ago.

In 2018, that same URL will lead people to the next CMSS.

I want to consistently lead readers to the 2017 version which is why I’ll incorporate contentmarketingsuccesssummit.com/2017 as the link. I want to lead readers to the 2017 version because that’s the one I currently have, and the book is based on the summit.

What are your thoughts about including back-end offers in your books? Have any tips for us? Do you have a question? Sound off in the comments section below.

 

How To Freelance Without Losing Control Of Your Blog

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success

Freelancing presents a golden opportunity to make money to finance your blogging efforts. After all, blogging itself is a big investment of both time and money — you have to invest in various tools, platforms, and even freelancers.

Still, many people who try to juggle freelancing and blogging end up losing control over one or the other. Balance is the key to keeping both moving forward in tandem, and this post offer tips to help you get there.

Hire Freelancers

When you start earning money as a freelancer, it’s perfectly acceptable to use some of those earnings to hire a freelancer.

Do the math:

Let’s assume it takes you an hour to schedule your daily social media posts. And as a freelancer, you’re hired to write content at $20/hr.

If you hire a freelancer to schedule your social media posts at $10/hr, and both of you work the same amount of hours each week, you’ll have a net gain of $10/hr.

Sure, $10/hr may not sound life altering, but this example gives you an idea of how you can freelance to lighten your workload and make a profit. And the principle can be applied to higher amounts of money.

If you’re paid $50/hr as a freelancer, for example, you’ll have a bit more wiggle room and more money to spend on outsourcing content creation, outreach efforts, or any other business activity that’s important to you.

For content creation specifically, you can hire writers that can imitate your style and complete your projects. For instance, if you’re paid $100 to write an article, you can pay a ghostwriter $50 to write it for you in your voice.

If you work with a good writer, you’ll only need to proofread the article and/or make minor adjustments before submitting it.

Using these simple calculations, it’s easy to see how you can make extra income without making additional time commitments. You are simply shifting attention from one task to another (i.e. from scheduling social media posts to writing content for someone else).

Stick to a Schedule 

Part of making the freelancer-blogger journey work for you is sticking to a schedule. You need to delegate certain times of day in which you focus on your freelance work or blog.

That means time stamping when you’ll begin a task, and when you’ll finish it. My own schedule includes running, content creation, summit preparation, showering, eating, and a wide range of other activities – all of which are written into my daily schedule.

Schedule your day down to the minute, but be sure to give yourself some free time because you’ll need short recovery periods to remain energized and motivated.

Connect the Dots

The best freelancing opportunities are high paying jobs that perfectly align with the work you’re already doing for your blog. If you like to write about social media, for example, look for freelancing opportunities that require knowledge of social media.

When your blogging and freelancing efforts work in synergy, you’ll naturally be more efficient since there isn’t as much of a learning curve.

Simply managing a social media account connects with blogging about social media. You can write content based on what you’ve learned (just make sure not to mention a client by name unless you have permission).

Efficiency is Everything

And everything you do should be done as efficiently as possible.

We are either efficient or inefficient at any given moment. Inefficient time represents failure, while efficient time represents success. Strive to become as efficient as possible in carrying out your freelancing and blogging tasks.

And don’t forget to carry it over into every other thing you do. Rather than write emails of several paragraphs, for example, write a few sentences that get your point across. And when appropriate, copy and paste responses that you’ve written ahead of time.

Every second you save adds up. Get into the habit of saving a few seconds here and there, and soon those seconds will turn into minutes and hours.

Identify the tasks that take up the majority of your time. If you’re not sure, simply begin tracking your daily activity over the next month. Once you have these tasks in mind, ask yourself how you can cut 20% of the time needed to complete them and still get the same results.

Here are two critical ways to boost your efficiency:

  1. Have a strong desire to boost your efficiency.
  2. Create systems that allow you to become more efficient.

Your desire will increase as you work towards becoming more efficient each day.

The winning system is dependent on the task and how you work. We all have different philosophies; the key to building better systems is understanding the methods that work best for you, not others.

Some people prefer to spend 2-3 days a month on their content creation efforts; others work on their content a little each day. Some people spend time outlining their blog posts; others let the writing itself guide direction.

I happen to think that if you aren’t using outlines, you’re making an efficiency blunder. But again, the trick is understanding what works for you.

Concentrate on Long-Term Clients

Freelancers spend a lot of their time looking for work and writing proposals.

While there’s nothing wrong with a one-time job, once it’s finished the freelancer must seek out another job, and write another proposal.

If you’re serious about pursuing freelancing, always be on the look out for long-term work and spend time writing winning proposals for those clients.

Not only will you work more efficiently, you’ll have a steady income and won’t always be stressed out about finding the next job.

In Conclusion

Freelancing provides a certain sense of security (you can’t fire yourself) and independence (like working in pajamas?).

Not only that, many jobs have a payout ceiling; more effort and results don’t necessarily translate to more pay. But other jobs pay by performance, and the idea of being paid for what you’re truly worth makes the entrepreneurial journey very appealing.

As a freelancer, you set your own rates. Start small, and as you work your way up, raise them! Use the money to pay for some of your business expenses now with the goal of being completely free to run your business in the long-term.

While it’s harder to get out of the gate initially as a teen (you have to do a lot more to demonstrate your credibility), a huge benefit of starting early is experience.

Freelancing will help you with expenses as you charge forward on your blogging journey. I was able to completely offset my living expenses!

What are your thoughts on freelancing and blogging? Have any tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.

Update

I joined together with some other experts on a project with the Tommy John team. venThere’s e more tactics in this infographic for freelancing without losing control of your blog or any of your other big projects.

Marc_Freelancers