When I meet other business owners and share what I do, I often get comments like “I know I need to blog, but I don’t have the time. I’d love to work with you, but it’s going to be expensive, right?”. And that’s a tricky question to answer because ‘expensive’ is all relative, don’t you think? What may be expensive to you may not be expensive to me. And that’s probably because we value different things in different ways depending on what our priorities are at that point in time. So I can’t answer the ‘expensive’ question for you. But what I can do is to help you decide how working with me compares with other solutions. So here are 3 alternatives to hiring me as your Content Writer.

1. Hire a freelancer on an online marketplace

If we’re going to have the price conversation, it’s only fair to put this out there. You can indeed find someone who’ll write your blog posts at a more competitive price. And it’d be totally wrong for me to say that the quality of the work would be poor. Because I don’t know that, and the quality may be just fine!

So, for example, you could outsource your writing to someone who advertises on Fiverr and pay very little for the service. You may be happy with the quality of the work, but you also have to remember you get what you pay for. 

Think about budget airlines. They’re safe and generally reliable – they do the job. They take you where you need to go. But they also tend to provide a very basic service. If you want anything else on top, you have to pay for it separately.

And Fiverr is a bit like that. Service tends to start at a very competitive price (and level). And if you change your requirements because the initial spec doesn’t quite meet your needs (think revisions, or word count, for example) you may end up paying a much higher price. In the end, when you add it all up, have you really saved any money?

Is it worth the gamble?

I’ve personally used freelancers on Fiverr (for graphic design or illustrations) a number of times. And I definitely cannot fault the quality of their work. Often though, I’ve had issues with communication or with the level of service received. I’d send a message that would remain unanswered for days, leaving me worried about whether the person in question was ever going to deliver the work!. And if so, when?! In one specific case, I ended up having to ask for numerous revisions simply because the other person didn’t seem to understand my requirements.

And while all ended up being well for me in the end, I’ve also worked with clients who had been burnt by similar experiences in the past. Their feedback was that although the freelancer they hired delivered the work, they didn’t know anything about their brand, didn’t sound anything like them, and overall, didn’t really get what my clients were trying to achieve with their blogging. So when you think about the frustration and the amount of time spent in countless email exchanges, is the risk worth taking?

2. Learn how to blog yourself

If you don’t want to invest in a Content Writer to create blog posts for you, you could learn how to do your own blogging. Now, personally, I think that’s a great idea! Doing your own blogging has amazing benefits, and I passionately believe in the fact that everyone can write their own content, including people who hate writing or were told (many moons prior and often at school by their English teacher) that they can’t write. 

And if you’re a non-native English speaker who has any doubts about your writing abilities, we definitely need to talk, as I can help specifically with that.

But back to why you should blog!

As a business owner, no one knows your business better than you. If you’re a personal brand entrepreneur, you are the business! You know your target audience better than anyone else, and you know exactly what pain points you can address and what solutions you can provide. So yes, in an ideal world, you’d be doing your own blogging.

However, if you’ve gone down this route before, you may have dipped your feet into the water and tried to DIY it all. Instead of taking courses or investing in tailored solutions that you possibly weren’t in a position to afford when you first started your business, you found yourself throwing spaghetti at the all to see what stuck. The result? 

You probably didn’t create a huge amount of strategic content that resonated with your audience. And soon enough, you started to feel resentful and frustrated at the amount of time you were wasting in writing blog posts that didn’t work for your business.

And I don’t blame you. Because you have more important things to do than writing blog posts that no one reads, right? (You know, like actually running a business?!).

Would you like me to teach you how to blog for business?

If you found yourself in this situation, I have a couple of propositions for you that may help:

1. I’m running a face-to-face, hands-on workshop in West London on Friday 10th May with my colleague Silvia Del Corso, who is an SEO and Digital Marketing Specialist. ‘Blog your way to more money‘ is aimed at business owners who’d like to blog more strategically. So if you’d like to find out how you can come up with the right ideas for content and how to write effective posts without spending all your free time working on them, you need to get yourself to our workshop.
2. And if you can’t (because you live no one near West London), then get in touch. I can offer you a one-to-one tailored session where I teach you everything you need to know to get you started.

Either way, it’s all much cheaper than hiring me as a Content Writer. So could this be the right solution for you?

3. Do nothing

You only have to take a quick look at my LinkedIn profile to find out I worked for many years as a Business Analyst in big corporate companies. A big part of my job was to produce Feasibility Studies. A feasibility study could take months to complete. And it basically looked at a project proposal and considered all the options to achieve a particular result. We’d assess any feasible options, look at pro’s and con’s, costs, etc. And one of the options we’d always consider was doing nothing. In other words, we’d look at what would happen if the company didn’t go ahead with the project at all.

So let me ask you this.

When it comes to blogging, what’s the cost of ‘doing nothing’ for your business?

Because, let’s face it, blogging isn’t the only type of content marketing out there. You could still create and share content via social media, a podcast, or a YouTube channel. And be hugely successful and profitable. But if you want more people to find you via Google searches (as things stand) you need written content. And you want that written content to be on your own platform (i.e. your website), rather than on ‘rented’ social media land.

Also, content marketing isn’t the only type of marketing available. You could forget about content and even about marketing altogether if you really wanted. In fact, you could go down the (more expensive) route of advertising. And instead of playing the long game of creating content that helps you build trust and credibility, you could fast-track the process and spend money on advertising.

But at the end of the day, if you want to have a profitable business, you need to attract clients. And if you’re not going to blog at all (i.e. do nothing), what are you going to do instead? And crucially, how much time and how much money is that costing you? 

Because with my Business Analyst hat on, I can promise you that unless you’ve compared the costs (and the benefits) of hiring me to write your content with the other alternatives, you’ll never really be able to work out how expensive (or not) I am.

So I’ll now do that annoying thing that people do when you ask them a question of turning the question over to you. Am I expensive? When you spend some time looking at the alternatives available to you, does hiring me as your Content Writer still feel expensive?