The Complete Guide to Hiring and Managing Blog Writers

One of the first, and most important things I figured out when I started blogging full time is that hiring a team to write for you can be much more profitable than doing all of the writing yourself. Two or three writers can manage to crank out way more content than I could flying solo. The best part is that the writers begin to pay for themselves very quickly, here’s why:

• Having multiple writers allows me to increase the content of my sites at 2 – 5x the rate that I could when writing articles myself (depending on how many writers I hire). More content and more frequent updates equals more traffic which leads to more revenue.
• I now have more time to spend on marketing and promotion. Many successful bloggers will tell you that when first starting a new site, 70% or more of your time should be spent on marketing and promotion.

Many people decide not to hire writers because they worry about the quality of the writing. My philosophy has always been that if I can do it myself, I can probably hire someone to do it better than I can, for less than the cost of my time. The trick is to give the people that work for you all of your expectations up front, and not to settle with anything less than what you outlined initially. If the writer ends up writing on the wrong topic, make them rewrite it. If the article isn’t formatted correctly, make them reformat it etc.. There are always going to be bad hires out there but most people do just fine with clear instructions.

I think the main reason I held off on hiring writers at first was that I thought that it would cut into my profits and I didn’t want to take that initial plunge when I should have been thinking of it as an investment.

When I finally did the research, writers ended up being much cheaper than I first imagined ($4 – $10 per article depending on the topic). I finally decided to take the plunge and list a job on the Problogger job board, which I still use to fill my writing positions to this day.

Posting a job on the Problogger job board is $50 for a 30 day listing. During this 30 day period I average around 100 applications but it really depends on your blogs topic. Out of those 100 applications, around 70 of them will usually have decent writing skills and are qualified for the position. Out of the 70 that are qualified, 50 or so will be willing to work within my price range. I then select around 10 random applications from those that are qualified and request a test article to weed out any bad writers that may have gotten through.

Here is an example of my “help wanted” ad:

Many people don’t put the compensation in the initial job listing, which I believe to be a mistake. I’ve found that it’s good to give people a general idea of what your willing to pay. This way your time isn’t wasted with people who are still stuck in the golden era of newspapers and try to charge something astronomical like $150 a blog post.. trust me they’re still out there.

The results of the ad:

The reason I always talk about having multiple writers is that a single writer with a high workload seems to get burnt out fairly quickly. It’s better to keep the workload on the light side and divide the work up between two or three people. This way if someone quits, your operation isn’t at a standstill while you try to find a replacement.

The fact is that people will end up getting burnt out eventually and you’ll have to replace them, that’s just how it works. Over the last two years I’ve replaced my entire staff two or three times over, generally people are looking to at this job as something that’s part time and short term. Make sure to save all of the other applications so that you don’t have to go back and post another job listing 3 months from now when you need to bring someone new on board.

If you have WordPress you want to start by create a new account for each of your writers under the “Users” tab in the back-end. Make sure to assign their account Editor permissions. This will allow them to login to the WordPress back-end and post new articles etc.. but they can’t go into my site settings or screw around with anything that could bring the site down.

I offer Net 15 payments via Paypal, meaning that I send out payments to all of my writers at once every 15 days, or around the 1st and 15th of every month. For awhile I was paying different people at different times and it became way to much to handle and keep track of.

If there is anything I missed I’ll be sure to add it in when I think of it. If you have any questions be sure to leave a comment below!