Ghost blogging seems to be an industry on the rise.
Businesses, organizations and individuals are having success with content marketing. They’re publishing content on their own websites and promoting that content in various ways to get new visitors and new customers.
The issue for some, though, is finding the time to research, write and publish content. That’s where the demand for ghost blogging and copywriting services comes in. At GBW, we provide blogging services for our clients. We also have a few partners that work on other types of content and others that help with the marketing of the content.
As with anything, there are many common questions about ghost blogging. Here are three common questions and the answers we provide to prospective clients.
Question #1. Why do blogs have so many list posts?
There is a myth about online content that people don’t read online content. This is certainly the case for a lot of bad content on the web. If you get to a page that promised something in the title and didn’t deliver with the content then you’re certainly not going to read it.
However, if your content answers on the promise in the title then the visitor is very likely to read the content. However, people seem to be conditioned to not trust content at first glance. People scan content to see if they can dig deeper.
List posts and segmented posts help your visitors scan the content and see if it will deliver on the promise.
At GBW, we use lists and segmented posts to help break up long blocks of content. When someone stumbles on a page you kind of have to ease them into the story and the content. A big block of text is intimidating and it’s hard to read if the content isn’t broken up a bit.
And we also find that people like reading posts with actionable content and content that follows a formula. Lists give readers a clear formula. This post is an example of a list.
One final thing is that headlines that include a number seem to do well on search and social media. People seem to be drawn to titles with numbers in them. So we write a good number of list posts, but we also find success with how-to posts and a few other formats.
Question #2. How can the writer possibly know enough about our business and industry to write effective, accurate blog posts?
Our writers are expert bloggers. They know how to research and format a blog post. They can do it very well and very fast.
However, our writers aren’t experts in every topic. We always match up writers that have a passion or experience related to the client’s business and industry.
But something we do with a few of our clients is ask them for a few notes on a topic. After all, the client is the expert in the industry, but they often just don’t have time to write blog posts. That’s where we can come in.
So we’ll ask the client to provide notes on a topic. Then the writer can take those notes, find additional relevant research and create a great post that is full of detail about the topic, business and industry.
We like to setup a content calendar that has 2-3 months worth of post titles and notes at all times. So the client can take 20 minutes or so to provide a few notes on each of the topics every couple months and we can write detailed posts.
This process has worked well for us when it comes to the really unique businesses that want really detailed blog posts.
Question #3. How long does it take to start the ghost blogging process?
If pressed, we can turn around a post in the same day, but we don’t like doing that. When we get a new client coming on board we tell them that it takes about 5-7 days to turn the first post around. The reason is that we take time to find the right writer for the client. We want a writer that has a passion for the topic or a writer that has specific experience.
Our writers keep a schedule for the writing they do and a week or so gives them time to work a new post into their schedule.
Once we deliver the post we get feedback from the client, make revisions if necessary and use the feedback to help us learn more about the content the client would like.
From there we setup the ongoing schedule and start blogging regularly whether that’s weekly or even daily.
So the process takes about a week to two weeks to go through the first post and from there it’s right into the regular blogging schedule.
Hopefully the answers to these questions are useful. If you’re wondering about ghost blogging you can always reach out via our Contact page and ask us for an answer. We try to answer common questions with the content on our site and in blog posts, but we can’t answer them all so feel free to reach out and ask. We’re always happy to help!