One of the things businesses ask when considering business blogging is how they can control the content.
Now, writers don’t really like to feel controlled. It can crush creativity and make the writer feel uninspired since their work can be edited and contained, but we’ve talked about working within a framework before and how it’s the perfect environment for creativity and success.
That is how writers and business owners should look at business blogging. The writer has the freedom to work within a framework. They can get creative as long as they stick with the basic concepts and strategies.
But even with this understanding in place the business owner needs to have a way to make sure they can review and edit the posts.
WordPress Roles for Business Blogging
WordPress is the platform we use at Ghost Blog Writers. Many of our clients use WordPress as well. It’s by far the most commonly used platform we see in all of our work. It’s free. It has good support and the community is amazing.
One of the great features with WordPress is Roles and Capabilities.
There are roles for everyone on your business blogging team.
Administrator
You, the business owner, can be the Administrator. It’s common to designate your IT person as an administrator or editor as well. This allows them to get behind the scenes and change things like plugins, CSS, design and other items that require coding changes. The Administrator can also change settings on the blog. Basically, this role is for the person with the most control.
Editor
This role has always kind of confused me. It seems to take away some of the capabilities of the admin, but the editor can still make changes to posts of their own and those of others. They can also make some minor changes around the site in terms of coding. The Editor role can be for someone like a Social Media Manager that will oversee the blogging process. They can also write posts.
Author
Author is a great role for established bloggers. These folks can write posts and publish/schedule posts. That’s a big difference between an Author and a Contributor. The Author can publish their posts without review. Many of our clients give us the role of Author on their blogs so we can go ahead and schedule posts. Businesses are busy doing all kinds of things these days and until more have full-time editors the Author role is great. If you trust your writing team then giving them capability to be an Author will let them post without interruption. They still won’t have access to the meat and potatoes behind the scenes on the site so you’re protected in that way.
We have had times when clients have asked us to change things like comments and settings. The Author role doesn’t allow for some of those things, but it’s easy to change the role to Admin for a day or so to let someone make a change and then go back to being an Author.
Contributor
Finally, we have the role of Contributor. This is great for businesses that want to have real editorial control over the writing team. “Control” is a word that can be scary to some, but it’s good to embrace it. We have this role with a few clients. Especially in the early days of a new relationship it’s good for this role to be in place. We understand it and accept it.
The Contributor can write and format a post and submit it for review. It allows the manager to review the post, provide feedback and schedule it for publishing. Getting that feedback is great for writers like us. That allows us to learn and eventually earn the trust to become Authors.
One issue we notice with the role of Contributor is the owner of the blog falls behind in reviewing the posts. One of the reasons businesses hire us in the first place is because they are too busy to manage the blog. They want a blog, but they don’t have the time.
So even though they may want to review they find they don’t have time and soon the blog gets behind and off schedule.
If you think this could be an issue you might have to trust your writers with Author status because getting content on the site is usually more valuable than having a long line of blogs waiting to be approved.
Conclusion
WordPress is a really great tool and Roles is just one example of why WP is a great business blogging solution. It allows site owners to have control over how the blog posts are published. We use it all the time with our clients and it works great. It makes the process easy and efficient.