How to Hire Writers for Your Blog

In this Itecguide, Victor walks you through 12 actionable steps to hire writers for your blog. The guide also discusses 3 things that may stop content site owners from hiring writers.

So, you started your blog and have achieved modest success. By writing yourself, you have achieved 100k+ visitors every month. You also earn a decent monthly ad and affiliate income.

However, you feel that you want to move from 100k visitors to 1m visitors a month. To achieve this, you know that you have to write more content. 

After all, more content equals more traffic and more traffic equals more revenue!

However, you cannot physically write more than you are currently writing per day. So what do you do?

The simple answer? Hire writers for your blog! In theory, this sounds very simple. However, in reality, it is more difficult than it sounds.

I know this because some time in 2020 I was in the same place. 

I started www.itechguides.com in April 2019. By 2020, www.itechguides.com was attracting over 100k monthly visits but I wanted more. 

At the time, my fingers were already aching from writing thousands of words every week. 

I needed to do something. I needed to hire other writers to help me move www.itechguides.com from 100k monthly to 1m monthly visits.

Today, I have 3 writers writing for www.itechguides.com and I am still hiring. I admit that 3 is very modest but at least I am no longer writing all by myself. 

Most importantly, even with other writers writing for www.itechguides.com, the site has retained the same high levels of quality. 

In this guide, I will share how I was able to hire writers to write for www.itechguides.com without losing the quality of my content. 

Before I proceed though, let me share why content site owners may not be so keen to hire writers for their blog:

1. Fear of Losing Quality

In my opinion, the first reason content site owners may not want to hire writers for their blog is fear of losing quality.

As a content site owner, your site is your baby. If you are like me,  you write meticulously, check the Google search console for errors and literally refresh Google Analytics every hour! 

In other words, you cannot even consider something going wrong with the site. I am sure you can relate to what I am saying! 

Here is a good example: how do you feel when your site’s traffic suddenly drops? How about bounce rate increasing or average session duration dropping? Your heart literally sinks, right? 

With all this in mind, I understand why a lot of site owners will find it difficult to hire writers for their blog. After all, naturally, it is difficult to trust others with something you hold so dearly!

I will share practical things you can do to overcome this fear and hire content writers to write for your blog. 

2. What Will It Cost Me?

The next challenge content site owners will face when they think of hiring writers for their blog is cost. How do I pay for it? What if I hire and my revenue drops?

These questions battle in your mind. I get it. They are all legitimate concerns and I will address how you can hire content writers with minimal budget and still publish excellent content. 

I will also address this concern in my 12-point action plan, shortly.

3. What Type of Permissions Do I Grant My Writers? 

This is another nagging question in the minds of content site owners when they think about hiring writers for their blog.

If you publish with WordPress, there are so many roles – Authors, Editors, Administrators. Which of these roles can I safely grant my writers?

Can I allow them to publish, or do they write and submit for me to review and publish? But, wait a minute, none of the WordPress roles offer these options. How do I customize roles to meet my needs?

I will address these concerns and give you some information about how to manage roles for your writers. I will also talk about some best practices – all based on my personal experience. 

12 Steps to Hire Writers for Your Blog and Retain Your Content Quality

Now that you know your greatest fears and concerns about hiring writers for your blog, I will dive into the steps to solve the problem.

Here are the 12 actionable steps to hire writers for your blog:

1. Create a Team Structure

Before you hire your first writer for your blog, create a team structure. This is more of creating a long-term growth infrastructure. 

Creating a team structure means that you can segment your writers by teams. One easy way to create a team structure is to follow your existing content category structure. 

To give you an example, in www.itechguides.com, our content is structured according to these top categories:

• Gadgets & Software Specs
• How-tos
• Fix-it guides
• Reviews 
• Technology Explained

I simply turned these top-level categories into teams. However, because How-to guides are similar to Fix-it guides, I combined them into 1 team. 

With this arrangement, I can create writing templates for each category. Moreover, I can create a writing template for each team as well.

2. Create Writing Templates

This is arguably the most important element of your plan to hire writers for your blog. A writing template is a document defining the structure of a specific type of content. 

Broadly speaking, contents are divided into 3 parts – Introduction, body, conclusion. When you create a template, you define, in some details, what goes into these three sections of the content. 

For example, you specify how many paragraphs should be in the introduction. You also specify what should be in each paragraph.  

It will not be a word-for-word template but each paragraph will have to carry the same message. 

Next, you define the structure of the body of the content. A content’s body is structured with H tags, sentences, and paragraphs.  

I will talk more about sentences and paragraphs when I discuss creating writing guidelines. 

In the content template, your focus is on the structure. Determine how many H2, H3 or H4 tags will be on the body. 

Then, for each section, segmented by H tags define what goes into them. When your content template is this detailed, it becomes easy to hire someone and “plug” them into the template.

It also guarantees that every writer will produce a consistent result. 

Please do not get me wrong here. I am not suggesting that you define what will be in each sentence. No, the writers will still be able to be creative. 

However, they will be creative within a defined guideline. This gives you control over how your content looks, no matter who is writing that content. 

Finally, you define the conclusion. In www.itechguides.com our conclusion follows a specific pattern which includes a call to action. 

So far, I have mentioned so many benefits of using templates to create your content. However, I have not mentioned the in-content SEO benefit. 

By creating a content template, you can balance the placement of the target keywords on the content even before you start writing – or your writers start writing.

This way, you avoid keyword stuffing and are able to have an acceptable keyword density. 

3. Create a General Writing Guideline

This is another action you need to take before you hire writers for your blog.

There are generally accepted guidelines around writing great content. One of those rules is keeping your sentences as short as possible. 

Another generally agreed standard is to keep your paragraphs short. It is also generally accepted that the use of transition words makes content more readable. 

Create a content guideline and define these rules. For example, define how many words should be in a sentence – a good number is 20. 

Furthermore, define how many sentences that should make a paragraph – most people go to the extreme of using one sentence as a paragraph but I think two sentences are okay. 

When you combine a great writing template, with a well-written writing guideline, anybody can write for you and produce a consistent result.

4. Perform Keyword Research Yourself

I have been discussing steps you can take to hire writers for your blog, increase your output but maintain your content quality. 

So far I have talked about creating a team structure, creating a writing template and guideline.

Now, I will discuss another important element of a good content  – keyword research. 

As you may already know, keyword research is part of a good SEO strategy. To successfully rank on search engines, among other factors, every content MUST target a keyword or set of keywords. 

However, to ensure that you retain control of the keyword of your content, perform keyword research yourself. Do not leave this task to your writers.

5. Create an Article List for Each Writer

Once you have completed your keyword research, the next step to ensure the quality of your content written by others is to create an article list for each writer. 

Your article list should include the core elements of an article – viz, the article title, the target keyword, the SEO title, and SEO description. 

6. Grant Writers Permission to Write But Not Publish

This is another important step to prepare to hire writers for your blog.

As a general rule, you do NOT want your writers to have the ability to publish articles before you review them. Whatever platform you use to publish your content, bear this in mind. 

However, if you use WordPress, you have to modify the default Author role and remove the permission to publish. There is a Plugin called Capabilities by PublishPress. 

You can use this plugin to modify the WordPress Author role. The good news is that you can use the free version of the plugin to perform this task. 

7. Create Onboarding Training Videos

Now that you have created a writing template, developed a writing guideline, and performed the other tasks I have discussed so far, it is time to create onboarding training videos. 

This bit is as important as every other part of the strategy to hire writers for your blog. Think of all you will have to teach each new writer and list them.

Then, create a video for each. As a rough idea, your video should include, the following:

• How to gain access to the data they need to work – including the article list
• A list of software and tools each writer needs to install
• Your general content writing guidelines
• How to update profile picture and profile description
• How to write an article with the platform you use

8. Develop an Onboarding Process/Tasklist

After developing your onboarding videos, the next step to hire writers for your blog is to develop an onboarding task list.

Write down the process to onboard every new writer. This will make it easier for you to onboard your writers. 

To give you an example, here is part of my new writer onboarding process/tasklist:

• Create an account for the new writer and add her to the right role
• Request the new writer to write a short profile which I will approve
• Send the first video to the writer – with details of how to access other videos/resources

9. Be Willing to Continuously Train and Develop

If you hire writers for your blog, you should not expect them to get it right the first time.

Even the most experienced writers may not grasp your processes on their first try. You have to patiently guide them to what you want. 

Finally, for this point, have a long time strategy. Do not expect to build up your team of writers for your blog in 1 year. 

I have a 5-year plan to hire about 54 writers and 10 Team Editors for www.itechguides.com.

10. Make Your Interviewing Process Hands-On

Typically, interviews are normally oral – the interviewer asks a question and the interviewee responds. 

This style of interviewing may be suitable in other circumstances. However, from my experience, if you are interviewing writers for your blog, it is better to get the candidates to write an article. 

What I do is send out an actual article topic with the keyword and the article title. I also include the information from my general writing guideline and my writing template. 

When I receive the articles from the candidates, the first thing I do is to check the copy for plagiarism. Grammarly premium has a very good plagiarism tool. 

Unless you have another plagiarism tool, you need to pay for Grammarly premium. This is extremely important as publishing plagiarized content can hurt the SEO ranking of your blog.

You will be amazed how many candidates will submit copied content. In my experience hiring for my blog, I have seen copies plagiarized up to 26%!

Needless to say that if an article fails plagiarism, I do not proceed with it. However, if an article passes plagiarism, I then review it for content quality.

Furthermore, I do not stop at the first article. If I am happy with a candidate’s first article, I send them a second article. 

The second article goes through the same detailed scrutiny. Finally, if I am happy with the final article, I schedule an oral interview. 

You can follow this strategy or a slightly modified version.

11. Outsource Your Hiring

The process of sourcing writers to write for your blog can extremely time-consuming. So, I strongly recommend that you outsource this service.

I don’t mean outsourcing the steps I discussed in 10. You have to handle that part.

However, I recommend outsourcing the part of advertising the role and going through hundreds of applications.

Before I proceed, let me say that this is where you resolve your cost concerns. Another important cost-saving measure is to pay your writers per word, instead of hiring them on a fixed salary. 

This next point is also extremely important. If you live in the US or the UK, you do not have to hire from your country. There is a reason why big companies ship some jobs overseas.

You can consider hiring writers from India and/or the Philippines. 

However, because I was born in Nigeria – even though I now live in the UK – I hire my writers from Nigeria. This is possible because I understand the local market. 

Hiring from my home country also helps me create jobs in the local market. However, since your circumstance is likely different from mine, you can hire from India and/or the Philippines. 

I have hired candidates from the Philippines in a previous business and the people I worked with have excellent work ethics. 

12.Review All Articles and Publish Them Yourself

At this stage, you have hired the first writer for your blog. From this point, your role will start changing gradually. 

You will continue being a writer. However, you will also pick up a new role – Content Editor. 

In point 6, I recommended that you do not grant writers permission to publish. With this setup, when a writer finishes writing and clicks Publish – this example is specific to WordPress – they will send the article for review. 

You can then review the article and provide feedback. Do not try to rewrite the article. No, that will be the wrong approach. 

What I do is review the article, and provide as much feedback as possible – via WhatsApp – then, send the article back for the writer to fix the problems.

From my experience, by the time you do this back and forth two to three times, the new writer will get it right. However, as I stated in point 9, the process of training and development is not one-off.

I hope you were able to hire writers for your blog with the steps in this guide.

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