If you’ve launched a new business, whether you’re an individual, working with partners, or with a small team, you’re going to need content to promote your business. By content, I mean the articles you post on your blog, the videos you release and all the positive messaging you put out there to make sure that potential customers know about you and your brand.
But, what do you do if you’re too busy to create all of this high quality content for yourself? Well then, you can outsource the content creation and hire someone to create it for you. But if you’re not done this before, you might make mistakes. I’ve picked out three mistakes which you should avoid when you’re outsourcing content for your startup business.
Mistake #1 – Hiring a single writer who can’t handle all areas of the business
There are a lot of excellent writers out there, but just because someone sends you their writing samples about dog food and proves that they can write, this doesn’t mean that they can also write about the field you’re in. Or, they might be able to write about the business side of your field, but not the more technical side. You need to choose a writer carefully, really interview and speak to them and check the right familiarity necessary, or at least can research effectively as needed. If this doesn’t work for you, why not think about hiring a team of writers instead? They can be employed on a part time or freelance basis and each just concentrate on the areas they’re good at.
Mistake #2 – Not asking the project team to contribute based on their own expertise
If you’re working in a team, you already have the resources on hand to create good content. You have access to people who are passionate about the project you’re working on together being successful. You have people who are already knowledgeable about the area. Why not ask them and see if they want to contribute or if they have great ideas for themselves? You could give them some guidance about the type of content you want, or even encourage them to contribute articles that are more technically rich. Your team members also get the benefit of promoting themselves through their content, which can help them to feel more valued.
Mistake #3 – Hiring a writer who is SEO focused
One of the biggest problems I’ve seen with writers is that a lot of them have just been taught to be Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) focused. That means they concentrate more on working certain key terms into the articles they’re writing rather than making sure it reads well and interests and engages your site visitors. That’s not good, as poor quality content that is designed more for computers than humans will just put off your potential customers. The search engines, such as Google, have also got wise to this trick. Hire people who have proven writing ability and you’ll go a lot further.
Avoid These Mistakes
I recommend that you take care to avoid these three mistakes with your growing business. Make sure that you have the right team of writers in place who can cover all aspects of business and produce fresh content for it. Try and involve your project team as well. They can concentrate content directly and this may complement the content produced by your writing team well. Whoever you hire, make sure that they are writing for the benefit of readers, by providing excellent and insightful content, rather than for machines. That will help more people to see your content and appreciate your brand and you’ll get much more value from the content you’ve had produced.