How to Outsource Guest Blog Posts?

[SLINC]

We have operated a small ecommerce company for over 10 years in the home and garden industry.  Our product niche is small and there is not a lot of "community" around it as it is just not a social product, yet the product is interesting.  Our internal time is very limited and therefore we have hired external help over the years to do our SEO.  As you all know, this is very challenging to do affordably and not get spammers.

As part of our SEO strategy we would like to do some guest blog posts but do not have the internal time to research and build the relationships needed.  We basically have no internal writing skills and have always hired writers to do our blog postings.My question is if you had to hire someone to do guest blog posts how would you go about finding the right person to use?  Of course an excellent writer would be required.  What would you expect to pay for this type of service?  Would you do it hourly or "pay per live post". Any ideas on where to find this type of person?  Thanks.

[EGOL]

My question is if you had to hire someone to do guest blog posts how would you go about finding the right person to use?

I would go out to blogs in the home and garden niche and hire one of the best...

.... but instead of giving that fantastic content to everybody everywhere I would place all of that content on my own website.  This will build the equity in your site and you will not have to hire a person who is both a great writer and a relationship builder.  It's hard enough to get a great writer.

You probably think that this guest blogging is going to get you links.  The approach that I would take is hire someone who produces specific topic article content that will attract links to your site because the content is so fantastic.  I would want widely known GardenBlogger guest posting writing specific topic articles on my site and mentioning on his blog that he just did a blog post article on xyz on the Goodwin blog.

What would you expect to pay for this type of service?

If you are hiring a highly skilled and knowledgeable person you will need to pay them enough to give you their fantastic content instead of putting it on their own site where it will make them a lot of money.  If this person is really good you should be willing to pay her at least as much as you make because she will save you a lot of time.

Hopefully you will be able to afford her.

[matbennett]

If you want to dabble with guest posting without initially having to over-commit, you could try a couple of the blog networks like myblogguest.  These get bloggers and publishers together, so practically remove the need to the usual outreach.  The nature of them does mean that you have a much smaller pool to work with though, so it's not the most scaleable approach.

For the writing you could find freelance writers with specialist knowledge.  Try the usual freelance places (I quite like peopleperhour for this sort of thing), but advertise specifically for writers with topical expertise.  Ensure that stipulates that they must provide a topical writing sample - you will soon figure out which applicants actually know the topic rather than those just trying to wing it.