Yeah, most of my traffic was already longtail as well so I was interested to see how that would work out. If you already get a lot of longtail traffic you'll probably see what I'm seeing: a ton of keyword suggestions that look similar what you already rank for but is actually different. It's totally worth going after those terms.
Re writing service: I haven't used the blog writing service since I already had a couple of writers that I was working with so I just had them focus on HitTail terms.