What Your Pro Blogger Wishes You Knew

Blogging is all about communication.  While you might think I'm belaboring the obvious here, stick with me.  Clearly, the entire point of having a business blog is to communicate with your audience.  But are you communicating with your blogger?

We professional bloggers want to be just that - utterly professional.  But our clients can make this easy or pretty gosh darn hard.  Let's take a look at a couple of things that any writer-for-hire worth his or her hourly rate wants you to know.


Ways to Seriously Annoy Your Blogger
First and foremost, the biggest way you can annoy a blogger is not to pay them.  This also has the effect of shortening any working relationship you might have.  By the way, I'm not just referring to simple non-payment; late payments (weeks or months after work has been delivered) make us pretty ticked off too.  Sure, everyone runs late or misplaces an invoice occasionally, but if you make it a practice, you'll be short one writer in no time.

Right up there with non-payment is leaving your blogger out of the loop.  Blogging is part of your larger social media and marketing picture.  So keep your blogger in the picture too.

As a rule, in larger companies I work with marketing directors, social media managers, and the like.  While I may not have any input on their plans, I at least get to deeply understand their audience, goals, timelines, and campaigns.  I learn what keywords they want, what performs well for their business, and how my posts work in the overall picture.  

I like this.

The opposite is also common.  I'm given a list of topics and keywords and told to have at it.  While this may seem like absolute freedom, it actually slows me down.  I find myself formulating my own target audience, trying to build my own reasonably effective campaigns, without any background or feedback.  I have no idea if anything I write is effective.  It's working in a vacuum, and we know nature abhors a vacuum.  This goes double for anyone involved in the quick-change, analytics-driven world of content marketing. I compare it to driving around aimlessly in a car, hoping you'll stumble on the right destination - without knowing what that destination is. 

How to Keep Your Pro Blogger Happy
Keeping a pro writer happy isn't hard.  Remember, we're information junkies, or we wouldn't be in this field.  I have never ever heard of a writer saying 'My client gave me way too much background on this job!'.  Here are a couple of things you can do to nurture a good relationship with your writer of choice:

1. Be reasonably sure of what your project will entail before work starts.
   
2. Give the writer clear goals and timelines.
3. Be lavish in sharing project-related information.
   
4. Let them know how their work performs for you - and what can be done to improve its performance in the future.
   
5. Provide constructive feedback.
   
6. Thoroughly read and understand outlines and drafts as they are submitted.
7. And - definitely not least - respond promptly to messages.
   

With common sense and common courtesy, you and your professional blogger can have a long and happy working relationship.  
 

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