Written by Azanta Rezwana Mirza
There’s a reason I always prefer writing articles for blogs – they mean similar-kind of work for a long period, with a decent interval between each submission. Most bloggers or clients won’t require more than 2 or 3 articles per week; sometimes, when the blog is an old one, they only need a single article per week.
Practical matters aside, writing for blogs is fun, more if you are genuinely interested in the topic you are writing about.
When you are writing articles – or content – for a blog, your work needs to be of a high quality. Businesses depend on the quality of their blog articles to boost sales or attract new customers. They cannot risk a mediocre-level writer for their own sake. Blog articles pay well, but you need to spend a lot of time and attention on those articles. You need to consider yourself almost an expert on the topic, or at least very interested in the topic you are writing about.
To write for a blog or to write a blog article means that you are:
1. Writing articles for your own blog
2. Supplying regular articles for a business on topics related to your client’s business
3. Writing and maintaining a Personal blog your client as started
4. Writing articles for your client’s blogs on a given topic or title.
I have worked on all four kinds of these projects, so I can definitely describe them in details for you. In the first post, let’s learn about the first two types of work regarding blogs: writing articles for your own blogs, and supplying regular articles for your client’s blogs.
Writing articles for your own blog
What you are reading now is a blog. I write the articles in it, and I maintain the whole thing. If you are thinking of creating your own blog, this is what you do (there are other better platforms, of course). Most of the time, people open their own blogs to monetize them, as a passive source of income. You can can also sell your entire blog after you are done writing it. A well-written, well-informed, well-researched blog is pretty expensive, and there will be clients who will buy your blog to monetize it themselves. If you are interested in this, please do some more research. Since it is not my plan to monetize or sell my blog, I don’t have a lot of information regarding this.
Otherwise, you can simply create a blog for yourself, simply to practice writing. You can use your own blog as a reference or a portfolio of your skill when you are applying for a job. It will be much easier for a potential client to take a look at your well-presented blog than to download and read your randomly attached writing samples.
We open a blog when we think we have something to say about a particular topic, and when we want other people to read them. Whether we monetize it, use it as a portfolio to show our writing skills, or increase our online presence on the Internet – that’s completely up to you.
So to open a blog for yourself, choose a topic that you think you have a lot to talk about. It can be literally anything, anything at all. Review books and movies, add your own recipes, make a travel blog about your adventures, talk about your feelings or simply review restaurants. Make sure to give your blogs your 110% effort, even when you are not making any money from it. You never know who ends up reading your articles online.
As I have said before, this is a blog. I am simply simply putting my name and my words out there in the open, not worrying about who reads them. I have something to write, to put down in words, and I am doing it. It actually makes me happy.
Supplying Regular Articles for a business on topics related to your client’s business
This isn’t a regular practice for our country yet but most online (and offline) business abroad maintain their own blogs. I’m attaching a few samples below as example.
The first two names are examples of Bangladeshi eCommerce sites that have their own blogs. The last two are international brands. One sells bed sheets, cushion covers, towels, shower curtains, and everything else you need in the house; the other one sells whatever your dog needs. I’m sure everyone already knows about Bagdoom and Rokomari.
If your client has an eCommerce site or a business selling electronic gadgets, the articles in their blog would be all related to gadgets, i.e.
– Best Smartphones coming in the next year
– 10 smart phones with the best cameras
– 20 gadgets your home definitely needs
– Important features of a smart TV, and so on.
What is the use of all these articles in a business website? To inform the client, to keep them engaged, and sometimes, to attract them to services other than the ones they were looking for. A person looking for a business for getting a haircut will end up with a lot of information in a single site. They’ll know which haircut to get, how famous or popular that haircut is, which celebrity has that haircut, whether they also want to color their hair or straighten it. Before you know it, the client will book 2 or 3 other services instead of just the haircut, and recommend the well-written articles to their friends. The business will gain more customers. Genius, isn’t it?
If the client hires you simply to write articles for them, they will ideally also supply the title, the concept or the SEO keywords. All you need to do is to send them the articles whenever they ask for it.
Clients can give you the exact titles, or after you are both a little familiar with each other’s work, they can simply trust you to provide a specific number of articles every week or month. It all depends on the kind of rapport you can build with your client.
Writing and Maintaining a Personal Blog your Client has Started
Both in our country and abroad, a lot of people are investing time and effort on a passive income source, via their own blog. They start a blog, monetize it, spend money on the SEO so that it reaches the right people, and then give a writer the job to continue working on it. If you are the writer hired for the job, you have to maintain a constant flow of articles on related topics.
Unfortunately, I can’t add examples here because the job of a ghostwriter is to write behind the shadow of the “original” writer. You get it, right? If a professional chef has his/her own blog with recipes, they won’t want other people to know that a ghostwriter is providing the articles, not themselves!
This is a great job opportunity for any writer; you get to provide a continuous supply of articles every day, every week or every month, as per the requirements of the client. It helps if you get to write on a topic that genuinely interests you. If the client is looking for more than just writing services, you might also land the responsibilities of sharing the articles on their Social Media sites, research the ideas for the articles, and manage the whole website/blog yourself. The client will simply drop in on the blog every now and then, and release your payments.
I had four to five such clients in the past, and I supplied them regular articles every week. I’ll explain the whole project here.
My client was a doctor, specialized in Type-I and Type-II Diabetes. He has a website of his medical chamber, and a blog that I maintained for more than 6 months. Every two days, I had to write an article related to this illness and send it to the IT guy responsible for uploading them to the website. I would then share the article to the numerous Social Media sites, and promote both the disease and the doctor. If you are wondering what can a writer possibly write about Diabetes, here are some titles:
- Type I Diabetes: can it be avoided?
- How can you avoid getting Type II diabetes?
- Super foods for a diabetic patient
- What can you not eat if you have Type II diabetes?
- Can you completely cure diabetes?
- Can children get Type II diabetes?
- Who is at risk of Type I diabetes?
- Exercising if you are a diabetic, and so on.
So, you see, there will never be a lack of titles once you know how to research your topics.
Writing Articles for your Client’s Blogs on a Given Topic or Title
Or, it could just be that your client will give you a topic, a subject matter or a title, or even just a few SEO-friendly phrases, and you have to write an entire article based on that. The articles need to be exactly as long as the client wants them to be, and supplied whenever they ask you to. This kind of job means you are simply an article writer hired by one or multiple clients, with almost no other responsibilities.
Of course, you can suggest topics to write about or titles for the articles, but it is up to the client whether they like your suggestion or not. I had this client for whom I researched and suggested 10 article titles per week, and she would choose five among them for me to write for that week.
The good thing about these kind of jobs is that you can work for multiple clients at the same time, depending on the time on your hand. If you want a week or two off, you can simply do double the amount of writing one week and then rest completely the next 7 days.
So, that, in a nutshell, is what it means to be a writer working on blogs. If I can think of some other categories, I will add them here.
