Running a blog is hard work. It’s incredibly time consuming, coming up with a constant flow of topics and a constant stream of quality writing. Add to that the editing, formatting, imagery and scheduling, and you’re spending entire days just running a blog. If you have several blogs for different sites, it’s even worse. This is why many businesses and entrepreneurs turn to freelance writers for help.

There’s a lot to consider when you’re talking about the price of blog content. I’ll try to cover every angle, so you can make an adequate decision.

Writer Credits

The first thing you have to decide is whether or not you’re going to credit your writer. You have three options. The first is to hire the writer on as an employee, giving them CMS access and a salary to write a certain number of posts on a given range of topics per week. This is going to be as expensive as you might expect an employee to be.

The second option is to hire a writer and give them a byline, but don’t give them CMS access or a salary. They will remain freelancers, paid by the post. Their byline allows you to keep a stable of writers who contribute occasionally, to vary the writing styles and perspectives on your blog.

The third option is to hire a ghostwriter. As far as anyone but you and the writer knows, all of the content on your blog is written by you. In reality, the ghostwriter creates the content, you pay for it, and post it under your name. This is the cheapest of the three options, though it varies wildly in costs depending on the writer, contract, topic, length of the posts, frequency, and more.

Expected Responsibilities

Just like there are different tiers of credit, there are different tiers of responsibility.

• You have an idea and you have knowledge. You talk to the writer and give the information, and the writer turns this information into a post. Essentially, they take what you say and turn it into something presentable for the web.
• You have an idea, but you don’t necessarily have the knowledge. You give the writer the assignment, and they perform the research. They present to you a post, and after potential revisions, you have a blog post worth publishing.
• You have a topic, but neither a specific idea nor the knowledge to fill out a post. You give the writer the assignment and they do what they can, creating a piece of their own. This is typically the most expensive, because it’s the most time-consuming for the writer.

You also have to consider extras. Do you want links in your post, or are you going to add them yourself? Do you want images? Some writers will refuse to find images for you, while others are happy to do so. Are you very picky about voice and require revisions frequently, or are you happy to have anything with a suitable message and a good style?

The Ethics of Ghostwriting

There’s a social contract between a blogger and their readers. You publish content under your name, and the reader expects that you wrote that content. If you’re hiring a ghostwriter, you could be considered in violation of that social contract. It’s an ongoing debate, and it gets more heated in certain industries, where readers expect a certain level of knowledge.

For example, just about anyone could go in and write a basic guide to Football. You don’t need to be an established authority with insider vision in order to write that. It can easily be ghostwritten and no one would care. On the other hand, you wouldn’t want to learn that anything on WebMD with a doctor’s credit was written by an inexperienced freelancer, would you? A misdiagnosis in that case could literally cost someone their life.

It’s up to you if you find ghostwriting ethical enough to do it. You should just be aware that, well, basically everyone does. Small businesses, large companies, fortune 500s, and everything in between; ghostwriters occupy every niche.

Low Tier Costs

Yes, I know. You came to this post hoping for specifics on the cost of content. I can’t give you exact prices; those are negotiated between you and a writer. I’ll give you general tiers, though, and what you can expect from each tier.

At the absolute rock bottom, you have the crazy outsourced content or the super low quality content mills. Something like Textbroker’s 2-star level, where you’re paying fractions of a penny per word. You might get thousand-word blog posts for $3 or less, but you’re getting very low quality content for your cash. Some of it will look like it was written in India and run through Google Translate, which it very well might have been.

A bit higher up the scale and you’re still paying only a few dollar per post, but you at least have a bit of a guarantee of readability. Think Fiverr and the like. I don’t recommend going this route; not if you want to engage readers and keep them around. It’s more useful for paying to populate 10,000 product descriptions or copy that doesn’t need to be perfect.

Mid Tier Costs

In the middle, you have paying anywhere from $25 to $100 per blog post, depending on the length of the content. Higher levels of Textbroker, Writer Access, Constant Content and other content mills fall under this heading, as do many freelancers you might find through personal sites, LinkedIn or oDesk.

Middle tier freelancers are also where you start getting people potentially asking for bylines. It’s also where you start getting people who are willing to do more than just give you a text document. Links and some research can be expected in this tier.

High Tier Costs

At the high end, costs can soar. You might be paying $1 per word or more, which many professional magazines and publications do. A good 1,200-word post for Cosmopolitan, for example, might cost as much as $2,500.

On the other hand, this tier is where you get writers willing to do anything for you. Pay them enough and they’ll bend over backwards for you.

Don’t forget; all of these costs are per post. Remember to multiply the price by the number of posts per week you expect; seven posts per week per blog can get expensive very quickly. This is why it can be a good idea to hire multiple writers, if your funds can cover them.

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