Blog publishing has lowered the barrier for businesses to start their own publication. Whether you're looking to publish your own news, establish your company as a firm of experts, engage in a conversation with your customers and colleagues or raise your profile for key topics in search engines the costs are so low that it can make economic sense for many businesses.
You can do the writing yourself, but to really benefit from a blog you must publish as frequently as you can. Let's face it, how many businesspeople really need another distraction? Sometimes hiring a paid blogger to write blog copy for you can help you benefit from blog publishing without distracting you from your real job. The upside of hiring a paid blogger to write for your company is that you can (for now) pay below traditional copywriting rates. The cost per word goes down because it's on the web, the articles are shorter and there isn't editorial review.
Incentivise Paid Blogging
What's missing is real incentive for the paid blogger to drive business to clients. Sure, they can publish about things that are directly or indirectly related to your products and services, but how about a little something to make them share in your success. Who doesn't like rewards for putting in the extra effort. Some of the blog publishing houses are tying salaries to traffic, but this model adds some more qualifications that were missing.
Find Your Baseline
This method requires that you know your web site statistics. You'll need to know your average traffic per month, growth for the last 3-6 months, what links people are clicking on inside your website, where the where the traffic is coming from. Any decent web statistics program can give you this information. Your paid blogger should also know how to track these statistics.
Find your baseline monthly statistics and adjust for growth based on the last 3-6 months. Now you know what your starting point is.
Reward Results
Assign points for increases in hits to the part of the site you want to drive traffic to, signups for your services or purchases of your products and increases in inbound links. Here is my outline, adjust as you see fit:
+1 point for every extra 100 hits to the desired part of the site
+1 point for every 5 signups to a service or purchase of a product
+1 point for every 10 inbound links to the site from other sites that reference the blog
Set a base price for each post: $10 - $20 should work for most cases. For the sake of this guide, let's say the base price per post is $20.
Now set a graded monthly bonus structure like so:
Guaranteed Level - (0 points) - $20/per blog post
Basic Level (10 points) - $25/per blog post
Happy Level (20 points) - $30/per blog post
Ecstatic Level (30 points) - $35/per blog post
Adjust the base price per post and bonus increases to fit the project. But a word of caution: if there isn't the a real opportunity for the paid blogger to rise through the levels, then the exercise is moot. This model is built for paid bloggers and the clients they serve to succeed together.