Part of a good social media marketing strategy is to publish a blog on your small business website. Setting up a blog is not only easy, but brings a myriad of benefits, including better search engine optimization and deeper customer loyalty.
Some small businesses will write their own blog posts, and others will outsource the job to a contract writer, also called “ghost blogging.” While there are many benefits to ghost blogging, many questions arise, such as is it right? Isn’t that cheating? Isn’t it misleading?
Reasons for Ghost Blogging
First, let’s take a look at the benefits of ghost blogging on your small business website. Many website owners have other writers compose blog posts for several reasons:
It saves time for you to perform other management duties
You are busy as a small business owner, and your time is valuable. Although blogging can be fun, it does take time to sit and compose an interesting blog post that is 300-500 words. Writing a daily blog could take up to an hour or more of your time. Why not have a ghost blogger do it while you concentrate on expanding your business and forming your business strategies?
You don’t like to write.
Some business owners simply have an aversion to writing consistent content. Whether it is a fear of writing or simply an admission of poor grammar and spelling, writing blog posts is too much of a chore.
You don’t like research.
A small business blog does not just describe the type of coffee you brought to your staff meeting. You need to provide new, updated content that benefits your readers. Sometimes this requires research on a topic. Looking through online and hard copy sources can also be time demanding, providing a great deal more stress than you can spare.
All of these are good reasons to hire a ghost blogger for your small business. Ghost blogging saves you time, energy, and stress, and it can give you the opportunity to present your readers with professional content written by a seasoned writer.
Why Ghost Blogging is Wrong
Why would ghost blogging be wrong for your small business? Many nay-sayers have good reasons:
You present yourself as the expert author.
Some small business website owners are considered experts or specialists in their field. When you sign off on an article that you didn’t write, some people may consider that fraud.
You lose credibility and your reputation
If it’s discovered that you are not the author of your own blog, you could lose your credibility, your reputation, and worse, your customers. Consider whether this fact could cost you your business.
The fact is that ghost writing has been in existence for hundreds of years. Even today, entire books are ghostwritten, and the full credit is taken by a different author. You must decide whether ghost blogging is right for you and your business. If you do chose to publish ghost blogging posts, consider whether to disclose that posts are written by someone other than yourself.
