Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

You don’t have time to maintain your blog

blog.scripted.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 49 posts

Re: You don’t have time to maintain your blog

#11

Post by alanctgardner2 »

rbucks wrote: post #9
alanctgardner2 wrote: post #4

This seems like a disingenuous service. For any company, the goal of having a corporate blog is to demonstrate your employees' knowledge and present interesting problems you've encountered. There are two outcomes I see from outsourcing blog posts: 1) interesting content which isn't directly relevant to your business. They write a good blog, but it's always going to be an arm's length from your real business. Either y…

Valid points, but what Scripted does is not much different than hiring a blogger intern. To keep the content genuine, our clients have to be engaged. We simply promote them from writer to editor. Scripted helps businesses take the time spent from idea to publishing down from hours to minutes.

I can see this being useful in some circumstance, but I think the kinds of people who read HN value blog posts that aren't considered a chore. If you're offloading blog posts on someone junior, they're not going to be very interesting. At best they're meta analysis of what other, more invested writers have already said.

You're basically distilling a blog post down into a premise and high quality writing. A lot of what makes technical, corporate blogging effective is content and honesty, which are much harder to outsource.

Re: You don’t have time to maintain your blog

#13

Post by mnicole »

Is this solely for people that know the topics your writers are writing on thoroughly enough that they don't approve something that is potentially harmful to their brand? What happens in the event that the audience is largely put off by the post or if the author is wrong about the topic they're writing on but the client was none-the-wiser to it at approval?

Re: You don’t have time to maintain your blog

#15

Post by netmau5 »

I like the concept although I always hesitate to use ghost writers. If you really want my business, you have to show me the money. Demonstrate the expertise in your writers, their engagement (comments), their impact/retention (uniques/views), and their ability to write deeply interesting content.

What I saw was a collection of random, poorly-formatted writing samples, disorganized testimonials, and vague pricing details. Normally I'd just keep to myself and move along, but this is a service my company would potentially use in certain areas. So I think it would be a huge improvement if the site were focused on convincing me, as the owner and someone with irrational concern for our image, how you'll make us bigger/better/faster/stronger.

Re: You don’t have time to maintain your blog

#16

Post by kiba »

Hmm, it makes me think twice about corporate blogs in general if they're not written from the horse's mouth. Credibility of all corporate blogs are undermined just by this post from a service.

Also, it is hard to see if they use ghost writers or not. Which, makes me even more skeptical.

Re: You don’t have time to maintain your blog

#17

Post by noelwelsh »

I have a long long list of blog posts I haven't got around to writing. Creating the skeleton is easy, but filling in the details is time consuming. I can see a use for this service to get someone else to do that. I don't really see a big deal with this, so long as everyone involved is credited.

Re: You don’t have time to maintain your blog

#20

Post by jabbernotty »

Not to be down on the service, but I have to do some nitpicking.

There is a difference between "checkout" and "check out". "checkout" is not a verb, but a thingamajig. "the checkout page". "to check out" is a verb.

The first proper word on the blog seems incorrect. That doesn't inspire confidence. There are a few more problems with the text such as (preposition) words that appear missing, for example.

Post reply on HN