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You don’t have time to maintain your blog

blog.scripted.com

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

#41

Post by scott_meade »

noelwelsh wrote: post #35
ricardobeat wrote: post #29

Outsource your blog today! Curated top trending topics, SEO optimized, ready to go viral and customized to your audience. This is the kind of crap I wish would disappear from the web. At least Google is trying to do it's part. I also think a company blog is not the place for this kind of arbitrage, I see it often on random companies websites and it shows: instead of engaging the audience, the post listing looks like…

Authenticity is very ill-defined (just ask any hipster). What makes an authentic company blog in your mind? Does it have to written by an employee of the company? What if it the company is entirely outsourced (except for the owners, obviously)? Does that mean the owners must write it? What if the owners aren't any good at writing? Can they not hire someone to do this job for them? Let's say we're talking about a soft…

One type of authenticity speaks to origin an item. Whether it be a painting, writing, or any other work, when a work's origin is in doubt, it can be said to be lacking authenticity. The inauthentic part of ghostwriting is that the name of the author on the content is not the person who created the content.

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

#42

Post by alanctgardner2 »

jbkring wrote: post #21
alanctgardner2 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wha…

Totally agree. Which is why I wrote this post myself. I can only hope that my approach to the pain point felt 'honest', and that the content of my post was HN-worthy. We are absolutely not saying that you should outsource your entire social media presence. What we are saying is that consistency over time matters. If I wrote a post like this every day, Scripted would never ship another feature again. So I don't. I wri…

I definitely understand that blogs can be ignored in favour of shipping. But I think a service like this would make me write to my blog even less, because it wouldn't feel urgent. Someone else has got it, and even if I write something brilliant, it'll get pushed off the front page in a couple days.

What would be more interesting to me is a proofing service where the content is entirely the actual owner's, but the voice and style are tuned by a professional writer. This would smooth out some idiosyncrasies (for better or worse) and make a corporate blog more approachable for customers, without compromising on quality. I imagine most people let their blog posts ferment for a few days, maybe weeks, before releasing them. Outsourcing the polishing and reflecting period would speed things up without cheapening the whole thing.

Having a small, paid audience of writers who also have a technical background to assess posts before they go out would be another way to take it.

Regardless, I suspect you guys will still kill it because there is a need for this in places where they would normally hire an intern to write the blog. Good luck!

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

#43

Post by nathan_long »

rbucks wrote: post #33
ricardobeat wrote: post #29

Outsource your blog today! Curated top trending topics, SEO optimized, ready to go viral and customized to your audience. This is the kind of crap I wish would disappear from the web. At least Google is trying to do it's part. I also think a company blog is not the place for this kind of arbitrage, I see it often on random companies websites and it shows: instead of engaging the audience, the post listing looks like…

Let me take the discussion up a level. There's huge demand for great writing, that's been made clear in the comments (and we see this every day at Scripted HQ). There are millions of underemployed professionals in this country, thousands of whom are exceptional writers. Scripted bridges the two, allowing businesses to get great writing (not just blog posts, also white papers, landing pages, status updates, case studi…

The problem is that "great writing", in this context, is business owners writing something that being a business owner qualifies them to write.

How is an outsourced writer going to draw on someone else's experiences?

A blog written from real experience may be valuable. A blog pretending to be written from real experience is worse that worthless for the readers.

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

#44

Post by rbucks »

nathan_long wrote: post #43
rbucks wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me take the discussion up a level. There's huge demand for great writing, that's been made clear in the comments (and we see this every day at Scripted HQ). There are millions of underemployed professionals in this country, thousands of whom are exceptional writers. Scripted bridges the two, allowing businesses to get great writing (not just blog posts, also white papers, landing pages, status updates, case studi…

The problem is that "great writing", in this context, is business owners writing something that being a business owner qualifies them to write . How is an outsourced writer going to draw on someone else's experiences? A blog written from real experience may be valuable. A blog pretending to be written from real experience is worse that worthless for the readers.

In most cases, we'll take an outline from a business owner along with a style guide they produced or had produced by their agency, and choose a writer as close as possible to their industry. You can't fake insider knowledge, but you can transfer the details and have a great writer build in the details.

Maybe a better analogy is like a head chef and his souz-chefs. Our clients create the recipe, but our writers prepare the dish.

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

#45

Post by noelwelsh »

scott_meade wrote: post #41
noelwelsh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Authenticity is very ill-defined (just ask any hipster). What makes an authentic company blog in your mind? Does it have to written by an employee of the company? What if it the company is entirely outsourced (except for the owners, obviously)? Does that mean the owners must write it? What if the owners aren't any good at writing? Can they not hire someone to do this job for them? Let's say we're talking about a soft…

One type of authenticity speaks to origin an item. Whether it be a painting, writing, or any other work, when a work's origin is in doubt, it can be said to be lacking authenticity. The inauthentic part of ghostwriting is that the name of the author on the content is not the person who created the content.

There is no requirement that the authors aren't credited. To quote another comment in this thread by someone from Scripted

  Yup. Which is why many of our clients give byline to our writers!
I agree that if the author isn't credited the setup is a bit dubious.

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

#46

Post by jbkring »

netmau5 wrote: post #15

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 deta…

This is very good feedback. We're actually working on some Machine-Learning technology that takes all of Wikipedia's content, builds a topic model, and applies it to the 10k pieces of content that we've written over the past couple months. It will allow us to rank writers by their expertise in very granular fields (so for instance we'll be able to tell you who our best "outdoor recreational equipment" writer is). We'll provide a deeper explanation of this technology in a (hopefully less controversial) blog post in the next couple of weeks.

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

#47

Post by ricardobeat »

winsmart wrote: post #37
ricardobeat wrote: post #29

Outsource your blog today! Curated top trending topics, SEO optimized, ready to go viral and customized to your audience. This is the kind of crap I wish would disappear from the web. At least Google is trying to do it's part. I also think a company blog is not the place for this kind of arbitrage, I see it often on random companies websites and it shows: instead of engaging the audience, the post listing looks like…

Whoa buddy, sounds like you're on your high horse in your ivory tower. Must be lonely up there!

Yes, my comment was a bit harsh, but that's the gist of my opinion, sometimes blunt comments make for better discussion than candy-coated ones. Plus I'm a little annoyed by promotional posts on HN...

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

#48

Post by winsmart »

ricardobeat wrote: post #47
winsmart wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa buddy, sounds like you're on your high horse in your ivory tower. Must be lonely up there!

Yes, my comment was a bit harsh, but that's the gist of my opinion, sometimes blunt comments make for better discussion than candy-coated ones. Plus I'm a little annoyed by promotional posts on HN...

So do I, and I can be harsh too. You are not alone my friend.

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

#49

Post by shanedanger »

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…

Respectfully, if your startup wants to be recognized as a thought leader, YOU should write and manage your own blog. Your brand is one of the only assets you have in the early days; don't water it down with a steady flow of mediocre blog posts by strangers. Your personal brand, expertise, and storytelling as a founder is the most compelling part of your company. This is why Jake wrote this blog post rather than having an automated writer from their network do it.

IMO content and automation never belong in the same sentence together, unless your only goal is to fill in SEO content of which you aren't particularly concerned about the quality. If you're a startup concerned with your image, I don't think you want to be in that game.

You can't automate quality. It's impossible develop high-quality media without constant, transparent communication and editorial oversight. Especially if you're trying to do it cheaply.

If you're a big-budget brand with that wants to trade out banner ads for thoughtful content marketing, hire an editor with real journalism experience, then hire (or contract) the best journalists you can afford, with the biggest social media followings. This is why Red Bull, American Express, and Gilt Groupe kill it with content marketing, meanwhile you and I have never clicked "Like" on an auto-generated blog post from a random startup. The only way you'll compete with media companies for content-share is by beating them at their game.

That can't happen "automatically."

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