What $150 Buys From a Monthly Blog Writing Service

A monthly blog writing service is usually sold by the word, which is the wrong unit entirely. What you are buying is the decision about what to write, the writing, the publishing and somebody keeping the site current. Mine is $150 a month for two articles with all of that included.

This is what should be in a content retainer at any price, what mine covers, and the cases where you should not buy one at all.

What a content retainer should actually include

Writing is the visible part and the smallest part of the value. These are the pieces that decide whether the work is worth paying for.

• Keyword research before anything is written. Deciding what to write about is most of the job. An article on a topic nobody searches is a well written waste of money.
• The writing itself. Original, in your voice, about your actual business rather than generic advice.
• On page optimisation. Title, meta description, headings, internal links to the pages that sell, and structured data.
• Publishing. Live on your site, formatted, with the images sorted. Not a document emailed to you to deal with.
• Internal linking to your money pages. Every article should point at the pages that make you money. This is the part that is skipped most often.
• Your business profile kept current. Hours, photos and posts, so the free listing does not go stale while the blog grows.

Photo: Pexels

What mine includes, and what it costs

Keyword research and content are not part of a website build. Only the technical SEO is. I keep that line hard on purpose, because blurring it is how people end up paying monthly for something that was already finished once. What the build itself covers is set out on the what every build includes page.

Why two articles a month and not eight

Volume is the easiest thing for a content service to sell and the least useful thing to buy. Eight thin articles a month, written quickly about whatever came to mind, will do less than two that answer a question your customers actually type.

Two a month is also a pace a real business can sustain without the quality collapsing, and it compounds. Twenty four articles after a year, each one linking to the pages that sell, is a genuinely different website from the one you started with.

When you should not buy a content plan

That last pair matters most. Content is slow. If you need the phone to ring this week, spend the money somewhere with a faster answer and come back to this when the urgent problem is solved. If the website itself is not right yet, fix that first, because sending readers to a page that does not convert is paying twice for the same visitor.

Who owns the articles

You do, and it should not be a question you have to ask. Everything published under the plan lives on your site, on your hosting, in your account. If you stop the plan, the articles stay exactly where they are and keep working, and the site does not change in any way. A content plan you cannot leave without losing the work is not a content plan.

What twenty four articles look like after a year

Two a month sounds slow until you look at the total. After a year it is twenty four pages, each aimed at a question a customer types, each linking to the pages that sell.

The compounding is the point. Articles do not expire, so month twelve has twenty four pages working rather than two. The catch is honest: they take months to do anything, some will never do anything, and the ones that work are rarely the ones you expected. That is why the research matters more than the writing.

How the topics get chosen

1. Start with what customers ask you

   The questions you answer on the phone every week are the ones being typed into a search box by people who have not called yet.

2. Check whether anybody searches for it

   Some of the best questions have no search volume at all. Those still get answered, on a service page rather than in an article.

3. Check what is already ranking

   If the first page is all national brands with thousands of links, that topic is not winnable this year and something else gets written instead.

4. Write the one that is both wanted and winnable

   Low competition and real demand. That combination is rarer than it sounds and it is most of the value in the plan.

What you should see every month

A content plan is easy to sell and easy to fake, so here is what visible work looks like.

• Two published articles. On your site, live, formatted, with images. Not drafts in a shared folder.
• The reason each one was chosen. A sentence about the search behind it. If nobody can explain why a topic was picked, it was picked because it was easy to write.
• Internal links to your money pages. Every article should point at the pages that make you money. This is the part most services skip.
• Your business profile still current. Hours, photos, posts. It takes minutes and it is the free listing most people neglect.

There is more detail on what the build itself includes, as opposed to what the monthly plan covers, on the what every build includes page. The line between them is deliberate and I keep it hard.

What cancelling looks like

Worth knowing before you start, because the answer is where most content retainers hide their teeth.

You tell me to stop. That is it. There is no notice period, no minimum term, and no invoice for the month you did not want. Everything published stays on your site, keeps working and keeps ranking exactly as it did, because it lives on your hosting in your account and it always did.

The site itself does not change in any way when the plan stops. Nothing switches off, nothing gets removed, no feature is disabled. If a content plan cannot survive that description, it is not a content plan, it is a lease on your own website with articles attached.

One last thing on expectations. Two articles a month is a pace, not a promise about outcomes, and the honest version of this is that some months look like nothing happened. The work is only visible in aggregate, over quarters rather than weeks, which is exactly why it is sold monthly and judged annually.