Hiring a Blogger for Your ECommerce Site

Content marketing is a smart way to attract attention to your ecommerce site. It enables you to establish yourself as an authority in your area of business. It gives casual readers an opportunity to discover your site and it improves your search engine rankings. On the other hand, blogging can also be a full time job. Hiring a blogger for your ecommerce site is a good way to go, but how do you know if you’re getting someone who would be a good fit?

Experience in Your Industry

The ideal person would be someone who is intimately familiar with the ins and outs of your business. They’ll know the “language” your customers speak. They’ll be familiar with the pain points surrounding your marketplace and more likely to hit the ground running with good story ideas.

Along these same lines, formal education in your area of business would be useful to have as well. Long story short, the deeper their background in your space, the more valuable they will be to you.

Blogging Experience in General

Have they written for other blogs? Do they currently write for other blogs? Are they blogging independently? Can you get the URL to their site to see their work? How do they approach editing and proofreading? Do they have someone who will look their articles over to make sure they’re free of spelling and grammatical errors?

What is their experience with copyrights as they pertain to blogging, including obtaining photography and etc? If they were to be tasked with sourcing images, what resource would they use to acquire them? Are they familiar with search engine optimization? Can they explain what makes an article attractive to search engines?

Style Considerations

A good website theme like those offered by the Shopify, allows customization to appeal to the sensibilities of your ideal customer. After reviewing your theme, how would they voice your blog?

Can they approximate the tone and voice of the content already on your site, so it matches what your customers have come to expect from you? Can they write in a conversational style? After all, this has been proven to humanize blogs to better engage customers.

Social Media Considerations

Do they have a social media following from which you can benefit? Do they know how to promote articles to improve likes, shares and garner re-tweets?

Are they considered an influencer? How many followers to they have?

Of that number, how many routinely engage with the content they produce? How would they respond to negative comments about something they wrote—or about your business in general?

What tools would they use to manage your social media presence?

Logistical Questions

Given you’ll need to update your blog on a daily basis, what will happen if they’re sick for a few days and can’t write? What precautions would they take to ensure you still have fresh content to post?

These tend to be remote positions, so what hours would they consider “yours” each day? How do you get in touch with them if you need them to turn something time-sensitive around quickly?

Looking at your blog as it is now, what’s the first thing they’d do to improve it? What are some of the blogs they admire—and why? Are they comfortable working with a content management system, or will they need someone on your side to post the articles after you’ve approved them?

Hiring a blogger for your ecommerce site can be a tremendous boost for your content marketing effort. If you find a person with solid responses to the questions above you’ll be in good hands.