How to Hire a Blogger in Nigeria

Do you have a website or blog but don’t know how to keep updating it with the latest information? Do you know you can hire a blogger in Nigeria? It’s not different from how you can hire anyone to work for you. But its only slightly different because you have to find the right person that can add value to your blog or website.

If you have a website or blog, it needs to be regularly updated. I write at least three blog posts every week. Some bloggers write more than that. But at least you should post a new blog weekly on your site.

The value of your site increases as you add new blog posts. It’s like a building. The more blocks you add to the building, the more the house takes better shape. And in this case, your website is improved each time you add a new blog post or web page.

That doesn’t mean you should post too many blogs at the same time. Just let the content grow with a defined plan that works for you. And that is why I’m recommending that you learn how to hire a blogger in Nigeria.

Description

The main job of a blogger is primarily to create blog contents. And it can be referred to in many ways as blog posts, or blog articles, or web articles, web copy, just content, or web content, or even blog content. A blogger can also blog for personal use, or for businesses, news, networking or other professional means.

How to hire a blogger may not be the same for everyone. This article is not offering you a global standard on how to engage bloggers. The ideas in this post are to help you form the basic concept to hire bloggers when you need one.

If you are running your website on your own, it might just be right to outsource some of these things online. There are many sites where you can find freelance bloggers to help you handle your website. One of the most popular ones is Fiverr and Upwork. And it can be cheaper as well.

But if it’s a business entity website, there may be the need to have an in-house blogger. Having a blogger working for your company may be helpful in many ways than outsourcing. However, if your site needs minimal update work once in a while, you may stick with the outsourcing option.

How it Works

In the world of internet of things, a website that is not updated is like an online graveyard. It smells of death with stale news. And that can rebuff search engines like Google. It also means you won’t be seeing much online traffic to your website. Even if you do get some traffic, your visitors won’t find any useful value on your site. And search engine pushes your website to the bottom of SERP.

Giving your website or blog a regular update will make it both users and search engine friendly. It may not even be to add new information but to update the existing ones with current information about your business.

And if your website is old, you may have to upgrade to better website theme. A good WordPress theme doesn’t cost so much. You can also hire a blogger to handle that for you. And if you are not using WordPress for your website backend, you need to migrate to WordPress. There are so many reasons WordPress is ideal for running your website or blog.

It gives you easy access to update your blog. You can also provide access to others and control their access and what they do on your site. And you can remove that access when you are done with them.

The Benefits of Hiring a Blogger

And before you ask about the cost of hiring a blogger in Nigeria, let’s consider the benefits above the price. The internet works by this singular honour, content! A blogger is a content creator. Hiring a blogger means you want to create good blog contents for your site. It’s going to add more value than hiring a marketer. The full benefits are listed in the blogger ob description.

A marketer can help you sell today but hiring a blogger helps you sell for all time. A professional blogger must be competent in content marketing. That’s what makes a professional blogger different from someone who merely owns a blog and posts to it regularly.

It also makes the value of a blogger unquantifiable. There is no set amount you must pay for the services of a blogger. But depending on your country, you may decide what’s right for you. A blogger in Nigeria can earn between $500 to $5,000 monthly.

And professional bloggers would work from their convenience, using their own devices, internet access, and some personal blogging tools. That saves your company some cost associated with running a full blog department. These guys already have a setting that works, you just leverage, and not learning the ropes from the ground floor.

Important Job Description of a Blogger

According to a blog post on Sokanu Blog on what a blogger does, it listed over 35 job description for a blogger. I’m going to be selecting most of them for you here. But if you want to read the full list just go to their website here.

Also, note that I do not subscribe to all the items it listed there but it’s also an excellent way to start. I also starred some to show that I accepted it as partially true. But the ones I don’t agree with entirely or on a higher percentage, I dropped some from the list as well. That doesn’t mean Sokanu’s list is wrong. It just that it went too far in some descriptions.

Here is my edited list from Sokanu blog on the variety of things that bloggers can do to support their blog:

The Blogger Job List

• create fresh, original content a few times a week
• keep up with all changes on the social media platforms***
• update their credits page with all their media and significant mentions and all the guest posts they have written***
• share their content on social media, encouraging conversation
• manage comments, spam, and read and reply to each one***
• guest blog once or twice a month by creating fresh, engaging content for another blog***
  * Respond to comments on every guest post***
• engage with any reader who contacts them or asks a question***
• run the back-end smoothly; such as their publishing platform, plugins, design, code***
• optimise their top pages, top blog posts, service, and product pages***
• research opportunities that come to their ways such as advertisers and promotional inquiries***
• communicate with their peer bloggers and support each other
• Build relationships online and offline with their community***
• give interviews
• beta test for plugins and work with developers to test applications on their site
• set up consulting services with their blogging knowledge and any other skills and experience to help others***
• set up their newsletter, and are smart with their email marketing strategies***
• set up and support a Facebook fan page, and understand that some people only use Facebook but can still benefit from their message***
• set up a strong LinkedIn presence and engage in groups and offer value to conversations***
• educate themselves continually with free webinars, online courses, and tons of other material in their niche and about blogging, business, and marketing in general
• do the bookkeeping if their blog is their business and if they have set it up as a business
• take care of the legal stuff like Trademark, set up an S-Corp or LLC or a sole proprietorship and find an accountant for the taxes
• attend conferences at least once a year and learn the latest and greatest as well as build new connections***
• speak to a group about their expertise or share their story and prepare well for that speech in advance***
• set up a podcast and expand their audience and their brand by reaching people who prefer an audio medium***
• track their stats using Google Analytics, make sure Google can find them, where their referrals are coming from and what is happening on their site
• Collaborate on projects with other bloggers such as an eBook or other creations
• create their own products; this can be in the form of a product with audio interviews, a guidebook, a Kindle book, an e-course, or a video series. (This can take the most amount of time, but once it is done, it gains credibility and potential income.)

Action Points to Hire a Blogger In Nigeria

Hiring a blogger in Nigeria who may not add value to your business will be a waste of time and resources, so, it’s ideal to take precaution and hire a blogger who knows better than you may even need.

The important aspect of blogs in today’s digital marketing is making its content of the business relevant online. I have looked at some of the things you may want to consider before you hire a blogger in Nigeria.

Step One: Check Ability to Write Compelling Blog Post

The first test is the ability to write. And that’s not to measure if the person went to school and can read and write. Ability to write may include the ability to create content out of a word. For example, if I give you the word SMILE, can you create an enjoyable and sellable content from it? The persons’ power to articulate is the key to content creation.

Also, the style of writing may be needed as well. How convincing does the person write? A marketing content should be able to sell the idea better. If it’s lame, it won’t convert your visitors to customers. So, hiring a blogger with great writing skill is one of them.

You may also consider language if you are dealing with different countries. You should hire a blogger who can write in the primary language of your blog. Most bloggers use English, but that doesn’t mean there are no French blogs. Although hiring a blogger in Nigeria may limit your language to just English, unless you are considering local dialect blogs like Pidgin, Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa or any other local language.

Step Two: Must Understand Content Marketing

Selling online is no longer for dummies. If you must succeed online, you have to create attention-grabbing contents for your website or blog. Content is king for online marketing. And the chief creators are bloggers. Hiring a blogger who has the gift of content creation in a pulsating storyline will win you more customers than a marketer would do.

People love stories, and that’s why novels are the most widely read fiction in history. Even though the stories are not real, readers are willing to delve into that illusion and are satisfied. You can craft compelling contents with stories about your product, or business and visitors will keep coming back for more.

Hire a blogger in Nigeria with the skills of a storyteller and a good one will be worth the cost.

Step Three: Must Have SEO Knowledge

Search engine optimisation technic is not an essential need to hire a blogger, but if you can find one that understands the technics why not. It costs a lot in website optimisation. If your blogger can do that, it saves you tones of capital and ensures your contents are getting you the right online traffic from search engines. That doesn’t mean you should have an SEO agency to manage your in-depth online optimisation. A blogger can do the basic on-site SEO optimisation but not deep offsite as the SEO agency would do for you.

Some SEO companies charge as much as $500 monthly to optimise websites for on-site SEO. This would come free for you if your blogger has such knowledge. And it’s not hard to find one these days. It’s almost a requirement now for bloggers to learn digital marketing, of which SEO is one of the skills.

Step Four: Must Understand SMM (Social Media Marketing)

Hire a blogger with social media marketing skills. I know some businesses have social media guy. But most social media hires don’t understand other aspects of digital marketing like SEO and blogging. But if you hire a blogger with SEO and SMM skills, you kill many birds with one stone.

It’s different from social media influencers. You can still have influencers. But hire a blogger with skills that would enhance your social media marketing. And as the Facebook algorithm changes, combining social media marketing with search engine optimisation will make sure a high return on your investment over time.

Step Five: Must Know How to Use WordPress

The crucial part for hiring a blogger in Nigeria will be to blog. WordPress is the number one blogging platform. Therefore hire a blogger who knows how to use WordPress. Unless your website is built on a different blog engine than WordPress.

However, I would recommend WordPress for both website and blog. It makes a lot of things so easy to add on your site. If you know about web design, you can buy a WordPress theme as low as $50 and immediately transform your website into a new model without the high cost of web design.

Fastweb, one of my online businesses is providing free websites for every local government council in Nigeria. And there are 774 local government areas in the country. The free package includes only the site plus other benefits. The local government will provide their domain name and web hosting account. We will design a professional website for free and train a staff of the LGA on how to update, edit and manage the site and its blog. Skills transfer is a part of the concept.

Even these sites, when completed, will create 774 jobs in the LGA’s for bloggers in Nigeria. We also going to extend it to public schools. The idea is to create many public websites to offer more jobs for bloggers in Nigeria. And you can help by nominating your local government or schools in your area for this free website offer. Yes, we are also giving out free websites to public secondary schools.

Step Six: Must Be Familiar With Your Business

Another critical step is to hire a blogger who is familiar with your kind of business. Blogging is a creative way to use content to sell businesses online. And a great blogger must be familiar with the industry to create compelling blog contents that can attract the right target customers.

Hiring a blogger that knows the how, why and what of your business will add more value to your target audience. But how are you going to see a blogger in Nigeria with such knowledge of your business? That may be difficult, right? An excellent digital agency can act as your intermediary to hire a blogger in Nigeria. You can also advertise for one on social media like Facebook.

Well, you can also ask that they offer a content guide for your business. However, this may be too much to ask for. Some clients would demand such and still not use the blogger. And that’s a waste of the bloggers time. Maybe conducting a little interview would help. But if you find a blogger that knows his job as a blogger, he may not have to know your business to create high content for you.

Also, you have to create the path that will guide the blogger. Since it’s your business, you should compile all the significant topic areas in your industry that you want to cover in your blog. This will help the blogger you hire to begin the journey of being more familiar with your business. You can also ask to see other jobs done by the blogger in Nigeria to certify the content quality, the blogger’s grasp of the topic and the presentation style.

Step Seven: Must be Diligent and Trusted

This part is a significant criterion. Blogging is a serious business. Creating high-quality contents and thought-provoking information doesn’t come without hard work. You need to hire a blogger who is diligent and trusted enough to deliver better content.

One of the critical aspects of being diligent is time. If the blogger doesn’t deliver on time, you have to start considering hiring another blogger. It doesn’t matter if the job doesn’t need urgency. If the blogger is missing out on the timeline, it won’t be hard to miss out on critical information that’s valuable to the topic. You shouldn’t make excuses for an in-diligent blogger.

Conclusion

Hiring a blogger in Nigeria may seem simple, but it’s not. The best bloggers are all working for themselves. Blogging is one of the fastest ways to earn residual income on the internet. And you can’t be good at it and still want to work for pay. That’s why most of those who still work for others are mostly good writers but not good bloggers.

Although, there are still few great bloggers who are working for others. That’s why it’s a bit challenging to find them because those who hired them are not letting go of them. But you can hire a blogger on a freelance. Or better still on a contract basis for a time.

You should know that if you want to build real free online traffic to your website, you don’t need a marketer, what you need is a blogger. Your company can hire a great marketer to sell your product but to bring in online customers, it’s not marketers that do the job better, but bloggers.

Even in the world of digital marketing, the most impactful area is content marketing, of which blogging is an integral part. You need to hire a blogger now if you want to build your business online for the next wave of customers.

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