Blogging has proven itself as a powerful medium to get your company’s message out. It’s a valuable source of company news and a useful way to give tips and tricks on best practices and best uses of your products and services.

Providing complementary content about the industry you work in is a great way to drive traffic to your website. But if you want people to visit your site more than once, you’ll need good content. Of course, if you want good content, you have to pay for it.

Figuring out what to pay a blogger raises a lot of questions for some business owners who may not know much about the business of writing. In case you’re not sure how to proceed, here are some guidelines to consider when you seek out someone (or several people) to populate your blog with content.

Full-time vs. Freelance

Once you’ve established your content budget, the next step is deciding how to allocate the money. Do you want to establish one voice and have a personality build your blog? Or would you prefer several voices feeding into your blog?

If you decide on one voice, bringing someone in-house full-time could bring some other side benefits. If you hire someone who’s not only an excellent writer, but also a little web savvy, you can have him or her write a couple of articles per day, and make updates to your website. However, depending on the level of experience of a person like this, this position could cost in the $50,000-$80,000 per-year range.

Freelance writers generally service many clients and write on a per-article basis. Managing several freelancers and scheduling their efforts into your blog to make sure your content is consistent can be a fair amount of work for a business owner. It may be in your best interest to pay an additional administration fee to one of your freelance writers to schedule the content and maintain a relationship with all your freelancers on your behalf.

Paying Per Post vs. Flat Rate

Blog rates per-post vary greatly depending on your needs. You can expect to find a writer in the $25 to $150 range for one article. A lot of this depends on how much time and effort goes into creating the content. If little to no research is necessary to write a piece, you can easily source a writer at the lower end of the scale.

However, if you require the writer to do a fair amount of research, source images, and tag your content, you can expect to pay more in the range of $75-$100 per article. If you want your writer to also do things like take photos and do multiple interviews for a piece, expect to pay in the upper range of $125-$150 per post.

However, once you’ve found some writers whose work you like, you may want to investigate bringing them on board on a semi-permanent basis. Negotiating a weekly or monthly flat rate will ensure that you’ve got a regular stream of content coming in, and freelance writers often like to take on some consistent clients. Some writers may even discount their rates for regular work assignments.

Paying Based on Experience

Depending on the nature of your company blog, you may want to enlist some subject matter experts to write for you. But these experts aren’t always writers.

You want to pay for their experience and knowledge just as you’d pay any other freelancer. However, if the person isn’t a skilled writer, you may need to enlist the help of an editor to help the subject matter expert write better copy. Consider this additional expense when looking for alternative content for your blog.

Have you been paying for blog content? What criteria do you apply when looking for writers? We’d love for you to share your tips in the comments below.

[Image credits: Rosaura Ochoa, jnyemb, Maria Reyes-McDavis, Mai Le]