Every service starts with an invoice; prompt payment means scheduled work in my workflow.

In terms of getting started on the writing bit, I need the following:

• Brand style guide

• Tone of voice

• Buyer personas

• Keyword map

• Project outline

But don’t worry - if you don’t have these, I can get started with our project questionnaire, which I will send you during onboarding. I will follow this up with a project call to cover any further questions.

If you have several stakeholders invested in blog content, I’m more than happy to meet them. It’ll allow us to audit what you already have and brainstorm the right “next move”.

Each audit starts with a kick-off call, brand and competitor research and studying your internal documentation (brand tone of voice and style guide, buyer personas, keyword maps, etc.). Once I have that, it’s time to sit down and look at the numbers, auditing based on suggestions I believe will make your blog content stronger going forward.

Audits can be pretty intensive and take me around 30 hours.

The best thing about an audit with me is that if you have me come on board as your new ghostwriter, my prep work is already done!

Whether looking at your blog topics or SEO, I start with research. That helps me understand your business, customer, services and competitors well enough to establish where to position your blog content.

From here, it’s about documenting thoughts as I travel through your blog and showing you where improvements could make a big difference.

At the end of each blog audit, there is a recommendation section. That will give you an actionable to-do list to plan your workload.

Of course, I can do all that for you, which can be charged hourly or at day rates.

Of course!

You don’t need an active website or blog to start with me. I will help you create strategy and content from scratch. I’m happy to work with web developers and stakeholders to find out what content you need to make a splash as you go live.

It depends - wildly vague, eh?! But it is true.

Let me explain.

Typically a 750-1000 word blog post takes 2.5 to 4 hours to write. Some less and some even more. Why? Well, there are many reasons, which typically play out to

• The strength of your brief

• The style of the blog - informational, thought leadership, case study, etc.

• Inclusion of your point of view (PoVs, as I’ll call them)

• Research including SEO

• If it relates to a blog cluster

• If I need to conduct interviews

• The editing and approval process

Want more specifics? Read my full guide to blog writing time frames here.

Typically you are looking at a 3 to 6 month timeframe from publication to ranking if you have your SEO ducks in a row. In some cases, it can be even sooner than that.

SEO has become more complicated over the past few years. It is no longer just about creating content and focusing it around keyphrases and keywords your user would search for. It’s much broader. Now you need to consider how helpful your content is and look forward to the new generative search, which Google is rolling out with their AI. That has many more factors to consider. Don’t worry though, I’m updating my research and all that goodness filters down to your website.

That is a new question I’ve been asked a lot recently. Let me clarify.

I do use AI to help brainstorm topics and expedite research. That includes

• SEO-specific AI to discover keywords and phrases for content

• SERP-specific AI to discover user intent based on keywords and phrases

• If you have a team of writers I need to brief, I use AI to help me brainstorm outlines quickly, which I edit heavily for our brand voice and buyer personas

• Grammarly to help me quick edit rough drafts

So yes, I use AI.

But I don’t write your blogs using ChatGPT. Here’s why. AI like this scrapes existing web content up to a “trained to” date, meaning some of what it scrapes may no longer be correct. Couple with that, there’s a lot of misinformation out there, and AI can get the answer wrong. That’s not to say it hasn’t come on leaps and bounds, but you can’t position yourself as an expert in business if you don’t prove you know what you are talking about. Then, of course, there’s innovation. If you are scraping content from the internet, how do you make your content stand out? That’s why you need a blogger like me on board.

Audits are pre-paid single purchases and monthly retainers are pre-paid monthly subscriptions, paid by BACs (or Direct Debit for retainers).

As a sole trader, I don’t offer extended payment terms or negotiate on price, but I can tell you that the average day rate for someone of my experience is £425. I charge £350. *Runs to make a note - I need to up my prices!

I work wherever you work. So if you have a preference, let me know. We can also catch up by email too.

As a new client, there will undoubtedly be a transitional period between getting to know you and knowing you. That means that sign-offs need to reflect this.

Largely I’ll submit you a first draft, which has been rigorously quality assured at my desk. If you have amendments, I’ll work through these and resubmit a second draft. How much further this process goes is down to the individual piece, the number of stakeholders involved and your in-house process.

I think there’s always room for ideas; collaboration is important. I’ll work with you until your blog post is the best example of answering the brief. Charging by the hour or under retainers I can do this much more easily for you.

My client base is mostly retainer work these days, so while my work varies, I often have limited time. While that makes me super happy, finding a fresh opening with me can be frustrating - but not impossible. Fill in the form below, and let’s book an online meeting to discuss your needs.