As a blogger, the expectation is that you blog. You sit down at your computer and write up the amazing posts that are the reason people come to your site in the first place. But running a blog doesn’t mean that you have to create every single piece of content that goes up on your site, does it?

I have a biased opinion of course, being that I’ve written for far more blogs than just my own and have paid my bills with the resulting money. It’s a discussion that’s happening more and more often, though: there are bloggers who barely feel present on their own sites anymore, others that herald paid posters as the harbingers of some sort of blogging apocalypse, and plenty of opinions in between. Assuming that you’re comfortable with the idea of using paid bloggers for your own site, though, there is a difference between what you get and what you might write yourself.

When You Pay a Blogger…

When you write a post for your own site, the only people you’re responsible to are your readers. You can have an off day and not feel badly; a typo can slide through and it’s not the end of the world. But when you’re putting down cash money for someone else to write that same post, even one typo is really unacceptable. You have a right to expect a certain type of quality from a paid blogger.

I say a ‘certain type of quality’ because you can judge a post on a variety of different qualities. In question here are the mechanics of a post: Is it well constructed? Are the grammar and spelling spot on? Does it convey a set of thoughts in a way that the reader will understand? Those are the expectations that go along with a paid post — what you can and should expect. That’s also the difference that you’ll see: paid bloggers don’t have the luxury of ‘phoning it in.’ That’s a fast way to lose a client, after all.

You may not get some of the other types of quality you are looking for with a paid blogger, though: unless you’re able to hire a mind reader, you’re not going to get a voice absolutely consistent with the rest of your site. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get a post that will go viral either (no matter what some paid bloggers will promise). What you’re paying for is almost always good, not great. And that’s okay.