You’ve decided that content marketing is definitely a part of your business that you need to expand. Then again, your budget for marketing hasn’t increased much over the past few months, so you’re not sure how you’re going to squeeze content marketing into your overall marketing agenda. That’s okay. Fortunately, content marketing doesn’t have to be as expensive as lots of companies make it out to be.
Some companies pay $500 for 500 words, and while this is great for companies that have the funds, it can be detrimental to a small content marketing budget.
To create a content marketing budget that you’re content with, you first need to identify your content marketing needs, followed then by hiring a freelance writer who can meet your needs within your budget limits, and you can rest assured there are excellent writers available who will write for just about any rate.
What Are Your Content Marketing Needs?
Do you need brochures? Blog postings? Press releases? Content for landing pages? The more you need, the larger your budget needs to be. Hopefully, your business is already up and running and pretty well established, meaning consumers know about your brand, even if it’s just locally. If you don’t have a website, this will be one of the first things to include in your content marketing budget. You’ll need content for your landing pages, blog, and possibly even product descriptions. Once you have content for these pages, you’ll then just need regular blog postings, which are rather cheap to purchase (about $8 a piece).
It’s Time to Bring in the Content Mills
If you’re on a limited content marketing budget, you’ll likely find it advantageous to outsource your content creation needs through a content mill. Freelance writing rates through these sites tend to be quite reasonable, and even better is the fact that some of them provide a 100% guarantee, meaning if you aren’t satisfied with the content provided to you, you don’t have to pay for it.
Hiring an Individual Writer
If you’re leery about content mills, you could always take the route of hiring a professional freelance writer outside of the mills. These writers tend to have higher rates than most content mills, but then again, their work is usually first-class and well worth the investment. Working one on one with a professional writer is also advantageous because the person can really get to know your business.
Promoting Your Content
Content is only good when it reaches the right consumers. Because of this, your content marketing budget needs to include funds that allow for the promotion of your content to be carried out. Fortunately, promotion doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. In fact, it can be achieved free of charge by sharing your content via social media networks.
The Takeaway
Creating a content marketing budget that you’re content with isn’t difficult when your budget is large. However, if it’s small, you’ll likely want to stick with acquiring your content through content mills and promoting it via social media platforms.
Whitney W creates content for both online and offline clients. She spends her days switching back and forth between the roles of a content writer, mother and wife. As she continues to progress in her career as both a content creator and content buyer, she has learned the importance of creating a content marketing budget that doesn’t cause her to lose sleep at night.
