Hire Help for Your Mom Blogging Business

By Wendy Piersall from Mom Blogging For Dummies

The point at which you think about hiring writers should not be when you need more content, but instead when you know you can turn that content into dollars. If you’re focused on creating more content, you should already have a way to make money from that content — namely with advertisers. If you don’t already have advertisers in place, don’t hire anybody else until you get them.

If you hire writers, you have been blogging for more than just a few months. Hopefully, that means you have a track record and have established analytics in place.

So, how do you know if you can make enough money to justify hiring help? Estimating future revenue involves looking at past performance and projecting future profits based on estimated traffic.

For this example, say you want to know whether paying $50 for a tutorial on a sewing project is worth the cost. You’ll need to have an ad network or current advertisers that pay you according to the number of impressions you can deliver, not on a per-month or per-week basis. To crunch the numbers, use the following steps:

Pull your Top Content report up in Google Analytics: Go to your Google Analytics Dashboard, click Content, and then click View Full Report at the bottom of the page.
Change the date range to a full year’s worth of data: Click the drop-down list next to the current date range and type in today’s date last year as your start date. Click Apply.
Find a page that already exists on your blog that is a close approximation of the content you want to pay for and click on the page URL to view the Content Detail page.
Estimate past advertising earnings by adding the number of ads on the page and the average rate you’re paid for each ad.
Weigh your final calculation against your costs.

If you estimate that you can earn $85 over a reasonable period of time, paying $50 for a sewing tutorial probably works for your budget. If you think that page will get about 24,000 views, you can definitely expect to earn your money back in less than a year.

So: Say you’ve established that you have a budget to pay for content. What other indicators signal that it’s time to hire help?

You can’t dedicate any more time to writing than you already are.
You have the time to commit to hiring, training, and managing writers.
Your readers have expressed an interest in content you can’t or don’t want to write.
You have money you can front and not earn back for 6–12 months.
You’re ready to take your business to the next level, and are willing to do all the work that goes along with it.