6 ms·

You don’t have time to maintain your blog

42 points by jbkring 14y ago

pkamb 14y ago
No BS: what's the price of the 'basic' plan?
- rbucks 14y ago
  Price isn't shown because it depends on level of account support and job customization. We try not to run package deals for less than $500/mo.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - jbkring 14y ago
    If you go to scripted.com the first thing you'll see is "Standard Blog Post for $49". If you click on that dropdown, you'll see pricing for every format...
alanctgardner2 14y ago
This seems like a disingenuous service. For any company, the goal of having a corporate blog is to demonstrate your employees' knowledge and present interesting problems you've encountered. There are two outcomes I see from outsourcing blog posts: 1) interesting content which isn't directly relevant to your business. They write a good blog, but it's always going to be an arm's length from your real business. Either you mislead users about where the content comes from, or you're up front and people realize that he blog, while good, doesn't really reflect your business. 2) the company doesn't really have bloggers for niche enough specialties to be interesting. You end up with a broad, lookalike blog that could have been written by anybody. This stops customers from engaging with your company. The correct answer is what New Relic does with The Daily WTF; sponsor an established or up and coming blogger. Make the relationship clear. Users will appreciate your funding interesting content, while understanding that you didn't create it. If you align the audience of the blog with your customer base, I think you could get the same effect without the middleman. Edit: this definitely seems to fall into category two. Their example posts are overly broad and not very engaging. Lots of link-baity, list-format titles which will drive eyeballs, but ultimately have poor conversion. I'd be interested in any case studies that prove me wrong, thugh
- rbucks 14y ago
  Valid points, but what Scripted does is not much different than hiring a blogger intern. To keep the content genuine, our clients have to be engaged. We simply promote them from writer to editor. Scripted helps businesses take the time spent from idea to publishing down from hours to minutes.
  - alanctgardner2 14y ago
    I can see this being useful in some circumstance, but I think the kinds of people who read HN value blog posts that aren't considered a chore. If you're offloading blog posts on someone junior, they're not going to be very interesting. At best they're meta analysis of what other, more invested writers have already said. You're basically distilling a blog post down into a premise and high quality writing. A lot of what makes technical, corporate blogging effective is content and honesty, which are much harder to outsource.
    - jbkring 14y ago
      Totally agree. Which is why I wrote this post myself. I can only hope that my approach to the pain point felt 'honest', and that the content of my post was HN-worthy. We are absolutely not saying that you should outsource your entire social media presence. What we are saying is that consistency over time matters. If I wrote a post like this every day, Scripted would never ship another feature again. So I don't. I write a post like this every couple of weeks. But if we only posted every couple of weeks, a prospective client might show up to our blog, see that we hadn't posted anything recently, and think "I wonder whether they'll be as lackadaisical about customer service as they are about their blog". So we fill the gaps in our 'technical, corporate blog' with simple but engaging outsourced content. We allow you to 'set it and forget it', so that you only have to think about your blog when some crazy new topic pops into your head, and you can't control the urge to fervently hammer away at your typewriter.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
natep 14y ago
From the blog post and main screen, I have no idea what this service is selling. Is it promising to aggregate blogs/tweets/FB posts of a certain topic and deliver them to you on a weekly basis? Is it promising to prompt you weekly along the lines of "you promised you'd write about ___ today!"? Is it promising to find ghost writers for the topics you specify, and have them churn out content on a weekly schedule? Once I've specified weekly blog posts from topics I have in mind, the next form makes it pretty clear that the service will find people to write your blog for you, which sounds pretty skeevy. I don't know how you would detect a Scripted blog post, but I'd rather not see them on HN. If someone's writing is good enough to make it to HN, it should do so under the author's own brand. Just my opinion.
- jbkring 14y ago
  Hey Nate. Agreed, you definitely need a bit of context regarding what exactly Scripted does in order to understand this feature. The assumption was that if someone navigated their way to our weekly offering, they probably did so after grasping the basics of our business. But by announcing this as a standalone, I can see how we introduced tons of confusion. Sorry! For what it's worth, we have many clients that give byline to their writers, and a couple of them are HN regulars!
zobzu 14y ago
here my tl;dr: if you don't want to write a blog, but instead want to be well-known because of your blog, then don't write one. Don't do stuff for the wrong reasons.
spindritf 14y ago
Ghost writers for blogs. Isn't the whole reason for reading a blog, instead of some other publication on a similar topic, to get insights from (apparent) blog author?
- jbkring 14y ago
  Yup. Which is why many of our clients give byline to our writers!
anonymouz 14y ago
You might want to ask one of your copyeditors to have another look at your website. On the Features page: "We'll take some basic information about what you field you're in and what you need written."
mnicole 14y ago
Is this solely for people that know the topics your writers are writing on thoroughly enough that they don't approve something that is potentially harmful to their brand? What happens in the event that the audience is largely put off by the post or if the author is wrong about the topic they're writing on but the client was none-the-wiser to it at approval?
miggitymac 14y ago
seems interesting and as though you could get a freelance writer to get to know your brand better instead of hiring a staff writer.
netmau5 14y ago
I like the concept although I always hesitate to use ghost writers. If you really want my business, you have to show me the money. Demonstrate the expertise in your writers, their engagement (comments), their impact/retention (uniques/views), and their ability to write deeply interesting content. What I saw was a collection of random, poorly-formatted writing samples, disorganized testimonials, and vague pricing details. Normally I'd just keep to myself and move along, but this is a service my company would potentially use in certain areas. So I think it would be a huge improvement if the site were focused on convincing me, as the owner and someone with irrational concern for our image, how you'll make us bigger/better/faster/stronger.
- jbkring 14y ago
  This is very good feedback. We're actually working on some Machine-Learning technology that takes all of Wikipedia's content, builds a topic model, and applies it to the 10k pieces of content that we've written over the past couple months. It will allow us to rank writers by their expertise in very granular fields (so for instance we'll be able to tell you who our best "outdoor recreational equipment" writer is). We'll provide a deeper explanation of this technology in a (hopefully less controversial) blog post in the next couple of weeks.
kiba 14y ago
Hmm, it makes me think twice about corporate blogs in general if they're not written from the horse's mouth. Credibility of all corporate blogs are undermined just by this post from a service. Also, it is hard to see if they use ghost writers or not. Which, makes me even more skeptical.
noelwelsh 14y ago
I have a long long list of blog posts I haven't got around to writing. Creating the skeleton is easy, but filling in the details is time consuming. I can see a use for this service to get someone else to do that. I don't really see a big deal with this, so long as everyone involved is credited.
- hippo33 14y ago
  I'm in the same boat. I've tried using Dragon, because talking is easier than writing for me. But then, I end up with a lot of umms and uhs and unstructured posts. Copywriting is super important, very difficult for non-writers, and time-consuming (for non-writers)
philip1209 14y ago
Is this like blogmutt?
philip1209 14y ago
Is this like blogmutt?
jabbernotty 14y ago
Not to be down on the service, but I have to do some nitpicking. There is a difference between "checkout" and "check out". "checkout" is not a verb, but a thingamajig. "the checkout page". "to check out" is a verb. The first proper word on the blog seems incorrect. That doesn't inspire confidence. There are a few more problems with the text such as (preposition) words that appear missing, for example.
- jbkring 14y ago
  Thanks! Fixed the "check out" issue. I don't see the other problems, but such is the nature of copy-editing your own writing.
  - jabbernotty 14y ago
    From the last paragraph: "a couple writers" -> "a couple of writers" "its completion" -> "it's completion" It seems really important to me, that you get these sorts of things right in all your posts, even if you yourself won't be writing your prospective clients' blog posts.
    - jbkring 14y ago
      It is really important. You are right. In my haste to get this product out the door this morning, I forgot to send the post to our copy-editors. I screwed up. Sorry :( I certainly won't be making that mistake again.
  - hippo33 14y ago
    Actually, those are correct. "a couple writers" and "a couple of writers" are both grammatically correct. "its completion" -> "it's completion" is just wrong. "It is completion" is not the intent of the sentence.
    - jabbernotty 14y ago
      You are certainly right about the "its". I have an annoying habit of incorrectly correcting people.
chasing 14y ago
Hey, can you guys provide a list of your clients so I know which blogs to avoid?
ricardobeat 14y ago
Outsource your blog today! Curated top trending topics, SEO optimized, ready to go viral and customized to your audience. This is the kind of crap I wish would disappear from the web. At least Google is trying to do it's part. I also think a company blog is not the place for this kind of arbitrage, I see it often on random companies websites and it shows: instead of engaging the audience, the post listing looks like a pyramid marketing scheme.
- zalew 14y ago
  They could pair up with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIwH7ptHCWc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIwH7ptHCWc (if it wasn't a joke)
- rbucks 14y ago
  Let me take the discussion up a level. There's huge demand for great writing, that's been made clear in the comments (and we see this every day at Scripted HQ). There are millions of underemployed professionals in this country, thousands of whom are exceptional writers. Scripted bridges the two, allowing businesses to get great writing (not just blog posts, also white papers, landing pages, status updates, case studies, and product descriptions) by someone who actually knows the industry. I totally understand the skepticism surrounding ghostwriting, but it's not so different than hiring a PR agency or marketing firm. We're just making these services available to any business a la carte, and using a distributed workforce of real American professionals. Where's the scheming in that?
  - nathan_long 14y ago
    The problem is that "great writing", in this context, is business owners writing something that being a business owner qualifies them to write. How is an outsourced writer going to draw on someone else's experiences? A blog written from real experience may be valuable. A blog pretending to be written from real experience is worse that worthless for the readers.
    - rbucks 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mnemonicsloth 14y ago
No list of satisfied customers?
baconhigh 14y ago
I thought this was going to be about actually maintaining a blog - Upgrades etc. I am Disappoint.

42 points by jbkring 14y ago

pkamb 14y ago

No BS: what's the price of the 'basic' plan?

rbucks 14y ago
Price isn't shown because it depends on level of account support and job customization. We try not to run package deals for less than $500/mo.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- jbkring 14y ago
  If you go to scripted.com the first thing you'll see is "Standard Blog Post for $49". If you click on that dropdown, you'll see pricing for every format...

alanctgardner2 14y ago

This seems like a disingenuous service. For any company, the goal of having a corporate blog is to demonstrate your employees' knowledge and present interesting problems you've encountered. There are two outcomes I see from outsourcing blog posts: 1) interesting content which isn't directly relevant to your business. They write a good blog, but it's always going to be an arm's length from your real business. Either you mislead users about where the content comes from, or you're up front and people realize that he blog, while good, doesn't really reflect your business. 2) the company doesn't really have bloggers for niche enough specialties to be interesting. You end up with a broad, lookalike blog that could have been written by anybody. This stops customers from engaging with your company. The correct answer is what New Relic does with The Daily WTF; sponsor an established or up and coming blogger. Make the relationship clear. Users will appreciate your funding interesting content, while understanding that you didn't create it. If you align the audience of the blog with your customer base, I think you could get the same effect without the middleman. Edit: this definitely seems to fall into category two. Their example posts are overly broad and not very engaging. Lots of link-baity, list-format titles which will drive eyeballs, but ultimately have poor conversion. I'd be interested in any case studies that prove me wrong, thugh

rbucks 14y ago
Valid points, but what Scripted does is not much different than hiring a blogger intern. To keep the content genuine, our clients have to be engaged. We simply promote them from writer to editor. Scripted helps businesses take the time spent from idea to publishing down from hours to minutes.
- alanctgardner2 14y ago
  I can see this being useful in some circumstance, but I think the kinds of people who read HN value blog posts that aren't considered a chore. If you're offloading blog posts on someone junior, they're not going to be very interesting. At best they're meta analysis of what other, more invested writers have already said. You're basically distilling a blog post down into a premise and high quality writing. A lot of what makes technical, corporate blogging effective is content and honesty, which are much harder to outsource.
  - jbkring 14y ago
    Totally agree. Which is why I wrote this post myself. I can only hope that my approach to the pain point felt 'honest', and that the content of my post was HN-worthy. We are absolutely not saying that you should outsource your entire social media presence. What we are saying is that consistency over time matters. If I wrote a post like this every day, Scripted would never ship another feature again. So I don't. I write a post like this every couple of weeks. But if we only posted every couple of weeks, a prospective client might show up to our blog, see that we hadn't posted anything recently, and think "I wonder whether they'll be as lackadaisical about customer service as they are about their blog". So we fill the gaps in our 'technical, corporate blog' with simple but engaging outsourced content. We allow you to 'set it and forget it', so that you only have to think about your blog when some crazy new topic pops into your head, and you can't control the urge to fervently hammer away at your typewriter.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]

natep 14y ago

From the blog post and main screen, I have no idea what this service is selling. Is it promising to aggregate blogs/tweets/FB posts of a certain topic and deliver them to you on a weekly basis? Is it promising to prompt you weekly along the lines of "you promised you'd write about ___ today!"? Is it promising to find ghost writers for the topics you specify, and have them churn out content on a weekly schedule? Once I've specified weekly blog posts from topics I have in mind, the next form makes it pretty clear that the service will find people to write your blog for you, which sounds pretty skeevy. I don't know how you would detect a Scripted blog post, but I'd rather not see them on HN. If someone's writing is good enough to make it to HN, it should do so under the author's own brand. Just my opinion.

jbkring 14y ago
Hey Nate. Agreed, you definitely need a bit of context regarding what exactly Scripted does in order to understand this feature. The assumption was that if someone navigated their way to our weekly offering, they probably did so after grasping the basics of our business. But by announcing this as a standalone, I can see how we introduced tons of confusion. Sorry! For what it's worth, we have many clients that give byline to their writers, and a couple of them are HN regulars!

zobzu 14y ago

here my tl;dr: if you don't want to write a blog, but instead want to be well-known because of your blog, then don't write one. Don't do stuff for the wrong reasons.

spindritf 14y ago

Ghost writers for blogs. Isn't the whole reason for reading a blog, instead of some other publication on a similar topic, to get insights from (apparent) blog author?

jbkring 14y ago
Yup. Which is why many of our clients give byline to our writers!

anonymouz 14y ago

You might want to ask one of your copyeditors to have another look at your website. On the Features page: "We'll take some basic information about what you field you're in and what you need written."

mnicole 14y ago

Is this solely for people that know the topics your writers are writing on thoroughly enough that they don't approve something that is potentially harmful to their brand? What happens in the event that the audience is largely put off by the post or if the author is wrong about the topic they're writing on but the client was none-the-wiser to it at approval?

miggitymac 14y ago

seems interesting and as though you could get a freelance writer to get to know your brand better instead of hiring a staff writer.

netmau5 14y ago

I like the concept although I always hesitate to use ghost writers. If you really want my business, you have to show me the money. Demonstrate the expertise in your writers, their engagement (comments), their impact/retention (uniques/views), and their ability to write deeply interesting content. What I saw was a collection of random, poorly-formatted writing samples, disorganized testimonials, and vague pricing details. Normally I'd just keep to myself and move along, but this is a service my company would potentially use in certain areas. So I think it would be a huge improvement if the site were focused on convincing me, as the owner and someone with irrational concern for our image, how you'll make us bigger/better/faster/stronger.

jbkring 14y ago
This is very good feedback. We're actually working on some Machine-Learning technology that takes all of Wikipedia's content, builds a topic model, and applies it to the 10k pieces of content that we've written over the past couple months. It will allow us to rank writers by their expertise in very granular fields (so for instance we'll be able to tell you who our best "outdoor recreational equipment" writer is). We'll provide a deeper explanation of this technology in a (hopefully less controversial) blog post in the next couple of weeks.

kiba 14y ago

Hmm, it makes me think twice about corporate blogs in general if they're not written from the horse's mouth. Credibility of all corporate blogs are undermined just by this post from a service. Also, it is hard to see if they use ghost writers or not. Which, makes me even more skeptical.

noelwelsh 14y ago

I have a long long list of blog posts I haven't got around to writing. Creating the skeleton is easy, but filling in the details is time consuming. I can see a use for this service to get someone else to do that. I don't really see a big deal with this, so long as everyone involved is credited.

hippo33 14y ago
I'm in the same boat. I've tried using Dragon, because talking is easier than writing for me. But then, I end up with a lot of umms and uhs and unstructured posts. Copywriting is super important, very difficult for non-writers, and time-consuming (for non-writers)

philip1209 14y ago

Is this like blogmutt?

philip1209 14y ago

Is this like blogmutt?

jabbernotty 14y ago

Not to be down on the service, but I have to do some nitpicking. There is a difference between "checkout" and "check out". "checkout" is not a verb, but a thingamajig. "the checkout page". "to check out" is a verb. The first proper word on the blog seems incorrect. That doesn't inspire confidence. There are a few more problems with the text such as (preposition) words that appear missing, for example.

jbkring 14y ago
Thanks! Fixed the "check out" issue. I don't see the other problems, but such is the nature of copy-editing your own writing.
- jabbernotty 14y ago
  From the last paragraph: "a couple writers" -> "a couple of writers" "its completion" -> "it's completion" It seems really important to me, that you get these sorts of things right in all your posts, even if you yourself won't be writing your prospective clients' blog posts.
  - jbkring 14y ago
    It is really important. You are right. In my haste to get this product out the door this morning, I forgot to send the post to our copy-editors. I screwed up. Sorry :( I certainly won't be making that mistake again.
- hippo33 14y ago
  Actually, those are correct. "a couple writers" and "a couple of writers" are both grammatically correct. "its completion" -> "it's completion" is just wrong. "It is completion" is not the intent of the sentence.
  - jabbernotty 14y ago
    You are certainly right about the "its". I have an annoying habit of incorrectly correcting people.

chasing 14y ago

Hey, can you guys provide a list of your clients so I know which blogs to avoid?

ricardobeat 14y ago

Outsource your blog today! Curated top trending topics, SEO optimized, ready to go viral and customized to your audience. This is the kind of crap I wish would disappear from the web. At least Google is trying to do it's part. I also think a company blog is not the place for this kind of arbitrage, I see it often on random companies websites and it shows: instead of engaging the audience, the post listing looks like a pyramid marketing scheme.

zalew 14y ago
They could pair up with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIwH7ptHCWc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIwH7ptHCWc (if it wasn't a joke)
rbucks 14y ago
Let me take the discussion up a level. There's huge demand for great writing, that's been made clear in the comments (and we see this every day at Scripted HQ). There are millions of underemployed professionals in this country, thousands of whom are exceptional writers. Scripted bridges the two, allowing businesses to get great writing (not just blog posts, also white papers, landing pages, status updates, case studies, and product descriptions) by someone who actually knows the industry. I totally understand the skepticism surrounding ghostwriting, but it's not so different than hiring a PR agency or marketing firm. We're just making these services available to any business a la carte, and using a distributed workforce of real American professionals. Where's the scheming in that?
- nathan_long 14y ago
  The problem is that "great writing", in this context, is business owners writing something that being a business owner qualifies them to write. How is an outsourced writer going to draw on someone else's experiences? A blog written from real experience may be valuable. A blog pretending to be written from real experience is worse that worthless for the readers.
  - rbucks 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mnemonicsloth 14y ago

No list of satisfied customers?

baconhigh 14y ago

I thought this was going to be about actually maintaining a blog - Upgrades etc. I am Disappoint.