You've been meaning to start the blog since January. Or there are 3 posts on it from 2023, and you'd rather nobody scrolled that far.

Either way, you've landed on the same question everyone brings us. Should you write your own blog posts, or pay someone to write them for you?

We're an agency. You'd expect one answer from us. You're getting a straighter one than that.

Some business owners should absolutely write their own. Some of you really shouldn't. Most sit somewhere in the middle, and nobody ever tells you the middle exists.

Here's how to work out which one you are, and what each route costs you in hours and in rand.

The honest answer depends on 4 things

Four things decide this for you. None of them is how much you enjoy writing.

• The time you genuinely have. Not the time you'd have if a week ever went to plan. It never goes to plan.
• Whether you can write. Plenty of sharp people can't get a sentence to behave, and there's no shame in it.
• How much you know that's worth saying. If you've been doing the work for 15 years, you're sitting on things no outside writer can invent.
• What the blog is meant to do. A blog that keeps your site looking alive is a completely different job to a blog meant to bring you leads.

Why does that last one matter most? Because it sets the bar for everything you do after it.

If you want the site to look busy, your own rough post on a Sunday night is fine. If you want the blog pulling in search traffic and turning strangers into enquiries, it needs keyword research, structure and a publishing rhythm you'll keep.

Score yourself on all 4, honestly. One weak answer is survivable. Two or three, and you're going to need a hand somewhere.

Write them yourself if…

Write them yourself. We mean that. If the next few lines sound like you, paying us would be a waste of your money.

You know the subject cold. You explain this stuff to customers every week already, and you're good at it. The knowledge is the hard part, and you've got it.

You've got a voice. People who deal with you would recognise your writing without the byline. That's rarer than you think, and an outside writer can only approximate it.

You can block out 90 minutes, twice a month, and defend it against everything else. Not intend to. Defend it!

Your customers buy you, not your polish. If you're a consultant, a coach, a specialist tradesperson or a one-person shop, your slightly wonky voice sells better than a smooth one.

The best small business blogs we read weren't written by writers. They were written by the person doing the actual work, with wandering punctuation and complete conviction.

If that's you, close this page and go and write one! Today, ideally. You don't need us for that!

Get help if…

Now the other side. The tells are pretty reliable, and you'll recognise your own.

You've been about to start for a year. Not stuck, not blocked. Just about to start, since last winter.

You rewrite the first line 11 times and abandon it. If the opening paragraph regularly eats a whole morning, that's not a writing problem, that's an expensive hobby!

Your blog matters commercially and keeps losing to client work. It will keep losing, every time, because paying work always wins. That's not a discipline failure, that's just how running a business goes.

You paid for a site built to rank, and nothing has gone on it since launch. Your competitors are publishing. Google notices things like that.

Or the simplest tell of all: you can talk about your subject for an hour and can't get a paragraph down. That gap is exactly what copywriting and content people are for.

The bit in the middle nobody mentions

Everyone frames this as a straight choice. Do it all yourself, or hand the whole thing over. That's not how most of it gets made in the real world.

There are at least 4 positions on the scale, and you can sit anywhere on it.

• Fully yourself. Topic, research, draft, images, publishing, the lot.
• Yourself, with the scaffolding done for you. Someone hands you the topic, the angle, the headings and the keyword to aim at. You fill in the substance, because only you have it.
• You talk, someone else writes. You send a 20 minute voice note on your phone between jobs. It comes back as a post that sounds like you.
• Fully outsourced. You approve a plan once a quarter and check the drafts.

That second option is worth a proper look, because the thing you're missing is usually structure, not knowledge. What you get is a brief. A brief is a posh word for a page telling you what to write about and roughly in what order, and honestly, that's all it is.

Treating this as all or nothing is like refusing to cook dinner because you can't farm the cow yourself. You're allowed to buy some of it in!

Most of our happiest content clients live on that scale, not at either end of it.

What it costs, in time and money

Start with your time, because that's the cost owners never add up.

A 900 word post that's worth reading takes roughly 3 hours if you write comfortably. Research and picking an angle, 30 to 60 minutes. Drafting, an hour or so.

Then editing, half an hour, because your first draft is not the post. Then images, formatting, links and publishing, another 20 to 30 minutes.

If writing doesn't come easily, double it. That's our experience across client work, not a laboratory figure, but it's close enough to plan with.

So 2 posts a month is 6 to 10 hours of your time. Work out what an hour of your time bills at, multiply, and look at the number. That's the real price of doing it yourself.

Now your money. SAFREA's 2026 Rates Report puts corporate content at R4 a word and up, with magazine work at R3 to R4. Business blog posts sit in that corporate bracket.

So a 900 word post starts around R3,600. That's the number most owners are surprised by, and it's the one worth knowing before you go shopping.

Treat those as market guidance, not our prices, and not gospel. Real quotes land well above and well below, and SAFREA publish the report free if you'd like to check the market yourself.

Agencies charge more than a lone freelancer, and you should know what the difference buys. Usually a brief, keyword research, editing, images, internal linking and someone who publishes it properly.

So ask what's included before you compare 2 quotes. "A blog post" means 6 different things to 6 different suppliers!

Get 3 quotes! The cheapest per word is often the priciest per result, because you end up rewriting it yourself at midnight.

What "good enough" looks like

Here's where we let ourselves down a bit. We've written posts we thought were brilliant that did absolutely nothing, and dashed-off ones that brought in work for 2 years running.

We're not always great at picking the winner in advance! Nobody is, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

Which is oddly freeing for you. Your blog does not need to be brilliant. It needs to be useful, plainly written, honest about what you do, and published.

A decent post that goes live on Tuesday beats a masterpiece that stays in drafts until you leave the business. Get it out!

One warning, though, and we'd rather say it than sell around it. A blog on its own does very little.

Nobody stumbles onto a post by accident. It needs SEO behind it, a share on social, and sometimes a bit of ad spend to give it a nudge. Without the rest of your marketing doing its bit, you've written a diary.

Questions we get asked

Can't I just use AI for this? Partly, and we'd rather be straight with you about it. It'll give you a competent draft in 30 seconds that reads exactly like everyone else's competent draft.

What it can't do is know what happened on your job last Thursday, or why that client changed their mind. Use it to break the blank page, then put your own facts and your own voice through it. Google doesn't ban AI writing, it bins unhelpful writing, and unedited AI is mostly that.

How often do I actually need to post? Less often than you fear. Once a month, kept up for 2 years, beats 8 posts in January and silence until the following January.

Pick a rhythm you can survive in your worst month, not your best one!

What if I hate everything I write? Welcome to writing! Everyone hates their own drafts, and that includes us.

Write it as though you're emailing a customer who asked you a question, then get somebody else to tidy it. Hating it is not evidence that it's bad.

So which one are you?

Go back to the 4 things and give yourself a score. If you came out DIY, shut the laptop lid on this page and go and write your first post this week.

If you landed in the middle, that's the normal answer, and the middle is where most of our content work happens anyway.

Don't leave it as a maybe for another 12 months. Come and have a chat about it, or WhatsApp us and tell us where you get stuck.

Bring us the 3 posts from 2023. We promise not to laugh!