Blog editing

What blog editing is

Blog editing is a standing arrangement on your blog. Your people write the posts, each draft comes to me, and it goes back publishable: correct, consistent with everything else you have published, structured so the answer arrives early, and in one voice rather than four.

It is not the same as sending a document out to be edited. Copyediting is a one-off job on a file you hand over, and it is the right purchase for a proposal, a report or a single important page. Blog editing is ongoing, and the difference is memory. Because every post passes through the same pair of hands, the twentieth is edited in the knowledge of the previous nineteen: the same spellings, the same capitalisation of your product names, the same treatment of numbers, no contradiction of something you published in March.

It is also not ghostwriting. The words stay your team's. I do not add claims, invent examples or put opinions in your writers' mouths. If a draft needs material that is not there, it goes back with a question, not with something invented.

When you need one

You need this when you have people who can write but nobody who can finish. A founder who produces a good draft at eleven at night. Two subject experts who know the trade and are uneasy about their grammar. A marketing coordinator publishing everything because nobody else will, with no one checking it. The writing exists; what is missing is the last pass that makes it safe to publish under the company name.

It also suits a business that has quietly stopped publishing because approval is too painful. When every draft waits for an owner who never has a free hour, the blog dies. Routing drafts to an editor with a stated turnaround removes that bottleneck.

You do not need this if you have nobody writing. Editing needs drafts, and an arrangement with no drafts coming in is money spent on nothing; if the writing has to come from outside, look at having the whole blog run instead. You also do not need it if there is one troubled document rather than a stream. Send that one out for a single edit and keep your money.

What gets done to each post

Structure first. Does the answer arrive in the first two sentences, do the headings describe what is under them, and is there a paragraph in the middle that should have been the opening. This change does the most and is asked for least.

Line editing. Sentences shortened, passive constructions turned round, repetition cut. Most drafts come back shorter, and nothing a reader would have missed goes with them.

Consistency against the record. Product names, job titles, place names, numbers, dates, capitals and Canadian spellings, checked against how you have written them before. Where no rule exists, one gets decided and written down, which over a year becomes a style guide you never had to sit down and draft.

Claims flagged, not deleted. Anything stated as fact that I cannot see a basis for comes back as a query, and anything legally or professionally rash gets marked before publication rather than after.

The publishing furniture. Headline, title tag, meta description, internal links to your own pages, and alt text for images, filled in rather than left empty.

What you get

The edited post. Returned in tracked changes so nothing is done to your writer's work invisibly, with queries in the margin where a decision is yours to make.

A short note to the writer. Three or four lines on what kept recurring in this draft. Not a critique, a pattern. Writers who get the same note twice generally stop producing the fault, and drafts arriving six months in need noticeably less work than drafts arriving in week one. That improvement is the real return on this arrangement.

A running decisions list. Every judgement call about spelling, naming and formatting, kept in one document you own, so the standard survives me and survives staff turnover.

A stated turnaround. Two working days per post as standard, one if agreed in advance. A turnaround your team can plan around is most of what makes an editing arrangement usable.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Halifax accounting practice has three partners who each write occasionally and a junior who writes most weeks. Over two years they have published about sixty posts. The firm's name appears three different ways, one partner writes "client" where the others write "customer", numbers are formatted four ways, and two posts give different answers about the same filing deadline.

The arrangement is per post, with a two-day turnaround, running to roughly three posts a month. The first month is heavier than expected, because the decisions list has to be built from scratch: house spelling, how the firm's name is written, how currency and dates appear, whether posts are signed. By month three the junior's drafts arrive with headings that already work, and the note going back is two lines rather than six. The contradiction about the deadline is caught in month one, which is the sort of thing a client would otherwise find. The practice publishes more than before, because the partners stopped being the approval step.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Who writes, how often, what usually goes wrong, and who currently signs off. No charge.
2. A read of what exists. I go through a sample of your published posts and return the decisions list.
3. A price and a turnaround in writing. Per post, with the standard turnaround and how rush work is handled.
4. Drafts come in. By shared folder or email, whichever your team already uses. No new system to learn.
5. Each post goes back edited. Tracked changes, margin queries, and the note to the writer, inside the agreed turnaround.
6. A short review every quarter. What is improving, what is still recurring, and whether the arrangement should change shape.

What it costs

Blog editing is priced per post, fixed after the half-hour call once I have seen a sample of what your team writes. Two drafts of the same length can be very different jobs, so the price is set against your actual writing rather than a word count. Very long or heavily technical posts are quoted separately, and there is no minimum monthly commitment. Everything is in CAD and agreed in writing before the first draft arrives. The pricing page shows the four ways of working, including the monthly band if you would rather hand over the whole blog.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The decisions list grows into a written set of rules your team can follow without asking. Editing the same faults month after month often makes it cheaper to fix the source, which is working with the writer directly. And once posts are being finished reliably, the bottleneck moves to getting them onto the site properly, which is formatting and posting done the same way every time. None of that is assumed. The editing arrangement stands on its own, runs month to month, and can be stopped whenever you like.