Newshound’s skill helps BlogMutt succeed

Scott Yates and Wade Green launched BlogMutt in 2010 because they saw a need in business for people who could write blog posts.

BlogMutt is a crowdsourced blog-writing service based in Boulder that pairs companies that need blog writers with freelance writers who apply to be part of BlogMutt’s organization.

To be noticed anymore, companies have to be Internet savvy. Social media and blogs play a huge role in whether or not a company’s website comes up in Internet searches, Yates said.

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Even though blogging has become important, many companies don’t have the time or don’t feel they are good enough writers to start a blog.

That’s where BlogMutt comes in.

Yates, who started his career as a newspaper journalist, is excited to be part of a fast-growing company that allows him to tap into his entrepreneurial and journalism backgrounds.

Green is the company’s technical mastermind, handling the technology side of the business.

Companies once could use search-engine optimization to get placed higher in Google searches or on Facebook pages, but Google and Facebook have made that more difficult. The best way to be noticed now on the Internet is to have a blog that is updated frequently and gets the company’s name out there constantly, Yates said.

BlogMutt has taken off in the past two years, growing by 566.7 percent. Yates and Green started the business in 2010 but it only came out of testing and was officially launched in 2012. In its first year, BlogMutt had $150,000 in revenue. In 2014, it grew to $1 million in revenue.

Yates said he knows there are competitors out there in the freelance writing space, but what sets his business apart is that it was started by a journalist.

“There are other businesses out there, but I don’t think they were started by writers. Creating a space that is safe and encouraging and positive for writers is part of our success,” he said.

BlogMutt has 8,000 writers who have signed onto its service as bloggers.

“A lot of our writers are happy not to be full-time workers,” he said. “This is what they are choosing to do – and for people who are busy as moms or whatever, it is especially hard if they are doing this full-time.

“You spend a lot of time positioning yourself and spending time invoicing,” he said. “The thing I feel good about on the writer side of BlogMutt is that we strip all that away. It is not the best-paying gig, but if you only have an hour a day to work, it is great.”

Instead of trying to game the Internet search engines with optimization tricks, Yates said the philosophy is to “write great content people want to read.”

BlogMutt doesn’t use editors. It was a conscious decision. It eliminates costs and allows the writers and customers to have a closer relationship.

“It adds a bunch of costs, and I don’t have any evidence it produces better content for customers,” Yates said. Customers are the editors. They have the ability to accept or reject any blog post they don’t like. Yates said that only about 10 percent of submitted blogs get rejected.

“The world is changing from an advertising model to an inbound model. Customers are finding businesses based on search and needs, not on advertisements, and that’s true for consumer businesses and B-to-B,” he said. “As the world makes that switch, we’re part of that.”