Olivia Sundstrom and
Kristina Corbitt
Oh, ghostwriting – a
siren call to the busiest of us bloggers. A seemingly easy answer to the
difficult task to maintain content-focused internet presence without additional
time. But ghostwriting can do more harm than good.
Ghostwriting is defined as a writer who authors books, manuscripts, screenplays, scripts,
articles, blog posts, stories, reports, newspapers, or other texts that are
officially credited to another person or brand.Ghostwriting can
happen internally within a firm, or via another company.
Though convenient, #ghostwriting or “ghostblogging” can
do more harm than good. Here’s how:
1 – It’s like the post
never happened
The immediate downside of any ghostwritten work is
that as a writer you will not receive any notable credit. You may be payed for
the post by your employer but you wont be able to use any ghostwritten material
in your portfolio as proof that you worked on those posts due to being
anonymous or under someone else’s name. If a post was written without an author
was it really written at all? Maybe, but your future employers and clients
won’t think so.
2 – Harmful to your blog’s credibility
Although ghostwriting is appealing for consistency’s
sake, when there is not a credited individual author for a post, it is hard for
the reader to judge the credibility of the source. When an author is provided
for a post, the reader can be assured through the author’s bio that the post
was written with integrity and character.
3 – Lack of personality
Like credibility, the reader also looks for a
connections and relate-ability to the author as well as the post they are
reading.
4 – Not
search engine friendly
The benefit to crediting your writers is the the
benefit of having more ways to have that post come up in a search engine. Not
only will the post come up in a search under the blog name, brand, and tag, but
the more authors in a blog, the more searchable links to that blog. Whenever
someone searches an author of the blog, those posts and blogs will come into
the feed, whereas a ghostwritten post depends upon the usual tags and branding
for traffic.
Rand Fiskin of Moz, a Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
company also notes the human factor (which is something that directly
influences search presence) as quoted in Raven’s blog:
The
biggest negative, for me, [is] the voice and tone [of] the writing…nothing
technically wrong with the content, but some of the “magic” [is] missing.
In the SEO world, I think the same concerns hold true.
5 – Bad for company
culture
At the end of the day, everyone wants to be recognized
for their work. Its sometimes the small things like a byline that go the
greatest distance.
Do you have experience with ghostwriting? What did you
learn or discover?
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