How Much Does a Blog Post Cost for an Online Store
You want to keep your store blog alive, and the first question is the price. So how much does a blog post cost, honestly: somewhere between $50 and $200 if a freelance writer produces it, and several hours of your week if you write it yourself. What moves that number is almost never the length of the text. It is the work that happens before and after the writing.
TL;DR
- On the open market, a freelance writer commonly charges $50 to $200 per post, and a content agency $1,200 to $5,000 a month. These are orders of magnitude, not a price list.
- Writing it yourself is not free. The post costs you the hours you did not spend packing orders or answering pre-sale questions.
- The most expensive line is not the writing, it is picking the topic. A flawless post about a question nobody asks costs one hundred percent of its price and returns zero visitors.
- Generating posts lowers the unit cost, not the underlying work. The raw material and the review stay with you.
- The only number that matters in the end is your cost per useful post, not your cost per published post.
Table of contents
- The four jobs hidden inside the price
- How much does a blog post cost, by who writes it
- The cost nobody counts: your own hours
- Hiring a writer or generating your posts
- What actually inflates the bill
- Working out your cost per useful post
- The mistakes that cost money
- Frequently asked questions
- Where to start this week
The four jobs hidden inside the price
When someone quotes you a price, it usually covers one job out of four. Here they are, in the order they happen.
Choosing the topic. Deciding what the post is about, based on what your customers actually ask. It takes the fewest hours and carries the most weight, because everything else depends on it.
Writing. The only job most quotes put a number on. It is also the easiest one to hand over, and the one that decides the least about the outcome.
Publishing. The title, the description, the image, the links to your product pages, the check that it reads well on a phone. Fifteen minutes per post once you have a routine, half a day the first time.
Following up. Coming back a few weeks later to see whether the page gets visitors, and which ones. Without this job, you will never know which of your posts was worth paying for.
A skincare brand that orders ten posts at $80 pays for job number two, ten times over. The other three stay on the owner's desk, and they are the ones that decide whether the $800 produces anything at all.
How much does a blog post cost, by who writes it
Here are the orders of magnitude you will run into, along with what stays on your plate in each case.
| Who writes | What you pay | What you still do |
|---|---|---|
| You | your hours | everything, from topic to follow-up |
| A freelance writer | $50 to $200 per post | the brief, the review, the publishing |
| A content agency | $1,200 to $5,000 a month | approve the plan, supply what you know about your trade |
| A tool that generates posts | a monthly subscription, often $29 to $49 | pick the topics, review, link to product pages |
Two notes on those numbers. A $50 post is almost always written by someone who knows neither your trade nor your customers. The text will be correct and completely interchangeable with your competitor's. At $200 you are paying someone who asks questions, and that changes what you get back.
As for the agency, $1,200 a month is not expensive in itself. It is simply priced for budgets that are not those of a store doing $5,000 or $15,000 in monthly revenue. That is a question of scale, not of quality.
The cost nobody counts: your own hours
If you write the posts yourself, your books will show a zero. That zero is wrong, and it is the most expensive line on your blog.
Run the exercise once, on your next post. Note the time when you start looking for the topic, and the time when the page is live with its image and its links. Track the four jobs separately. You end up with a real number, specific to how you work, and it beats every industry average.
Then compare those hours with what you would have done instead. An evening spent writing is an evening not spent packing orders, chasing a supplier, or answering the questions that come in right before a purchase. For a lot of store owners, that hour is worth more than a writer's fee, and that is exactly what a quote never tells you.
The reverse holds too. If your store is just starting and your days are not full, your time is the cheapest resource you have, and writing the first ten posts yourself is probably the smartest economic decision of your year. You will learn what your customers actually ask, which no supplier can learn on your behalf.
Hiring a writer or generating your posts
This is the trade-off almost everyone faces now. It gets easier once you look at what each option really delivers.
A freelance writer brings an outside eye, a genuine review, and, if they know ecommerce, questions you had not thought to ask. They cannot guess your catalog, your recurring stockouts, or the three questions that land in your inbox every week. They produce one piece at a time, and they bill you for every change of plan.
Generating posts brings unit cost and regularity, which is its real strength and the one that counts when you are starting from an empty blog. It replaces neither the raw material nor the review. On whether Google accepts it, the answer is simpler than the noise around it suggests, and it turns on the value of the page rather than the tool: what Google allows for generated content.
What the two options share deserves to be spelled out: the raw material comes from you either way. If you cannot write three lines of brief explaining who the post is for and which question it settles, neither option will work. That is also why pulling topics out of your own catalog does more for your budget than any negotiation over rates.
What actually inflates the bill
The overruns on a store blog look the same from one shop to the next.
Rewrites. A post ordered without a brief comes back off target. You pay for version two, sometimes version three. The brief costs ten minutes, the rewrite costs a full post.
Orphan posts. A page that links to no product page can pull in visitors and never produce an order. The traffic is real, the return is zero, and you wrongly conclude that blogging does not work.
Topics picked at random. A keyword list bought with no relation to what you sell produces posts that attract browsers, not buyers. It is the fastest way to spend a content budget for nothing, and it is why a blog sells for an online store only when it talks about the same thing your catalog does.
The burst followed by silence. Twelve posts in three weeks, then six months of nothing: you paid for twelve posts to send a signal nobody had time to notice. Steady beats bursty, and the rhythm question is settled once and for all in how often you should post.
Working out your cost per useful post
The unit price means nothing until you know how many of your posts do any work. The calculation fits on one line.
Take a quarter. Add up everything the blog cost you over that period: the invoices, plus the hours you put in, valued at whatever you consider honest. Divide that total by the number of posts that currently receive visitors from Google. That is your cost per useful post.
The number is brutal at first. On a young blog the denominator is often zero or one, and the result looks alarming. That is normal, and it is not a verdict: a page published today is neither read nor ranked by Google for several weeks. The right way to use it is to run the same calculation next quarter and watch whether the denominator climbs.
What should worry you is not a high cost per useful post in your first quarter. It is a number that has not come down by the third, with twenty posts live and still only two getting visits. That means the problem is in how topics are chosen, and paying a more expensive writer will not fix it.
The mistakes that cost money
- Paying per word. You get long texts, not useful ones. Price per post, against a brief, never by weight.
- Ordering ten posts at once. Order one, publish it, wait six weeks, look at what it did. The next nine will be better and you will know why.
- Buying a keyword pack. A generic list produces topics unrelated to your products. Your real topics sit in your customer emails, and they cost nothing.
- Watching only total traffic. A blog going from 0 to 300 visits a month with no orders is telling you something important: those visitors are not buyers. Look page by page.
- Deleting a post after three weeks. You are throwing away an investment at the exact moment it starts to exist for Google.
Frequently asked questions
How much should I pay for a well written blog post?
Expect an order of magnitude of $50 to $200 for a freelance writer, with the spread mostly explained by how much research time is included. Below that, the text is generally written without any knowledge of your trade. Above it, you are paying for sector expertise, which is worth it on technical subjects.
Is writing it myself cheaper?
Only if your time has no other use. Time one complete post, from topic to publication, and compare it with what you would have produced during those hours. Many store owners realise at that point that the real question was never the price, it was the room in their week.
Is a $30 post ever worth it?
Rarely, unless you supply a very precise brief and you are willing to review it properly. At that price nobody can spend time understanding your catalog. The risk is not getting a bad text, it is getting a text any store could have published.
Should I pay for an ecommerce specialist?
It helps when your product needs technical or regulatory explanation. For most stores, a good generalist working from a solid brief does just as well for less, provided the brief comes from you.
How many posts should I budget to get started?
Think in quarters rather than in units. A budget that sustains twelve weeks of steady publishing beats a budget that buys ten posts released in three weeks and nothing after. Consistency is what Google and your readers notice.
Where to start this week
Open your last statement and put two numbers side by side: what the blog has cost you so far, and how many posts get visitors today. If you do not know the second one, you are not steering a budget, you are paying for a habit.
Then write the brief for one single post, in three lines: who it is for, which question it settles, which product page it sends people to. Those three lines are worth more than the difference between an $80 quote and a $150 one.
That is exactly what Ecomrank does: write posts around your catalog and the questions your buyers ask, publish them on your store blog, link them to your product pages, then measure honestly what they return at day 7, day 14 and day 28. Ecomrank is live: the trial is free for 7 days and you can cancel anytime.