How to Hire a B2B Writer for Blog Posts

A B2B writer has two jobs a generalist does not. They have to pull real information out of your product team without burning an engineer’s afternoon, and they have to write for a group of people who read the same piece for different reasons and never sit in a room together.

Most B2B hires go wrong because the role gets posted as “content writer, SaaS experience preferred.” That selects for someone who has written near your industry, which is not the same as someone who can do either of those things. Here is what to test for instead, and what it costs.

B2B Is an Audience Problem Before It Is a Topic Problem

In consumer content, one person reads the piece and the same person decides. In B2B, the person who finds your article is almost never the person who signs anything.

An engineer reads it to work out whether the product is real. A manager reads it to work out whether it solves the thing they got asked about last quarter. Someone in finance eventually lands on a nearby page to work out what it costs and what happens if you disappear.

A writer who does not know this writes for one of the three and loses the other two. Usually they write for the manager, because that voice sounds the most like marketing, and the engineer bounces in the first paragraph because the piece is visibly hollow.

Good B2B writers hold all three readers at once without writing three articles. That is a specific skill, and it does not show up in a portfolio.

The Technical Conversation Is the Real Filter

Your writer will need information that exists only inside your company. They will get it in a thirty minute call with someone who did not want to be on a call.

A strong B2B writer leaves that call with the piece basically solved. They ask the question that surfaces the thing your engineer thinks is too obvious to mention, which is usually the thing no competitor has bothered to write down. A weak one leaves with a transcript and turns it into paraphrase.

So test the call. Put the candidate on twenty minutes with someone technical and listen to the questions rather than the answers. You are watching for whether they push back when an answer is vague, whether they ask what breaks rather than what works, and whether they can tell a feature from a reason anyone would care.

A candidate who nods through the whole call and says “great, I think I have enough” has told you exactly what the draft will be.

Ask for a Position, Not a Summary

Give the candidate a topic in your category and ask what most people get wrong about it.

You want an opinion, ideally a slightly irritable one. Real experience in a niche produces strong views about the received wisdom, because the person has watched it fail in front of them. A candidate without that experience hands you a balanced overview, since balance is the safe default when nothing is at stake.

Then push on specificity, because familiarity is worthless. “Do you know B2B SaaS” gets a yes from everyone and costs them nothing to say. Ask instead what usually goes wrong in a product like yours, who your buyer is comparing you against, and what the objection sounds like in month three rather than month one.

Generic competence collapses immediately under a request for specificity. The candidate either knows your category or produces a fog of nouns arranged in a confident order, and the difference is obvious within a minute. This is the same filter that replaced the resume across the board, and the full process for hiring a content writer is worth reading before you post the role, because the mechanics are the same whether the work is B2B or not.

Run a Paid Trial on Something Real

Everything above narrows the field. The trial settles it.

One article, your real brief, your real rate. Give them the same access they would have after hiring, and watch the whole loop rather than just the draft. We wrote a walkthrough on how to run a paid trial piece, including how to judge it fairly, because a badly run trial is worse than no trial. Anyone who refuses one is answering the question anyway.

• Test the technical call. Put the candidate on twenty minutes with someone technical and listen to the questions rather than the answers.
• Ask for a position, not a summary. Give them a topic in your category and ask what most people get wrong about it.
• Push on specificity. Ask what goes wrong in a product like yours, who your buyer compares you against, and what the objection sounds like in month three.
• Run a paid trial on something real. One article, your real brief, your real rate, and watch the whole loop.

What B2B Writing Costs

Credible human writing runs $0.10 to $0.16 per word, which is $100 to $160 for a 1,000 word post. B2B work that requires research, interviews, or genuine domain expertise sits in the expert band at $0.20 to $0.40 per word, or $200 to $800 a post.

Below roughly $75 a post you are buying model output with a light edit, whatever the listing says. The $30 to $75 band is the worst place to shop, because it is too expensive to be honest filler and too cheap to be a professional doing real work.

For B2B specifically, the top of the band is usually right for anything that has to survive an engineer reading it. We broke down what a blog post actually costs, including the platform fees that never appear in the advertised rate.

What you pay	What you get
$100 to $160 per post ($0.10 to $0.16 a word)	Credible human writing to your brief
$200 to $800 per post ($0.20 to $0.40 a word)	Research, interviews, or genuine domain expertise, usually right for B2B
Under $75 per post	Model output with a light edit, whatever the listing says
$30 to $75 per post	The worst place to shop, too expensive for honest filler and too cheap for a professional

Do Not Hire This Person to Write Your Pricing Page

A B2B blog writer and a conversion copywriter are different professionals who happen to share an industry. The blog writer builds trust with someone who is not ready to buy. The copywriter closes someone who already arrived on purpose.

The skills overlap less than the titles suggest, and the mismatch is covered in content writer vs copywriter. Hire for the job in front of you, not the category.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does a B2B blog writer cost? $0.10 to $0.16 per word for solid human work, so $100 to $160 for a 1,000 word post. Research heavy or genuinely technical B2B work runs $0.20 to $0.40 per word, which is $200 to $800 a post. Anything under about $75 is model output with a pass over it.

Do I need a writer with experience in my exact industry? Less often than it feels. Domain knowledge costs about double, and half the time the knowledge lives in your team and can be transferred in a brief and a call. Pay the premium when the topic needs judgment your team cannot hand over on a call, or when being subtly wrong carries a real cost. A well briefed generalist beats a poorly briefed specialist more often than this industry likes to admit.

How do I know if a B2B writer actually understands the technical side? Put them on a short call with someone technical and listen to their questions. Ask what breaks, ask what they would cut, ask what most people get wrong about your category. Samples cannot tell you this. Twenty minutes can.

Can I tell whether a writer used AI on the draft? Not reliably, and detection tools produce false positives often enough to get good writers rejected. Test for judgment instead. Ask for an opinion, ask about a piece that failed, ask them to be specific about your niche.

How Postdex Fits

If the process above is more machinery than the piece deserves, Postdex is built for that case. Every article in the catalog is finished and readable before you buy, so you judge the actual writing instead of predicting it from a sample. When nothing on the shelf fits, the commissioning desk takes the brief and a named editor reviews the piece before it ships.

If you would rather hire, the process still stands. Test the call, ask for a position, run the paid trial, and stop reading portfolios for information they no longer contain.