My firm blogs for many clients professionally and we may be one of the only writing firms doing this, but we license our content to you for exclusive use on your blog, but do not write blog posts as “work for hire”.
We don’t specifically blog as “work for hire” to protect our writers and our content from unexpected use. We’ve had people write how-to books from a compilation of our blog posts, use blog posts verbatim as press releases, and we’ve even had some clients use our blog posts as new website content. None of them ever told us upfront what they were going to do, but used our services in a manner in which they were not contracted for nor expected for use. Blog posts are supplied at a much lower compensation rate than other writing and so use in this manner is simply cheating us out of a fee.
You only have to be burned once to know you need to cover an issue in your letter of agreement! Now we license our writing to clients for their exclusive use on their blog only. We can expand on a blog post and create web content or a press release at our special writer rates for these services, but a blog post has to stay as a blog post. That protects other aspects of our writing business, makes sure that our writing staff is fairly compensated for their work based on market pricing, and allows our business to grow.