Have any of you guys achieved a good ROI by hiring freelancers for content marketing?

I don't think you can measure ROI on this too much. Content marketing is a way for you to get users over a longer amount of time and it's difficult to measure if people didn't come directly from your blog articles.

That being said, for a Indie Hacker, it almost never makes sense. A good blog article costs ~$100, so you'd have to make that back with a single blog post, which is super difficult. My advice, take a day and write 10 blog posts, schedule them over two months.

Hey Max,

I think it depends on how much you're willing to invest. If you're only willing to pay someone $10 for a blog article, hell even $50 is bad, then you'll get crap.

I say create content yourself first. When you're business becomes sustainable enough to hire someone who has consistently created content that brings in people all the time, then that's when I'd hire them.

Assuming it's done well with consistent SEO strategy, especially for less competitive search queries the ROI will always be higher than cost. But it's not an immediate customer acquisition channel.