Is it a good idea to hire a freelance to write articles for me?
I am working on my side SaaS project, developing tools for small online retailers who sell on eBay and Amazon to help them manage and grow their stores. And I am thinking to start publishing articles in the niche that I am developing a product for. To have my presents in the seller's community. At the same time to bring more value to others. As I have my current day job, and many tasks to work on the actual software, I am thinking about hiring someone. Is it a good idea to hire a freelancer to research and write articles instead of doing it myself? Is this a good investment?
I have local writers who write for me from 2 to 3 cents per word. Right now I use six of them, and they have all proven themselves to be solid resources for my personal 50-site portfolio. Here is how I ensure that their content is as close to plug-and-play as possible:
About a week before the start of the month, I check out all my sites in Ahrefs and see what sites are on the upswing and what are stagnating. I pick and choose some sites to focus on for the month, and perform my own keyword research using Ahrefs. I provide them a title, focus keyword, multiple resources, word count, and a requested heading structure, and they basically fill in the blanks.
I compile all of this in a new tab of their own Google Sheet, and then on the first of the month, I pay them in advance, with an additional 5% on top to cover any fees they may incur on their end, and send them the updated sheet, along with the content structures. A couple of them send me the articles as they complete them, while a few others send them to me in one large batch at the end of the month.
Doing this has 1) helped me support my local economy, 2) alleviated a ton of stress off my own workload, 3) kept me from needing to have articles rewritten or receive subpar work, and 4) provided me with over 80,000 words of nice fresh, SEO-optimized content (at least) each month.
I'll typically give each writer a single site to focus their efforts on for a month. That being the case, for a real world example, I just took the content one of my writers provided me in May and developed the article Best Pools in Las Vegas for one of my sites. That same writer provided me with five more articles on other topics for that same site, that were all structured the same.
Since I have that one done, I go to my full-time virtual assistant with the other five articles, structure, SEO information, and have them replicate that post structure with new content and images.
Basically, with an hour of keyword research and another hour of content development and instructions, I get 20,000 words of high-quality content, developed, formatted, and published. Not bad.
Wow, this is impressive. Thanks for the detailed advice. You gave me some food for thought on how to organize this work right.
Awesome, thanks for sharing! Do you have to do any edit work then? And how do you find and vet your writers?
To be honest, I'll typically post the content as-is for all the sites that aren't full-blown passion projects (one example of a full-blown passion project I'm working on right now is Killer Urbex, so with those I carefully do all the work myself). Then I add it to my queue to go through myself by hand. I like to focus on one site a week with updates, expansions, and edits.
As far as finding writers is concerned, I found all of them via Craigslist. Here is the copy for my original ad:
---
Hi there!
I run a writing service, and a couple hundred sites of my own, including multiple projects for the Jacksonville area. I can write myself just fine, and do so regularly. The thing I am lacking is time. With a full-time job, and many side projects, and managing a household, there aren't enough hours in the day. Therefore, I'm starting to outsource the writing of some of my tasks for my sites to local area writers.
Here is what I am offering.
1.5 cents per word, plus $2 per transaction to cover fees, paid via PayPal upfront before work begins. I've got a few writers from a previous gig ad, and the typical article length is between 1,000 and 3,000 words, and expectation for turnaround is 2-4 days.
That might sound like a paltry amount, however if you write 1,500 words an hour (which is a pretty standard pace), that's $20 for an hour of solid work. No meetings, no physical products, no need to drive anywhere, no blood and sweat. Just some typing while watching Netflix, and getting paid one and a half cents every time you hit the space bar.
Here is what I am looking for.
A couple people in the Jacksonville area, first off. Secondly, aptitude for writing content that can be used for online articles. I'm not looking for a novel-writer or a fiction writer. I love fiction as much as the next person, but that doesn't convert well with the online world. I'm talking about things like lengthy product reviews, travel articles, that kind of thing.
No fluff, no filler, no narrative styling.
I'm looking for someone who understands SEO for content, and can utilize requested keywords, perform their own research, and include in-text links and relevant images where applicable. I provide a topic and as much information as I can, then you put together the article.
Please do not apply if you aren't from the Jacksonville area. I am not looking for someone in-house, but instead for someone to work from home and deliver ad-hoc articles to me in the range of 1,000 to 4,000 words per article. However, I do like this city, and want to hire local. It's worked out well for me so far.
Please let me know an email address where I can reach you easily when I have a writing request, as I expect a turnaround of 24 hours per 1,000 words (so a 1,000 word article turned around in 24 hours, a 3,000 word article turned around in 72 hours, etc). I am wanting a few people available so I can submit a request BCCing multiple people and the first available can claim, I will pay and provide instructions and a template, and we can go from there.
When applying, please respond with the following:
Your name
What you do currently
Your writing skill on a scale of 1-10
A little bit about yourself
What writing things you've done in the past
A few samples of past writing of available
An email address I can reach you at
A PayPal email address (if different than the above)
That's it!
---
This is awesome! Thanks for sharing :)
It's all about opportunity cost. If there is something more valuable that you could be doing at that time, then probably yes, but if it is something that you would really enjoy doing, then you can do it yourself. After all, it makes more sense to spend more time on the parts that you enjoy.
I think that's the first step in scaling, I've considered hiring some people to parts of task of a project that I found tedious, I haven't yet, but will most likely do it if the project progress to the bigger parts. (That specific project I'm working on is a client project for which we are basically turning his manga comic into a semi animated series, so I'd animate and all that, but the part I found tedious was separating the images into the different layers, so, I'd find someone that would like to do that at a price that still keeps me profitable, and voila.)
I think there might be some articles with tips and stuff about hiring/outsorcing for the first time that could be useful. There's probably youtube videos on the topic too.
Yeah, writing content this not my most favourite part. I can write articles and nice content with no problems. But it would take a nice chunk of my time. There people more talented at this than I am.
Yea, then hiring someone might be a good choice. Now finding the right person is probably the harder part, but I guess if you don't try it, you will never know/learn.
I would say so. If you have the financial capacity to hire someone to do tasks you wouldn't normally have time to do yourself, it all seems beneficial, don't you think?
Yup, I have similar thought about it. I have really good content and topic to write about. But with all other tasks, I just don't have time to do so. And at the same time I don't want to just let it go and don't do anything about it.
As long as you hire a competent, dependable writer, there's no problem with bringing on somebody to produce content for you.
The one issue I could see happening is based on your company's focus on inventory management. Hiring a cheap writer might not get you good results if you need a technical writer who knows the industry to make your content credible and build trust with readers!
The thing I'd focus on (that most people don't) is doing all the due diligence required to make sure that content will provide good financial ROI for ByteConn!
This means...
If you have all of these things lined up, you can hire a writer to product and publish content on your blog that, over time, will actually drive revenue. Of course this will take a lot of experimentation, trial/error, funnel optimization and patience but if you keep your content focused on answering questions that high-quality leads are Googling, you'll figure it out :)
Hope this helps!
This is very helpful. Thanks a lot Joe!
It made a lot of sense. I need to rethink a lot of part of that process.
Cool!
Yeah, we've scaled SEO through blog posts pretty well but we made the mistake of targeting topics that had good volume:competition ratios but that weren't necessarily being searched by "buyers."
So we were able to drive good traffic, but most of it didn't convert.
Good luck with all the content work!
Well on a funny note, can't say no ... :) since one of our income stream is writing articles, blog posts etc to those who need it after proper R&D .
Saying that, If I were you in your position I would tell them write a 100 word para on what you need. It might be hard to gauge but definitely you will get a gist of how good the content is once you start reading the content they delivered + their previous works as well.
Hello - I have a business tool app which falls under SaaS... if you were open to the opportunity, i'd be happy to do a guest blog for a guest blog kind of thing? Like a collab...
We've done this quite a few times and it's a great way of changing the language in an article, get your business in front of a different audience and build a business relationship.
If it's of interest, please drop me an email giuseppe@contapp.uk
Thanks Giuseppe. I'll shoot you an email. Would be more than happy to collab...
Sounds good! I look forward to receiving your email, alternatively please connect with me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/giuseppemilazzo/
I have absolutely the same concern. I know a good portion of my audience is on Medium, but I don't want to invest time in becoming a blogger. At the same time, no other person can write such good insights for your business.
In my experience, it really depends on the freelancer.
You could find one that knows the industry well, can research, and can produce quality material. You could also find one that you will end up constantly going back to, asking to make changes.
The former is normally a lot more expensive, as they are experienced and know their worth. The former, while more attractive at first, will end up wasting a lot of your time and probably discouraging you from ever hiring another freelancer.
So what I'm trying to say, is that yes, if you have the budget it could be very beneficial. However, be prepared to spend a lot of time looking for one, interviewing them and making sure that they know the industry before hiring them.