Outsourcing Content Writing?

Good content marketing takes a long time to learn, and good writers are a rare sort. A lot of folks super under-charge on sides like UpWork, so that might be your best bet.

A tip from someone who did freelance content writing for several years: A lot of freelancers loathe sites like Upwork that cut their pay out of the freelancer's income. If you find someone who's good and trustworthy, offer to pay them directly instead of through the freelancer site and you'll have made a friend for life.

Depends on what type of content we are looking at, right?

Hi Kyle,

If you’re looking for a content writer that doesn't cost you an arm and a leg and still provides you with high-quality, search-engine-optimized content on many subjects, then let me suggest my company, Everscript.

Our team of writers are highly-vetted and are required to pass a English-speaking and English-writing test before ever being able to produce content for our customers. Upon signing up, you can expect to get the same high-quality content you would expect from hiring in-house writers or outsourcing to agencies.

In addition, you will never be capped on how much content you can request. We offer unlimited content each month starting at $399. In addition to blog articles, you can request press releases, newsletters, and eBook chapters.

As stated by some of the other Indiehackers already in the comments, the easiest way to get the most from your content writer is to provide them a good outline of what you are looking for in each article. The good thing about our service is that we provide unlimited revisions in addition to unlimited content requests each month via our dashboard.

We offer a 30-day money back guarantee for new sign ups. Definitely check us out at www.everscript.co and feel free to message or email me at nigel@everscript.co if you would like some more info or would want to jump on a call.

Also, forgive me if you recognize any typos in this comment...I'm typing this on my iPhone.

I read good reviews about contentfly, I never tried it personally but at least they have a money-back guarantee.

For me, Income School on Youtube is very educational on content strategy, they're not bro-bling-internet marketers like most channels. I found their content writing service review video from Income School to be particularly helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7pCrM2TEdY
I'm planning on using iWriter in the next couple of weeks to do some shorter articles for my user experience blog as a test. My goal is to find a service that can do about 30% of the content I need to write.

As for Fiverr, I've had good and so-so success getting content written. I tested around four writers on 500-word articles that cost around $15-$25 each. I didn't limit on what country they were from, as that can drastically increase the cost, for instance, writers from the USA are often >$100 per article. Out of the four, two came back with good content ideas. One of those required lots of editing on my and Grammarly's part to fix the English. The last one was quite good, required little editing, came with good images for social media, and several social post blurbs with our keywords. Using her again has worked well quality-wise but there are often delays, so not great if you're in a rush. Being a freelancer myself (UX/Dev) I understand the triple constraint of project management so I am not in a rush for what I'm paying.

My takeaways so far:

1. spend a fair amount of time researching a group to test.
2. Either get test samples around the subject area or do low-cost jobs to test quality.
3. Most of the content quality was related to how well I provided information to the writer. Similar content, researched keywords, and even titles.
4. Outsourcing content and the cost will depend on how niche or technical the subject matter is. For one project I was looking at teaching music online, the other for UX. Music teaching is a hard subject to find a writer, but online teaching isn't. For user experience, I pick easier topics like "What is UX Design" for the freelance writer, and save more technical articles for myself, like "Conducting User Research."
5. Most importantly, it's better to do your own writing as much as possible. It's a skill I think most early founders need to master and it gets easier the more you practice.

Hope this helps! I had to dive into this topic over the past year myself.

-- Wes

Yes, I hired someone on Elance many years ago to write an ebook. A journalist from Malaysia if I remember correctly. I paid a few hundred bucks for 40 pages of original content and it turned out quite well.

I think the key is to be very specific about what you want. I did the research myself and gave the writer a detailed outline with bullet points and links to various online resources for each section.

I'd also love to know of anyone else's experiences. Content marketing seems to be a great long term investment, but it's a huge time suck, especially if you aren't the greatest writer.

Looking forward to everyone's responses!