When it comes to sourcing content for your website, some of the easiest resources to use are the various freelance writing sites that allow you to post jobs and solicit ghostwriters. Using these sites is a mixed bag when it comes to quality, price, and turnaround. Since they are so popular as a way to find a freelancer, new webmasters and developers will invariably be faced with the decision to utilize their services or search for an alternative at some point. A basic rundown of these sites, concepts to consider when sourcing talent, and a basic guide to factors that may shed light on whether your budget is realistic or not have been compiled for your convenience. First, though, is a list of some of the sites that are most likely to put you in touch with a writer.
- oDesk- This is the melting pot of freelancers, and you can find content creators from any corner of the globe for the lowest prices on the internet. Scan available jobs and it will not take you long to see many offering $1-3 per 500 word article.
- Elance- Much like the previous entry, this is an excellent resource for finding a wide range of talent. Writers are generally of a higher quality but also are better paid for it.
- Guru- This site operates much like Elance and oDesk but is much less active and frantically paced. The number of active members that use the site are lower than the other alternatives but this also means that average writer quality is higher.
- Textbroker- There is actually incentive for authors here to write high quality articles. Editors review content constantly and upgrade or downgrade writers’ rankings, which directly impacts the amount they can charge per word.
The Good
These sites are a great place to find burgeoning talent. The price you pay for writing from job boards will, almost invariably, be less expensive than any other freelance talent sourcing method. The selection of available copywriters is staggering and there is no shortage of talent to choose from. Posting a job on one of these boards requires little more than monitoring your email and funding the job through the website. Additionally, most sites have a system set up which allows you to get a refund on your work if you are not content with it. oDesk, for example, allows professionals to delete bad reviews from their profiles if they completely refund all the work they did for that client.
The Bad
Sorting through the bad writers can sometimes require extensively checking into their abilities. Writers in developing nations often use template applications and deceptive means to cover their inability to write with a native tone. Even asking for examples of their work can lead to deception, since it is so difficult to verify the author of a ghostwritten article. The only moderately reliable way to screen a writer is to give them a sample assignment with a limited time frame. However, even this can be faked and you may end up with a writer stuck in SEO from 1999 sending you articles that look like they should be hosted as invisible text in a background.
Jobs boards are the primary resource for content mills. Getting a bad writer from any of the listed communities is not the same as finding a mediocre one in any other environment. Bad writers you find on those boards can produce deliverables that look like little more than a mass of unrelated words that include one of your keywords every so often.
Everybody has seen ugly web content and wondered what the owner of the site was thinking. Rest assured that most of it is just re-hashed articles that “content spinners” have fed into software programs in order to “re-spin” the work of others. However, if you want spun articles, there is no need to pay someone else to do it, and you can just download and use the software yourself. Google may thank you for electing to opt out of search results for your spam and saving them overhead. Here’s a list of some of the more popular ones:
- Spinnerchief
- Spinrewriter
- Chimprewriter
- Jetspinner
- TheBestSpinner
Note: If you notice your search rankings drop after hosting your shiny, not-so-new articles, you can generally submit a reconsideration request to Google to review your site again.
What to Pay
Determining just how much you should pay for your content is not the easiest thing to do. Given the fact that there is so much evidence for $3 articles being generated en masse, paying top dollar for any copy can be almost painful. There are a few specific aspects of the work you need done that can have a drastic effect on your bottom line.
- Word Count– Generally speaking, word count is the best primary indicator of what the cost of any block of text will be. Given recent changes to the Google search algorithm, those 500 word articles that were once a mainstay of web content are going the way of the dodo, and new quality rules are giving preference to sites with pillar articles with text in excess of 1,000 words. This change means that, for many webmasters, the price for each page of content doubled since the most recent Hummingbird and Panda updates.
- Research Involved-Some topics require large amounts of research or require you to contract with a ghostwriter that is a specialist. Either way, when hard to come by information must be included in an article, the price you pay for quality copy will tend to reflect just how difficult it was to get. If you expect your copywriter to include all the most current academic studies into research, access to those publications alone requires substantial fees. On the other hand, if your article is on topical information that requires little more than sifting through search results, the investment should also reflect this.
- Obscurity of the Field– For some topics, there is no recourse but to rely upon communication with specialists. This can require substantial time investment outside of overt writing activities. For instance, if you want information on archaeological developments in the analysis of pithouses associated with the Mimbres/Mogollon area of New Mexico during the first millennium of the common era, a writer must employ a specialist like Dr. Barbara Roth from the University of Las Vegas, Nevada since she is one of the few people in the world with access to current information on the subject that may not be published for years.
Alternatives
There are alternatives out there for finding writing talent that does not require you to sift through every third world ghostwriter with aspirations of becoming an English language author. Given those aforementioned changes to quality ranking for SEO, using non-native speakers for your content is simply a bad idea. While there is a marketing niche for styles like Engrish, it is something that should never be accidental.
- Other Webmasters– You are not the first person to earn a headache over finding someone to produce compelling copy. You can enlist those other webmasters and developers in sourcing talent, and all you have to do is send an email asking for a referral.
- Blogs– There are few better indicators of a writer’s ability than a blog. Perusing active bloggers’ sites and screening for authors that have the tone, style, and command of the language you need can be one of the most effective methods of sourcing writing talent.
- Classifieds– Websites like Craigslist offer a free method of posting writing jobs. Many of the best writers monitor the jobs posted to the largest cities, so you may actually be able to get by with only making a few ads.
- Colleges– College students are hungry and used to producing high quality deliverables. Posting jobs on physical boards around your local campus can net you some amazing talent for bargain prices.
- Social Media– The interconnectedness of the current era has given people looking for a ghostwriter a useful resource. Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter all provide ways for you to leverage your current contacts to find new ones. Just make a post and ask if anyone knows a good copywriter.
Since Google’s most recent updates, quality requirements are higher than they have ever been. There are organizations scrambling, trying to figure out how to earn their old positions on search rankings again because their content has been labeled as spam. Even those old link trading networks are nearly useless for SEO anymore due to the search rank penalty Google is handing out for reciprocal links. Submitting articles to places like Ezinearticles is now being seen as a link scheme as are other sites for press release distribution. It has never been more important to ensure the content you are hosting is adding value to the internet and to your industry, so finding a good freelance writer is absolutely necessary if you want to maintain a competitive online presence.