Hiring a Writer—The Freelance Way

You’ve had a killer website designed for you. Your products or services are listed. Your payment processing service is established. Now you sit… and wait… Do you hear the crickets chirping yet? Getting traffic to flow to your website is not as easy as simply building a great website and waiting for the income to start flowing in, as you probably know if you are reading this right now. Hiring a writer to create content is the first step, but there are some considerations to take into account before you take the plunge.

In order for your potential clients or customers to find you, your website has to appear high on the list that the search engine returns to the person doing the search. Chances are if your website is not performing as you hoped, your listing is buried deep in the pages of the search results. The key to obtaining high search engine ranking is hiring a writer that can produce search engine friendly content.

Search engines like Google use a complex algorithm to determine what websites are most relevant to the user’s keyword search. You have two options to get traffic to your website. Start studying and learn SEO so that you can write your own content for your website, or hire a writer or content marketer to do the work for you. If you do not know what SEO is, then you should probably choose the latter.

Finding freelance writers that are experts at creating unique and interesting content that your readers will enjoy is easy. Dozens of project bidding sites and content mills exist that you can turn to for engaging content. Finding freelance writers that can do this and are also SEO expert is a different story altogether.

Imagine being told you had to hire an engineer to work on a machine that you knew nothing about. How would you know if the person you were interviewing had a clue about the machine if you yourself did not have the knowledge? The same concept applies when you hire a writer. If you are not an SEO expert, you are simply throwing the dice and hoping for a lucky combination when you hire a writer.

Content marketing companies can take the gamble out of hiring a writer. By carefully screening potential writers, the content marketing company develops a diverse group of freelance writers that have a wide variety of professional expertise. They match the writer’s background with your content needs, and ensure that every article is search engine optimized. This provides you with the many benefits of having a freelance writer work on your website without the Vegas style risks.

As with any product or service, you get what you pay for, and quality is one of the biggest factors affecting price. Before you choose a freelance writer or a company to write your content, be sure to do the “What is in it for me?” test. It is important to compare the cost and benefits of hiring a writer or partnering with a content marketing company. The latter will often bundle services, such as conversion tracking or content performance reporting, along with the freelance writer’s work. On a dollar-to-dollar basis, partnering with a content marketing company is often the better deal.