Be Careful when Hiring Professional Writers
Hiring writers from places like Elance.com and Guru.com are effective ways to add quality content to your websites if you don’t have the time to write it yourself or if you don’t know enough about the topic.
Most sites that offer freelance writing services will feature writers in a wide spectrum of quality. You’ll be able to find writers that will write 400 word articles for as little as $2 a piece but you will also find that the quality isn’t as great as you would want it to be.
In the other side of the range you will find writers that will have you pay $40 (or more) for the same size article. The quality will probably be a lot higher and you will probably be more willing to put your name to that article than the former.
Whether you go for the cheap or the expensive type is all up to you and it should depend on what you’re planning to do with the article.
I’ve tried to hire writers that will do the $2 articles and I’ve hired writers that would charge about $15 per article. There definitely is a difference in the quality and the writing style. But what I have also found is that articles that cost around $6 – $8 for 4-600 words can be just as good as the once that cost $15.
Recently I had a chat with a writer from India about a project and in the conversation he suddenly mentioned that he had been writing articles for me before through a US writer.
The reality was that this seemingly “professional” writer had put in a bid on my project and had then afterwards outsourced it to the guy from India. She had done next to nothing but ended up getting the difference (probably $4 – $6 per article).
Maybe I was too naive but I had imagined that if I hired a writer from i.e. the US, then I would get a native English speaking writer to do the article. Obviously I was wrong.
The writer from India also told me that this was a very natural thing and that the majority of the jobs the Indian writers gets are from these “professional writers”. To tell you the least I was stunned.
So this post is my warning to you. Don’t think that hiring an English writer will do you any good besides having you pay more per article. I’m not saying that every professional writer is like that (I’m sure they’re not!!) but I’m saying that you should beware.
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Interesting observation – a perfect example of bait and switch in the service industry.
My guess is that a lot of those “pro” writers will hire an Indian to write a low quality article, and then spend 10 minutes rewriting bits of it to make the quality slightly better. Change the wording, correct the grammar and such.
It’s much easier to turn a low quality piece into medium quality, than it is to write it from scratch.
Søren you might be right but I’m not convinced. I’ve dealt with a smaller bunch of these Indian writers now and some of them are actually quite good. I’m pretty sure that there will be a significant amount of the pros that may only run a spell check and nothing more.