Glow

Posts Tagged ‘free lance’

Anyone who has been in Internet marketing for more than a month knows that the Internet consumes content in a hurry. So much of the success of online ventures eventually comes back to the quantity and quality of the output of the writers. Regardless of the medium through which the content is presented, it first needs to be written! That is as true of video as it is true of an article on your website.

Your website is often the initial contact a prospect has with your company. While web design and your actual product or service are essential, the quality of the presentation of your words will have a huge impact upon the lingering impressions that your prospects have of your company. Therefore, you must be certain that the writers who are doing the work are the best that you are able to afford. This is no place to look for small savings in the budget.

Some businesses are large and diverse operations that choose to handle almost every task within one of the company’s departments. Many of us, on the other hand, do not have the time or, perhaps the in-house talent to meet all of the writing needs that we have. A great many Internet marketers choose to out-source the authoring to professionals–or to whom they hope will be professionals. There are many free lance authors and web article writing services available.

Out-sourcing writing can be a sound investment for most businesses. Before you accept a writing service or individual author, however, take time to be sure that they have some reasonable understanding of the unique requirements of Internet businesses. Here are a few things to check:

1) Any writer should be properly trained, of course. Equally important is that the author is naturally fluent in the language of your target market. For example, I grew up primarily in the United States. I speak a couple of other languages, however, I would hire a British writer to at least edit my work if I were writing exclusively for a target market in the U.K. While we write (and speak) the same language, the idioms, slang and many casual expressions are very different.

2) Unless you narrow your search to only writers who are part of your industry, you will not find someone who is an expert in your field. In most cases, that is not a problem. However you do need to be certain that the writer has the research skills and the research ethic to be able to quickly learn what is necessary to learn to be able to communicate credibly with your prospects.

3) They must be able to write conversationally for the web. Writing for most Internet venues is very different from writing for an academic journal or composing a report for school.

4) The writers must understand your different business purposes for various kinds of articles. They should be able to verbalize the difference in objectives for writing for your website versus writing for article marketing uses.

5) They must recognize the role articles play in your essential search engine optimization efforts. Some free lancers will recognize that need because of repeated exposure to writing for the web. Others will have no idea what the term even means.

All of these issues are more important to consider than whether an article costs $10, $30 or even $100. Ten poor articles do not have the impact on your long term profits that one very good piece of prose will have.

I’m in my fourth year of Internet marketing, and I remain awestruck by the significant role that content plays in the eventual success of any online venture. If any cliche relating to this relatively new field is accurate, it is this: Content is King!

Anyone who has done much article writing for syndication for either traffic or SEO purposes will recognize that it is not a simple task. Good web writers have a special skill set.

Last night I happened to find myself at one of those websites where free lancers can view project proposals from businesses and vice versa. It was not guru.com, but it was a site similar to that. I decided to look around just to see the sorts of things that were listed. I actually laughed out loud at some of the proposals, even though I was alone in my office. I needed to share my frustration; hence this article.

One business was looking for someone to help with search engine optimization by negotiating over a thousand one way links, all from ranked sites and all with keyword rich anchor text. A good plan, no doubt. Their top end of the budget for this work was $300! Oh yeah, they mentioned that they had tried to reach their goals before but hadn’t received good results. I wonder why…

More to the point was another company that was looking for 300 optimized five hundred word articles. This project had a more modest budget of $150. Could this explain all the sites with worthless content that give the Internet a bad name?

Very early in my short career, I was guilty of the same thing. I once contracted for a package of ten original optimized articles for $70. I received articles that were strikingly similar to each other. They were indeed packed with my key phrases. Indeed, they were little more than keyword spam. I tried to revise them so that they would be usable, but I finally decided that I would be better off just completely starting over.

Think of it this way: Our content, whether it is published on our own sites or distributed to other sites with links leading back to us, reflects on our business. If we have shoddy content, our customers are going to rightly wonder about our dedication to detail. We must be wise in our content syndication efforts.

I wasted $70 for 10 articles and then invested a lot of time trying to rework those, albeit unsuccessfully. I would have been much better off using that money and time pay a good writer to produce two articles. My time could have been spent spinning those two into twenty or so variations for submission to article directories and distribution to other sites.

A well known Internet marketer whom I know owns a number of online stores. He told me that he started out paying ten dollars per article, soon moved to twenty and now pays his free lance writers, with whom he has a continuing relationship, fifty dollars for a 500 word article. He says it is the best money he spends.

I hope that some of you will profit from the errors in this regard that my acquaintance and I made. However, I’d be willing to bet that you’ll have to learn the hard way just like the rest of us.