How to Hire a Content Writer (The Right Way)
If you’re a content marketer, then you understand the struggle of keeping up with your loyal customer base. Curating content includes more than just writing. It involves editing, graphics creation, branding, marketing and more. And your content must be engaging, educational and entertaining at all times.
It can be daunting to hire outside help, for fear of ruining your business reputation and status. It may take some time and effort, but the right fit is out there. It’s possible to choose freelance content writer successfully; you simply need to know where to look.
You want someone you can trust and someone that understands your business, brand, and mission. And you, of course, want to choose someone that’s witty, educated and that has flawless grammar.
These skilled content writers exist, and they can help generate new leads for your business. They can add value and authority to your blog and online content that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. You need them for your overall success.
Define What You Expect From Your Writers
Words or results?
Do you want to pay someone just to get words on proverbial paper? Or do you want to hire a writer who understands content marketing, who can represent your vision effectively and write with your audience in mind?
Budget
Human resource
Content objectives
Industry knowledge
The more specific you need your content to be, the smaller the pool of appropriate writers will be. Having fewer writers to choose from also means that their rates may well be higher.
Production rhythm
Design a structure of engagement
If you’re able to provide structure to a freelancer, you’ll attract the best writers while promoting a motivational work environment. You might offer one article a week as a starting point, with the potential to increase the workload to four articles per week.
Scaling
The best freelance content and blog writers can produce roughly four to five pieces of content per week. Whilst physically they may be able to write more, freelancers are often restricted to 50% of their maximum productivity because of external factors that require time and attention.
In-house writers are often similarly constrained in the number of words they can produce, though the factors inhibiting their writing are more likely to be busy office environments or lots of meetings.
Set a budget
One of the tricky parts is navigating the spectrum of hourly rates that writers charge. It’s obvious that if you hire a cheap freelancer they’ll produce low quality work, and vice-versa, but rates in the middle of the spectrum are unpredictable.
Per word
Paying a price per word is lucrative for the client when you’re paying a beginner or new freelancer. Experienced freelancers will have a much higher rate per word, and you could end up paying a lot more than you’d like to
Per piece
Paying a fixed price rate for an article is ideal for the client, as they can control the costs from the outset. It’s less handy for the writer, as a fixed price contract doesn’t take any additional time spent on the article into consideration
Per hour
Further considerations
Unless you implicitly trust your freelancer and have an established working relationship, we’d be cautious about paying per hour. Great content can take hours to produce, but until you trust a writer implicitly, you’ll want some oversight on what they’re charging for.
Where to recruit your writers?
Networking & referrals
If you’ve worked with good writers before, you can save yourself time using somebody you already know through your personal network. This saves you time by negating the need for interviews.
If you don’t have any writers that are available to work for you, reach out to your network to see if anybody knows any writers they can refer to you. You’re more likely to be referred to trustworthy writers if others have had good experiences working with them.
Sites whose content you enjoy reading
Chances are, you’ll have come across websites, blogs, and articles that have a content and writing style you admire. It’s worth reaching out to the authors of this content, particularly if they’re specific to your industry.
Job boards
Problogger
WeWorkRemotely
Prices for WeWorkRemotely are more expensive than Problogger, costing $299 to post a job. You can also choose to pay more to ‘boost’ your job posts, meaning they will stand out to prospective applicants,
Fiverr
Fiverr is a platform used by a variety of freelancers and those who want to hire people online. Traditionally, freelancers charged $5 per service, but now they are free to charge what they’d like for different services.
Fiverr is free to join—you just need to pay a small service fee when you’re paying for services and the platform takes a percentage of earnings from the freelancer. You can also upgrade to unlock extras and tools.
Upwork
Upwork is free to join, and it’s free to post jobs. The platform takes a service fee from the freelancer, so some people may make their rates higher to compensate for the loss of income to the platform.
Source:
https://www.dreamgrow.com/choosing-content-writer/
https://www.themetablog.io/content/writing/hire-freelance-writer/
https://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/how-to-hire-a-freelance-writer