Is it worth hiring a professional copywriter?
"Article writers wanted: I will pay $3.50 per article. Must be
quality writing - no hobbyists!"
No, this isn't a joke. It's an actual job advert, posted on a
website earlier this year. What's more, there's nothing
particularly unusual about this advert. It seems that more and
more often these days, people expect writers to work for free -
or as close to free as it's possible to get.
So what's the catch? Well, professional copywriters won't write
for $3.50, which means that the only people who'll respond to an
advert like this will be very people the employer says he
doesn't want - hobbyists.
But what's wrong with that? Why not go with a hobbyist - a
non-professional writer? What can a professional copywriter give
you that an amateur can't?
Here's what:
1. Time
Let's think for a minute about how many $3.50 articles a writer
would need to produce in order to make anything like a decent
amount of money from it. Quite a few. Quite a few hundred, in
fact. In order for it to be worth their while, then, the cheap
article writer has to be churning them out at the rate of at
least a few an hour. They're not going to spend a lot of time on
each article: what would be the point? Even if each article
takes them an hour, they're still earning less than minimum
wage, so the article you receive isn't going to be carefully
researched and written: it's going to be churned out in as
little time as possible.
2. Quality
You may think quality doesn't matter too much. If you're
commissioning articles for a website, you may be tempted to
think that quantity is all that matters: the more pages of
content and keywords you have, the better your chances of being
ranked in the search engines, after all.
Think about why you want a good ranking though? Presumably you
want your site to be well-ranked in order to receive more
traffic and more sales. Your content, then, is there to lure in
people, not search engines. And it's a fact that most people
arriving at a website full of badly-written content will just
hit that back button right away.
3. Credibility
There's no doubt that good quality writing lends credibility to
your website or articles, while sloppy writing creates the
impression that even you didn't think your project was worth
investing in, so no-one else should either.
4. Skill and Experience
Some people think that anyone who knows how to string a sentence
together can call themselves a writer. Not so. A professional
copywriter doesn't just put words on the page: they know the
right words to use to gain the reaction you're looking for from
your audience. It takes years of experience to know what works
and what doesn't in terms of website copy. Do you really think
someone who's spent years acquiring those skills will give them
away for $3.50?
Of course, it's up to you. If your main concern is adding
content to your site for very little cost, go with the $3
article writers. But if you want to create a high quality
website, with content which will pull in visitors and keep them
coming back, it could be worth bringing in the professionals.