Sep 01 2009
A Few Thoughts on Outsourcing
After a great weekend trip to Toronto, I’m back in my parent’s basement attempting to pump out as many articles as I can before my head explodes or I go insane. Writing articles for submission sites is probably one of my least favourite jobs, so my goal of writing 80 articles before the end of September seems a long way off at the moment, even though I’m off to a good start.
A few people have mentioned that article writing should be outsourced, not only to save one’s sanity but also because outsourcing allows for far more articles to be written than one person would be capable of. I think it’s a great idea, believe me. I would love to spend my time thinking of article topics and anchor text and let someone else fill in the gaps but unfortunately it’s not really in the budget at the moment.
That’s not to say I don’t already outsource, though. I currently pay writers to produce content for several sites because I’m not able to come up with the same quality of information without spending loads of time on research. At $15 for 800-1000 word articles, I think it’s a bargain, especially considering the quality of some of the submissions. Link building is important, but so is having actual content on my own sites to point the links to, so I feel like paying writers to make that content is worthwhile.
I have also outsourced the development of a custom Wordpress site for $500. According to comments on the post, it’s sort of been 50/50 on whether this has been a huge waste of money or not. I’m still up in the air until I see the final product but for the amount of time I have saved in not having to wrestle with Wordpress, so far so good. Getting the new site just the way I want it isn’t something I would have been able to do on my own so, once again, the outsourcing is to fill a gap in my own skills and knowledge.
Article writing, on the other hand, is something I am fully capable of doing myself, probably to a higher standard than if I were to pay someone else to do it for me. Sure, my time might be better spent elsewhere but writing articles, while annoying, is easy. It might drive me crazy if I do it for long enough but I think writing a few for myself is important so I can get a feel for what works and what doesn’t and do a bit of experimentation. I think it would be silly to pay money to outsource right now since I have very little experience with this. I want to do some testing and have a good plan in place before I start paying other people to do it for me.
Curious about what outsourcing article writing would cost, I took a look over at Elance to see what people charge for article writing but it’s difficult to tell because the bids always seem to be sealed. The only information I have is that the budget for the jobs is almost always ‘Less than $500′ which tells me nothing, especially since the number of articles being asked for will vary. I did browse through completed jobs though, it looks like this service goes for around $8-12 per article which is a bit too rich for me right now.
So I am a bit fan of outsourcing but I’m not yet in a financial position to throw money at article writers. I would rather use the few outsourcing funds I have towards things I can’t easily do myself. Once I get more of a feel for article writing and get a bit more money behind me I will experiment with outsourcing but, for the moment, I am content writing them myself.
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I’ve been looking into outsourcing article writing for a few new projects of my own, too. I’ll let you know if I find something better than Elance, Guru and their ilk.
How has HubPages and such been going for you? I keep hearing about how they can be a great passive income generator, but I’m a bit skeptical.
Just to give you some pricing comparison. I was using a service that charged me $8.00 per 500 word article then $1.00 per directory submission. I required them to make sure every article was approved for each directory and typically had 8 directories to submit to. That worked out to $16 per article. Kind of rich pricing, I know. However, I find the submission process to be almost as labor intensive as writing the article. Also I wanted true manual submission, not automated because auto submission rarely works with the better directories. Lots of services will tell you they are manually submitting, but they don’t. My bottom line was that every article had to be approved at each directory. So they would have to make the necessary changes until it was approved. I made sure to greenlight each article though and sent some back for rewriting. On one occasion, I had to get an entire order rewritten. When you are getting a ton of articles written, even just skimming them to make sure they meet your standards can become tedious.
I have been a fan of outsourcing articles for a while with decent results.
I have a few different people & I normally pay around $10 per 400 words
Last Weekend I pulled my Dragon naturally speaking software & fired it up
to see if i could do more of my own articles it was surprisingly easy.
http://hubpages.com/hub/Do-I-have-to-be-a-good-typist-to-create-an-article
I’m going to be trying to balance out hiring & writing.
As a professional copywriter, I found this fascinating, especially from a perceived value standpoint.
Writing is often perceived — and priced — as a commodity. Something anyone can do (I guess) and not worth spending a lot of time and money on. It’s just content… and writers are perceived as loving to write so much that they’re willing to do it for slave wages (again, I guess). You should pay as little as possible and just get something up there.
Web design and anything sort of technical is perceived as very difficult, however, and people are willing to pay good money for it.
Of course, customers and readers don’t visit web sites because of the logo, the number of columns, and so on. They will trust a professional looking site more than something that looks cheap, of course — but they’re going there for the content. The content, the writing, is ultimately what sells.
For http://freedomainclassifieds.com, I had the idea, bought the domain name, and set up and designed the site with WordPress in under 2 hours. It was super easy. There are so many templates and plugins available that you can quickly do a lot of customization. (Now that it’s up, I’m not sure it was a good idea, and I don’t know what to do with it, but that’s another issue.)
On the other hand, I’ve spent hours trying to come up with one good, solid headline that will communicate a benefit and motivate customers to act. And then been told to write a hundred more. It’s really hard — and generates a lot of money, which is why top ad agencies and Fortune 500 companies pay good copywriters fairly well. The economic collapse lowered prices for everyone, but the price range for professional copywriters who know what they’re doing is anywhere from $50 to $150 per hour. (At the moment, the biggest challenge is getting work.) Some of the direct mail writers earn tens of thousands of dollars per project and get a share of the income they generate — but they’re in a special class of their own.
Not trying to pick on you, Kristy, or start an argument with you or anyone else. I just find the issue very interesting for personal and professional reasons and thought I share my perspective with you. The companies that really make a fortune don’t pay some guy or gal in India 8 bucks for their web content. They pay professionals thousands and thousands — and outsource the technical work.
You will definitely achieve your goal of 80 articles till the September end. All the best.
no one ever reads these directory articles. who cares what he quality is? you just need passable. If you search enough, you can find articles on elance for $5 dollars. Your time is better spent getting quality one way links which will help your search ranking way more.
I definitely think you should start outsourcing more article writing when you can. In my opinion it is one of the best marketing investments a website or blog can make. The price of outsourced articles is so low that it really should outperform any other marketing initiative.
So the only value of these “articles” is the back links? Well, I live, I learn.
Carl,
Yes that’s the reality as far as articles for directories are concerned. Now the writing on your own site is definitely another story. The better the writing on your own site, the better off you are. However, even with your own site, you should probably settle for less than ideal for now.
Drivel is dirt cheap right now and will probably remain that way. However, good quality writing is still relatively inexpensive. That said as someone who pays for writing and blogging, I can tell you that market prices are slowly creeping upwards.
If you want to be an internet publisher, then you better start now because as demand grows, good writing will become more and more expensive. So much so in fact, that I believe in a few more years it will be quite a bit more expensive to get good writing. This will effectively slam the door shut on people who want to bootstrap sites that are magazines with a stable of writers or regular contributors. It’s still pretty cheap to get what is effectively a magazine site up with lots of good content. I think internet publishing costs will rhyme with 20th century publishing costs. So get started now, because it will eventually become more difficult and a lot more expensive to get good talent.
If you want to be a writer, then you’ll probably be able to make much more in a few years than you can today. I could be wrong, but that’s my view.
@colinwright I would appreciate that, thanks! I think I have decided to give HubPages the axe in favour of more Ezine Articles. I will probably do some in the future though.
@Language Dude Thanks for giving me an idea of pricing. Actually submitting the articles isn’t something I mind too much but when you start getting into huge amounts, I imagine it would get tedious. Editing articles is something I would probably find even more annoying than writing them myself.
@Goldfish Care I think a good balance is something I would be aiming for too, at least at this stage until I can afford to go 100% outsourcing.
@Carl For article sites, yeah, it’s just content and as long as it makes sense and speaks the truth, it doesn’t matter if it’s not of a high quality. For my own sites, however, getting high quality content is very important. The difference with me though is that I actually prefer it when my writers aren’t professionals. I like the content on my sites to have an informal, chatty sort of approach and non-pro writers can do this just fine. What I’m most interested in is the information they’re writing about, not really the style. I believe that people visit sites because of the information that they’re looking for and the quality of the writing. I’m not a professional writer but I don’t think that fact would ever turn a reader away as long as they’re getting the information they’re after. Yep, the only reason I’m writing the articles is to get the backlinks.
@Language Dude again I agree that good writing will get more and more expensive. I remember when people would gladly submit content for free and they didn’t have any sites to promote either. I guess it would just to help out, share info, or to get their name on an online article, I don’t know. The online writing market has changed and is continually changing, I think, and I think it is heading in the direction you are talking about.
I am all for outsourcing article writing once I get a plan and a bit of cash behind me. So if anyone can recommend writers they use, I would love to have some contacts for when the time comes.
IMO outsourcing is save your time. Article writing outsource to content writers or any company and they have good skill of writing.
I write and get paid fairly well for others and then I pay outsourcers to write some of my content. To be honest when I end up with sites whose content I know nothing about but others can write with their eyes shut (e.g. kids, cars etc) then its an easy trade off.
@Carl one of the issues that western world readers need to come to grips with is the quality of English in countries such as India and Philippines is sometimes much better than American/UK/Australian writers - and yes they are native speakers too.