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.

About The Author Amber McNaught offers a professional but affordable copywriting service through her business, Hot Igloo Productions Ltd. Amber also runs WritingWorld.org - an online agency for freelance writers, editors and proofreaders. >

This article was posted on October 01, 2005

Your Literary Agent—how To Get One Fast!
There are a few ways to find and get an agent quickly for your book. In this report I'll deal with the most popular. To begin with, your book doesn't need to be complete. You could have written only a couple of chapters and have a complete outline of your book and that will do nicely. In fact, agents and publishers almost always take on books before they are completed. They need a couple of chapters to see that you can actually write and they need the ent...

What Employers Look For In A Freelance Writer
Freelance writing is as much about selling yourself as it is about writing. With this in mind, we asked some of the employers who use our site, and others like it, just what it is that they look for in a freelance writer. Here's what they told us:1. Employers won't go looking for the information they need "A lot of the freelancers who replied to my advert just sent me their quote and nothing else," says Angel, who advertised for a freelancer in July. "There was absolutely nothing to set them apart from all of the other writers who responded, and I'd have had to contact them with questions to try and get the in...

Interviewing Your Characters
One of my favorite techniques for getting into the head of my characters is, interviewing them. This relies heavily on rapid writing, so be sure you fully understand that concept first. If you don't, you can read my article "Rapid Writing" on my den. Interviewing characters is exactly how it sounds. You sit down with your characters and interview them, just like you would if you were a reporter.To start, ta...