Should you hire people to write your articles for you?
November 20, 2006
My ongoing article case study has established that writing articles is a great way to get traffic to your web site. If you're not writing articles, you need to be. Or do you?
That's the question I asked myself. Is it really necessary for me to write my own articles, or is it worth paying a ghost writer to write the articles for me?
Up until I asked this question, I had never hired anyone to write any of my content for me. I'd always used tools I've created to help me do that (such as my Instant Article Wizard). But I got to thinking: if I can pay somebody a few bucks to write some great articles for me, then I can focus on creating the sites that those articles will point to. That would save me a lot of time.
So I decided to give it a try and see how it went. I registered at ELance.com and posted a project. I wanted 5 articles written on 5 separate acne topics (teen acne, adult acne, severe acne, cystic acne and acne scars). I wanted each article to be between 650 and 850 words, and I wanted 100% rights to claim those articles as my own.
The Good News
Within 24 hours I had 3 bids on the project. One bid for $140, one for $85 and a third for $50. The first two didn't have any feedback or ratings at all, so I chose to go with the third one, who had a lot of good reviews and a very high satisfaction rating (4.9 out of 5). Besides, for $50, the price was dirt cheap! That's only $10 an article.
So I accepted their bid and paid the 20% up front via PayPal. Within 48 hours all 5 articles were written.
If it sounds like it was a wonderful experience so far, it was! Within 3 days I had a complete set of 5 articles I could use, put my name on (or a pseudonym for tracking purposes) and start distributing to build traffic to my web site.
The Bad News
The downside was clear when I actually read the articles. The articles were well researched and offered professional information on each of the keyword sets I created the project for, yes, but…
The English used to write the article had a lot of little problems.
Now, don't get me wrong, the articles weren't terrible. They were of decent quality, and as I said, the research was great so the information was good. But the articles were clearly written by somebody who did not speak and write English as a first language, and so there were little grammatical issues that I would have to go in and fix.
Having to go in and fix these grammatical errors takes time, and the whole purpose of hiring a ghost writer is to save time, so this extra step took away some of the value of hiring out for the job.
However, as the saying goes, you get what you pay for, and I hired the cheapest group to write the articles. At only $50, perhaps it was worth the $35 - $90 I saved from not hiring the other bidders. After all, in about an hour all five articles could be polished to make them perfect.
It Costs Money
Of course, the other problem is that hiring out costs money. If I wanted to create a full content site of 100 articles, with the bidders I hired I'm looking at $1,000 up front plus twenty hours of solid editing work to get the articles polished enough to post them to a web site.
So on the one hand I can see the benefit of hiring out: it still saves a lot of time since you don't have to do the research, and if you get a good bidder the articles are pretty good.
On the other hand I see the drawbacks: if you go cheap you will have to edit the articles into "real" English, and if you don't go cheap it can be pretty expensive to get them written.
So Is It Worth It?
The real question is the bottom line, isn't it? If I can make those five acne articles result in $1,000 in product sales over the course of a year, it was certainly worth the $50 and hour of my time to go in and edit the articles.
I'm not sure yet if it's worth it, but believe me that I will be distributing these articles and watching the results. When the results are in I will post them to the blog so you can see for yourself whether or not it paid off to hire other people to write my articles for me.
Comments
34 Responses to “Should you hire people to write your articles for you?”
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. He is the creator of a suite of popular software tools, including: Jonathan L Leger 
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Do you submit all your articles to article directories or do you submit only unique articles to articles directories. I have a site and want to submit some of my articles to article directories but want to know the good and bad.
I submit most of my articles to article directories. Some that are more "blogish" and don't really work as articles outside of the blog I do not submit.
Just make sure that any articles you submit, if you're posting them also on your own web site, that the search engines have indexed them before you submit them for distribution.
Hi Jonathon,
I have often found this is a MAJOR problem with hiring article writers. Most of them are from India or similar, and their grammar and sentence structure is at a grade 3 or 4 level, which is totally unsuitable for my needs.
So… the simple solution is to specify in your bid that the writer MUST be a natural english speaker from a country like USA, UK, Australia, Canada, etc
THEN, be prepared to weed out the idiots who still apply that are not suitable.
Just by applying, they prove they are not suitable, because they can't or won't read & follow instructions.
In the end, I request samples of their work and if it doesn't meet my standards, I don't hire them.
Lastly, once you find a quality ghost writer, hang on to them!!! I have found a great one and I use him all the time. He only charges $10/article and his work is great.
He's my secret weapon
and I am looking for more like him!
I joined a scheme that provides 400 articles a month plus other 'benefits' and gave it a try. The article quality was appalling. Yes they had keywords in that were researched to provide high paying adverts but they were so badly written I was ashamed to publish them without so much alteration that I may as well have written them myself.
Perhaps the idea was that rubbish articles make people click on adverts - but they won't get people back to the site for sure.
Hi Jonathan,
How do you know if you're indexed?
Len
Hi Jonathan,
A very interesting post.
It will be great to see the results from these articles.
I am so fascinated with writing these days so anything about this subject piques my interest.
I look forward to more of your experiments from the J-Lab
Phil
Hiring more expensive people… does not guarantee "better quality" either. On websites like elance or getafreelancer its really often hit and miss and like on ebay those "ratings" are sometimes also not always really helpful.
As Steve Manning points out in his wonderful course that you, Jonathan, also recommend he says about editing "good enough, is good enough!".
My first language is not English, and yet I continue to sell things online even with sometimes what US people think "funny grammar" (well, people in the US also think people from the UK have funny English grammar… and like wise…). But I rather have a "authentic" language that sounds like a real person (within reason, you don't want to be Sherlock to detect what an article or sales letter is "trying to say"), than a perfect polished grammatical correct piece, that just offers hype and fluff.
If you have an interesting article that is HELPFUL and USEFUL, then who cares if there are some typos or grammar mistakes?
I personally always get upset when I research a topic online and find pages of "articles" that look like articles, but have no content and basically repeat stuff that I can find on www.dictionary.com or directly going to www.wikipedia.com myself.
Great article Jonathon,
But I know from personal experience that you can get articles written for just $5 a piece by Americans (top quality). I do it all the time with my private label article membership sites.
It's all about who you know ;-).
Sincerely,
Paul Kleinmeulman
Australia
It is truly a time consuming task to create articles of high calibre.
If you're making money and heaps it is even wiser to get it done in a more professional way instead of going with the one that is giving you the best price.
As you have demonstrated if you don't have the time to create these articles and you're busy then pay that extra money to have them really done professionally without the errors. The long term benefits outweigh the short-term expenditure.
When I make a decision to buy anything I go with the long term benefits it will give me. Sometimes the long term benefits would be saving me more money in the future even if I pay more for it in the beginning. So it is always best to make the maths before purchasing anything.
Do let us know where those articles end up and the impact they make on your site(s).
One other thing, the world is spinning fast, but the internet spins even faster by a factor of 4 - 10 times.
Cheers,
John Dogan
http://www.xpertdomains.net - Affordable Domains
Hi Jonathan,
As someone who regularly uses Elance for getting articles written, I think that you just had an unfortunate experience.
My own experience indicates that the more articles you have written, the more likely you are to get the professionals interested.
When I've posted projects with for just a handful of articles, I've got less interest and quality writers than for projects with, say, around 20 articles. On my last project for 18 articles, I got 9 bidders, of whom several were very experienced writers. I'm really pleased with the resulting articles which I've waited two weeks for.
Also, on the rare occasions where you feel that the articles aren't up to scratch, emailing via the Message Board and asking for revisions so that you can give a good feedback could be the way forward. It's worked for me just fine.
Keep trying - there are some good writers out there on Elance - but a slightly bigger project, leaving more time might get the professional writers interested.
All the best,
Jen
One other thing one should do before hiring a writer is to ask for samples of their past work. And I totally agree with Semmy, the article must be useful and unique in order for it to be effective in sending visitors to one's site.
This is a very common experience out there on elance and rentacoder.
I had a classic once, where the service provider was registered in US, and claimed to be a first class writer. When I got the articels and rewrites back, they were attrocious and obviosuly written by an Indian author. Turns out she sub-contracted out the rewrites, (which I was getting done for SEO purposes), for only $1 each !!! Thats why they were shoddy quality.
Jonothan, try http://need-an-article.net/ you pay $9/mth to join and get articels for $5.50 and rewrites for $2.75. They are mostly pretty good, although the articels are better qual than the rewrites
I've had over 400 articles written and/or rewritten by them, and overall, I'm still going back for more. They have the best system for keeping track of everything too which really helps.
Peter Cutforth
http://www.articlemarketingmadeeasy.com
Len:
Just search for the page URL in the 3 big search engines (Google/MSN/Yahoo). If they're indexed they will be in the results.
Everyone Else:
Awesome pointers, suggestions and feedback on my article. I appreciate it, and will be using some of the suggestions the next time I have articles written.
So, Paul Kleinmeulman, who DO you know?
I think it depends on the website. If you are creating a website simply on the basis of high adsense possiblities and have no special knowledge of your own then Ghost writers can do the job.
But I still think you have to reckon to polish each article. I certainly want my "personality" on my articles.
If you have special knowledge use it! And maybe talk into an mp3 player…
I have had good performance from http://need-an-article.com/
Hi Jonathan,
I used to hire ghost writers from everywhere including Elance. I was always disaapointed in the quality of the articles and still had to edit each article.
I have a lot of web sites so it consumed most of my time. Recently I got Instant Article Wizard and it changed everything.
I'm still editing but not having to pay anything for my articles and it's quick. $10 or even $5 an article can get expensive even if you do get good articles.
It is important to put an original article on your web site before submitting to the directories. Once that article has been spidered by the search engines, I rewrite it and submit it to a few article directories.
I now use Instant Article Wizard to write my articles and Website Content Wizard to make them unique and between the two my content is covered for all of my sites.
I've used articles to drive traffic to all of my sites for over three years and let me tell you it works. For free traffic and back links to your site, articles continually deliver.
Hi Ken,
That's an interesting experiment that I would be keen on watching the results for. I have recently started my own blog, and am writing my own original content. It takes me about an hour so far to write one article and post it, and a further couple of hours to submit it.
I imagine as I get busier this is an area I just might want to consider. Great idea.
I am wondering though if the ghost writer has used paragraphs from content already out there or if it is 100% written in his own words.
I look forward to seeing the results.
Mark McGimpsey
I have three good writers who do articles for five dollar each.
To insure that they continue at that price I have given each of them a copy of Jonanthan's Instant Article Wizard.
That allows them to write at least three articles an hour. Since I keep all three part time writers busy they don't have down time while bidding on other projects. That means they can earn from $15 to $20 per hour.
I am also generous with my praise for the work they produce.
Lloyd:
I hope you purchased 3 additional copies to give out.
Hi:
I justed wanted to make a comment about non-native english speakers. It's not entirely accurate to say that just because someone is not a native speaker, he/she will not be able to write correctly.
In fact, I sometimes catch a few mistakes on native speakers/writers. For example, it's very common to ignore the difference between "its" and "it's". I've seen this mistake even in "professional" sales letters.
By the way, Johnatan, thank you very much for this highly informative post!
Just my two cents
Ricardo Flores
Mexico City (i.e. non-native english writer/speaker)
Oops Jonathan, I misspelled your name! I thought it was derived from John
Ricardo:
I didn't mean to imply that a non-native English speaker is not capable of writing great copy in English, only that in this case it was obvious that the person writing was not a native English speaker based on the way they "spoke" through their writing and the mistakes that they made.
Yes…. you get what you pay for! Isn't that always the case?
I normally say yes, but it depends on your goals.
Conversion. Clicks. Content. Ranking. Traffic.
What do you want your copy writing to do?
Like many things, start with the END RESULTS first, then do what it takes to get them.
If you are selling diamond rings, poor quality content will not cut it. If you need to make people fill out a form, you need to convince the reader to do so.
Etc. etc. etc.
Planning is just as important as Execution… or it is the other way around?
Larry
Hi Jonathan,
This is an interesting study that you are doing. By choosing the cheapest offer, you may actually have found the most expensive offer, because of the time that you needed to put in to fix your articles - and your time is worth money.
How do you go about submitting your articles to article directories? Do you do this manually or using submission software? I would be interested to know your feedback, as this is a strategy that I have tried recently - still too early to know all the answers, but I am pleased with what I have seen so far. I would like to know if I am on the right track though
Hi Jonathan,
As long as you setting out to test different methods of generating traffic using articles it would be really interesting if you used a rewriter like website content wizard to create multiple copies of the same article and tracked things like adsense earnings for the rewritten page vs the original article.
Day Online Trading:
I submit manually, since it's only 3 article sites so it's not a big deal.
When will we see the new numbers?
Here some more avice…I always loked at some samples of their writings before I seclect and winner. I've had some great work done in the past from cheaper quotes…i must have been lucky. If you message most of them they might be able to go lower than thier orginal bid ya gotta sweet talk em lol but at the same time remember they are tryingt o mae money to.
Ok im done ranting
Desmond
I too have had great work done from http://need-an-article.net for around $5 an article. This has been the only membership site that I never plan on leaving. The articles are well written and never need polishing. Here is an article that I had written just the other day… http://enjoythecruise.com/glacier_bay_alaskan_cruise.htm
Wah, this site is very simple and mature.
And its easy to access. Bravo.
Hi Jonathan and thanks for your great insights and sharing your results with us.
I would love do more outsourcing but tend to find it just as time-consuming as doing it all myself. I think the key is to spend the time to find the right people whether cheap or expensive.
I too would love to know the contact for the $5 per article!
Peter Twist
Hi,
Jonathan, I would like to know did you stop using
content wizard, One can be successful as it claimed to be. since I am planning to have , But it is little bit costly for me.
Mohammed
Cool, I also have problems with ghost writers and articles are a pain to fix so I am going to pirchase the instant article wizard and see if it is any easier.
thanks
Jon Perin
Since several contributors were so positive towards www.need-an-article.com I'd like to balance things up a little because my experience with NAA was not so positive.
I ordered 5 articles to assist with the launch of my new site but none were really of value, despite the fact keywords which I supplied. Yes, they no doubt met the keyword count criteria but they said nothing.
I think I finished up using ONE of them. The other 4 are an embarrassment so maybe one day I'll release them under a pseudonym.
After I expressed my disappointment to the owner of NAA, he emailed back that some of his writers were not up to speed yet on internet marketing related topics.
Gary
I can offer a different perspective on this since I am a ghostwriter who charges a minimum of $50 per article I write for someone. Although I'd like to tell all of you that you get what you pay for, obviously some of you are getting acceptable articles for much less than I would consider working for.
Interestingly, I posted an article today on my blog refrencing this artice by Jonathan to make the case that sometimes cheap is not always good (hey, I hae a vested interest in not seeing the market push my rates down lower).
But coincidently, while I was posting that article, Steve Slaunwhite, who is definitely no slouch in the writing business, commented on one of my earlier articles that he thought $50 was way to cheap (see 10 Tips For Choosing A Ghostwriter For Your Online Articles(.
So I guess the debate continues. I guess it really depends on whether you are just wanting links or if you are also wanting to brand yourself online as an expert in your field.
Clearly some of you are getting "good enough" articles that provide links for much less, but you might not want to put your names on those articles if you are trying to establish yourself as an expert in your fields.
The latter category are the people who do business with me, because the must have well-written articles when their own names are put on the byline.
Charles Brown
www.dynamiccopywriting.blogspot.com