How to hire a content writer without getting burned
Especially if you’re wondering if the writer has to be an expert in your field...
In this post, I’m going to talk about some of the risks of hiring a freelance writer. In particular, I’m going to focus on whether it’s essential to hire a content writer who is also an expert in your field. The short answer is: If you find an excellent, reliable writer who’s also an expert in your field, then they should be your first choice (if you can afford them!).
But what if you can’t find — or can’t afford — this rare and elusive unicorn? What should you do?
If low cost is a priority, you might be able to find a writer who will write brilliant blog posts for $5 each on Fiverr. (For comparison, let me tell you I charge a minimum of $400 for short blog posts.)
If cost is less of an issue for you, what about expertise? To write your content, is it better to use an expert who’s not a good writer (e.g. someone on your team)? Or is it better to hire a good writer who’s not an expert in your field to write your content? I explain why the second option is the better choice. This does not mean that any writer can successfully execute any project, though!
The fact is that no writer is a good choice for every project — including myself. I currently specialize in writing about construction and evidence-based health topics. (An unusual combination, but it keeps things interesting for me!)
Someone once asked me to write the copy for their naturopathic health website. I declined because I don’t write bullshit. (I didn’t use those exact words when I turned down the job.) That’s one way of not being a good fit for a specific project. Just as importantly, though, there are subject areas I would be unable to write in. This is because I don’t have the background knowledge to be able to produce high quality work in a reasonable period of time. This includes high-paying industries such as fintech (financial technology).
If you’re thinking of hiring a freelance content writer, always keep in mind that not every writer is a good fit for every project. In this post, I explain how you can reduce your risk when you start working with a new freelancer.
Let’s get started.
The risks of hiring a freelance content writer
You’re convinced of the benefits of content marketing. Perhaps you’ve boosted your website traffic with blogging but you’re finding it hard to keep up with the writing. Or you want to use a white paper to generate leads, but you don’t know how to write an effective one. Or you want to increase potential customers’ trust, but you don’t have time to interview past customers and write case studies.
So you’re thinking it may be time to hire a content writer for these writing tasks. (Note that I’m talking about writing content for marketing purposes. I’m not talking about technical writing, which is a whole nother kettle of fish.)
Let’s face it, though. When you hire a freelancer you haven’t worked with before, you’re taking a risk. You don’t want to hire a dud. There are freelance writers out there who would do a bad job for your company. This could be for any number of reasons:
They don’t take the time to understand your needs (or they ignore them).
They don’t have the necessary background knowledge to produce good content.
Their writing skills are mediocre or worse.
They plagiarize content.
They break deadlines.
They simply don’t ever deliver the content you paid them for.
It doesn’t matter how cheap their services are, these writers are obviously not worth it.
Inexpensive doesn’t mean bad though
However, this doesn’t mean it’s impossible to find a good writer whose services are also inexpensive. There are excellent writers on platforms (also known as ‘content mills’) like Upwork and Fiverr. You might be lucky and find a gem who’ll write reliably excellent blog posts for a few dollars each.
On the other hand, you might find a writer who would be happy to take your cash but can’t produce what you need. Anyone with an internet connection can sign up on these sites. You have to decide if you want to spend the time sifting through writers whose English is poor, or who plagiarize (aka steal content and hope you won’t notice), or who pretend to have expertise they don’t. If you have to re-write everything they’ve written, how much time/money would you really save by hiring them? That said, there are certain circumstances in which it makes sense to try the content mill route. If you meet all these criteria, then go for it:
Your project isn’t ambitious. (E.g. It’s a short blog post about home decorating trends, rather than a book on the effect of cryptocurrencies on the global economy.)
You have the time and patience to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Your business has a small marketing budget so can’t go straight to someone good.
If you have a reasonable amount of money to spend, it’s not worth your time trying to find a unicorn in the haystack of Fiverr or Upwork. Look elsewhere. I don’t know the best places to find freelance writers. There are lots of articles that come up when I search for “how to find a freelance writer”. (Perhaps this is a topic for a later blog post.) In any case, it’s easy to start with Google and LinkedIn. Try typing ‘freelance writer [your industry]’ or ‘content writer [your industry]’.
Also ask your connections in your industry if they can recommend any writers they’ve worked with. Referrals are a common way for writers and clients to connect. The popular freelance writing website Make A Living Writing conducted a survey of more than 1,400 freelance writers. Between 25% and 40% of freelance writers — depending on their career stage — report that referrals are how they get most of their clients.
What to do if you find a great writer who is also an industry expert
If you find an excellent writer who has demonstrated expertise in your industry, and who has published examples of the type of content you need, then hire ‘em lickety-split! Be prepared to pay accordingly.
If they already have a well-established track record in your industry for exactly the type of content you need, you don’t need to give them a small ‘trial run’ project.
For a writer whose reputation isn’t yet well-established, I recommend working with them on a small, one-off project first.
I’ve heard stories of writers simply not turning work in when they said they would. My mind boggles at this, but apparently it happens. Expertise and excellent writing are useless if the writer doesn’t ever deliver them. (Of course, writers also have horror stories of overly demanding clients, of clients who don’t pay, and so on. Unfortunately, caution has to run both ways.)
So, give the writer a trial run project; you don’t necessarily have to say that’s what you’re doing. You just need to give them a low risk, low cost project before investing more time and money into them. You want to see if they produce excellent content, on time. You want to get a feel for what it’s like to work with them.
Please don’t ever ask any writer to write for free.
When you hire somebody to answer the phones in your office, you still pay them during a probation period. You might try out a new accountant, or a new window cleaning company, but you don’t expect them to work for free until you make up your mind. But it’s reasonable to try working with them for a short period before signing a long term contract. Please have the same respect for writers’ time and expertise.
Pay a writer to produce one or two blog posts before you hire them to write four posts every month for a year. Ask them to write a case study before they write a white paper. Ask them to write an article before they write an e-book.
Remember, this means that they get to try you out first too! Did you pay on time? Did you have repeated urgent-not-really-urgent requests? Did you expect the writer to drop everything to talk on the phone at 10pm on a Sunday night? Did you take two weeks to provide information you said you’d send in two days?
So: If you find a great writer, who’s also an expert in your field, hire them for a small project and see how it goes. (If they already have a well-established reputation, you can skip the trial project.)
What to do if you find a great writer who is not an industry expert
I’ve often seen the advice to freelancers to say ‘yes’ to a job and figure it out later. Of course, some writers can indeed ‘figure it out later’ for some topics. But some writers can’t, and there are some topics about which it would be unreasonable to attempt to do so. If you come across a writer who says they can write about anything, that’s a blazing red flag and you should sprint in the opposite direction.
If you can’t find someone who’s both a great writer and an expert in your field, what should you do? Hire an expert who’s not a great writer? Or hire a great writer who’s not an expert?
You already have plenty of experts in your company (including yourself). But if they’re not skilled writers, they’re unlikely to have time to become one while also doing their jobs. Even if a member of your team already writes well, do they have time to dedicate to writing excellent content? If so, lucky you! You don’t need to hire a freelance content writer.
Let’s suppose nobody on your team has the time and talent to write the content you need. You’ve found a writer whose work you like — but they aren’t an expert in your field. What should you do? Here’s my take:
While your content writer may never become a true expert in your field, the chances are they don’t need to.
You need a content writer who:
Has enough background understanding of your field to be able to do the research necessary for your content
Is able to interview experts in your field
Can understand what those experts say
Can translate that information into excellent content that’s appropriate for your audience
How do you know if the writer you’ve found will be able to do these things? After examining their portfolio, do a trial run to test them out, as described above: Pay for a small, low risk project. And remember the writer is testing you out too!
Does this mean a great writer can write about anything?
If a writer doesn’t need to be an expert in a particular field in order to write good content in that field, does that mean I’m saying they can write anything in any field?! No. Some things are too complicated for a writer to get a handle on in a reasonable period of time. In some cases, deep background knowledge is necessary to write something sensible. The audience also makes a difference of course. There’s a big difference between writing for lay people and writing for experts.
To use myself as an example, I couldn’t write for an audience of epidemiologists on the molecular mechanism by which residues at position 481 and 545 of measles virus hemagglutinin protein define CD46 receptor binding using a molecular docking approach. (I don’t know what that means either. It’s from the title of an article in the academic journal, Computational Biology and Chemistry.)
But, for a layperson audience, I can write about the symptoms of measles, how it’s spread, and the importance of making sure you and your kids are vaccinated. I didn’t need a medical degree to write All About Measles for London Drugs. To write about measles for lay people, I need to be able to do basic health research. I need to know, for example, that the Cochrane Review, Health Canada, and the NIH are reliable sources of information but Natural News and the Boiron blog is not. I need to be able to interview health and medical experts, understand what they say (and ask follow-up questions if I don’t), and be able to turn that information into valuable content such as Accessing the right information is still problematic in healthcare (starting on p.4).
I can also write about when modular construction is a good idea and when it might be better to stick with conventional construction. I could do background research, understand well enough to ask experts sensible questions, and understand their answers. I can turn that information into content that’s appropriate for a specific audience. Check out my post on Content Marketing for Modular Construction Companies.
But I couldn’t write about the methods for forming disc springs made of metastable austenitic stainless steel using incremental sheet forming, generating compressive residual stresses. (I have no idea what that sentence means either. It’s butchered from the abstract of an article in the academic journal, Production Engineering.)
Even if it was possible for me to learn about those things, it wouldn’t be profitable for me to do so. Producing high quality writing would take too long — like maybe getting another PhD — to get up to speed. And much as I enjoy learning and writing, I want my business to make money. This is one of the reasons many freelance writers develop an industry niche or two — so they can get more efficient as they learn more. They’re not always having to learn from scratch every time they write something.
Conclusion
So, if you need to hire a content writer, it’s not necessary to find a writer who is an expert in your field. You already have experts up the wazoo. What you need is a content writer who can do research, interview and understand experts, and produce high quality writing that meets your company’s needs.
You need to increase the chances that you’ll hire a content writer who can deliver what you need (and reduce the chances of paying big money for a dud). Do this by paying for a small, low risk project. If the writer delivers excellent content, and they’re easy to work with, then you can be more confident moving on to projects that require a bigger investment.
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Photo at the top of the page by J. Kelly Brito on Unsplash.