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How to hire a freelance content writer without getting burned

(Especially if you’re wondering if the writer has to be an expert in your field...)

In this article, I’m going to talk about how to mitigate the risks of hiring a freelance writer.

Let’s say you find an excellent freelance writer, who has a strong publishing track record, and who’s also an expert in your field. You can check their portfolio and see who they’ve worked with in the past. You can read their recommendations on LinkedIn (which are hard to fake, unlike testimonials on a website). This writer should be your first choice.

Expect to pay handsomely to work with them. 

But what if you can’t find — or can’t afford — this rare and elusive unicorn? What should you do?

How can you safely hire a freelance content writer who hasn’t (yet) demonstrated extensive expertise in your industry?

In this article, I explain how you can reduce your risk when you start working with a new freelancer. 

The risks of hiring a freelance content writer

Let’s face it. When you hire a freelancer you haven’t worked with before, you’re taking a risk. There are freelance writers out there who would do a bad job 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.

• They lack research skills.

• They don’t know anything about marketing.

• 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. But before I explain how to reduce the risk when you hire a freelance writer for the first time, I want to clear something up…

Inexpensive does not mean bad

It’s possible to find good writers whose services are also cheap. 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. 

But the quality is mixed on these platforms. You have to decide whether to spend the time sifting through and testing writers whose English is poor, or who plagiarize, or who pretend to have expertise they don’t.

That said, there are 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.

If you have a reasonable amount of money to spend, it’s probably not worth your time trying to find a unicorn in the haystack of Fiverr or Upwork. Look elsewhere. I suggest you start by searching on Google and LinkedIn for ‘freelance writer [industry]’ or ‘content writer [industry]’. If you’re looking for something more specific, try ‘case study writer [industry]’, for example.

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.

If you find a great writer who doesn’t have a well-established track record

I already mentioned that if you find an excellent writer with an impressive portfolio, and who’s also an expert in your industry, then you should hire ‘em lickety-split! Be prepared to pay accordingly.

However, if you find a writer who seems good, but you feel uncertain because they don’t (yet) have a strong track record in your industry for the type of content you need, don’t lose hope! :)

After talking with the writer, if you’re still interested, all you need to do is to give them a small trial project.

You don’t necessarily have to say that your project is a trial run for a bigger project. That’s your call. You just need to give the writer 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 try a new accountant, or a new window cleaning company, you don’t expect them to work for free until you make up your mind. But it’s perfectly reasonable to work with them for a short period before signing a long term contract. Please have the same respect for writers.

For example, 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 trial project means that they get to try you out first too! Did you give unclear instructions and expect the writer to be psychic about what you want? Did you have repeated so-called ‘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? Did you pay on time?

So: If you find a writer who seems like they might be a good fit, 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.)

Does your writer have to be an industry expert?

Let’s suppose you’ve found a writer whose work you like — but they aren’t an expert in your field. Does that rule them out? 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 (including you and your employees)

• Can understand what those experts say and asks sensible questions

• 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 and talking with them, do a trial run to test them out, as described above: Pay for a small, low risk project.

Make sure you pick a project that will tell you what you need to know: Is the writer able to write excellent content for your industry, despite not being an industry expert? And remember the writer is testing you out too! 

Does this mean a good writer can write about anything?

I often see 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. (I certainly have! I know I’m good at doing research and getting a reasonable overview of things.) But some writers can’t do that, 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.

Some things are just 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 laypeople and technical writing for an expert audience. 

To use myself as an example, although I’ve written plenty about construction, 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 that, 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.

Summary

So, if you want to hire a content writer, it’s not necessary to find someone who is an expert in your field. (Although if you do find one, count your lucky stars!) Remember, you already have experts up the wazoo at your company. 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. 

If a writer has an extensive portfolio and a long list of happy clients, there’s no need to do a trial project. (Although by all means do so, if it makes you feel more comfortable. There’s no harm in it.)

If you’re feeling less confident — perhaps because a writer doesn’t have an extensive portfolio, although you like what you’ve seen — do a small, low risk project with them. This increases the chances of hiring a content writer who delivers what you need (and reduces the chances of paying big money for a dud). If the writer delivers excellent content, on time, and they’re easy to work with, then you can be more confident moving on to more ambitious projects that require a bigger investment.

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If you’d like to market your construction or robotics company with content like blog posts, white papers, and case studies, I can write those for you.

Let’s talk: zena@zenafreelancewriter.com